The coverage surrounding the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol is some of the worst I have experienced throughout my years of reporting and opining on the news. 

And it’s not just coming from the Left, who are desperate to spin that President Trump and his supporters are the ringleaders of a treasonous insurrection. Conservatives have dropped the ball in reporting on the matter as well.

There is a concerted effort to shoehorn the narrative that a small handful of ANTIFA provocateurs engineered the whole scene. In the social media age, there will always be individuals who hope to maximize carnage to increase their followings and get clicks. This is a sad fact of life, and it is being used by lazy and disingenuous conservatives to reject blame and refrain from grabbling with the serious implications of what occurred.

These conservatives throw Trump supporters under the bus, suggesting that they are dumb enough to be held hostage to the whims of maybe a dozen or so leftist provocateurs. Heroes who displayed tremendous courage, like Air Force veteran turned patriot martyr Ashli Babbitt who was executed in the Capitol by an officer, have been completely dismissed as a result of this dishonest reporting. These voices are ostensibly suggesting that only ANTIFA would ever dare to make a stand, as True Conservatives™ only wave the flag and vote harder when confronted with tyranny.

This false narrative ignores what has been occurring in the grassroots American Right. The government institutions supported by conservatives with an almost religious fervor, namely the police and the military, have failed them. The police protected the officials who covered up election fraud in crucial battleground states and crushed the rights of whistleblowers. This is fueling radicalization as conservatives are forced to flirt with options they never hoped to consider.

Ornery right-wing protesters now chant “f*ck the blue” as they watch cops protect ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter thugs. They are watching a literal military occupation of Washington D.C. take place, with the troops used as pawns to prop up a ruler lacking legitimacy with tens of millions of Americans. They’d never be deployed to keep out foreign invaders, but they will certainly be used to keep the commoners in line. Conservatives become laughingstocks when they appeal to law-and-order sentiments under these conditions. The Left used the U.S. Constitution to bludgeon Trump in the courts and obstruct his agenda. When the rule of law is no more, what alternative is there to rebellion?

I want to make clear that this is not a defense of what happened at the U.S. Capitol. The rioters were certainly lawless, bloodthirsty, and acted with reckless abandon. They defiled sacred ground, as the political class has made clear in the aftermath, and may have opened Pandora’s box with the ramifications. A 9/11-style overreach is being prepared against the patriotic remnant of America, and there will likely be no turning back. Whether it is ultimately remembered as the modern incarnation of the Boston Tea Party or an infamous and humiliating display of America’s startling decline as an empire will be determined by the historians.

The insults and smears from the elites toward the rioters are similar to the contempt that Tory loyalists had for the founding-era revolutionaries as they agitated against British royalty. The Founding Fathers were men who seized the moment and did the unthinkable using means that would offend modern holier-than-thou conservatives. They defaced property, committed politically-motivated beatings, boiled their opponents’ skin with hot tar, and delegitimized standing government officials with aggressive propaganda campaigns. This is the history of America that the globalist establishment and their ANTIFA/BLM shock troops desperately want to erase from the record.

The display on Jan. 6 shows that the America of old will be very difficult to put down. The official conservative movement, with its rigid gatekeeping at every level, does not want the truth to be known. Many Trump backers, desperate to protect the president, want to obscure the truth as well. They do not want to admit that the populist America First movement inspired by Trump is evolving into a leaderless force capable of spontaneous mass action. The energy from Trump’s frenetic rallies is taking shape into a movement that can overtake a Capitol in an afternoon. This is the truth that so many on the Right are incentivized to deny.