RUSH: Ben Domenech. “The Consequences of the Capitol Assault — A little over a decade ago, I was tear-gassed for the first time.” This is how he begins his piece. “It was the first day of September in the Twin Cities.” That’s Minneapolis and St. Paul, for those of you in Rio Linda, not Romulus and Remus. “And the anti-globalist, anti-war protesters were milling about with giant papier-mache heads of the people they hated. Mark Hemingway was there,” of The Federalist. “My future wife and the mother of my child was inside.” That’d be Meghan McCain.
“It was painful. Afterward, I left and set up my laptop at a nearby rooftop bar and had the best Guinness I’ve ever ordered in my life. The reports about the protesters were overwhelmingly sympathetic.” These are left-wing Democrat protesters he’s talking about. This is Minneapolis/St. Paul. ” These were justified because of the wars. The New York Times said so. A few years later, I covered Occupy Wall Street, and the tone was similar. These people taking over public parks, shitting all over the place, yelling at each other in circles, and setting up occasional rape tents were to be accepted, because Wall Street exists and is a thing.” And that’s what Wall Street people do. They rape people. “The sympathy for them was even greater than for the war people because of a lot of guilt about how media is funded. Zephyr Teachout wrote a thing.”
“Around the same time, there was another form of protest, something very different, which emerged. It was called the Tea Party. It was, unlike the anti-war, anti-globalist, anti-Wall Street folks, a fundamentally dangerous and racist entity, bent on destruction and violence, that threatened the very foundations of representative government and only existed because people couldn’t accept a black president. They were basically the Klan. Alan Grayson said it.
“It was odd. In all my years of covering the Tea Party, I never saw them be rude to a cop, even by accident. They were upper-middle-class people who drove up in SUVs. They had no designs on destruction or occupation. Their taxes paid for that park, so they would clean up after themselves. They took pride in it — that they weren’t like the dirty, filthy leftists who left graffiti and literal shit on the ground.”
I must stop because of the constraints of time, but this only gets better. Hang on.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me resume with the Ben Dominich piece here. “In all my years of covering the Tea Party, I never saw them be rude to a cop, even by accident. They were upper-middle-class people who drove up in SUVs. They had no designs on destruction or occupation. Their taxes paid for that park” they were in, “so they would clean up after themselves.
“They took pride in it — that they weren’t like the dirty, filthy leftists who left graffiti and literal [crap] on the ground. Of course, it was these people who were absolutely marauded by the media. Their shouting at politicians — confined of course to town halls — was an act of political sabotage that threatened everything we hold dear.”
Occupy Wall Street could go dump on the ground and shout at everybody and just make general mayhem, and they were praised for being political activists. Tea Party people go to town halls and participate in the political process, and they were accused of political sabotage. “Mediocre politician Joe Biden literally called [Tea Party activists] ‘terrorists.’ He can be a nice guy, but he’s also kind of an a–hole that way. That’s Delaware for you,” writes Mr. Domenech.
“This absolutely happened in response to the 2012 election. As I said a few years ago about Democratic attacks on the misogyny and heartlessness of Mitt Romney, if you cry wolf about extremism long enough, you [are going to someday] lack the vocabulary when the actual beast shows up. The rise of Donald Trump is a piece of that — a takeover of the Republican Party by a politician who represents everything the media has framed a cliched view of the party as for decades: a rich, old, white racist who likes to fire people.
“Yeah? So suck on that. Go write a million pieces. They don’t care. What happened yesterday,” meaning Wednesday at the Capitol, “didn’t depress me the way it seemed to depress other people. Maybe that’s because I don’t view the institution of the Capitol as sacred the way others do. As a former staffer [in that building], I’ve known too many stories about the nooks and crannies where Ted Kennedy did stuff [to women] to get too verklempt about it. And the invaders stayed inside the velvet ropes in Statuary Hall, which I actually care about.
“But it’s disturbing for a lot of reasons, two in particular that stick out. The first is a comment from an apolitical friend who wandered into the room where the roiling crowd was on the screen in the early afternoon yesterday: ‘Is that Black Lives Matter?’ No, it’s not — but also, it is. An apolitical viewer of the summer of 2020 would learn one distinct lesson:
“If you want to be heard, if you want to be listened to, you need to go into the streets, make a ruckus, set things on fire, and tear down icons of America. This disrespect will be welcomed, hailed, and supported if your cause is just and your motives are righteous,” as determined by the media. “Just about everyone who showed up on Capitol Hill yesterday believed that about why they were there.
