Tag: January 6

Collateral damage

By Steve Woodward

In the aftermath of a glaring security failure that allowed a deranged man-child to aim his rifle and fire multiple rounds at President Donald Trump, wise media overlords are warning that we must strive for national unity. This is a vile diversionary tactic intended to spin a narrative that every American is equally to blame for the so-called polarization that defines our times.

Instead, it must be loudly vocalized that what we observed on July 13, 2024, in rural Pennsylvania was a perfect storm of a vast mentally ill sector of our population converging with the relentless weaponization of corporate media, social media and our legal system.

The latter has been taking aim at Trump and his 75-million-plus legion for eight tumultuous years by trivializing physical threats against Trump or, worse, ignoring them.

But we’re once again called upon to unite, and lower the “temperature” of political discourse. It’s a sophomoric, hollow ploy to provide cover to the Biden regime’s army of surrogates in the White House, on Capitol Hill and within the corrupt, decaying journalism profession, all solely responsible for stoking smoldering embers of wrath.

“(Trump’s) opportunity now is to present himself as someone who can rise above the attack on his life and unite the country,” instructs a Wall Street Journal editorial.

It is “on all Republicans, all Democrats to come together, to lower the temperature (and) to measure the rhetoric,” said U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) during a television interview. Republicans? Are Republicans the ones drawing frequent comparisons between and Adolf Hitler and Trump? Are Republicans cheering on deeply corrupt attorneys general intent on imprisoning Trump?

The blue ribbon for post-Pennsylvania sermonizing goes to the Journal’s Gerard Baker, who wrote: “If there is room for emotional restraint in the aftermath of this horror, there is also reason to hope for a small movement toward de-escalating the mutual loathing to which so many Americans have fallen prey.”

Let us unpack the absurdity of Baker’s bloviation: Conservatives, many guided by Judeo-Christian principles, loathe hypocrisy, deceit and threats to our inalienable rights and freedom. Conservatives have not called for the execution of Joe Biden, however. 

By contrast, the Left hates us. As people. You. Me. Our very existence. There is no pleasure to be gained from knowing this, but there is no escaping the reality that it is so. If we are collateral damage in their war on American exceptionalism it’s our fault. We keep getting in the way. Military veteran Ashli Babbitt got in the way of a bullet on January 6, 2021, the day she died in the U.S. Capitol, an unarmed protestor. What explains a Capitol Police officer’s impulsive firing of a pistol that took her life? Rage? Contempt? The question never was formally asked. Lt. Michael Byrd was not charged. 

The Left coldly refuses to contemplate the collateral damage trailing in its relentless wake. Consider the the human toll during nearly a decade of Trump Delusion Syndrome. Lives lost. Jobs lost. Careers destroyed. Businesses closed or vandalized by BLM brigades. Kids trafficked. 

Something resonated with the Pennsylvania shooter. How can we not conclude that this mentally damaged person believed his cause was just? He believed that Trump needed to die. What triggered that belief and his act of terror might never be known. Take your choice on what influenced him. Trump is 21st century Hitler. Trump is an existential threat to “democracy”. Trump’s supporters are racist, sexist, transphobic. These narratives have bubbled like a toxic brew for years. Suck the hope out of human souls for long enough and some of them will snap.

The collateral damage in Butler, PA, was a firefighter, 50, attending Trump’s rally, Corey Comperatore. He is deceased. He took bullets to save his wife and daughter. David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74, remain hospitalized and critically wounded by the gunman’s erratic shots.

These names are added to the rolls of lives ended, or upended, by the a weaponized federal government during the Trump presidency, and by the current Biden regime. Many of these shortened lives include growing numbers of victims of murderous illegal aliens swarming our homeland, aided and abetted by Team Biden’s open border betrayal.  

Recent victims of immigrant misconduct are Lisbeth Gutierrez-Salazar and her two sons, Juan Gutierrez-Salazar, 10, and Julian Cardona-Gutierrez, 7 (photos nearby), who died in an arson fire set in Stockton, CA, by three-time deportee Jose Carmen Cardona. Joining the list of needlessly deceased: Kristie Thibodeaux, 43, of New Orleans, fatally shot by three illegals, including Joshua Bonifacio-Avila, 19, a Honduran citizen who illegally entered the U.S. on an unknown date at an unknown location. Authorities say he was arrested for theft and released on two previous occasions. In New Mexico, Tiger Gutierrez, 22, was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver on July 1, 2024. Mexican national invader Jesus Sandoval-Martinez, 21, is charged with vehicular homicide. 

These incidents are just a few of many happening almost everyday across the homeland. And this is only one category of Biden-era carnage.

