BY ROBERT SPENCER | PJ MEDIA
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File
On Jan. 6, 2021, a protestor, 40-year-old Brady Knowlton,
says that an officer at the Capitol told “You can go in, as long as you don’t break
anything.” At 2:35 p.m., Knowlton did, entering through the Upper West Terrace
doors. He looked around inside the building, walked through the Rotunda, lobby,
and Senate chamber gallery, obeyed the officer’s injunction not to break
anything, and left the building at 2:53 p.m. For that, Knowlton now faces
twenty years in prison in Old Joe Biden’s vengeful banana republic.
On top of the possibility of being behind bars until
2042, Knowlton, a law student, has suffered numerous other consequences
already. According to the Daily Wire, “his law degree has been withheld, his
lawyers say, Airbnb has banned him and his wife, and, for reasons that
remain undisclosed, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has stripped
his Global Entry access.”
According to the charges filed against him in the U.S. District Court
for the District of Columbia, Knowlton “did unlawfully and knowingly enter and
remain in a restricted building and grounds.” He also “did knowingly, and with
intent to impede and disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business and
official functions, engage in disorderly and disruptive conduct in and within
such proximity to, a restricted building and grounds, that is, any posted,
cordoned-off, and otherwise restricted area within the United States Capitol
and its grounds, where the Vice President and Vice President-elect were
temporarily visiting.” He “willfully and knowingly engaged in disorderly and
disruptive conduct within the United States Capitol Grounds. He “willfully and knowingly
entered and remained in the gallery of either House of Congress, without
authorization to do so.”
If Knowlton’s contention that a police officer said he
could go in is true, it vitiates all these charges, and Knowlton’s claim is
certainly corroborated by photographic and video evidence of cops at the
Capitol opening gates, holding the doors open for protestors, and reports that police
even posed for selfies with protestors. Also, when the FBI
raided Knowlton’s home, they found no evidence whatsoever “concerning the
breach and unlawful entry” of the Capitol, or “of any conspiracy, planning, or
preparation,” or “maps or diagrams” of the Capitol, or of any “materials,
devices, or tools” that Knowlton might have planned to use to get inside.
So why is the government pursuing Knowlton with such
ferocity? The answer to that is clear: he is being set up to be a fall guy, to
validate the Left’s hysterical and counterfactual claims about Jan. 6 by being
made to play the role of the “insurrectionist” who was determined to destroy
“our democracy” and install Trump as a dictator.
Imagine a country that imprisons peaceful protestors on
false charges of participating in an attempt to overthrow the government, as
part of efforts to discredit and ultimately criminalize all opposition to the
ruling party’s agenda. People who entered a public building when police held
the door open for them are being held in solitary confinement and given
draconian punishments far out of proportion to what they actually did. This is
the sort of thing that happens in Third World countries, right? This is the
sort of thing tinpot dictators do in banana republics, where the rulers gained
power by underhanded means and have no respect for due process, the rule of
law, or the rights of their citizens — right? Maybe so, but the cases of
Knowlton and other Jan. 6 protestors show that all this and worse is happening
right now in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where up until
quite recently, it all would have been unthinkable.
Compare the treatment of Knowlton and the other Jan. 6
scapegoats to the treatment of Quintez Brown, the Black Lives Matter activist
who recently shot at Louisville mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg. Journalist
Miranda Devine noted that Brown was “portrayed sympathetically by the
media and immediately bailed out of jail by his Black Lives Matter
comrades, who crowdfunded the $100,000 cost.” Devine added that Brown was
“a celebrated gun control advocate, anointed as a rising star by the Obama
Foundation, he was an honored guest on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show. He was granted a
biweekly opinion column in the Louisville Courier-Journal to spew boilerplate
leftist, race-based, anti-cop sentiment.” Brown had, Devine says, “BLM
privilege.” Indeed.
In America, we no longer have a single justice system for
all people, regardless of race, or of power, or privilege, or the protected
victimhood status they may have among the Leftist intelligentsia. We no longer
have a justice system that is indifferent to and independent of political
pressure. The politically and culturally dominant Left is not content with the
massive power and influence it wields now; it is determined to silence all
opposition and destroy it utterly.
We have seen the totalitarian impulse of the far-Left
play out in revolutionary France, as well as in the Soviet Union, Communist
China, Democratic Kampuchea, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and a host of other places.
In every one, the judiciary serves as a tool of the political elites, who wield
it in order to prosecute, persecute, and obliterate their opposition. American
schools used to teach that our system had a series of built-in checks and
balances that would prevent that kind of tyranny from developing.
But now the schools focus on teaching that the Founding
Fathers were evil slaveowners and the system they created is just another
vehicle of white privilege to be dismantled. By the time the fanatics they have
indoctrinated get around to dismantling that system altogether, doing so will
be just a formality. The Left has long since hollowed it out and rendered its
safeguards meaningless. The persecution of Brady Knowlton and the other Jan. 6
defendants proves that.
