The Patriot Post® · Two-Tiered Justice for Three Sets of Rioters

On any given weekend in Chicago — take this past weekend, for example — the self-inflicted slaughter of the city’s black population continues apace.

And yet all Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Georgetown Democrats can seem to focus on is the unarmed non-insurrection of January 6, an unruly and at times violent event that nonetheless saw just one violent casualty: that of an unarmed 110-pound Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally and, we believe unjustifiably shot by a Capitol cop who absurdly declared of his actions afterward, “I showed the utmost courage on January 6.”

Democrats want blood for the events of January 6, and they’re getting it. In July, the first of the “felony” offenders who breached the Capitol was sentenced: a 38-year-old Tampa resident named Paul Hodgkins, whose crime was having walked peacefully into “The People’s House” while sporting a “Trump 2020” flag.

For his utterly nonviolent offense, Hodgkins got eight months in prison. And there are hundreds more like Hodgkins still languishing in jail eight months after the offense, still awaiting their sentencing for having protested an election they believed to have been deeply flawed and improperly investigated. So much for our Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantee of “the right to a speedy and public trial.”

Thus, DC Democrats, having had their comfy confines invaded by the likes of a QAnon shaman with horns and fur, reached for the smelling salts and headed for the fainting couches. “We came close to half of the House nearly dying,” shrieked New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Smollett, who also accused Texas Senator Ted Cruz of having almost “murdered” her.

The Left’s hyperbole about that day wasn’t limited to erstwhile Manhattan bartenders, though. As Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin put it: “A violent mob … broke into the Congress of the United States, broke into the Capitol, and came within a hair’s breadth of hanging Vice President Pence. … They built a gallows outside the Capitol of the United States. There was an assassination party hunting for Nancy Pelosi. … This was an attack on our country.”

Wow, what a Nervous Nellie. We must’ve been watching a different riot that day.

But what of those other DC rioters — the rioters of January 20, 2017? Surely you remember the ruckus Nancy Pelosi and her ilk raised in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s inauguration, when hundreds of violent protesters took to the streets and made mayhem? No, no you don’t. Because she didn’t say a word. As we wrote:

A month after the 2017 inauguration, CNN reported that 214 people had been indicted on felony rioting charges, which carry a maximum sentence of 10 years and a fine of up to $25,000. This seemed altogether appropriate for the “black bloc” antifa thugs who “smashed storefronts and bus stops, hammered out the windows of a limousine, and eventually launched rocks at a phalanx of police.” Six cops were injured that day, and 230 rioters were arrested. So far, so good, right?

Wrong. More than two years later, on July 6, 2018, the Associated Press reported that the government had dropped the charges against all inauguration protesters.

That’s right. All of those violent, Trump-hating, would-be felons had their charges dropped.

Then there were the rioters of last summer. You remember: the Black Lives Matter rioters. As RealClearInvestigations reported: “The summer 2020 riots resulted in some 15 times more injured police officers, 30 times as many arrests, and estimated damages in dollar terms up to 1,300 times more costly than those of the Capitol riot. George Floyd rioters were found to have used more sophisticated and dangerous tactics than did the Capitol rioters, and in some cases weapons of greater lethality.”

Those were “good” rioters, though. As the sleuths at RCI continue: “Authorities have pursued the largely Trump-supporting Capitol rioters with substantially more vigor than suspected wrongdoers in the earlier two cases. Many accused Capitol rioters, unlike accused participants in the other riots, have been held in pretrial detention for months — with one defendant serving more time than the maximum sentence for the charge to which he pleaded guilty. Some allegedly endured solitary confinement and other mistreatment.”

The reality is no longer debatable, and the statistics bear it out: There are two tiers of justice in this country — one for the Left, and one for the Right.