Forgotten DC Riots Did Far More Than Physical Damage to America

By Jarrett Stepman | The Daily Signal

The D.C. riots of 2020, now ignored by the news media, put the country on a dark path. Pictured: A maintenance building in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, burns on May 31, 2020. (Photo: Samuel Corum/ AFP/Getty Images)

The three-year anniversary of the Lafayette Square and Black Lives Matter riots in the nation’s capital has come and gone without much media fanfare.

These apparently forgotten riots, and the harsher official response to the Capitol riot seven months later, say much about our media landscape and rapidly transforming legal system.

On May 29, 2020, a riot in front of the White House in Lafayette Square prompted a lockdown to protect then-President Donald Trump and the first family. 

At the time, four days after George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis, many in the media portrayed the incident as Trump hiding from protesters and being real mean to them, rather than as an assault on democracy.

But it was a serious riot. Protesters tried to get inside a temporary fence protecting the White House before being stopped by police.

The situation kept getting worse. The next day, rioters set fire to part of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, a block from the White House. Such chaos continued in the District for the next month and throughout the summer.

Damages resulting from the D.C. unrest—which were extensive—and other Black Lives Matter protests around the country ran into the billions of dollars.

Yet, the D.C. riots are mostly forgotten, even though the damage to our society went far beyond the financial and physical.

Some rioters were arrested in connection with acts of mayhem, vandalism, and violence. Did they pay a price for their actions? Not really.

“Dozens of people were arrested, including a man who jumped over two barriers in an attempt to enter the White House,” Julie Kelly wrote in American Greatness. “Yet only a handful of protesters faced federal charges—in sharp contrast to January 6 protesters who all face federal counts even for low-level offenses such as ‘parading’ in the Capitol. Nearly all the charges initially filed by the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office were dropped.”

She noted that U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves didn’t take office until November 2021.

Graves, appointed by President Joe Biden, said at a May 16 hearing that “our office prosecutes all acts of violence, regardless of political motivation, the same.”

Yeah, right.

The Justice Department has relentlessly pursued those who were part of the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol.

“More than 1,033 of the rioters have been arrested, with approximately 485 federal defendants receiving sentences,” Politico reported Tuesday. “About 277 defendants have been sentenced to time behind bars, and roughly 113 defendants have been sentenced to a period of home detention.”

Contrast that with the riots in front of the White House and elsewhere in D.C. in 2020.

“FBI agents worked about 16,000 more hours during the pay period of the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, than they did during the pay period of the 2020 riots that hit Washington, D.C.,” Fred Lucas reported for The Daily Signal.

The difference in treatment is stark.

“In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time,” conservative scholar Victor Davis Hanson wrote. “In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.”

That really highlights the fundamental problem exposed by the radically different responses to civil unrest.

It’s obvious that by the standards of the legacy media, not all “insurrections” are treated equally. That’s been true for some time.

More worryingly, it seems that the judicial system and the legal profession are being radicalized and weaponized. In the name of social justice, radicals are throwing away the ideal of an adversarial system where justice is blind.

It wasn’t just the rioters in front of the White House who seemingly got off easy.

For instance, two New York lawyers firebombed an NYPD police cruiser during the 2020 BLM protests. This act of terrorism was a serious crime, regardless of who committed it. But the fact that it was committed by two lawyers, who presumably swore to uphold the Constitution, made it much worse.

And what was the result of their crime? Glowing profiles from some media outlets. The New York Times spun a sympathetic story about how the two lawyers, Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman,  were good people who made a mistake and ruined their careers. The courts took it from there.

“The original indictment included a 40-year mandatory minimum count and Mattis and Rahman risked a punishment of life imprisonment,” Fox News reported a year ago, but federal prosecutors instead sought a 10-year sentence for the pair.

“It’s bad enough that these dangerous criminals have been allowed to sit at home for the past two years,” Patrick J. Lynch, president of New York City’s Police Benevolent Association, said at the time. “Handing them a below-guidelines sentence would give a green light to other anti-police radicals who seek to advance their cause through violence. The judge must reject this request.”

Justice Department prosecutors argued that the “history and personal characteristics” of Mattis and Rahman, and the “aberrational nature of the defendants’ conduct” warranted lighter sentences.

