Jan 6 "Insurrection"

I have not written anything much political since just before the Jan 6 "Insurrection", as people on the left were going absolutely nuts, though I did promise I would comment once passions subsided.

One of my most favoured sources for unbiased news and opinion is Glenn Greenwald. He was a full-time practicing US constitutional and civil rights lawyer from 1994-2005. He then started his Unclaimed Territory blog and wrote a column for Salon, a progressive/liberal news and opinion website. Greenwald was described by Rachel Maddow during this period as "the American left's most fearless political commentator." In 2012 he went to work for Britain's Guardian newspaper.

While at The Guardian, Greenwald was one of the reporters who, on June 5, 2013, broke Snowden's leak of classified documents that exposed the NSA's massive global surveillance programs. This caught the then Director of National Intelligence under Obama, James Clapper, in a massive lie to Congress during an exchange at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, March 12, 2013:

SEN. RON WYDEN (D-Ore.): "This is for you, Director Clapper, again on the surveillance front. And I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer because I know Senator Feinstein wants to move on. Last summer, the NSA director was at a conference, and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, 'The story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.'

"The reason I’m asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don’t really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Director of National Intelligence JAMES CLAPPER: "No, sir."

SEN. WYDEN: "It does not?"

DIR. CLAPPER: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly."

SEN. WYDEN: "Thank you. I’ll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer."

Clapper has yet to answer for his lie to Congress.

Greenwald left The Guardian in late 2013 to found The Intercept, an independent news and opinion outlet against press censorship. On October 29, 2020, Greenwald resigned from The Intercept because of political censorship by the editors who prevented him from reporting on the allegations concerning Joe and Hunter Biden's conduct with regard to China and Ukraine, and had demanded that he not publish the article in any other publication. All the details surrounding that are explained in My Resignation From the Intercept, and Emails with Intercept Editors Showing Censorship of my Joe Biden Article.

Greenwald went to substack and published his article there, where he remains as a fully independent columnist living in Brazil to this day.

Greenwald first reported on the so-called "Insurrection" on Jan 8 in his article Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath. He was critical of the obvious, and politically feigned, overreaction from the left and the mainstream media. And remember, Greenwald is associated more with the left himself. He says, comparing Jan 6 to the Antifa/BLM violence of the preceding summer,

Those who argued in the summer that property damage is meaningless or even noble are treating smashed windows and looted podiums at the Capitol as treason, as a coup. One need not dismiss the lamentable actions of yesterday to simultaneously reject efforts to apply terms that are plainly inapplicable: attempted coup, insurrection, sedition. There was zero chance that the few hundred people who breached the Capitol could overthrow the U.S. Government — the most powerful, armed and militarized entity in the world — nor did they try.

Elsewhere in that article, prescient about the massive overreaction to come, Greenwald writes,

This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.

And,

It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism, including the aggressive exploitation of the emotions triggered by yesterday’s events at the Capitol to accelerate their implementation and demonize dissent over the quickly formed consensus. The same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terrorism is now being seamlessly applied — often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it — to the threat posed by “domestic white supremacist terrorists,” the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. In so many ways, yesterday was the liberals’ 9/11, as even the most sensible commentators among them are resorting to the most unhinged rhetoric available.

Greenwald wrote several follow-up articles, decrying the attack on civil liberties in the wake of Jan.6, such as,

• The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming
• The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot 
• As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever
• The U.S. Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Policies
  

The one "fact" that kept people excited over Jan.6, was that a Capitol Hill Police officer Brian Sicknick, was battered in the head with a fire extinguisher by a Trump supporter until dead. As it turns out, and as Greenwald covers in The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And They Just Got Caught, that was a complete leftist and media fabrication. Read the article. Not even an iota of truth in it. How do you feel knowing that now? Do you feel lied to? You should.