Out of all the crazy, strange, and unbelievable news items Insanity Wrap has brought you over the previous 119 editions of this column, “guns drawn in the Capitol” is the craziest, the strangest, and the most unbelievable — all in one item of just five words.
It’s difficult to be glib about the news after a day like yesterday, so today’s Insanity Wrap will be less of a wrap-up and more of a lament.
Four people are dead.
So many of us told you something like this was inevitable after Antifa/BLM was allowed for months to get away with their anarcho-communist brand of street thuggery.
Not that you, gentle reader, needed to be told.
Still, the timing and location came as a shock.
It remains to be seen whether yesterday’s deadly riot represents a one-off venting of political frustration or a sea-change in that the Right will from now on operate more like the Left does.
Just had a friend say to me “Republicans don’t ever protest or riot for long because they have jobs”
Bro… not anymore 👀
— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) January 7, 2021
Make no mistake: Despite our early concerns that the MAGA protest was turned into a riot by antifa infiltrators, there’s no evidence to support that comforting notion.
Don’t take Insanity Wrap’s word for it. Go to instead to Andy Ngo, whose undercover reporting on 2020’s left-wing violence has made him the go-to expert on the subject.
Paul Bedard reported last night:
“The people occupying the Capitol building do not look like antifa people dressed in Trump gear or Trump costumes,” [Ngo] said in an interview from England.
“I have seen no evidence that they are able to coordinate a mass infiltration on this scale before, so I’m really skeptical that they would have been able to do it here without any of that information leaking out,” he said.
DC Examiner’s Will Ricciardella — no friend of the Left — tweeted on Wednesday, “I didn’t see any BLM or antifa all day and I’ve walked through the crowd a few times.” But, he added, “Whatever bad elements there are, they’re vastly outnumbered by everyday folks. I walked through with no problems.”
The good news is that the riot was conducted by a small minority of the protestors. The bad news is that there were enough rioters to get four people killed while ransacking our nation’s Capitol building.
Shameful.
Previously On Insanity Wrap: Dangerous Biden-Harris Vaccine Hypocrisy Will Cost Lives
More shameful however is official Democrat tolerance and actual encouragement of political violence — provided the violence is committed by their own street thugs.
Violence on both sides is bad. But I didn't hear anything out of Biden or Harris' mouth all summer as our cities were burning down.
Americans are fed up with hypocrisy.
— Lisa Daftari (@LisaDaftari) January 6, 2021
Worse, any further right-wing violence could be used as a justification for Democrats — who will soon assume control of both chambers and the White House — to crack down on conservative groups.
It’s easy to see that becoming an escalating cycle of official lawlessness by the federal government, and unofficial lawlessness by the oppressed.
If that becomes the case, welcome to Banana Republic, USA.
We’re already there in places like Portland, where Democrats have had free rein to experiment with using official lawlessness to consolidate state power.
Hell, we’re already there in big blue states like California and New York. What else do you call it, other than a banana republic, when officials arbitrarily enact, rescind, and reenact random and capricious lockdown orders?
As Charles Lipson wrote Wednesday night:
The scale and symbolic significance of this attack are new and profoundly troubling. But it is also the culmination of several disturbing trends. For months now, we have witnessed a degradation of public order — mobs roaming city streets, unpunished; an effort to take over and firebomb a federal courthouse in Portland, unpunished; delegates attacked on the streets of Washington after the Republican convention, unpunished. And now this, far worse than anything that came before.
“It could be worse,” Igor told Dr. Frederick Frankenstein. “It could be raining.”
And the violence could be worse: Trump could have (and probably actually did) win the election. As Glenn Reynolds asked earlier this morning, “Does anyone think there wouldn’t have been riots if Trump had been declared the winner?”
Of course there would have been.
The Left has put on a four-year-long temper tantrum in response to Trump’s 2016 victory, culminating with them turning 2020 into the worst year of riots since 1968. Worse was the running coup attempt against Trump that began before he was even sworn into office.
“He egged on his supporters” yesterday, the Democrat-Media Complex claims. But that’s exactly what the Democrats have done on an ongoing basis since the morning of November 9, 2016.
The Left projects. Always. If you hear a committed progressive claim that Trump is stealing Easter eggs from children, it’s a sure thing you’ll catch them hiding brightly-colored shell fragments from a crying child.
It would be easy to predict that things will get worse before they get better — if they get better.
But as always, the outcome is up to us.
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