In the end, the two lawyers were merely disbarred and given sentences of just over a year in prison.

It’s likely that our legal system will get more biased and radical, as hard as that is to believe. Fanaticism for left-wing causes rather than adherence to basic decency and a commitment to free speech is taking over elite law schools.

It’s telling that Chesa Boudin, the district attorney who was too radical even for San Francisco, was just hired as executive director of a new research and advocacy center at the law school of University of California, Berkeley.

Soon, said constitutional lawyer Ilya Shapiro—who was ruthlessly canceled by Georgetown University—these law school students will “be occupying influential positions in state and federal government, bringing legal cases, becoming state legislators in some cases, or occupying the general counsel’s offices of Fortune 500 companies and the partnership ranks of big firms.”

The ideological weaponization of our judicial system undermines the foundation of what makes America a free country. 

That’s what was truly unleashed and exposed during the riots of 2020. The physical damage was bad enough. The long-lasting damage of giving the mob a pass because it aligned with the values of our elite ruling class will be far worse.

Brace for Impact: DOE Is About to Unleash Sexual Assault on Girls and Women

By Jonathan Emord | Townhall.com

AP Photo/Pat Eaton-Robb, File

Following the Senate vote championed by Sen. Tim Kaine to torpedo the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, the Biden administration’s Department of Education readied its proposal to change the historic interpretation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to accommodate those who “identify” as the opposite sex.   You can read the DOE summary of the proposed rule here.   It is open for public comment and will likely be rendered final and enforceable soon.  The new rule will permit boys and men who maintain a fiction, that they possess a gender other than their birth gender, not only to compete on girls’ and women’s teams but also to use their bathrooms and locker rooms.

In practical terms, the Biden administration is about to codify a “statutory right” for boys and men to enter girls’ and women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams nationwide with the full backing of federal law and law enforcement.  Every deviant out there who wants to sexually assault a girl or a woman is about to acquire an ally in the Department of Education and the Department of Justice.  

Indeed, any effort to stop boys and men from entering historically separate places for girls and women will now be subject to prosecution and each federally funded institution opposing such moves will risk losing its federal funding.  A new age of expanded access to girls and women for voyeurs and sex criminals is upon us, all in the name of accommodating a fiction.

In short, the undeniable and fully predictable consequence of the Biden DOE’s proposed rule is to increase the incidence of sexual assault and rape against women nationwide and to cause all manner of perverse effects in society as we all try to reduce the newly created risks to girls and women.  The rule’s underlying premise is a complete fiction.  It applies to those who “identify” as the opposite sex, but anyone can “identify” as anything.  A male interested in assaulting women can certainly declare with ease that he identifies as female to gain access to girls’ and women’s facilities.

Identification does not cause an actual change in gender; indeed, nothing can.  Even those who undergo surgery experience nothing more than a costly and irreversible fraud. Girls and women who are mutilated through hysterectomies, mastectomies, plastic surgeries, hormone blocking, and hormone therapy are still biologically the same as before that horror.  And the same goes for boys and men who undergo chemical castration, plastic surgery, hormone blocking, and hormone therapy.

As soon as this proposal becomes law, across the nation girls and women will be newly vulnerable in virtually every public place.  And where there is opportunity for crime, crime happens.  In schools, colleges, parks, and other public facilities, girls and women will be preyed upon by sex offenders in bathrooms and locker rooms.  Criminals will be given a perverse license to commit violent, life-altering crimes against girls and women.  Girls and women will be confronted by males when they are least able to defend themselves.   Historic places of refuge for women will be transformed into new places of heightened violent crime risk.  

Imagine what this new rule does for sex criminals.  In addition to inspiring deviants across the nation to take advantage of this opportunity for sexual assault, this change to accommodate a fiction will cause girls and women to suffer direct and palpable physical and mental harm as they take logical steps to avoid risk.  Because girls and women will now be forced to view every bathroom and locker room as a potential place of peril, they will logically avoid them despite physical need, to their physical and mental detriment.  Moreover, increasingly girls and women will avoid participating in sports because doing so carries with it not only the risk of loss to men possessed of greater muscle mass and strength but also because of the risk of sexual assault.

