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Kamala Harris Is Priming Democrats for Violent Resistance If Trump Wins


By: John Daniel Davidson | October 17, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/17/kamala-harris-is-priming-democrats-for-violent-resistance-if-trump-wins/

Kamala Harris

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By now it’s commonplace to note that Kamala Harris often seems out of her depth, like she’s unsure what to say about policy, or how to explain her past positions, or why she hasn’t already done the things she’s promised to do if she’s elected given that she’s the current vice president.

But on one particular subject she’s been consistent and forceful throughout her campaign. She’s adamant that Donald Trump will destroy America if he’s reelected. And not “destroy” in the sense of enact bad policies, but that he’ll round people up with the military and put them in camps. She talks about this all the time now. At one point during her Wednesday evening interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, she became visibly upset after Baier played a clip of former President Donald Trump calling out the weaponization of government and the endless investigations and lawfare he’s been subjected to.

The vice president, her voice rising in outrage, jabbed her finger at Baier and said, “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this week she told the crowd that former President Donald Trump considers anyone who doesn’t support him to be an enemy of the United States. “He is saying he would use the military to go after them.”

Earlier this week, during an audio town hall with Charlamagne Tha God, Harris claimed without a hint of irony that if Trump is elected, he’ll use the Department of Justice “as a weapon against his political enemies,” adding, “You know who does that? Dictators do that.” At one point during the show, she agreed with a caller who said Trump will lock “anyone who doesn’t look white into camps,” replying, “You’ve hit on a really important point and expressed it I think so well.”

That’s just a sampling from this week, but there are many other recent examples. In the waning weeks of the presidential election, Harris has been deploying increasingly extreme rhetoric about Trump and the dangers he poses to the country. Even before Harris seized the Democratic nomination from President Joe Biden, the idea that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy was the refrain of the Biden campaign. Harris has taken that theme and run with it. The purpose of it isn’t just to scare voters into casting their ballot against the former president, or to provoke some unstable would-be assassin into taking a shot at Trump (although some Democrats no doubt see that as a happy by-product of this Trump-as-dictator rhetoric). Its main purpose is to prime Democrat voters for violent resistance should Trump win in November.

Consider the lopsidedness of the rhetoric between the Trump and Harris campaigns. Trump often makes sweeping (and mostly true) statements about the deep state, about the border and illegal immigration, about crime, about how Harris and the Democrats are destroying the country. But when he uses the phrase “destroying the country,” he’s talking about things like crime, homelessness, drug addiction, rampant inflation and the cost of groceries. These things, he says, are the result of policies Democrats have put in place. If you’re looking for someone to blame, he says, blame Biden and Harris, because all these problems are their fault.

But that’s not what Harris and the Democrats are doing with their rhetoric. They’re not making a case that crime and inflation will be worse under Trump because of his policies. Democrats aren’t really interested in policy. What they’re doing is pushing a narrative that Trump is going to be a fascist dictator if he wins office and use the powers of the presidency to go after ordinary Americans. That’s an extreme and frankly unhinged position with no basis in reality. You don’t say things like that unless you’re hoping to provoke a strong reaction, and the reaction Democrats are hoping to provoke is violent resistance to a second Trump term.

After all, if you really thought that Trump would order the military and the Justice Department to round up you and your family, wouldn’t you do anything to stop him? Wouldn’t you take to the streets to save your country and thwart the rise of a fascist dictatorship? At least two would-be assassins have taken the Democrats’ anti-Trump rhetoric seriously. Harris is hoping that many more people will do so between now and Election Day and respond by rejecting a second Trump term — in the streets, if they must.

There’s a precedent for this that Democrats set four years ago. During the BLM riots in the summer of 2020, Harris herself was out in front egging on the rioters, infamously working to raise bail money for those who had been arrested. Of the protests, she said this in a June 2020 interview with Stephen Colbert: “Everyone beware. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day … They’re not gonna let up, and they should not.”

Harris and her fellow Democrats knew that the civic unrest unleashed by BLM and Antifa rioters would damage Trump’s reelection campaign, and they did their utmost to amplify the violence and also justify it by claiming the moral high ground. The protesters and rioters were only reacting to systemic injustice, after all, and as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

All of this only makes sense if you understand that Harris isn’t just a bumbling politician but a left-wing radical, and left-wing radicals have no qualms about using violence as a political weapon. If your goal is to seize and wield political power as part of a revolutionary program to transform America, then who cares if a couple neighborhoods here there get burned to the ground in race riots? Who cares if some young women get raped and killed by illegal immigrants, or a handful of apartment complexes get taken over by criminal alien gangs? Those things on their own might be unpleasant or disturbing, but they’re all in the service of a greater goal, which is the re-shaping of American society. So, it’s all justified.

