They're legitimately trying to make January 6 as bad or worse than September 11
Just a reminder than on the former date 3,000 people died over the course of 90 minutes
“It’s hard to watch” is a cliche thing people say but mostly don’t really mean—most people by-and-large don’t have any trouble watching distressing stuff—but for me the September 11 footage really is still hard to see in the rare instances when it comes up. Watching the planes hit the towers feels like a gunshot discharged directly next to your eardrum, something you can technically recover from but never fully. And the collapse of the buildings is a noisy, explosive kind of horror that I have never experienced in any other way. Aside from, I suppose, what the B-29 crews saw when they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never before in history have we watched the deaths of so many people play our right before our eyes. When you saw the towers collapse you witnessed a genuine act of mass murder, death on a scale that is hard to comprehend. There it is.
The January 6 Capitol riot footage, meanwhile, is boring, not merely by comparison but in absolute terms. It’s just a bunch of people running around and being stupid, hanging from congressional balconies, putting their dirty clod stompers up on Nancy Pelosi’s $350 office desk. We’ve discussed here before how the January 6 riot was not, in fact, an “insurrection,” which seems self-evident. But it seems worth stressing again, because not only are many notable people still insisting that Jan. 6 was really, really bad, they’re also attempting to position it as either as bad as, or worse than, Sept. 11.
Here’s political reporter Sarah Jones:
“Then the terror attack of 1/6.” Strange, it seems like this woman is equating the death of 3,000 innocent Americans at the hands of theocratic terrorists to a bunch of people wandering around the U.S. Capitol for a few hours and tussling with police. But that can’t be what she’s arguing. No way anyone would make such an outlandish and reprehensible equation, right?
Anyway here’s progressive lawyer Tristan Snell making the same argument:
This fellow noted in a followup tweet that the the two incidents were not “equivalent,” but “both were attacks on America.” Gee, that kinda sounds like you’re making them, I dunno, equivalent. I mean, I don’t know: suppose someone you know had his arm hacked off with a dull butcher knife by a psychopathic home invader, then suppose a while later someone else you know got elbowed in the ribs by an impatient traveler on the subway. If you tried to make a point by arguing that “both were violent assaults,” you’d obviously be trying to equate the two, and you’d be a kind of a scumbag for doing so. Just like…well, you know.
Here’s a writer for Conde Nast:
Oh, is that what it’s “important to remember” on September 11? Gee, it almost seems like Luke Zaleski is trying to make a comparison between…naaah, he wouldn’t do that, nobody would.
Now you might argue that these people, while well-known and prominent in their respective industries, are not exactly indicative of some kind of concerning mode of thought. Anybody can have dumb ideas but so long as it’s confined to a relatively small portion of the population it’s not as alarming. Well, here’s Georgia state Rep. Erick Allen yesterday:
“Never forget!” Buddy, January 6 was such a non-issue in terms of “our country [being] attacked” that I forget about it all the time and have to be reminded it even happened. Meanwhile, whenever I see a plane flying through the air, canted at a slight angle and with the morning sunlight glinting off it in a certain way, I still get the shivers and I probably always will, forever.
Here, too, is Virginia Sen. Mark Warner on Face the Nation yesterday. Mark Warner is one of the most respected, visible, celebrated senators in U.S. history, people love him, he’s seen as a paragon of stability and carefulness; Face the Nation, meanwhile, is the place where people go to insightfully discuss important ideas. And this is what Warner said:
[Since 9/11] we are safer, better prepared. The stunning thing to me is, here we are 20 years later, and the attack on the symbol of our democracy was not coming from terrorists, but it came from literally insurgents attacking the Capitol on January 6.
Disgraceful talk coming from a man bringing disgrace to himself and his office. Over at Meet the Press, meanwhile, Chuck Todd remarked:
Today is September 11th. It was twenty-one years ago that we were attacked by foreign terrorists. Not quite 20 years after 9/11, the Capitol came under attack from domestic terrorists.
I suppose we can look forward to this sort of thing for years. Jan. 6 was more or less a fart in a closed room, something unpleasant but not at all a crisis in any existential or even immediate sense. But they’re going to milk it for all it’s worth, up to and including bringing the deaths of 3,000 Americans down to the level of a viking dude beating his chest on the House rostrum for an hour. We should not tolerate this political sewage and we should be very frank in calling out and criticizing the people who spread it around.