Responsible parents will now be alarmed at the prospect of their daughters being assaulted in bathrooms and locker rooms at school.  Aware of that risk, they will no doubt remove their children from public schools and either home school them or place them in private micro-schools and other private schools that do not accept federal funding.   That will help further depopulate the failing public schools to the benefit of those girls whose parents can afford to escape.

In short, every gain that Title IX has brought women over the last forty-one years will be erased upon adoption of this radical new DOE rule.  Rather than secure the rights of girls and women from discrimination, if the Biden administration has its way, Title IX will become the legal means by which violent sexual assault against girls and women becomes more commonplace in America.  

Woke Vs. Holy

By Alan Joseph Bauer | Townhall.com

AP Photo/David Goldman

Why do Fortune 500 companies, one after another, roll out sales or advertising campaigns that offend the beliefs of a large number of their customers?

While the percentage of Americans formally associated with organized religion is dropping, America is still a relatively religious country. Most Americans have some religious association and most likely perform religious observance. "Holy" tends to describe items or people that are separated and elevated from everyday things. A holy book, while it might be printed in the same place where Harry Potter books are produced, has by its content standing in the eyes of its owner that he would not bring it into the bathroom or use it to hold open a barn door. That which one holds as holy is treated with reverence.

Now think about a person who grew up in a completely secular home. He went to a secular high school and later college and then moved to a big city, where he enjoyed the nightlife and entertainment. For such a person, maybe at no fault, nothing in his life is "holy." He has a special baseball card he treats with incredible respect, but that is for financial and not religious reasons. People like our secular fellow are the ones who make up the vast majority of executives and directors of Fortune 500 companies. While there may be a diversity of age, men and women, Blacks and Hispanics, gays and gender curious, there is almost no diversity of thought. All of them are college graduates, and at the highest levels, the majority likely all graduated from a few dozen schools selected from the Ivy League, expensive private schools, and top public universities. 

These people grew up with little to no religion, and pride week or month is standard on campus. I remember a Harvard student complaining in 2016 to the Harvard Crimson that as a Hilary Clinton supporter, she had to hide her affiliation at a campus overrun with Bernie Bros. Now, take these people, who have a tiny idea of what religion is and do not participate themselves in any organized religion, and give them the reins of the largest and most powerful corporations in the United States, and what do you get? A guy pretending to be a girl selling beer. Target puts "pride" clothing front and center in its numerous stores. Disney pushing sexually aggressive material in movies for very young children. And when there is a backlash, they do not understand why.

Americans are, by and large, not racist people. The Left can yell and scream how racist the US is, but if one looks at the incredible diversity of American life, he will conclude that all walks of life are allowed to succeed. Americans do not care what people do in their bedrooms, and they do not judge people by their characteristics. Most Americans think of meritocracy—can you get the job done? Americans do not like or even tolerate when a large corporation that, until last Thursday, used to hawk its products suddenly advertises or puts forward a position that belittles religious beliefs that millions hold to be holy. The Bible has what to say about homosexuality, and while Americans couldn't care less what their colleagues do on their own time, they do not like when companies tell them that something that the Good Book says is bad is somehow wonderful. 

Anheuser Busch, Target, Disney, Kohl, and other big firms do not have a clue how a large percentage of their customers live their lives—peddling narratives or products that say that your religion is stupid or backward means that people will have to choose between their beliefs or your cheap products. Most will stick with their beliefs. And since the top executives of these companies come from a near-uniform secular background, they don't know how their customers live their lives and cannot believe that there is a backlash to promotions that they think are benign. 

Busch started backpedaling almost immediately, with pseudo-patriotic ads and a joint ad with Harley Davidson. But the damage has been done. Again, Americans are very tolerant and don't care how others live their lives. But they will take it personally when they are told their lifestyle is wrong. And that is exactly how free markets should work. Not everything is price, and not every best-performing product is best-selling. People vote with their feet; if you offend your customers, expect a backlash. But those making the decision come from the same college/university experience of Left-think, and they don't know that if one promotes sexually offensive products, consumers might take their business elsewhere. The recent boycotts of Busch and Target have not been organized. Simply, each consumer decides that they have had enough and there are more than enough alternatives in beer and discount stores to leave the offenders behind. 