What Harris and the Democrats are doing with this line about Trump rounding up Americans and putting them in camps is preparing the ground for massive civic unrest in the event of a Trump victory. The purpose of the unrest would be to cripple Trump’s administration before he even takes office, and to disrupt normal life for so many Americans that they will rue the day they ever voted for Trump.

It’s the hecklers veto on steroids, and it’s exactly what Harris is planning for and hoping to provoke if Trump wins.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Tim Walz Silent on Ties to Minnesota Freedom Fund That Bailed Out Rioters, Domestic Abusers


By: Tyler O’Neil | August 07, 2024

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/07/tim-walz-silent-ties-minnesota-freedom-fund-bailed-rioters-domestic-abusers/

Rioters stand in front of a burning building
Rioters set fire to a multi-story affordable housing complex under construction near the Third Precinct police station on Wednesday, May 27, 2020 in Minneapolis. (Mark Vancleave/Star Tribune/Getty Images)

When rioters took to the streets of Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd, setting fire to a police station, a Japanese restaurant, and a low-income tenement building (among others), then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., raised money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which posted bail on behalf of the rioters.

Now that Harris, Joe Biden’s vice president and the presumptive Democratic nominee, has selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Americans may wonder about his position on the Minnesota Freedom Fund. As it turns out, Walz tapped the fund’s executive director for the state’s Sentencing Guidelines Commission.

Unfortunately, Walz’s office did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the matter. The Minnesota Freedom Fund also did not respond to The Daily Signal’s questions about whether Walz supported the fund to bail out rioters.

Harris infamously urged followers to contribute to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, urging them to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” after rioters ravaged Minneapolis following Floyd’s death in police custody.

Fact-checkers later established that Harris didn’t personally donate to the Freedom Fund, although at the time she and others helped direct more than $40 million to the organization.

Who Is Tonja Honsey?

Walz, first elected governor in 2018, doesn’t appear to have made any such public call for donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. However, he did grant one of the organization’s leaders a position in his administration.

In May 2019, Tonja Honsey, executive director of the fund, joined Minnesota’s Sentencing Guildelines Commission. The sentencing commission’s 13 members represent both the criminal justice system and the general public. They include judges, a public defender, a county attorney, a peace officer, an academic, and three members of the public.

The governor appoints all commissioners except the judicial representatives. Honsey, a public member who spent time in jail for possessing controlled substances, served on the commission from 2019 to 2023.

“I say that I’m an incarceration survivor,” Honsey told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2019. “The shift needs to turn from people who have gone to school to learn about reentry, to where people who are directly impacted need to be the ones leading,” Honsey added. “And not just brought in for a focus group. We actually need to be leading the charge.”

In June 2020, the Minnesota Freedom Fund fired Honsey after she admitted that she had lied about her ancestry. She falsely had described herself as indigenous, and later faced condemnation for misappropriating a Native American heritage and bloodline.

“The Minnesota Freedom Fund’s work is part of a larger movement to end the harms of money bail and jailing people for poverty,” the organization said in a public statement that since has been deleted from the website (but preserved on the Internet Archive here).

“As a collective effort, our mission has never relied on a single person and calls us to step up around issues of equity and truth,” the fund said, adding: “We know we must do better to address systemic racism, both internally in our work and with the community.”

According to the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, Honsey’s nonprofit, We Rise!, disbanded. The American Indian Prison Project put out a statement repudiating her.

In 2019, the Open Society Foundations awarded Honsey a Soros Justice Fellowship. Open Society did not respond to a request for comment.

A LinkedIn profile bearing Honsey’s name and history mentions Ladies of Hope Ministries as her current employer. Ladies of Hope Ministries did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. The Daily Signal was unable to reach Honsey for comment.

Who Does the Fund Help?

The Minnesota Freedom Fund opposes cash bail and pays to secure the freedom of those charged with various crimes.

