The first January 6 Mostly Peaceful Protester, Paul Hodgkins, has just been savagely sentenced for, as Julie Kelly points out on Twitter, the felony obstruction of an official proceeding. All he really did was go in the Capitol and take a selfie [Man Faces 1st Sentencing For Felony In Riot At U.S. Capitol, by Michael Tarm, AP, July 19, 2021].
In contrast, in the Kavanaugh Incursion into the Capitol Building on November 5, 2018, hundreds of anti- Kavanaugh protesters were arrested, and then immediately released. I can’t find any evidence that any of them were punished in any way [Most of the protesters arrested during Kavanaugh confirmation have been released, by Tara Bahrampour, Washington Post, October 8, 2018]. And they were just as guilty of “obstruction of an official proceeding” as the January 6 group.
The Federal Government has arrested 535 Mostly Peaceful protesters in the six months since January 6 [More than 535 arrested so far in Capitol riot case, while more than 300 suspects remain unidentified, CBS, July 16, 2021]. Most have been released pending trial, but dozens of them are still being held in solitary confinement in the District of Columbia [Jan. 6 defendants win unlikely Dem champions as they face harsh detainment, Politico, April 19, 2021].
This is especially interesting to us at VDARE.com because the Regime Media lied that the Mostly Peaceful Protesters carried a VDARE flag. (They didn’t, but we have been proud if they had). This means, of course, that the Biden Regime wants to suppress us too.
Note that that the Federal Government totally failed to do anything like this during the last year’s city-burning Black Lives Matter riots, the Antifa Riots, earlier black riots, or the massive disruptions that happened during the Vietnam War. (The famous Trial of the Chicago Seven involved, literally, seven people.)
We could say that this is unprecedented—or almost unprecedented.
Early in the 20th century, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, assisted by a young J. Edgar Hoover, launched raids against (literally) bomb-throwing radicals who had targeted, among others, the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Many of those were immigrant radicals, like Emma Goldman, who had conspired with her lover Alexander Berkman in the attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick.
These raids, which rounded up as many as 3000 people on suspicion of bomb-throwing, etc., which included a lot of immigrants, like Goldman and Berkman, and deported some 556 of them back to places like the Soviet Union.
But, even back then, the Deep State resisted:
Though 556 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer's efforts were largely frustrated by officials at the U.S. Department of Labor, which had authority for deportations and objected to Palmer's methods [Wikipedia on the Palmer Raids, July 19, 2021].
Rounding up radical foreigners is not a bad thing. Just after 9/11, I suggested that then-Attorney General Ashcroft ought to do something similar, starting with Arab and other Muslim illegal immigrants. My column was called Why No "Ashcroft Raids"?, October 31, 2001, and Pat Buchanan picked up the idea [Let the Ashcroft Raids Begin, November 10, 2001].
Very shortly after that, Ashcroft did indeed launch investigations of Arab immigrants, reported in US News as The Ashcroft way: The attorney general calls for eavesdropping and tells feds to question thousands of Arab-Americans, by Chitra Ragavan, November 19, 2001.
As part of a "wartime" reorganization of the Justice Department, U.S. News has learned, Ashcroft on Friday ordered all 93 U.S. attorneys to seek the assistance of state and local officials to question more than 5,000 men, mostly Arab-Americans[sic], between ages 18 and 33 who entered the United States after Jan. 1, 2000. The list, prepared by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was based on intelligence information from past al Qaeda activities, Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said.
That order was in addition to ongoing intelligence operations by the FBI. "We have been told to go to the mosques, to the Islamic centers, to universities, and to neighborhoods where there are large Arab-American populations," a FBI agent said.
Of course, none of these guys were “Arab-Americans”—there’s no way someone who entered in January of 2000 could have been an American citizen by November, 2001. They were immigrants, and Ashcroft was right to see if they were anti-American radical foreigners.
The Palmer Raids are famous, or perhaps I should say notorious. In 2001, retrospectively defending Palmer, I wrote:
A little historical perspective, please: between the wars, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan were all taken over by radical movements. Other countries had narrow escapes.
So I’m not saddened by the fact that a bunch of anarchists and communists were rounded up and sent back to Communist Russia, among other places. This had broad popular support: see the contemporary cartoon below.
However, it’s instructive to compare it to the “Garland Raids” now going on—in which the current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, is pursuing the Mostly Peaceful Protesters of January 6 from pillar to post.
Garland has been applying all the high-tech federal resources that President Trump (for some reason) wasn’t allowed to apply to the nationwide orgy of rioting, arson, and looting that Black Lives Matter and their followers have been engaging in since Memorial Day last year to the patriots who trespassed in the Capitol Building during a rally to protest voting irregularities.