Money is the only language that corporations understand, and if they want to offend religious and traditional Americans, they can see their sales and stock price head south. Target has lost billions on its market cap, and Bud Light sales are still falling. That's how a free market works. They may not have taught that in their Marxist economics classes.

If one boycotted every company that put out offensive content, there would be no sports to watch, movies to see, clothes to buy, or food to eat. Everyone can decide how to spend their money in their pockets and let the big corporations know that offending that which is holy means that their money goes to their competitor. Then, when the executive layoffs come, and the stock gets a downgrade (as Target did), they will start to respect the people who have made them rich.

Is the Sleeping Conservative Dragon Finally Waking Up?

By Victor Davis Hanson | Townhall.com

AP Photo/George Walker IV

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst.

How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?

They don't see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues.

Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.

They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.

Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.

In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.

Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.

How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them.

They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.

They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.

Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.

They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.

The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.

So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.

Yet suddenly they realize their apathy allowed the country to descend into something the nation's founders never imagined or intended, and antithetical to what most knew as America just a couple of decades ago.

So conservatives are awakening from their slumber. And they are discovering that they too can boycott, agitate - and roar.

The woke Target corporation in just a few days has suffered a more than $10 billion loss in its stock value. Millions of shoppers shunned its 2,000 stores after the chain showcased its "pride" apparel. The displays featured "tuck pieces" - veritable codpieces - that are intended to facilitate "women's" male genitalia.

Anheuser-Busch came up with the bright idea that it would highlight Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender performance activist, to hawk its Bud Light brand. But beer seemed incidental to the self-absorbed Mulvaney's fixation on promoting transgenderism. So Bud Light-drinking, red-state America got turned off by Mulvaney's in-your-face-advocacy.

An ensuing informal boycott cost the company nearly $16 billion in lost stock value. Hundreds of millions of dollars of unsellable light beer stagnated. Stores can't even give it away. Meanwhile, Bud Light's competitors coped with meeting record Memorial Day consumer demand.

Ditto the defiantly woke Disney Corporation.

The now politically activist entertainment corporation insisted on pushing woke agendas down the throats of its family-centered audience.

The result? Its online entertainment services are bleeding millions of subscribers. Disney stock has lost $16 billion in value. Its overpriced theme parks no longer count on continual increased attendance.

Sometimes traditionalists prefer simply to drop out rather than boycott wokeism. One result is that the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards now have a fraction of their previous televised audience.

In 1998 - when the United States had a population of 275 million - the NBA finals earned on average 29 million television viewers. This year the NBA bragged its finals averaged a pathetic 4 million viewers in a contemporary America of 335 million.

The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team reinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - a self-identified performance art "queer" group - to headline the team's "pride night."

The all-male "sisters" usually put on anti-Catholic pornographic skits that mock Jesus Christ and sexualize Christian rituals.

That Dodger indulgence is not going over well with its fan base, especially the city's millions of Catholic Latinos.

The woke Left still enjoys enormous advantages over the Right. The bicoastal elite has far more money, controls all the major American institutions, and dominates the dissemination of knowledge through the media and Silicon Valley.

But the Left does not enjoy majority public support. And now it has managed the impossible - to goad the normally comatose conservative dragon to awaken.

And it is just starting to breathe fire.

Senate Kills Biden's $400 Billion Student Loan Handout

By Sarah Arnold | Townhall.com

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

The Senate voted to kill President Joe Biden's proposal to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt in a 52-46 vote. 

On Thursday, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), along with all 49 Republicans, voted against the loan bailout, overturning Biden's plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for federal borrowers making under $125,000 a year. 

Last week, the House passed the legislation by a vote of 218-203 – despite Republicans criticizing the proposal. 

"It's something of a slap in the face to Americans who chose more affordable college options or worked their way through school to avoid taking on student loans, or whose parents scrimped and saved to put them through college," Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said just before the Senate vote. 

He called it unfair for hard-working Americans to bear the burden of paying off loans a second time or paying for a degree they didn't even receive. 

On the contrary, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) blasted Republicans who voted to slash Biden's billion-dollar plan, claiming the GOP will do anything in their power to prevent Americans from living a life without crushing debt. 

