January 6 was not an insurrection and it is ridiculous to think it was
The real national embarrassment
Of all the stupid political memes to have arisen out of the Donald Trump era—and there were just so many of them—perhaps the dumbest is the contention that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 constituted as “insurrection” or an “attempted coup” or some sort of real or attempted violent takeover of the United States government. The contention is laughable and you only need to use your common sense and look at about nine seconds of video footage from the day’s events to see that. So of course it’s become a sticking point of the whole hysteria for the past 18 months, so much so that it’s a regular descriptor used by coverage from The Most Trusted Name in News:
The dangers inherent in this defining-down of insurrectionism are obvious: Every time you expand the net of a particular activity or behavior or definition, you by design capture more people doing that thing, and usually not in a good way. It’s why 30 years of broadening the parameters of “racism,” for instance, have made it so that progressives now brand you a racist when you do pretty much literally anything. To do the same thing with “insurrection,” which is plainly what many people want to do, would of course be much more politically advantageous, because if you can classify the non-insurrectionist stuff your opponents are doing as “insurrection,” you can do way more than just embarrass them on the Internet or get them fired from their jobs—you can get their constitutional rights suspended and have them thrown in jail indefinitely, as has happened with so many of the “insurrectionists” of January 6.
None of this would matter, of course, if the 1/6 riot had actually been an “insurrection.” But it wasn’t. The people doing it didn’t try to insurrect anything, at all. They had no plans. They had no strategies. They had no weapons. They had no meaningful thoughts about any of those things. They had no coherent guiding principles or philosophies necessary to support an “insurrection;” all they had was the vague, disjointed, low-information sense that there had been some sort of “steal” of the 2020 election, which they didn’t actually believe or care about, as evidenced by the fact that they haven’t done anything else about it over the past 18 months. They made no concerted attempt to overtake and abolish the seat of American governmental power and replace it with a new government. They clearly had no intention of doing any of these things, not even in theory or principle, let alone in practice. This was not a paramilitary force or a junta or even a militia. A bunch of people in hoodies and wolf-and-eagle sweatshirts were mostly let into the U.S. Capitol by security guards, where they wandered around for a few hours, caused a ruckus, took some selfies, and then were easily cleared out and/or arrested by police. That is not an insurrection and the only way you would want to classify it as one is if doing so was politically advantageous, which of course it is to a certain political demographic.
As dumb and as self-evidently wrong as this meme is, many people in power are wielding it expertly to their advantage in order to crush their political opponents and stifle dissent. Here’s Elizabeth Warren last month calling for blood ahead of the show trials in Congress:
“Traitors,” “incited,” “violent insurrection,” these are incendiary words underlining explosive allegations. Treason against the United States is death penalty stuff—they can pump you full of lethal chemicals for this sort of thing, or string you up by your neck, or however they’re killing people at federal these days. Is Elizabeth Warren arguing that the federal government should execute people in response to the January 6 riot? I can’t imagine she is proposing that directly, she’s in favor of abolishing the death penalty, but she must at the very least be comfortable with the idea, or at least comfortable with taking the risk that someone might be strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal dose of potassium chloride all because some bitter underemployed low-information voters stumbled around Nancy Pelosi’s office for a few minutes.
That’s what you put on the table when you make “insurrection” just another thing you say on Twitter and on the Sunday shows—by making an idiot-fueled riot the equivalent of treason, you bring us one step closer to the outright criminalization of all forms of dissent, the execution of people guilty of nothing more than misdemeanors, and the transformation of the United States from a constitutional republic to a tyrannical hellscape run by bitter, dour old wannabe-dictators like Elizabeth Warren. The January 6 riot was not an insurrection. Stop calling it that unless you want to bring about something much worse.