The left is constantly barking about "sentencing disparities," "equal justice," "mass incarceration," and "criminal justice reform."

It's just this rubbish that has made cities such as San Francisco and Chicago (see this here today by AT editor Thomas Lifson) unliveable hellholes, awash in crime and violence.  No matter how bad a career criminal's crime may be, under leftism, everyone gets a get-out-of-jail-free card.  That can mean killers, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, violent people illegally present in the U.S. and deported multiple times, along with those who have rap sheets a mile long.  What's more, the left seeks to blur the distinction between law-abiding and non-law-abiding, in measures such as expunging criminal records and "ban the box" initiatives, forcing states and businesses to hire actual criminals on staff. The leftist, Soros-oriented plan is to make crime as consequence-free as possible.

But there's a barb to it that isn't being noted much: those convicted of political crimes against this establishment are getting intensified punishment even as criminals are walking free.  So much for "criminal justice reform."

This brings us to the case of the "QAnon Shamon," AKA Jacob Chansley, who got a 41-month jail sentence from a federal judge for "obstructing a federal proceeding" and "trespassing" during the Jan. 6 ruckus at the Capitol.  It seems excessive, given the kinds of sentences authentic violent criminals are now getting with all the leftist "reform." 

To take two examples from recent days — Chapo Guzmán's mobster-queen wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, got herself a 36-month sentence for running the entire Sinaloa Cartel responsible for wreaking havoc in Mexico and the U.S., bringing in industrial-sized shipments of meth, cocaine, heroin, and pot into the U.S., along with killers and violence, in lieu of her husband, who was in the Supermax.  Three years!

Meanwhile, an avowed Antifa activist, Alexander Starks, who violently attacked a GOP senator's office with an axe in North Dakota in 2020, got let off with just probation.  Like Chansley, his act was political.  Unlike Chansley, he used violence.  And he got let off with nothing while Chansley got more than three years in the can.

It seems that leftists love the idea of emptying out jails as a means of keeping law-abiding people in terror.  The Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union certainly employed it, populating their secret police recruitage with released criminals.  Hugo Chávez mastered this in Venezuela, too, when he turned Caracas into a crime pit to unleash terror.  Castro emptied his Cuban jails to wreak havoc on the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and his encore in 1994.  The Taliban followed, emptying jails of terrorists in order to secure new recruits for their advance on Kabul this past August.

Chansley isn't the most sympathetic character out there, given that he put on a horn suit, walked around topless in skins, and paraded for the American public during the congressional certification of Joe Biden's presidency.  He certainly didn't represent anyone but himself and his fellow misfits, amounting to an annoying clown who needed to be swept out of the Capitol and ticketed.  However, his crime was a nuisance crime, not a violent crime.  He and his fellow Jan. 6 cohorts foolishly entered the Capitol (possibly at the invitation of the Capitol Police), shouted their slogans, waved their flags, and imagined that they could reverse a very flawed 2020 election just by protesting loudly enough.  Chansley was pretty much the emblem of the bunch, helping delay the proceedings by several hours as he paraded around and his buddies made a mess.

Does it compare with these other criminals' activities?  Not in the least.  It was essentially a "political" crime in that Chansley helped delay congressional proceedings that otherwise would have happened and scared some Congress members with his showy display.  There was no substance to the spectacle whatsoever.  Trespassing may be understating matters, but to call what he did an "insurrection" is grossly overstating them.  Insurrection?  Where were the guns?  Who set fires?  Who got taken hostage?  How many days did this go on?  Those are the things that happen in real insurrections — think of all those coups in Bangkok with tanks in the streets, or Boris Yeltsin standing on the tank at the Russian White House.  Those are what real insurrections look like.  Chansley's act was simply laughable.  What it was was an Instagram opportunity, a chance for a certain subset of protesters to preen for the cameras and post the pictures to all their little friends on social media in order to impress them.

As the crime was in fact "political," and nothing else, with no complicating violence, that essentially makes Chansley a political prisoner.  (Kind of takes the romance out of the term, doesn't it?)  Didn't know America had those — seems that until recently, everyone thought that was something you find in places like Iran and Cuba and Venezuela.

But the draconian sentence meted out to Chansley, as well as the extensive pre-trial detention of other protesters and the weird robotic "re-education" statements of those protesters who got let out, all suggest something pretty Soviet going on, something very political prisoner–ish, except possibly harsher.  Vladimir Putin, after all, whose court sentenced the Pussy Riot disruptors of sacred cathedral services in Moscow to the Gulag, gave them only a two-year sentence.  A Jan. 6 protester such as Chansley got considerably more.  And now he's gotten new counsel and has started to try to undo his conviction, which won't be easy.  But on the other hand, why shouldn't he?  The sentence, to any civilized person, was way out of proportion.

Hypocrisy much, Democrats?  The whole thing goes to show that criminal justice reform is a sham.  What Democrats want are criminals on the streets and just conservatives populating U.S. jails.  If they get away with this disproportionate, draconian travesty of justice with Chansley, the path will be wide open for them to make this plan a way of life.

Image: Screen shot from NBC News video via shareable YouTube.

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