Of Cabbages and Kings

Once through the looking glass, one begins to see the trees for the forest. Turns out, that's a good thing for cabbages. For kings, though? Not so much.

During his recent show, “The White House vs. Tucker Carlson,” Ben Shapiro worries that Republicans may be “overplaying their hands” by appearing to media as being in solidarity with January 6 defendants still imprisoned. To Shapiro, incentives among some Republicans threaten to become “misaligned” as a result of the footage Tucker Carlson released from his review of the January 6 video trove; the anger from many in the base who feel they’ve been directly and repeatedly lied to, which Shapiro empathizes with, is politically dangerous insofar as it risks making the 2024 election a referendum on January 6. He singles out, for example, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who he fears may use access to both January 6 footage and January 6 prisoners as more of a “photo op” than anything that may actually help the GOP regain power.

From the perspective of election strategy, Shapiro’s argument is certainly fair and may be usefully debated. But from my perspective, his takeaway here is an example of misplaced priorities. The fact is, without doubt there are people — US citizens — being held prisoner whose only real offense was trespassing (or illegally parading): they entered the Capitol, walked around, snapped some pictures, and treated the building with due respect, if not awe. And those people should not be in jail, regardless of how strenuously certain opportunistic Never Trumpers decry them for their misdeeds. In fact, even those accused of rioting — which most conservatives have consistently condemned — should have access to potentially exculpatory footage, along with the right to a speedy trial. The Bill of Rights doesn’t cease to exist because Orange Man Bad — and those who align with Orange Man, as Shapiro rightly notes, must therefore (through “the transitive property” deployed by the left) be equally bad, “insurrectionists” whose selfie sticks and red baseball caps threatened to overthrow the US government in the worst attack on our democracy since 1812.

But here’s the problem: We have all seen, in similar instances, political rioters favored by the political elite who were arrested by police, then released almost immediately and en masse. We have witnessed the double standard in justice being meted out. And to some of us, the perception is that, not only are we living in a two-tiered justice system, but that most reprehensibly, this hierarchy isn’t even much hidden any longer. It just is, and there’s not a damn thing we in the cellar can do about it.

So right now, we should be worried less about how the legacy media will present GOP members who arrange to meet with prisoners, or who can now view footage Jan 6 committee members never viewed, and care more that in the United States of America, there are political prisoners — who also happen to be US citizens — being denied real due process. We have fellow conservatives in jail awaiting trial over two years after the “insurrection,” which was never as insurrection in the first place, outside of an attempt by unscrupulous opportunists to make it one by way of narrative manipulation. The White House, all of its Praetorian guard media stenographers, and members of the corrupt and cynical uniparty, are angry at Carlson not because he’s a threat to democracy, or that he’s “lying”; they are angry at him because they are a threat to democracy who’ve been caught lying — and his release of January 6 footage calling into question the narrative they’ve been so intent on cultivating and maintaining is the thing that has instantly opened so many eyes. They’re panicking — and when would-be authoritanians panic, they lash out in wild-eyed hyperbole and frothy denials, in this case even calling for censorship from the floor of the Senate.

Ben is correct that we can — and should (and indeed I have, largely in response to certain flaccidcons still violently pumping their virtue glands in an obvious effort to excrete the musk of their unassailable conservative principles, which they tether to law and order outside of all appropriate context) — recognize that the rally, the riot, and the foray into the Capitol by illegally parading non-violent trespassers, all happened that day, often separately, often simultaneously. We don’t, as the left and their media believe, need be fed a single narrative, something we can easily digest that cements into place January 6’s historicity. But this is how leftists operate: narratives created, repeated, asserted as truthful, then policed against dissident ideas or observations.

The vehement and frantic rebukes the ruling elite are unleashing on Tucker Carlson is a proxy for the vehemence they wish to unleash on you, particularly if you are one of the 50% or so Americans who voted incorrectly, with a mind toward replacing the US Constitution with Trump’s Art of the Deal. Which is of course preposterous, but when such lies are repeated so often by those in power — and in a bipartisan manner, as Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis, and Mitt Romney have revealed — they tend to take on the veneer of truth. And yet their primary function is to hide the truth when it threatens those in the power elite.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been raising concerns over the imprisonment of January 6 defendants and their treatment for going on two years now. She isn’t merely using the release of footage from Tucker Carlson as a way to grab attention for herself, though Ben worries that she may be, or that she doesn’t have any real plan even if her intentions are less self-serving than they are truly altruistic and patriotic. Shapiro is concerned that, in a repeat of 2020, the left will be able to hang the rioting of January 6 around the necks of conservatives and Republicans, which he frets may cost elections.