“Right now, the cash bail and immigration detention systems jail legally innocent people simply because they can’t afford their freedom, while wealthy people go free,” the organization’s website states. “Until we abolish wealth-based pre-trial and immigration detention in our state, Minnesota Freedom Fund will be here to level the playing field.”

The Minnesota Freedom Fund has paid $21.2 million in cash bail, freed 2,537 people from being jailed before trial, paid $4.8 million for immigration bonds, and freed another 463 people from immigration detention, according to the website. The organization faces criticism for bailing out potentially violent defendants who pose a threat to the community. It bailed out Timothy Wayne Columbus, who faced 30 years in prison for allegedly sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl in July 2020, the Daily Caller reported.

It also bailed out six men facing allegations that they committed violence against women between June and August 2020. Five of them previously were convicted of charges related to domestic abuse.

The Tides Center, a liberal dark money group, funneled more than $100,000 into the Minnesota Freedom Fund between 2019 and 2021, according to IRS filings. The Tides Foundation, the Tides Center’s sister organization, represents anti-Israel rioters through its fiscally sponsored project, Palestine Legal. Tides did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Walz did not respond to questions from The Daily Signal about whether he took any actions against the Minnesota Freedom Fund to ensure that it didn’t bail out criminal defendants who could pose a threat in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Flanagan, his lieutenant governor, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the letter of recommendation she wrote for Honsey.

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The Pro-Hamas Left Is Warming Up For Real Violence


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | NOVEMBER 02, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/the-pro-hamas-left-is-warming-up-for-real-violence-2666128386.html/

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Talk about bad timing. On Wednesday, the White House announced a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia,” the necessity of which, according to awkwardly scripted remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris, is that Muslims endure a disproportionate number of “hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents.”

Leave it to the Biden White House to pick a moment when a wave of antisemitism is surging across America to announce this. Set aside the dearth of evidence that Muslims face persecution or discrimination in mainstream American society. Last year set a record for anti-Jewish hate crimes, breaking the previous record that was set the year before. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, antisemitism has erupted in our cities and on campuses, this time with the imprimatur and cooperation of the identitarian left. The idea that now is the time to address Islamophobia is so out of touch with the reality of the moment, only the Biden-Harris administration could possibly have come up with it.

But the announcement inadvertently serves to highlight a rather disturbing development in our civic life. At this point, some three weeks removed from the Hamas slaughter of 1,400 Israelis, it’s hard to deny that we have a domestic constituency for Hamas in this country. Generally speaking, it’s comprised of a broad swath of the woke left together with a broad swath of Muslim-Americans, united in what amounts to an unstable Red-Green alliance.

It’s also easy to see that this Hamas constituency is warming up for a season of real violence.

We’ve all seen the recent videos of self-righteous Hamas sympathizers tearing down posters of missing or kidnapped Israeli children. In almost every case, their actions are accompanied by either a defiant callousness or a dead-eyed nonchalance. Pleading with them or interrogating them is pointless, as every person who has tried to do so on camera has quickly discovered. These people are antisemites, and it’s not possible to shame them out of their antisemitism. They own it gladly. 

But this week, a different sort of video appeared on social media. A group of Jews in Manhattan’s Upper East Side physically protected a bunch of posters of Israeli child hostages from an antisemite who was trying to tear them down. The man, who of course covered his face with a keffiyeh, tried to force his way through and a scuffle ensued. Eventually, a cop pulled up and appeared to arrest the man as a crowd gathered.

The incident illustrates the violence lurking just beneath the surface of the antisemitic, pro-Hamas sentiment now manifesting all across the country. The kind of people who are willing to casually rip down posters of children taken hostage by terrorists are not those who have any kind of principled commitment to nonviolence. They might or might not individually be cowards, but they clearly have no problem with violence as such — see, for example, the BLM posters celebrating Hamas paragliders who slaughtered more than 250 Israeli concertgoers on Oct. 7.

This is especially true on our nation’s college campuses. This week at Harvard, whose students have staged some of the most blatant and vile pro-Hamas demonstrations, including straightforward calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, a group of keffiyeh-waving students surrounded and then assaulted a Jewish student who was simply trying to get away from them.

Some of these assailants have been identified, like Ibrahim Bharmal, a student at Harvard Law School and an editor at the Harvard Law Review, as well as Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a student of Harvard Divinity School. That a Harvard law student feels free to harass and assault Jews on campus — the opposite of what we should expect from a student of the law — suggests not only that antisemitism on campus is a real threat to Jewish students but that the pro-Hamas woke left is growing in boldness and is reasonably confident it can target individual Jews on campus with impunity.