"I've heard from so many people across my state who were so grateful and relieved to have a glimmer of hope finally, to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and now, Republicans want to snuff it out," Murray said. "Millions of Americans find themselves unfairly bogged down with massive debt so often through no fault of their own." 

Passed by both chambers of Congress, the legislation was drafted under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to reject executive branch policy if both the House and Senate pass a resolution disapproving of that policy. 

Now that both chambers have passed the resolution, Biden is expected to veto it. However, it is unlikely that Congress will be able to secure the two-thirds majority needed to override Biden's imminent veto. 

WATCH: Joe Biden Takes Massive Fall at Air Force Commencement, Concerns Over Health Rage

By Bonchie | RedState.Com

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

As RedState reported, Joe Biden appeared at the U.S. Air Force Academy on Thursday to deliver this year’s commencement speech. As we’ve all come to expect from any public appearance by the president, things did not go well.

Biden got confused at multiple points, not knowing which way to go or where to sit. At another point, he claimed that he once applied to the academy himself. No record exists of any such application, though he has previously claimed that he received an appointment. That also has never been substantiated.

The president wasn’t done making news, though. Later in the ceremony, he got up to walk off the stage and took a massive fall, leaving Secret Service members scrambling to help him. Consider this a fair warning that the video is painful to watch.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO.

The White House responded by asserting that Biden tripped over a sandbag on stage, adding that he is uninjured. Members of the press were quick to pick up that line, asking no further questions nor speculating on how he managed to not see said sandbag. Certainly, they didn’t respond as they did when Donald Trump dared to walk down a wet ramp slowly during a military commencement at West Point.

Others wondered about Biden’s overall health, with Fox News immediately bringing it up on air. This is not his first fall since taking office. He has ended up on the ground multiple times throughout his presidency, including infamously falling going up the airstairs onto Air Force One. He also fell off a bike in front of reporters.

The chief question remains: How can this man make it through a real presidential campaign in his condition? It would not surprise me to see other Democrats start entertaining hopping in the race at this point.

House Passes Debt Deal to Avoid Default

By Spencer Brown | Townhall.com

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

With barely five days remaining until the projected "X-date" on which the United States is set to default on its debt, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) brought the Fiscal Responsibility Act — legislation resulting from a negotiated spending deal made with President Joe Biden — to the floor for consideration.

The result: successful passage of the 99-page bill in a vote that came down 314-117. 

Falling along anything but party lines, the legislation to raise the debt ceiling and avoid default was supported by 165 House Democrats and 149 House Republicans while 71 members of the GOP Conference voted no along with 46 Democrats.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) heralded the successful vote on the Fiscal Responsibility Act, calling it "the most conservative spending package during my time in Congress" and "the largest deficit-reduction bill in at least a decade," one that "will fundamentally change the spending trajectory in Washington."

McHenry added:

For the first time in a debt-limit negotiation, the U.S. government will spend less money than it did the year before. We achieved historic spending cuts that will help bring down inflation, consequential reforms to help Americans get out of poverty and back into the workforce, claw backs of billions of dollars of COVID money, and transformational permitting reforms that cut red tape for energy and infrastructure projects. This bill will block the Administration from imposing new taxes during a time of economic uncertainty and rein in Biden’s executive overreach through a statutory administrative pay-go rule. This agreement will also change the way Washington operates by compelling a workable appropriations process.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), one of the most vocal opponents of the deal, said he voted against the legislation "because our current financial situation is unsustainable, and this bill only ramps up the timeline to our government’s eventual default."

Buck explained his reservations:

Back in 2022, the American people gave Republicans the majority in the U.S House of Representatives because they wanted us to rein in the Democrats’ out-of-control spending. Yet Speaker McCarthy chose to negotiate a deal that codifies the post-COVID 2022 discretionary spending baseline, adds $4 trillion to the debt in less than two years, upholds Biden’s student loan bailout, funds 85,000 new IRS agents, and ensures Democrats don’t have to deal with the political fallout of raising the debt ceiling prior to the 2024 election. I can't imagine a better deal for Democrats or a worse deal for our nation.

The legislation now heads to the U.S. Senate for a vote and, presuming its passage in the upper chamber, President Joe Biden's desk for signature in time to prevent a default on the nation's ever-increasing debt.