Did Black Lives Matter Trigger the Jan. 6 Capitol attack? That’s a Stretch
I appreciate constructive criticism, even when I think the critic is full of prunes.
But that fortunately was not the case in an email I received from a reader in the past week as U.S. Capitol police in Washington braced themselves for a rally to protest prosecution of the fools who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Although he agreed with my criticism of the nitwits who attacked the Capitol, he thought I let the other nitwits who committed violence at Black Lives Matter protests in Chicago and other cities off the hook.
“Until we acknowledge that the insurrection in Washington resulted, at least in part, from the riots and disorder which occurred the previous summer we will not come together as a country,” he wrote. “Unification comes from the middle and spreads outward. There are too many in the middle who see the willingness to blame one side and not the other as hypocrisy at its worst.”
Fair enough. For the record, I strongly oppose violence by either side — and agree that violence by one side doesn’t justify violence by the other side.
Yet a number of outspoken supporters of former President Donald Trump have responded to the Capitol Hill violence, which left five dead including a Capitol police officer, as if blame should be put on BLM protests which, like most Trump rallies, were mostly peaceful.
Sure, arson and looting did break out during or following peaceful protests in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Louisville, Kentucky, Detroit, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
That should be condemned, and a lot of people were arrested for being part of it.
And more than 600 suspected Capitol Hill rioters also have been arrested, often as a result of their actions having been recorded by the many cameras present.
Yet the process of rewriting this history has begun.
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