Jon Levine called the Harvard assault a LARP pogrom, which is exactly what it was. And as we know from 2020, left-wing riot and assault LARPers eventually get around to the real thing. Indeed, all the elements are falling into place for a season of civic violence of the kind we saw during the summer of 2020. The White House’s ham-fisted campaign against Islamophobia is all the confirmation you need that Jewish Americans, not Muslims, are the ones in real danger right now.

This is something of a pattern on the left. When a dangerous or unstable element in its coalition is revealed as such, the official narrative is to pretend that element is under unique threat from the American mainstream. Look at the media and Democrat reaction to the mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville back in March. The shooter was Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as a man. She killed three children and three adults before police took her out. Hale was mentally unwell and left behind a kind of trans shooter manifesto, which was suspiciously never released to the public.

In the wake of the shooting, all we heard from the corporate press and Democratic leaders was that transgender Americans were under threat. Not a word about how transgender ideology attracts mentally unstable, unwell people who need help, not affirmation. That was not the conversation they wanted to have, even after the slaughter of six innocent people.

Likewise, we’re going to hear a lot more about how Muslims and left-wing Hamas apologists are the real victims, even as Jewish students suffer escalating attacks, harassment, and threats. Make no mistake, the violent rhetoric you hear at these pro-Hamas rallies, the revolting practice of tearing down posters of Israeli children taken hostage, the targeting of individual Jewish students on campus — it’s all leading somewhere very bad.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Mike Pence Pandering to D.C. Media Is Pathetic and Disqualifying


BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | MARCH 14, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/14/mike-pence-pandering-to-d-c-media-is-pathetic-and-disqualifying/

Mike Pence talks to reporter
Any candidate who is playing footsie with the propaganda press, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.

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On Saturday night, former Vice President Mike Pence addressed the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a white-tie gathering of Beltway media and political insiders. He took the opportunity to praise the D.C. media, attack Tucker Carlson, and condemn Donald Trump.

“History will hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6,” Pence said. “Make no mistake about it: What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way,” Pence said of Tucker Carlson’s journalism, which is at odds with the official narrative.

Pence praised the corporate media as well, saying, “We were able to stay at our post in part because you stayed at your post. The American people know what happened that day because you never stopped reporting.”

As if Pence’s views on the virtues of the propaganda press weren’t disappointing enough, his handlers bragged to the same media that he had lavished them with praise and attacked Trump and Carlson as part of his long-shot campaign to win the Republican nomination for president.

Really. According to a new Politico article, the Pence team intentionally crafted their remarks because they “believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days: Washington insiders and journalists.”

No offense, but how are these people political professionals? How many decades of political history have taught everyone with a pulse that Republican pandering to the media is a fool’s errand? In what world does this strategy make sense?

The strategy has never worked and will never work.

Consider the media’s most beloved Republican presidential contender, 2008 nominee Sen. John McCain. The Arizona senator was treated so well by the media for his self-styled “straight-talk” and attacks on fellow Republicans that he used to refer to them jokingly as his “base.” It’s true that their support of him did help him obtain the nomination. But the moment he posed even a tiny threat to Sen. Barack Obama, the true object of their devotion and affection, they turned on him in a heartbeat. He might as well have been Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, or Mitt Romney.

Nothing about Pence suggests he would receive even a short honeymoon of the type McCain benefited from. He should have learned this lesson when, as governor of Indiana, he caved to media demands that he decrease religious freedom in his state. His cowardice did not result in favorable media coverage then or while he was vice president. They loathe every single thing about him. They even mock him for how he and his wife protect their marriage!

It’s true that attacking fellow conservatives or Republicans will always generate some favorable media coverage. It’s the only way a non-leftist can be published in The New York Times, for instance. It’s the primary way to get airtime on NBC or CNN. It’s self-abasing and a dereliction of duty to your voters, but, hey, a fleeting moment of non-hostility from the corporate press is worth it, right?

Contrast Pence’s effort with how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis handles corporate media. He treats them as if he understands they are Republicans’ most steadfast political opponents. In press conferences, he points out the flaws in their assumptions and lies in their questions. He does not give them breaking news in the futile hope that they will be nicer to him later. He treats non-leftist press the same as or better than he treats the corrupt propaganda press. His communications team publicly posts the ridiculous questions they’re asked, and how they answer those questions. He refuses to treat requests as legitimate if they come from media who have lied about him.

