J6 Is the New 9/11

Politics

J6 Is the New 9/11

Undermining standards and norms is easier with an excuse.

At the beginning of this century, there were many critics of the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the American use of torture, and the prolonged U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, but War on Terror proponents always had a ready answer: 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack ever on American soil.

The American response to that fateful day was an unapologetic carte blanche, with Vice President Dick Cheney even vowing that the U.S. would work on the “dark side” henceforth. The rules had changed. So would morality.

If the Bush-Cheney administration had to build a case for war on false premises, encroach upon civil liberties, or go around the Geneva Convention, warhawks had their justification. If democratic norms, constitutional rights, and international treaties were going to be undermined—and they were—who were you to question what America did after 9/11?

For many, particularly Republicans, this was sound reasoning. For many, no doubt, it still is. And for many Democrats, J6 is the new 9/11.

On January 6, 2021, protesters rioted in and around the U.S. Capitol, many believing that the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden had been stolen from Donald Trump. Five were left dead (one shot by Capitol police, one drug overdose, three of natural causes) and many were injured, including police officers, four of whom would later commit suicide.

While most of the country was rightly horrified by the scenes and events in Washington that day, in the months and years since, there have been different interpretations, particularly along party lines, of what actually went down on that dreadful day.

Was this a pre-planned, genuine attempt to overthrow the government of the United States by actual “insurrectionists” with the power and know-how to succeed? Or was it a protest gone horribly wrong, by everyday Americans who were unhappy with the election and vented that anger in the worst way imaginable? Many Americans knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone who got caught up in the mania of that day. (I do—a cousin of a progressive friend). Most were not powerful, and in a different setting having different politics, the raging participants could have just as easily taken part in a Black Lives Matter riot.

Many and perhaps most Democrats today believe that it was an insurrection. There’s no question for them. Certainly no grace about it.

In fact, prominent Democrats have said that J6 is on par with 9/11. Kamala Harris said, in a supposedly symbolic Capitol Hill speech on January 6, 2022, “Certain dates echo throughout history, including dates that instantly remind all who have lived through them, where they were and what they were doing when our democracy came under assault.”

The then–vice president claimed some dates in U.S. history “occupy not only a place on our calendars, but a place in our collective memory. December 7, 1941. September 11, 2001. And January 6, 2021.”

But 9/11 was a genuine terrorist attack in the clearest sense. Few would dispute that. Was J6 really an ‘insurrection?’ It’s open to debate, at a minimum.

Regardless, J6 mythology is now central to Democratic party identity. If members are in large part defined by “the other,” well, what’s worse than MAGA rioters? 9/11 terrorists, for one. But instead of questioning whether that is a fair comparison, Democrats make the leap into lumping them together. It’s comfortable and satisfying.

And useful. Some of those arrested were seemingly made examples of by being given unusually lengthy sentences, similar to the mindset of “Gitmo”-crazed Republicans years prior. When the incoming second-term President Donald Trump pardoned the J6ers in January, only 40 percent of Republicans opposed it, while a whopping 90 percent of Democrats did.

Many of the same Democrats who may have once protested the George W. Bush administration’s mistreatment of detainees seemed happy, even gleeful, to punish J6 protesters as harshly as possible.

For many Republicans after 9/11, the extreme Muslim terrorists America would deal with weren’t like us. They were foreign. For many Democrats after J6, their place was taken by MAGA supporters. Different than. Less than. As TAC’s Harry Scherer framed it in 2022, “In criminal cases, we expect defendants to be indicted, temporarily detained, and acquitted or convicted and sentenced.”

“But defendants in the case of January 6 are different. How?” he explained. “They’re insurrectionists. They threatened our democracy. Have you seen the media they consumed online? They’re racist, sexist, anti-gay.”

“We told them to go away,” Scherer noted, describing how elites wanted these people permanently muted. “Some consider them to have gone away. In polite society, they’re occasionally mentioned only to be publicly mocked and defamed, sometimes viciously.”

Can one imagine this being done to George Floyd protesters? (Actually, we don’t have to imagine). Americans can still debate whether the millions who participated in those events on the streets of many cities in the summer of 2021 were protests or riots or perhaps both. In many instances, there is no clear line.

There was no clear line for many of the individual cases that occurred on January 6, 2021 either. Still, for Democrats, there is a line. There has to be.

Like 9/11 and the War on Terror, J6 was a backdrop for a number of democratic norms that were undermined throughout the Biden administration.

When the Twitter Files revealed in 2022 and 2023 that the Biden administration had pressured social media companies to censor, many Democrats were mad at the reporters. That the federal government appeared to have violated the First Amendment didn’t seem to bother them. After all, weren’t many J6 insurrectionists on Twitter? Covid-deniers. Transphobics. They still have rights?

A November 2021 Cato study showed 

large majorities of Democrats support punishing social media companies if they don’t stop people from saying or sharing things the government has classified as health misinformation (74%) or hate speech (78%). Only 34% and 37% of Republicans agree, respectively. Republicans, on the other hand, support (60%) punishing sites like Facebook if they aren’t politically neutral, while less than half (47%) of Democrats agree.

Republicans in this survey were more concerned if social media moderators were being fair. But strong majorities of Democrats, over 70 percent, appeared to be concerned that people might say things they didn’t like.

The lawfare used against Trump by Team Biden-Harris and their proxies set a new modern American precedent in the weaponizing of the legal system against one opponent. Democrats in various states trying to throw Trump off state ballots due to his role in the “insurrection” were seemingly fine with this attempt within the party. Biden getting kicked out as his party’s presidential nominee and Harris being installed without votes—that was new and didn’t faze many Dems. Then the Republican presidential nominee was shot at once and narrowly escaped an attempted shooting later, events in which there are still far more questions than answers.

America was very banana-republic for major parts of 2023 and 2024.

In an honest light, the Biden administration oversaw some of the most authoritarian and undemocratic behavior this side of FDR, but the party in power at the time with “democracy” in its name simply was not bothered by it. A means to an end. They don’t even acknowledge that it happened, and to the degree that they might, defend this behavior given the events of January 6 and their overriding mission of stopping Trump.

J6 has become to the current Democratic party what 9/11 was to George W. Bush’s GOP: A license to ignore long-established ethical parameters within American politics and a pass, for at least a time, on having to answer for it.

Of course, Trump and his administration are certainly guilty of defying norms too. There’s also an entire oppositional political party that never stops talking about this, even fabricating new misdeeds along the way.

The rule throughout the entire Biden administration seemed to be that it was not authoritarianism so long as Democrats were doing it. But it was.

J6 does not change this.

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