After then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s self-acknowledged refusal to bring in 10,000 National Guard troops to the U.S. Capitol ahead of an openly scheduled January 6, 2021, rally, Capitol security is seen welcoming citizens through the doors (contrasted by smaller pockets of more aggressive protestors). Rather than take responsibility for encouraging crowds to surge in, Pelosi and fellow Democrats doubled down. More than 460 January 6 patriots have been or are imprisoned. More than 1,260 have been charged with offenses. Matthew Perna, 37, one of those charged, committed suicide more than one year later as the feds prolonged an investigation without explanation.

Capitol police officers were not unscathed by the orchestrated free-for-all. At least two committed suicide in the aftermath

Trump surrogates have suffered greatly amid perpetual law-fare waged by the Left. Gen. Michael Flynn. Roger Stone. George Papadopoulos (the alleged Russian collusion agent). Peter Navarro (who will complete a four-month federal prison sentence on July 17, 2024). Steven Bannon (who reported to federal prison to begin a four-month sentence on July 1). Navarro and Bannon refused to testify before a sham House panel “investigating” January 6.

Finally, let us not diminish victims of Left-imposed pandemic hysteria, lockdowns and forced injections. Thousands were fired or suspended from jobs. Military service members were demonized and stripped of pensions for refusing the mRNA jabs. Teen suicide was rampant. But once the Left recognized that compliance was widespread, and that a virus during an election year worked to its advantage, there would be no further introspection, no reassessment. No regrets, certainly.

Former Centers for Disease Control chief Dr. Robert Redfield testified on July 11 to what many Americans knew instinctively three-plus years ago when he observed, “They never should have been mandated. It should have been open to personal choice. (mRNA jabs) don’t prevent infection; they do have side effects.”

The overlords are begging us to embrace a side effect of the bloodied side of Trump’s head. Unite, they say.

But Trump had it right as he rose, defiant, from the stage. Fight.

Turned to ashes

By Steve Woodward

“Progressives think that hating not only (Donald) Trump but all conservatives settles their debts and cleanses them of sin,” writes Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “It gives them a certain moral luster.”

But Morrow does not go so far as to dismiss their hatred as off-the-rails hysteria. Like many who never became comfortable with Trump’s ascendency to the White House, who were quick to cringe over a Rosie O’Donnell tweet but slow to celebrate a policy triumph, he gives progressives something of the benefit of the doubt.

“Whatever else one may say about Jan. 6, it was one of the stupidest afternoons in American history,” Morrow writes. “(Four centuries ago) Russia’s new (religious) orthodoxy eventually burned the archpriest (patron of the ‘old believers’) at the stake. The 21st-century left would do the same to Mr. Trump if it could. It may not be necessary. He’s a burnt-out case, an exhausted volcano, in Disraeli’s phrase. Let Palm Beach have him.”

This is where Morrow misses the source of the anger that sent thousands to Washington two months after the curious developments surrounding the Nov. 3, 2020, election. Their swarming of our Nation’s Capital never was driven by Trump’s “rhetoric”, the central talking point of the Left serving media. These were patriots, not zombies. It was fueled entirely by the many cases of voter fraud that were mounting ahead of and during Georgia’s Jan. 5 special elections for U.S. Senate seats (cases which in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are being fortified by audits and investigations).

Nevertheless, the stupidity to which Mr. Morrow eludes in his June 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “America’s Old Believers Need to Move Past Donald Trump”, I would acknowledge could be properly assigned to those massive throngs gathered on and near The Ellipse on January 6. 

Why might I agree with Mr. Morrow’s harsh criticism? Because many – including myself — did not layer adequately to protect themselves from bone-chilling, gusty winds as President Trump spoke. Quite stupid, for sure. Thus, plans to parade to the U.S. Capitol were scrapped in the name of practical concerns such as warmth and restrooms. It is a shame. Had thousands more trekked to the Capitol to assemble and hear from speakers – as was the intent by organizers – the contrast between militants assigned to “storm” the building and the rest of the assembled would have been even more stark. It would have been quite obvious that the vast majority had come to rally peacefully and to display unity.

But if we give credence to Mr. Morrow’s conclusion, that some of these acted stupidly, how then do we characterize the Marxist rioters, looters, arsonists and murderers who devastated American cities across a long violent summer of 2020? Are theirs the actions of merely stupid, misguided youth? While the Trump era certainly is not reduced, as Mr. Morrow contends, to smoldering embers; the burnt-out small businesses, restaurants and public squares of urban America are today boarded-up, vandalized memories, ashes scattered to the winds.