The only thing worse than a Republican who impotently complains about “media bias” instead of understanding that the country is in the midst of an all-out information war is a Republican who actually praises the press for its war on Republican voters.

Substantively Wrong

The other main problem with Pence’s pandering to the corporate press is that it was substantively in error. It rewrites his own history in the chaos and drama of the 2020 election. Here is Mike Pence in December of 2020, for example:

And as our election contest continues, I’ll make you a promise: We are going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We are going to keep fighting until every illegal vote is thrown out! We are going to win Georgia, we are going to save America, and we will never stop fighting to Make America Great Again!

And here is Mike Pence on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days prior to the big rally and subsequent riot at the Capitol:

I share the concerns of millions of Americans about voting irregularities. I promise you, come this Wednesday, we’ll have our day in Congress. We’ll hear the objections, we’ll hear the evidence!

Moments before that “day in Congress” began, Pence issued his letter to Congress saying he believed his role that day would be only ceremonial. However justified, it was something of a shock to the voters who had supported him and the president in their battle over election irregularities. If he wants to blame third parties for riling up the masses, he may want to consider his own role.

Pence is also wrong to attack Carlson for showing video footage of the riot at odds with the official narrative put forth by Nancy Pelosi and her cronies in the press. Tucker’s footage did not deny the violence that Pelosi and her fellow Democrats showed day after day for years for partisan gain. But it did show that Jacob Chansley was given something of a tour of the Capitol that day and was not viewed as violent by any of the many police officers he encountered. It showed that mysterious witness Ray Epps gave testimony about his whereabouts that contrasted with video evidence. And it showed that the Jan. 6 Committee’s show-trial had lied by omission when it falsely conveyed Sen. Josh Hawley’s behavior as the riot unfolded.

Calling these journalistic revelations a “disgrace” to reporters who lack Carlson’s independence and courage is shameful and reprehensible.

Finally, Pence was wrong to effusively praise the corporate press for its behavior in the aftermath of Jan. 6. The media never “reported” or covered the event or its circumstances so much as it exploited them for political purposes. The very same media that excused and vociferously defended the violent and deadly Black Lives Matter riots that besieged the White House, a federal courthouse, and police precincts, turned on a dime to treat the Jan. 6 riot as a literal insurrection, an absolutely absurd claim. The same media that reacted with abject horror and hysteria to the suggestion that order should be restored in cities across America as violent rioters terrified the citizens suddenly decided in the case of Trump supporters that First Amendment protections of speech, press, and assembly were negotiable, constitutional rights to a defense were unimportant, and certain citizens didn’t deserve speedy trials or due process.

No American should praise such behavior from the propaganda press. And no man seeking the votes of Republicans should pander to the propaganda press for political reasons, even if it weren’t delusional to think it would work.

The country is in the midst of an information war. The corporate media are a more formidable political opponent of Republicans than any Democrat running for office. Any candidate for the Republican nomination had better have a plan to protect and defend Republican voters and their goals. And any candidate who is playing footsie with these political opponents, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

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Mollie Hemingway Op-ed: Pelosi Owns the J6 Commission, And That’s Why It Failed


Commentary by: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JANUARY 05, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/05/pelosi-owns-the-j6-commission-and-thats-why-it-failed/

Nancy Pelosi in a mask

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Commission was supposed to help Democrats hold onto their slim majority during tough 2022 midterm elections. Instead, it stumbled out of the gate, failed to gain legitimacy among the public, and has been plagued with serious legal and ethical problems.

Pelosi’s decision to politically exploit the riot at the Capitol was a no-brainer. Democrats nearly lost the chamber in 2020 when Democrats took control of the Senate and presidency. The president’s party almost always loses significant numbers of House seats during midterm elections. The only time that didn’t happen in recent history was 2002, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Pelosi understandably felt her best bet to preserve power was, with a massive assist from left-wing media, to somehow turn disgruntled Donald Trump supporters’ riot at the Capitol into the next 9/11.

There were massive problems with the scheme. For one thing, Republicans had immediately and vociferously denounced the riot. This was a far cry from the Summer of Violence, when Democrats and their media enablers cheered as leftist groups destroyed sectors of cities throughout the country, resulting in “some 15 times more injured police officers, 23 times as many arrests, and estimated damages in dollar terms up to 1,300 times more costly than those of the Capitol riot.”