“The only difference between the horned man standing in the Senate chair or the smiling man hauling the speaker’s podium out the door and the fellow who attempted to tear down Andrew Jackson’s statue or the criminal who set fire to St. John’s Church is a matter of jersey color,” meaning are you Republican or Democrat? And if you’re Democrat, you’re great! You can get away with whatever destruction you want.
You can march into that Capitol. You can take it apart. You can take statues out and you can rip ’em to shreds and you’re praised. If you’re Republican and show up in that building and do anything but sneeze at something, you are a reprobate criminal. “The second is that blaming this on Donald Trump isn’t just too simplistic, it’s whistling past the graveyard of our norms. Of course, he egged on his crowd to go up to the Capitol and be loud and irritating. But he didn’t tell them to break down doors and crash the gates, and he didn’t need to. Blaming this on Trump assumes this type of attitude will go away when Trump himself does.
“That’s way too easy — it’s wishful thinking. The iconoclasm of the right is a real development, and it is here to stay. You’ll wish for the old man in the tricorn hat waving a Cato Constitution when you see the new right blasting statues with graffiti,” meaning you ain’t seen nothing yet. When Trump’s gone and is not the abject leader of this movement, you aren’t gonna believe what these people turn into.
And he’s excited about it. Don’t misunderstand.
“The crowd was not a Tea Party crowd. They brought their folding chairs and their canes. They drove more than they flew. They spat their dip on the ground. They peed on the trees. And they didn’t just disrespect the cops guarding the Capitol, they crushed past them. Capitol Police are fine people. They’re nice and generally accommodating.
“But they’re also the TSA of Capitol Hill — mostly used to telling people to go back and get their badge, not deal with a security issue. They rarely train. Most of them would fail a basic fitness test. But that’s understandable because what’s typically required of them is not a major security conflagration, but removing some loud Code Pink lady from a hearing, or grabbing a jumper from the Gallery.
That’s gonna happen next. Do you remember the Branch Davidians? Where were the Branch Davidians dealt with? Do you remember? (interruption) That’s right. In “Wacko,” Texas. The Branch Davidian complex. Who was the guy that ran the Branch Davidians? (interruption) David Koresh. Who was it that launched the invasion?
It was Janet El Reno, the attorney general of the United States. She burned them to the ground. Why? Well, supposedly they were doing something horrible to children in there. So she launched tanks and any number of heavy artillery instruments at the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas, and murdered a bunch of people.
So that’s what Domenech thinks is headed next. “A total, crushing anti-free speech effort that treats Trump-supporting groups like the Branch Davidians. An effort to restore the fundamentally unserious neocons as the voice of reason in the room.” Well, let’s attach some names to that. What Domenech is suggesting here is that the Washington establishment will bring back to life people like Bill Kristol and David Brooks.
You pick whoever your neocons are, they will be presented by the American left as the voice of reason, much like when Barack Hussein Obama had a pre-inauguration dinner, or maybe shortly after he was inaugurated, dinner with chosen conservatives in Washington. They were to be identified as the reasonable conservatives. And they were David Brooks and George Will and Bill Kristol and that’s where we got the comment about, “Man, look at the crease in Obama’s slacks. He’s gonna be a great president.”
There will be “A use of any levers of government power — including audits, regulation, and lawfare — to harass conservatives now categorized as seditionists and terrorists by the incoming president who falsely claims to want to unite the country. And above all, a doubling down on all the policies and efforts put in place to crush exactly the type of people who showed up at the Capitol yesterday in a foolish, desperate attempt to make themselves heard.”
The Washington establishment will double down on all the policies and efforts to make life miserable for them: Audits, regulations, lawfare. You see, “The rioters failed in their effort and ensured their marginalization. But marginalization doesn’t mean evaporation,” because the rioters, the Trump supporters, the base, they’re still there. “They’re still here. They’re still Americans. And they’re not going away. How our politicians handle that will dictate a lot about the next several years. And that shouldn’t give people a lot of hope, considering that four years after his election and two weeks before his departure, the only person they’ll apparently listen to is still Donald Trump.”
That’s Ben Domenech.
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