By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
IN the US summer of 2020 a series of destructive riots and/or “anti-racism protests” broke out across the country, supposedly against “systemic racism” in police forces and the death of the drug-addled criminal-turned-martyr, George Floyd.

In Minneapolis an entire city block including a police station was torched, prompting the Minnesota National Guard to be deployed on May 28th. The rioting caused more than $500 million in property damage in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area, and two deaths.

Unrest quickly spread throughout the US with rioting, looting, and arson and by early June, some 200 American cities had imposed curfews, and more than 30 states and Washington DC, activated more than 62,000 National Guard personnel in response.

By the end of June, about 14,000 people had been arrested and by June more than 19 people had died in relation to the unrest. A September 2020 estimate put the insured damage at $1–2 billion. However, many of those arrested received immediate legal aid and millions of dollars in bail money from a well-organised network of leftist organisations headed by the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter and reaching into the Democratic Party.

Media, academics and the Democrats later downplayed the widespread violence. Democrat judges released many on bail and the destructive event was soon pushed down the memory hole.

In sharp contrast, a brief riot associated with a mass protest event at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, was branded “an insurrection” and an “attempt to overthrow democracy”. What it turned out to be was false-flag provocation mostly likely run by the FBI and then used to justify an act of judicial terrorism.

In the four years following the 2021 riot, the FBI arrested and charged more than 1500 people with various offences, often using SWAT team raids on homes peacefully occupied by families and others. Hundreds of prison sentences were handed out, the longest being 18 years for Oathkeepers leader Stewart Rhodes.

Members of the Proud Boys group were hit particularly hard. Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman who never attended the rally, was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison on a seditious conspiracy charge. Joe Biggs, who frequently featured on Alex Jones programs, was sentenced to 17 years while Marine Zachary Rehl, the president of the Philadelphia Proud Boys, was later sentenced to 15 years.

The large majority of the J6 “offenders” were the hundreds of people who simply walked into the Capitol building after police opened the doors, while provocateurs continued to smash windows as if desperately required to gain entry.

However a US Supreme Court ruling earlier in the year has thrown hundreds of the sentences into doubt and prompted numerous appeals because the US Department of Justice was found to have wrongly charged defendants based on its interpretation of a statute dealing with obstructing an official proceeding.

Mainstream media and Democrats bleated repeatedly that “Trump ordered a mob of insurrectionists to overthrow the 2019 presidential election” by stopping its certification. Various historians called it a “self coup”. But the insurrection narrative was a monstrous lie, a co-ordinated media propaganda campaign based on a brief, provocateured riot that caused less than $3 million in damage.

A woman named Ashli Babbitt died after being shot in the head by a Capitol policeman while she attempted to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby.

The media lied for months that Capitol policeman Brian Sicknick was killed after being hit by a protestor wielding with a fire extinguisher, but a coroner later found two heart attacks on the day to be the cause.

So why the big rally in the first place? Trump and many observers had noted a series of highly suspicious events in the 2020 election count, for instance the appearance of tens of thousands of postal ballots in early-morning dumps that suddenly gave Biden the lead against a clear losing trend.

There was also the failure of voting machines in Arizona, irregular voting activity in Georgia, overseas internet traffic finding its way to voting centres and Trump election observers being locked out of counting centres – among other incidents.

That was what prompted Trump to seek a review of electoral votes from the key election swing states, and based on constitutional law advice, he believed to could do that by stopping the certification. Concurrently Trump supporters and a legal team launched multiple lawsuits in efforts to get the irregularities reviewed, but courts were largely unwilling and dismissed most cases on technicalities before evidence could be heard.

Media meanwhile, launched the narrative that all of the claims of irregularities and fraud were not just claims, but “false claims”. Biden, they said, had won a historic landslide with a vote tally that cannot be explained to this day. But Trump’s allegations of fraud were “false”, regardless of whether they had been proven or not.

This last December 11th, the US Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz revealed in his report that there were more than two dozen “confidential human sources” in the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “but only three were assigned by the FBI to be present for the event”.

Horowitz hastened to add that none of the sources was authorized or directed by the bureau to “break the law” or “encourage others to commit illegal acts,” Fox News reported. It’s rather curious that only three officers were assigned to be present while 23 others weren’t. What exactly was their status?

But the New York Post reported the FBI had “so many paid informants at the Capitol that it lost track of the number and had to perform a later audit” to determine exactly how many confidential human sources run by different FBI field offices were present that day, a former assistant director of the bureau, Steven D’Antuono, told congressional representatives.

“At least one informant was communicating with his FBI handler as he entered the Capitol,” said D’Antuono, formerly in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office.” Mr Horowitz’s story begab ti sound a little shaky.

The Post also reported former Capitol Hill Police Chief Steven Sund saying that in addition to the paid informants, the FBI had at least 18 undercover agents in the crowd plus an estimated 20 from the Department of Homeland Security. One could fairly state that the mob was riddled with feds.

Contrary to the media narrative giving the impression that a mob went to Washington with the intention of overthrowing the government, January 6th was in fact more than half a dozen Park Service-authorized protest events, the major ones being a prayer march and a rally at which President Trump would speak.

Also contrary to repeated media reports and claims made by the rigged January 6th Investigation Committee, Trump did attempt to get National Guard back-up for the day, but was obstructed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who failed to provide her required approval.

Trump faced overwhelming odds regardless of his attempt to “rally the troops” on January 6th. He faced opposition within his own party from the so-called RINO Republicans, the courts stacked by Democrat judges, most of the mainstream media and the new majority of Democrats in the House.

The repeated media narrative included the dramatic images of the “QAnon shaman” Jake Agneli in the Speaker’s seat. The impression given was that this wild, crazy Trump supporter had stormed the Capitol and seized the Speaker’s chair. However later security footage showed him being quietly led around by Capitol Police, even pausing to pray at one stage.

Even the dramatic riot footage in which the mob, egged on by “patriot” Ray Epps, who was never arrested by the FBI, is misleading. Smoke bombs suddenly appeared out of nowhere to add to the confusion as a group of protesters pushed up against a temporary fence held by outnumbered Capitol police.

Simultaneously another group of very fit men dressed in black started smashing Capitol windows at the top of the steps. Early footage from the riot showed some of them had expertly rappeled down an adjoining building, but the footage strangely disappeared from the repeated grabs of the most dramatic riot moments.

Last March, Trump wrote on his Truth Social account that one of his first acts as president would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” He repeated the pledge at a National Association of Black Journalists forum in Chicago in July.

But he has stopped short of proposing a blanket pardon, and told CNN: “I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”

However the Supreme Court’s ruling limiting the power of prosecutors to pursue obstruction charges against protesters and rioters, should take years off the sentences of hundreds of defendants.