The offenses of the Mostly Peaceful protesters are nothing like the Italian immigrant bombing campaign against Palmer and other American officials. They certainly don’t approach the level of the May 31, 2020 siege of Trump’s White House that injured 60 Secret Service officers, and caused Trump to fight back, and make a personal appearance at the head of Federal Law Enforcement troops.
THEY'RE BURNING DOWN CHURCHES IN DC RIGHT NOW pic.twitter.com/3H4mBToHTx
— Liberty Hangout (@LibertyHangout) June 1, 2020
(The Wikipedia article on this is called “Donald Trump photo op at St. John's Church” and refers to the protesters outside the burned church as “peaceful.”)
They also don’t approach the level of the 2017 Inauguration Riots, after which many rioters were arrested…and not punished.
Even though the Trump DOJ prosecuted those rioters caught burning things and attacking police, they didn’t use high-tech surveillance and all the resources of the DOJ to pursue people who were merely present.
BWAHAHAHAHA yes Trump's DOJ would never try -- or certainly get away with -- hunting down Americans for more than six months as retribution for protesting his election. Are these people for real? https://t.co/50TQ8UnH9u
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) July 9, 2021
I’m also not aware that any number of the Black Bloc Antifa rioters of January 2017 were held without bail for any length of time.
I think we would have heard about that:
More than 200 people were arrested on Jan. 20, 2017, during demonstrations where some protesters threw rocks and bricks at police officers, set a car on fire and shattered storefront windows.
[Prosecutors Dropping Remaining Charges Against Trump Inauguration Protesters, by Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks, New York Times, July 6, 2018]
Which is in spite of the fact that the J-20 riots were a literal conspiracy—with organizers and a website—whose explicit motive was to disrupt America’s peaceful transition of power.
And they were followed by many more Antifa riots during the Trump Presidency, the most notorious being the attack on the Unite The Right riot at Charlottesville, VA in August 2017.
The problem now is that the communists are in control. The Mostly Peaceful Protesters of January 6 have been pursued to Kentucky, to Alaska [Did agents raid home of wrong woman over Jan. 6 riot? Maybe, by Mark Thiessen and Michael Balsamo, AP, May 5, 2021], and to New York City, as John Derbyshire reported here on June 25:
Read Miranda Devine's account of the way they have dealt with Joseph Bolanos [FBI tears innocent New Yorker’s life into shreds after Jan. 6: Devine, New York Post, June 23, 2021].
Mr. Bolanos lives in New York City. He's a mild-mannered senior citizen, 69 years old and unmarried, and cares for his 94-year-old mother.
He went to Washington, DC on January 6th to listen to Trump's speech. He never got involved with the protests, was nowhere near any kind of disturbance, and can prove it—he was filming himself pretty continuously. He never breached the barricades or entered the Capitol.
Back in his mother's apartment in New York in mid-February, Mr. Bolanos was woken by federal agents breaking down the door. The apartment was trashed, his property was seized, he was cuffed and interrogated for four hours. He was so distressed he suffered a stroke. Today, four months later, he still hasn't been charged and his property still hasn't been returned to him.
Is the FBI a domestic terrorist organization? Ask Joseph Bolanos. He has not been charged with any crime regarding the Jan. 6 DC protest, but he has suffered two strokes from the stress of being detained and FBI raids.
— Roger Kimball (@rogerkimball) June 24, 2021
https://t.co/pwOc0U6kdPSo Mr. Bolanos had gone to Washington, DC to hear the president speak. Not much impressed with the speech, he'd left early and walked back to his hotel. Later he'd walked back to the Capitol, taken some pictures, then returned again to his hotel. For this, he is an Enemy of the People.
Apparently a neighbor had overheard him talking—the neighbor said "boasting"—about being at the Capitol. She had called the FBI hotline. Mr. Bolanos lives in New York City, remember: the beating heart of crazy gentry Leftism.
As Miranda Devine says, it's like something you'd read about Communist China.
This has been going on all over the country. Julie Kelly has covered some of the more outrageous cases at American Greatness:
While the authorities have been having FBI and DHS agents scan video footage of the riots for facial recognition, they’re unwilling to release this footage to the general public: see Michelle Malkin: The January 6 Video Cover-Up—The Case of John Steven Anderson, and Julie Kelly, above.
Attorney General Garland apparently has no concern for American civil liberties at all, especially those of wrongthinkers like us and our readers.
See
What makes the Garland Raids different from the Palmer Raids?
The Garland Raid victims are American Patriots.
James Fulford [Email him] is writer and editor for VDARE.com.
