This week, there was an “insurrection” in the California State Capitol in Sacramento.
A group of radical extremists invaded the State Assembly, interrupting the first day of the legislative session and forcing lawmakers to flee the chamber. They continued to occupy the legislature even after the lights were turned off. But eventually, they were allowed to leave peacefully, and there were no arrests at all.
The reason: unlike the January 6 protesters in Washington, the California protesters are on the political left.
Those who participated in the January 6 event three years ago are still being arrested and prosecuted for the nebulous crime of “obstructing an official proceeding.” Some are being punished merely for showing up on the Capitol grounds, without committing acts of violence. They have been publicly humiliated; they have lost jobs; and many have been forced to endure pre-trial detention before receiving long sentences.
The left-wing anti-Israel radicals who invaded the California capitol will never be punished.
In fact, they are more likely to be hailed as heroes.
That is because they are part of the Democratic Party coalition, and because they are using a tactic that Democrats have reserved for themselves for over a decade.
Long before a crowd of angry Donald Trump supporters — and a still-unknown number of provocateurs — invaded the U.S. Capitol, Democrats had repeatedly used the tactic of staging protests inside legislative buildings, both at the state and federal level, and praised themselves for their bravery.
The tactic was first used in Wisconsin in 2011, after the Tea Party wave election of 2010 propelled Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans into office. Walker wanted to pass legislation curtailing the massive power of public sector unions. Instead of just opposing the legislation, Democratic lawmakers fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum. Then thousands of protesters went into the state capitol, several times, to stage noisy protests and disrupt proceedings. Some even occupied the capitol for weeks.
That tactic was used over and over again, in various state legislatures around the country, for various causes, such as the “Red for Ed” protests staged by teachers’ unions. And each time, media outlets like MSNBC praised the activists who had led the way.
In May 2020, left-wing activists stepped up the level of aggression in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in deep-blue Minneapolis. A mob surrounded the White House and tried to storm the gates to remove Donald Trump from power.
The mob threw bottles and rocks at the Secret Service and other members of law enforcement, injuring scores of them. They also assaulted journalists who were there to report on the event. The situation was so grave that the Secret Service ushered President Trump into a bunker for his own safety, and that of the nation.
Instead of condemning the attack, Democrats joined the protest outside the White House the very next day, and then-candidate Joe Biden mocked Trump for hiding from the left-wing rioters.
Over the next several months, left-wing mobs staged insurrections in almost every major city in America, taking over the streets in illegal protests that often became riots. Though the media described these events as “mostly peaceful,” the fact is that riots hit 48 out America’s 50 largest cities. Ordinary citizens were placed under curfew while rioters looted businesses and even attacked government buildings.
And Democrats criticized the police who responded, rarely criticizing the mobs who were their own voters.
That was the context in which the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol took place. It was exactly that: a riot, not an “insurrection.”
A study by Harvard, no less, found that only 8% of participants in the riot wanted to overthrow the government; a plurality thought they were saving democracy.
They were mistaken, and as I said at the time, Trump should bear political (not legal) responsibility for what happened, just as the Black Lives Matter movement bore responsibility for the rioting that accompanied its own protests.
But if what happened on January 6 was an “insurrection,” then Democrats and their left-wing allies are guilty of staging such “insurrections,” repeatedly, for the past several years.
In 2016, elected Democrats in the House of Representatives staged an illegal sit-in on the floor of the chamber to demand gun control legislation. They halted the official proceedings of the House for a whole day. In that case, there were at least some arrests on minor charges, but the insurrectionists were celebrated by the media.
President Biden is going to mark the third anniversary of the January 6 riot this weekend by repeating his ominous and divisive warning from September 2022, when he stood in front of Marines at Independence Hall in Philadelphia and warned Americans about “dark” threat of “MAGA forces.” But he will say nothing about the “insurrection” in California this week, nor about any of the insurrections that he and his party have tolerated, and at times encouraged, for years.
Some insurrections, evidently, are OK.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