To which I say, maybe Ben is correct; maybe enough people will be reminded of January 6 and have that feeling rekindled that the republic was on the very precipice of falling to a handful of rioters — who in some instances may have been weaponized by undercover government agitators — and an awful lot of sightseers, many of them welcomed into the Capitol by Capitol police. Maybe they’ll ignore Carlson’s footage of the “Qanon Shaman” ambling through the Capitol with a police escort — and believe the inane cover story that he was being treated with deference by Capitol police because the police were “outnumbered” and “trying to de-escalate,” as people like Erick Erickson seem still to believe. But to believe that, you must believe that Capitol police officers didn’t arrest him out of fear that he may perhaps gore them, then carve them up with his flag pole and remove their scalps for his pelt, all while their firearms remained holstered. That’s how big the threat was!

The other side to this, though, is that maybe, after viewing that footage, many Americans — regardless of how they’ve voted in the past — will finally see with their own eyes how willing our own government is to prosecute its citizens to bolster a narrative that benefits them politically. Because it is hard to come away after watching that footage without realizing how the powerful view the proles — as throwaway humans whose treatment depends entirely on what seems most beneficial to those in power at any given time. There’s a reason Antifa is treated differently than illegal paraders holding American flags and not Molotov cocktails. And that’s because they are the shock troops for the ruling elite, the Useful Idiots the powerful allow to run wild when it suits their interests.

If citizens come to see that in the United States of America, a trespasser — who became a media-created figurehead for an insurrection that never was — is sitting in prison, sentenced to nearly 4 years for wearing a viking helmet and pelt ensemble, offering a prayer, and being escorted around the Capitol, often alone, by multiple officers who never once tried to arrest him, maybe, just maybe, their past impressions of January 6 will be replaced by fresher impressions of what certain types in DC wanted them to believe it was.

So in that regard, I don’t think the GOP would be overplaying its hand at all by keeping that newly-released footage in the public consciousness. And that’s just to address the strategy discussion Shapiro raised.

Ultimately, though — circling back to why I asserted that Ben’s priorities in this case are misplaced — it doesn’t matter whether or not Ben’s strategy or my strategy is the better one. What matters is that people are being kept in jail, denied due process, and being forced to take plea deals in order to protect a narrative that was dubious from the start, but that now looks increasingly contrived.

That is unacceptable. These prisoners should be immediately released on remand, their cases reviewed, and their counsel given access to all video and any other discovery material that may prove useful to their defense. This includes an accounting of embedded government agents; communications between Speaker Pelosi and Capitol police; the communications of the January 6 committee — members of which have now admitted that they didn’t review the footage used to push the insurrection narrative and recommend charges against a former President, instead leaving it to unelected staffers and an ABC producer brought in to frame the spectacle.

The more I learn about January 6, the more I believe that it has been the government’s response to it that is the real danger to democracy. And I’d like to see all those responsible for what it appears to me was a shoddy bit of gaslighting, used to demonize 75 million voters as potential domestic terrorists, held to account, either by censure, removal, or even conviction and imprisonment.

Our legal system is built around the high-minded idea that it is better for 100 guilty men to go free than one innocent man remain in prison, his liberty taken from him.

Today, we’ve watched that idealism succumb to its ruthless inverse: if a few of the filthies have to rot in prison to grab ever more power and control, the political elite will happily accept such circumstances, and rarely give it a second thought.

And the ease with which they rationalize it marks them more as sociopaths than statesmen.

So go ahead and risk overplaying that hand, Republicans. Because the idea that American citizens protesting at the People’s House have lost their liberty and been cast into execrable circumstances for a self-serving “greater good” dreamed up and narrativized by the ruling class, is utterly horrifying. And no amount of political calculus, expedience, or strategizing should preempt rectifying that singularly repulsive abuse of power.

That it is possible to make a strong case that using citizens as pawns to fortify political narratives benefiting the ruling class is perhaps the real threat to democracy? Well, that’s just icing on the cake.