Like the Jacobins of revolutionary France, leftist elites in America were diabolically prepared to use mob violence to advance their presidential ambitions in the mad year of 2020. Indeed, the very first protesters at the White House gates the Friday following George Floyd’s May 25 death in Minneapolis were calling for President Donald Trump’s resignation.
Protesting soon turned into rioting. That evening, anxious Secret Service agents ushered the president and his family into an underground bunker. The rioting resumed on Saturday and grew more serious. Rioters tried to push through security barriers, damaged six Secret Service vehicles, and threw bricks, rocks, fireworks, bottles, and other objects at Secret Service personnel. In some instances, they kicked, punched, and threw bodily fluids at the officers. By Sunday morning, 60 of the officers had been injured.
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The major media coverage of these riots bordered on parody. New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh quoted a young black protester as saying, “I think it’s nice that people are still coming out to push for change.” McCreesh immediately followed this bromide with the observation that “a Chevy Suburban on I Street was in flames” and the crowds were “smashing windows and trying to wreck as much as they could.”
Amid the carnage, organizers managed to get their point across: “We want charges. We want convictions. No more acquittals. We want these people to be held accountable.” This was Jacobin justice at its purest. In Minneapolis, these demands would rattle the jury pool, but in Washington, they rattled Congress, maybe even the Supreme Court. Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers would have no chance to secure justice in Minnesota. In the years ahead, Trump and the J6ers would have even less chance in Washington, D.C. (RELATED from Jack Cashill: Chauvin Did Not Murder George Floyd)
Watching the rioters in Washington, or any of the 140 other riotous cities, those who would go to Washington on Jan. 6 — the J6ers — could not help but see that the corporate media, locally and nationally, sympathized with the rioters. Journalists did not hesitate to scold the police for using tear gas or firing rubber bullets or making mass arrests.
There would be no such sympathy for the older woman who police pushed down the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6; or for Rosanne Boyland, who was also pushed down the steps, in her case fatally; or for Ashli Babbitt, killed in the least justifiable police shooting ever captured on video. In the months and years after Jan. 6, the media would use all manner of verbal jiu-jitsu to deny the obvious, namely that the “justice” dished out to the J6ers was far harsher than that applied to the Floyd protesters.
On Aug. 30, 2021, for instance, the Associated Press ran an article headlined, “Records rebut claims of unequal treatment of Jan. 6 rioters.” This was nonsense. A DOJ report from Sept. 24, 2020, set a baseline for federal offenses. As of that date, some 80 individuals had been charged “with offenses relating to arson and explosives.” No J6er was charged with either offense.
Fifteen Floyd rioters were charged with damaging federal property, but that damage included a $2 million, month-long siege on the federal courthouse in downtown Portland and the complete destruction of the Third Precinct Police Station in Minneapolis. The J6ers, at their worst, broke windows. They set no fires, overturned no cars, toppled no monuments.
The state and local authorities were even more lenient than the Feds. A record review by U.K.’s left-leaning Guardian found that the “vast majority” of charges against the Floyd rioters were “dropped, dismissed, or otherwise not filed.” In Dallas and Philadelphia, more than 95 percent of citations were dropped; in Houston, 93 percent; in San Francisco, 100 percent. Even for felonies like looting and assault, local authorities dropped the majority of charges. (READ MORE: Will the Real Election Interferers Please Stand Up?)
The leniency belies the gravity of the Floyd rioters’ crimes against police and property. Their unhinged violence cost insurers as much as $2 billion, all for a cause as counterfeit as the money Floyd was arrested for passing. Even with the most inflated accounting, Jan. 6 caused only about $2 million of real damage, a good chunk of which was caused by the Capitol Police’s promiscuous use of tear gas and other toxic sprays.
Lisa Eisenhart waded through the pepper spray as she walked into an open Capitol on Jan. 6. Her son Eric Munchel urged Lisa to put on her bandana. “It’s going to get spicy,” he said. After 30 years as a registered nurse, Lisa was undaunted. There was little she had not seen or experienced. Still, as a precaution, the 57-year-old Eisenhart and her son were wearing tactical gear. This was not illegal. Lisa had gone out the night before wearing it for safety reasons, this being Washington and all.
As the court acknowledged, Lisa “was not a member of any suspect group, did not do any advance planning, nor did she use force to enter the Capitol on January 6.” Although accused of threatening members of Congress by yelling “treason,” Lisa encountered no members to threaten, and no individual was identified as a potential target. What triggered the authorities is that Eric found a bunch of zip ties lying around — he was accused of stealing them — and gave one to his mother.
Said Lisa’s attorney: “The Government claims the ‘logical inference’ is that Munchel and Eisenhart wanted to use the zip tie handcuffs to capture their enemies, described generally as ‘the members of Congress voting to certify the election.’ But the Government’s problem here is: they never threatened to do that.” Like so many J6ers, Lisa and her son respected the police. On leaving the Capitol, Eric told the surrounding officers, “Sorry, guys, still love you.”
If Lisa had been following the case of Urooj Rahman, she had some reason to be hopeful about her sentencing.
In the early morning hours of May 30, 2020, Rahman drove with her friend and fellow attorney Colinford Mattis to a police precinct in the Clinton Hill section of New York City. There, Rahman threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of an empty NYPD patrol car, setting it on fire. She and Mattis were arrested and spent a few days in jail before being released to home confinement. By contrast, Lisa Eisenhart was held in pre-trial detention for a few months.
In November 2022, a federal judge sentenced Rahman, the 30-something daughter of Pakistani immigrants, to 15 months in prison. “She was the primary caretaker of her aging mother,” a pair of weepy New York Times reporters observed. Judge Brian Cogan sounded almost apologetic for having to sentence Rahman. “You are a remarkable person who did a terrible thing on one night,” Cogan told her. Praising her “lifetime of hard work,” he explained that hers was one of “the most difficult” sentences “he ever had to impose.”
There was, however, much the New York Times did not report about this “remarkable person.” The day before the attack, Rahman and Mattis exchanged a series of menacing texts in which Rahman boasted of her accomplishments. “Set a police car on fire,” she said in one text. “My rock hit someone. A cop of course,” she wrote in another, this one capped with a smiley face. “Molotovs rollin’,” she wrote in still another. “I hope they burn everything down. Need to burn all police stations down and probably the courts too.”
Unfortunately for Lisa and Eric, Rahman’s sentencing had no predictive value. At the New York Times, editors chose not to notice the disparity in a cold-hearted article headlined “‘Zip Tie Guy’ and His Mother Get Prison Terms in Jan. 6 Riot.” The Times summarized their offense as follows, “A Tennessee man and his mother were sentenced to prison on Friday for seeking to intimidate lawmakers by marching with matching tactical vests and carrying zip tie-style handcuffs.” That’s about it. Lisa got 2.5 years, twice what Urooj Rahman got for firebombing a police car. Eric was sentenced to nearly five years, four more than what Mattis got for aiding and abetting.
As of last count, more than 1,200 J6ers have been arrested and 450 incarcerated, the great majority for crimes no more serious than Lisa Eisenhart’s. Unequal treatment? No. That’s just another Trump lie.
Jack Cashill’s newest book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, will be released this summer. On sale now is his book Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities.
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