This article is cross-posted at the Gateway Pundit’s Fact Check Bureau here.
- Biden calls Capitol protest a “riot” when it wasn’t.
- Biden calls Capitol protest an “insurrection” when it wasn’t.
- Biden calls Capitol protest “mayhem” when it wasn’t.
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Indicted Outlet: Joseph Biden | U.S. President | Link | Archive | 8/5/21
The U.S. Capitol under San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi gave a participation trophy to every Capitol Police officer. During that ceremony, the elite powers decided to once again tarnish the many people who were ‘mostly peaceful’ protesting at the Capitol once provoked by the Capitol Police.
By every indication the tens of thousands of pro-Trump people at the Capitol were collectively radically more peaceful than the violent Capitol Police. But that hasn’t stopped a nearly daily demonization by Washington elites.
“It wasn’t dissent. It wasn’t debate. It wasn’t democracy,” Biden said during a somber ceremony in the Rose Garden. “It was insurrection. It was riot and mayhem. It was radical and chaotic, and it was unconstitutional. Maybe most important, it was fundamentally un-American.”
Words have meanings. Let’s focus on the words “insurrection” and “riot” and “mayhem.” Those are pretty loaded words. It’s all a bit of dishonest framing by Biden.
Major Violations:
- Opinion as Fact
- Misusing a Word
- Dishonest Framing
- Collective Guilt
Insurrection – an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. [1]
Riot – a violent public disorder; specifically : a tumultuous disturbance of the public peace by three or more persons assembled together and acting with a common intent. [2]
Mayhem – needless or willful damage or violence. [3]
It is tempting to let left-wing political figures just say whatever trash it is that they’re going to say, and not split hairs or fight about semantics. But it is telling that what they are trying to do is to manipulate language and words so as to overcome a deficit of evidence. What they cannot prove with testimony, video, pictures, they seek to overcome by controlling how we discuss and think about an event.
No one would say 9/11 was an insurrection. No one would say that Pearl Harbor was a riot. But when there is room for doubt and a political motive, left-wing political actors repeatedly stretch, distort, and pervert words in order to control the narrative and set the terms for debate.
Was the Capitol Protest an “Insurrection”? The definition says it must be a ‘revolt’ and what does that mean?
Revolt – to renounce allegiance or subjection (as to a government) : rebel. [4]
Were the Capitol protesters revolting? Did they renounce their allegiance to the United States government? Were they rebelling against the government? No matter how much the political left tries to stretch this, they clearly weren’t. They were a crowd of people waiting for a speech by the President who were being clubbed, shot, and maced by the Capitol Police. They fought back because the crowds pushed them into the front line and they had no other options.
This was not a revolt. To call it that is misusing a word.
pictured: the violent riot sedition fascism white supremacist name-calling revolt in the sacred temple of democracy
Was it an insurrection? Just because people had political grievances does not make their assembly an ‘insurrection’ – otherwise every political protest would be one. When the pro-lifers assemble every year by the hundreds of thousands at the March for Life, are they engaged in insurrection because they are opposed to the judicial activism in the Judiciary? If 300,000 pro-lifers gather to protest the Supreme Court and a dozen people get into a fight, is that an insurrection because now their political grievances involve violence?
Of course not. An insurrection is a directed group of people who are led for a political result. There was no direction of the Capitol protesters, and they had no discernable goal in mind. They were not there to kill Mike Pence or to stop the vote counting. They were there to hear a speech by President Trump. That’s why the crowd involved so many people who were obviously old grandmothers and mothers with children.
This was not an insurrection. To call it that is misusing a word.
Was this a ‘riot’? The definition clearly implies a certain level of violence. A disturbance of the public peace suggests that it has to be more than just hand-to-hand combat. Every time the police arrest someone who resists, that’s not a riot. When the police fight with a group of suspects, no one calls that a riot. The part of the definition that’s missing here is that the violence is somehow tied to a political goal, it’s an uprising and disturbance that is motivated at least in part due to political motives of the participants. It’s the political use of collective widespread violence to get a certain result.
And this is where the left-wing fantasyland takes over: they want the Capitol Protesters to have engaged in violence for no reason other than to stop the certification of votes. Now, that was the reason why the protesters were there, but it is not the reason why the events turned tense. [5] The escalation of violence seems to be from the Capitol Police who were pushing back against the crowd and often clubbing, maceing, and shooting people on the front lines. [6][7]
Video exists of the Capitol Police firing flashbangs into a defenseless, non-violent Trump crowd. [8]
So were these people revolting against civil government by engaging in unprovoked violence spontaneously? Were the people in the Trump crowd trying to use violence to accomplish their goals? Obviously not.
If the crowd’s goal was to kill Mike Pence, what stopped them exactly? By the media’s account, they were very close. [9] They apparently just lacked the willpower once they actually had him that close? All these thousands of people who were willing to siege the “temple of democracy” and yet lost their maniacal zeal once they were within smelling distance of Pence’s chrome dome?
This was not a riot. To call it that is misusing a word.
pictured: the violent insurrection
The definition of “mayhem” is a little broader, since it implies a certain proportionality to violence. Was the violence on January 6th ‘needless’ or ‘willful’? It seems clear that the extreme fatal violence used against Ashli Babbitt was completely needless and willful by Lt. Mike Byrd even though she was unarmed and just seeking to enter an empty hallway. Is there any other violence that was committed by Trump protesters that was clearly needless and willful?
We have the testimony of the Capitol Police, which is filled with political theater and almost laughable accounts of it being worse than a tour in war-torn Iraq. [10] Harry Dunn, one of the testifying Capitol Police officers, celebrated the violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin and was a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter. [11] Dunn referred to Trump as the “racist-in-chief” while a Capitol Police officer on Twitter. This has caused some others in law enforcement to say that their testimony, especially Dunn’s, “doesn’t pass the smell test.” [12]
It’s notable how much time the Capitol Police testimony spent on the protesters calling them naughty words. It kind of makes you think that maybe all the accusations of violence weren’t enough to really ‘sell’ the testimony and so they needed to add that element of things to the mix.
Protesters got shot without warning. [13][14]
That is ‘needless’ and ‘willful’ – would responding to that kind of aggression with resistance be disproportionate? That seems a hard case to make. If someone was shooting women and children with rubber bullets with no warning and with no clear cause, would it be proportionate to push them away? To spray them with mace? The crowd is only ‘needless’ and ‘willful’ in their resistance, if you presuppose that they had no valid reason to be there, that their claims were all illegitimate, and they were just drones responding to the leader of the hive.
And this is just opinion as fact. There’s very little evidence to back up this narrative, but the media dominates the field with it, and cancels and deplatforms anyone who disagrees, and deletes evidence to the contrary.
Biden’s motive for saying it isn’t hard to discern either: he can malign half the country who didn’t vote for him as seditionists, as criminals. It’s a way to impose collective guilt on all the people who didn’t vote for him.
Biden’s chronic lying continues without even a peep from the mainstream media.
OUR RATING: #FakeNews. This is what you’d expect on CNN playing to an empty airport.
Bibliography:
1 ] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insurrection
2 ] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riot
3 ] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mayhem
4 ] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revolt
6 ] https://libertyonenews.com/new-video-shows-capitol-police-unprovoked-firing-at-protesters-on-jan-6/
The post FACT CHECK: Lyin’ Biden Is Redefining Words to Smear Pro-Trump Capitol Protesters appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.