Author blows whistle on Jan. 6 ‘melodrama’ and police beatings
Paul Bedard
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A conservative author’s contrarian view of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots is drawing new attention to the lack of damage to the facility, extended sentences of bystander convicts, and alleged police beatings of former President Donald Trump’s supporters.
“It’s hard not to gag on the melodrama,” writes Federalist columnist and author Eddie Scarry.
“The riot on Capitol Hill after the 2020 election is one of the most boring, overblown stories of the Trump era, but naturally, Democrats and the media obsess over it because they think it makes Republicans look bad. Oh, and because it gives them an excuse to talk about one of their favorite things — themselves,” added Scarry in his latest book, Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.
Scarry, recently a Washington Examiner columnist, highlighted in his book stories from the Jan. 6 riots that have been ignored by the Democratic-led select committee that Tuesday added a new hearing to let a Trump insider talk about what she witnessed in the West Wing that day.
In it, Scarry mocked the comparisons key politicians from President Joe Biden to Republican select committee member Rep. Liz Cheney have made to the Civil War and other historical events in American history.
“This, the public was told by President Biden, is the makeup of the ‘worst attack on democracy since the Civil War,’ a multiyear conflict that may have resulted in the death of 750,000 American soldiers,” he wrote.
By comparison, the Jan. 6 event cost $1.5 million in damages. He cited a BuzzFeed headline that read “Alleged Jan. 6 Rioters Tried to Steal Signs, Booze, and a Fox News Football from the Capitol.” Scarry added, “Sounds truly horrifying.”
He cited the one death that day, of pushy Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer.
He conceded in the book, “To be sure, there were some involved that day who received harsher sentences. One man, fifty-four-year-old Robert Palmer, was accused of attacking an officer with a wooden plank and fire extinguisher. He was given a five-year sentence. Jake Angeli, thirty-four, known as the ‘QAnon Shaman,’ got about two-and-a-half years of prison time for the charges of trespassing and, again, ‘Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Capitol Building.’”
Scarry wrote, “By the charges alone, it looked less like the Civil War and more like Night at the Museum.”
While the hearings have at times focused on the angry crowds unprepared and understaffed Capitol Police faced, he highlighted reports from protesters of police brutality.
And he played up reports of police opening doors and guiding those who wanted to protest the certification of Biden’s election into the Capitol.
“None other than CNN reported on a photograph apparently showing a Capitol cop allowing a rioter to capture a selfie with him. Jake Tapper remarked on the ‘cell phone video’ that seemed ‘to show officers outside, opening gates, allowing even more of the mob to storm in.”
Scarry wrote in the Post Hill Press release, “A reasonable person watching those videos would certainly have to wonder to himself, ‘What happened? I thought this was the scene of a bloodthirsty mob trying to overthrow the government. These people just look like tourists without a map.”
Throughout his book, Scarry makes a case that liberals who thought defeating Trump would make the world better for them instead have just become angrier, and the Jan. 6 hearings are Exhibit 1.
“January 6 should have been a wake-up call that both sides have a breaking point. But it doesn’t look like the Left got that message,” said Scarry, adding:
“Think about it. Even when liberal Democrats emerged victorious from the suffocating bonfire of 2020 and then had control of the White House and all of Congress for two years, did their mood change? No. It only got worse. They may have traded their pussy hats for Fauci prayer candles but the attitude has never been angrier or more spiteful. Vengeance has animated them each and every day.”
