For four years we have heard of the horrors—unique in American history, we’re told—of the January 6, 2021, “insurrection” and “attack on the Capitol.”
On the first anniversary, Veep Kamala Harris shuddered to recall “dates [that] echo throughout history … that occupy not only a place on our calendars, but a place in our collective memory: December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021.”
During an address to a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden cast his troubled gaze 160 years back in history, calling J6 “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
And they’re not giving up the narrative. Just this morning, The View’s Sunny Hostin—who every other day seems to issue another correction on air to ward off libel lawsuits—compared J6 to “the worst moments in American history, like World War II, the Holocaust, chattel slavery.”
They’ve lost their minds. Four years on, it’s time to pardon the J6ers. Fortunately, Trump has made clear he plans to issue some form of pardon or clemency. I hope it’s a sweeping one.
January 6 was a series of chaotic events ranging from rioting to peaceful protests and unauthorized trespass while walking through the velvet ropes in the Rotunda. Many Americans were outraged by what they saw on a day the country traditionally witnesses a peaceful transfer of power.
Assaults, solitary confinement, and denial of medical care
However, it’s a stretch to label it an insurrection. The perpetrators of the worst event since Gettysburg strangely showed up without firearms. No one died but J6 participants, though the administration has done its best to mislead the nation about this. Authorities inexplicably failed to provide National Guardsmen and fencing that could have prevented the whole mess.
And the Justice Department wasn’t just ham-fisted toward rioters; it adopted a take-no-prisoners approach to misdemeanor defendants, prosecuting minor offenses and twisting the law to create felonies that the Supreme Court later shot down. Human rights abuses abounded. Guards beat bound J6 prisoners, denied them cancer and other medical treatment, and locked them in solitary confinement for long stretches.
A lawyer for Richard Barnett—the guy who famously posed resting his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk—echoed many inmates when he said his client endured “disgusting unsanitary conditions that include the presence of black mold inside the cell where he was being held in solitary confinement, as well as beatings, sleep deprivation, getting robbed of his belongings, and various psychological and emotional abuses—including the denial of timely medical care, and threats toward his wife.”
These are the kind of abuses I dramatized in my novel The Insurrectionist. As many J6ers have pointed out, jihadis at Gitmo were treated better.
Where once I supported pardoning everyone except for “the violent ones,” this administration has extended its definition of terrorism to include everyone from PTA members to Latin-rite Roman Catholics. I don’t trust the Justice Department’s definition of violence.
Besides, past presidents have often pardoned violent offenders. Biden himself commuted the sentences of 37 of death row inmates. Jimmy Carter did the same for four Puerto Ricans who shot up Congress, wounding five U.S. representatives. As did Clinton for 16 members of the Puerto Rican terrorist organization FALN, which set off more than 100 bombs and killed six people.
Furthermore, little attempt was made to prosecute political rioters on the left in 2020, including those outside the White House who injured Secret Service agents.
Worse than Pearl Harbor, Oklahoma City?
The hyperbole from the left led journalist Glenn Greenwald to scoff, “January 6 was worse than 9/11? Or Pearl Harbor? Or the Oklahoma City bombing? Or the dismantling of civil liberties in the name of the Cold War and War on Terror? Or the mass surveillance program secretly and illegally implemented by NSA aimed at US citizens?”
“Completely unhinged drama queen script to say that about Jan 6.”
Four years on, it’s time to put the abuses to rest with presidential pardons.
The Elephant Box 