Media watch: Calling a Riot a Riot
“Finally, the media understand how dangerous mobs can be,” snarks the Washington Examiner’s Eddie Scarry. “CNN’s Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and others” watched “aghast Wednesday,” as “thousands of President Trump’s supporters” breached the Capitol. But that “pro-Trump chaos” came after “months of the media and Democrats excusing and often encouraging the rioting, looting, arson and vandalism” last year by “Democratic voters, the Black Lives Matter crowd and Antifa.” Then, “terrified people” were told “the protests were ‘mostly peaceful,’ even as they watched their communities” terrorized. “Rioting isn’t a good look for the US This would be easier to explain if the media had believed it in 2020.”
Libertarian: No, Antifa Didn’t Storm the Capitol
After last week’s “mob assault on the US Capitol, some conservatives” tried to “shift blame from the dozens of pro-Trump protesters who stormed the building to a fictitious Antifa boogeyman,” reports Reason’s Robby Soave. But the attack didn’t carry the hard-left group’s signature tactics: “They dress in black and conceal their faces with masks and hoods” and “don’t aim to get caught.” They will “quickly smash windows and set fires” before blending back into the crowd. The Capitol rioters, “by contrast, were captured in numerous photos and videos” with “easily identifiable” faces. The violence was “overwhelmingly and provably committed by the president’s most fervent supporters.”
Iconoclast: Trump Is Still Not a Tyrant
While members of both parties insist that President Trump has once and for all proved himself a tyrant, it was exhaustion, “rather than ambition, that led this supposed totalitarian to give half-hearted encouragement to a mob that attempted to halt the ratification of last year’s election results,” counters The Week’s Matthew Walther. At some point in the last year, Trump lost “the will to govern,” and “his rule devolved into a fantastical senescence, aloof from the rapine and poverty into which the country had fallen.” Given his foolishly underwhelming response to the storming of the Capitol, “the legacy that awaits him” is almost certainly that of a tyrant. But ultimately, “it will be undeserved, albeit for reasons that do him even less credit than the overweening ambition of which he is so wrongly accused.”
Tech beat: The Woke Purge
Liberals insist there is no such thing as cancel culture. “And yet with the flick of a switch, billionaire capitalists voted for by precisely nobody” — Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — “have just silenced a man who is still the democratically elected president of the United States,” sighs Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill. Cancel culture, then, is “the means through which the powerful, unaccountable oligarchies of the Internet era and their clueless cheerleaders in the liberal elites interfere in the democratic process. . . . We underestimate the significance of this act of unilateral purging at our peril. It demonstrates that the greatest threat to freedom and democracy comes not from the oafs and hard-right clowns who stormed the Capitol this week, but from the technocratic elites who spy in the breaching of the Capitol an opportunity to consolidate their cultural power and their political dominance.”
Expert: The Capitol Assault Was No ‘Coup’
“Wednesday’s aborted insurrection on Capitol Hill was unique,” observes Edward N. Luttwak in The Wall Street Journal, since the nation’s ruler was “not the enemy to be replaced but rather the intended beneficiary of the insurrection.” Nor was this a covert-til-the-end coup attempt. The best description: “a venting of accumulated resentments,” over the anti-Trump “resistance,” the arcane abuses that ginned up the “Russiagate” probe and so on. As president, Joe Biden may find it easier to heal the nation, because of his “conspicuous refusal to adopt the language of resistance in 2016 — and his abstention from false accusations of collusion with Russia.” For all that “overwrought talk of a coup attempt” brings “a pleasurable shiver in some people,” note that “the market was supremely unimpressed: Stocks went up, because investors know it will all be over in two weeks.” — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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