Forget that 2020’s nationwide riots brought death and billions of dollars of destruction, that similar mayhem fronted the White House in 2019 and even 2024 sees pro-Hamas mobs block bridges and roads with nary an arrest, let alone trials and convictions. The ‘freedom to protest’ is only for the ideologically favored.

And never more a better example of compare-and-contrast than how the above mentioned groups of ‘mostly peaceful protesters’ have been treated vs the hundreds of J6 defendants locked up for months or years before they ever got to trial and facing ten or more years in federal prison even if all they did was walk between velvet ropes like tourists in the Capitol.

Now SCOTUS is hearing arguments on how a federal statute (18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2)) crafted out of the 2000 Enron debacle involving destruction of evidence applies to January 6th Capitol protestors. And some justices are quite skeptical of the Biden administration’s arguments.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch on Tuesday questioned the Biden administration’s ranking Justice Department lawyer about the scope of a federal criminal law used against protesters during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol charged for “obstruction” of an official proceeding.(snip)

The justice grilled Justice Department Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar on whether the same law could be applied to Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who was criminally charged for setting off a fire alarm in the Capitol last fall ahead of a government funding vote.

“Would a sit-in that disrupts a trial or access to a federal courthouse qualify? Would a heckler at today’s audience qualify, or a heckler at the State of the Union address? Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” Gorsuch asked without directly naming Bowman.

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Justices Gorsuch and Alito just annihilated the entire foundation of Biden’s DOJ case against J6 protesters.

They dunk on the US solicitor general with examples of unhinged leftist psychos disrupting official proceedings, and ask why those protesters were never charged.… pic.twitter.com/ovEMZqBbmZ

— Meara (@MillennialOther) April 16, 2024

Justice Thomas weighed in, too.

“[T]here have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings,” Justice Thomas opened the questioning of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. “Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past?” the justice queried.

After sidestepping the question, Prelogar replied that she couldn’t give an example of Section 1512(c)(2) being enforced “in a situation where people have violently stormed a building in order to prevent an official proceeding,” because nothing like Jan. 6, 2021, had ever happened before.

Really? Let’s leave aside Prelogar’s risible embroidering of the J6 protest as “violent storming”, because anyone with a rational interest in facts can look at hours of video tape of the event and see the vast majority were acting like tourists, staying within the ropes and directed along by the Capitol police acting as docents. There have been plenty of violent storminess in an effort to interfere with an official proceeding. From the occupation of the Senate Hart building in 2018, to protestors pounding on the doors of SCOTUS in an attempt to gain access to prevent the swearing in of Justice Kavanaugh.

Funny, how those are dismissed as irrelevant by the usual Leftwing excuse It’s different when we do it.

And that’s what Prelogar has been attempting to do in her, frankly bizarre, arguments on how the statute applies to hundreds of J6 protestors and not someone like Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who set off a fire alarm in the Capitol last fall to prevent/delay a government funding vote.

This is why the phrase “mostly peaceful protest” has come to be shorthand for Ruling Class gaslighting. Such short term gain in punishing their ideological enemies comes at the expense of cutting a high-trust society off at the knees. Thus the phrase really becomes

Tell us how there are two ‘justice’ systems without saying there are two justice systems.

Trust broken is rarely rebuilt. We should all fear for our nation.

featured image, generated by Darleen Click using AI Adobe Firefly, editorial use only