Hang on. It is going to be Mr. Toad’s wild scary ride for all of 2021.

The proper conservative response to last Wednesday’s violent entry into the Capitol and vandalism, as well as assaults on law-enforcement, is to identify the guilty parties and ensure they are arrested.

Such deterrence will prevent any future devolution from legal popular protests into thuggery. No constitutional republic can tolerate its iconic heart stormed, breached, and defiled.

Is Some Violence Worse than Others?

Of course, there is no such thing as “good” or “acceptable” violence of either Trump supporters or of the Antifa and BLM sort.

Yet the latter were largely exempt from any consequences for most of the summer—despite Joe Biden’s demagogic implication that the now multibillion-dollar funded BLM was treated harshly in comparison to the rogue Trump rioters.

Do we remember the authorities’ exemptions given to “warlord” Raz Simone and his armed thugs who, with absolute impunity, took over a Seattle “autonomous zone” known as CHOP or CHAZ, where four shootings and two deaths followed? Who exactly destroyed or vandalized thousands of state and federal public monuments—some in Washington, D.C.—and burned and looted hundreds of buildings with impunity?

Those who wrongly demanded to defund the police, now rightly deplore the lack of a Capitol police presence. Their only consistency is their own perceived political self-interest.

Biden himself rarely if ever, without exceptions, outright condemned the atrocious violence of Antifa and indeed contextualized it as an “idea”—a disincarnate entity that apparently could magically also burn and loot.

Again, his inaugural call for unity was quickly superseded by his surreal accusations that the police were racist in not quelling the violence. Yet the problem at the Capitol was not that security was racially selective, but that there was not much security at all. And the lapse was probably not by design as much as sheer incompetence.

The president-elect’s demeanor and furor certainly were not compatible with his media image as the supposedly angelic uniter of the country. Within 24 hours he had gone from blasting the police authorities as racists to the old reductio ad Hitlerum trope of comparing a few Republican senators to Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels, in a hysterical rant that descended into incoherent numerology about the bombing of Dresden. I’m sure Xi Jinping and Ayatollah Khamenei were impressed by his historical recollections.

Would that summer candidate Biden had just once said a word on behalf of the victims of Antifa and BLM—more than 700 injured law enforcement officers, billions of dollars in damage, and dozens killed over a summer of hateful violence that also wrecked the lives of thousands of struggling small business owners and their employees. What Kamala Harris said about the violent summer protests was appalling, and she was most worried about bailing out those arrested for street violence. Somehow a summer of hate and destruction earned BLM $10 billion in corporate gifts. Did anyone suggest that CEOs were subsidizing violence by crassly buying protection?

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