There are many people on the Right who are opposed to labeling what happened on Wednesday, January 6th, as a riot, insurrection, violent protest, etc. Despite all the footage, reporting, and pictures from the event, there is a hesitation to call this violent act what it was.
One of the most common arguments to this is one of the most frustrating to me because it cuts to the very core of what conservatism has become under Donald Trump. The idea espoused by many of these people is that since the Left never identified the violent protests over the summer as such, so we should not address what happened Wednesday that way, either.
It is more of the victimhood conservatives want to hide behind rather than make the uncomfortable admission that this is exactly the type of chaos the nomination of Trump promised in the beginning. That living solely to “own the libs” was a dangerous political philosophy with no future other than emotional escalation.
People making this argument aren’t seeking any real truth with regard to what happened over the summer, as Antifa morons burned down American cities in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests. They are looking for any excuse to not address the violence stemming from their own side, encouraged by the straight refusal of the Republican Party as a whole to accept the results of the November election that saw Donald Trump voted out of office by the American voters.
I’m sorry, but we should stand for honesty, not political hackery, and to insist that what happened on Wednesday wasn’t a riot or a violent protest is as dishonest as it gets.
It is understandable that the failure of institutions to treat both sides fairly has caused many on the Right to get fed up with the system as a whole. I feel that frustration and a lack of faith in the system time and again. But to use that as an excuse to dismiss a violent riot that openly threatened the Vice President of the United States and members of Congress is to ignore the volatility caused by two months of refusing to accept election results and insist there was some grand conspiracy that stole it.
But I fear that this argument over language isn’t the biggest issue in all this. A lot of the folks trying to play the language game here aren’t doing so because it’s really about the language. What Democrats and the media called the summer riots has nothing to do with the fact that a lot of people want what happened on Wednesday, and still want more of. They are fully on board with an insurrection against a government they feel has slighted them far too many times.
And that is pretty ridiculous. They are treating this as some opening act to the American Revolution when this is a drunken rabble not fit enough to destroy British tea. They were paranoid conspiracy theorists drunk on anti-government rage.
Now, the flip side to all this is that what happened Wednesday was a riot and was a violent protest. But the idea that this was some insurrection or coup attempt is absurd. This was an armed rabble with no plan, other than to cause chaos and violence. People are treating it as though Trump supporters really did try to pull a Handmaid’s Tale on Congress, but these rioters did not come close to that level of planning. They just wanting destruction.
Whether or not they were encouraged by Trump or anything like that doesn’t matter. They were a mob frothing with rage and nothing else. They couldn’t have attempted an actual insurrection if they wanted to. To treat it as an actual insurrection is giving them far too much credit.
Language is important but nearly as important as honesty. When we start downplaying or overplaying events for political purposes, we lose. We have to keep striving to be better at being civilized human beings, not better at beating the other side with word games.