Democrats did not condemn these serious and lengthy attacks on the White House, federal courthouses, police buildings, private businesses, and homes. Instead, they joined with the rioters in calling for the defunding of police and other radical measures.

The riots were the result of a deeply destructive lie, pushed by top Democrats, that the country and its policing are irredeemably evil and racist. What’s more, any and all attempts to quell the siege of federal buildings were condemned in the most hysterical terms by Pelosi and other Democrats.

Kamala Harris, then a senator from California and the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee, supported bailing out rioters who destroyed much of Minneapolis. Pelosi pooh-poohed the destruction of federal statues and historical markers. Republicans had consistently opposed political violence, beginning in the summer of 2020, but Democrats had not.

Still, the plan might have worked had Pelosi put together a decent committee. Yet she made several critical errors if she hoped it would be taken seriously.

Consider, first, how Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy managed a similarly important committee with a confidence that Pelosi has lacked.

Democrats threw together their first impeachment of President Trump in 2019 after their long-promised Russia collusion impeachment fell apart due to lack of evidence. Democrats and their media enablers had been claiming for years that Trump was an illegitimate president, and some Republicans had helped them in their general efforts to oust him. McCarthy had a difficult task, knowing that Republican voters weren’t nearly so weak as some of their leaders and would desert the party if it helped Democrats impeach President Trump.

McCarthy was constrained by Democrats’ avoidance of the Judiciary Committee as the venue for the impeachment investigation. Pelosi was concerned that Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, didn’t have what it would take to run impeachment. Impeachment was instead run through the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

That committee included a few Republican members known for opposing Trump, such as Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas. He and Mike Conaway, also of Texas, had already announced they weren’t running again. Some were urging McCarthy to remove Hurd and replace him with someone else. But McCarthy let everyone who wanted stay, while also encouraging any members who enjoyed performing oversight of the intelligence community but didn’t want to take part in an impeachment circus to step away temporarily. When Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Arizona, graciously agreed to such a move, McCarthy replaced him with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

Even that choice showed McCarthy’s confidence, since both McCarthy and Jordan had run for the top leadership spot not long prior. Jordan had also successfully helped block McCarthy from becoming speaker a few years prior. But once McCarthy was made Republican leader, he made Jordan the top Republican on the House’s Oversight and Reform Committee, even over the objections of his supporters on the Steering Committee.

The diverse Republican group on the Intelligence Committee ran an effective opposition, even with Schiff and Pelosi manipulating the proceedings for maximum gain. In the end, Republicans held together, with not a single member of the conference voting to impeach Trump over his phone call with the Ukraine president. It was significant that conservatives and moderates all agreed the charges didn’t pass muster. In the Senate, only Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah fell for the impeachment trial as led by Schiff, leading to Trump’s first acquittal.

By contrast, Pelosi’s roster management has been something of a disaster.

Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi is not even pretending to aim for impartiality and is not well versed in due process. He filed a lawsuit against Trump months before Pelosi chose him as her chairman. And he recently told rabid MSNBC conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow that if you invoke your constitutional rights against being forced to testify, you are “part and parcel guilty” of crimes.

Pelosi picked Schiff for the committee despite — or perhaps because of — his years of fabulism and lies concerning the Russia collusion hoax. Schiff falsely claimed for years that he had secret evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, leaked fake Donald Trump, Jr. emails, fabricated the transcript of a 2019 phone call between former President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s president, and lied about his interactions with the so-called whistleblower behind House Democrats’ first impeachment of Trump.

Far from protecting members from the politicized committee, Pelosi also harmed a few vulnerable members by putting them on it. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Florida, was viewed as a “rising star” in the party, even being floated in May as a tough potential opponent for Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. But a few weeks ago, she announced she would not even try to win re-election for her House seat.

Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia is also facing a tough re-election race, in a district the Republican governor-elect just won. Her seat is being targeted by Republicans. Being part of a uniparty probe with ethical problems can not be helping.

Pelosi’s fatal error, however, was blowing up her own committee by taking what she herself admitted was the “unprecedented” step of removing the Republican ranking member and another top member from it. Pelosi said that she would not allow Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, a distinguished Afghanistan veteran and leader of the Republican Study Committee, from serving. She also banned Jordan, now ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi later claimed the members’ concerns with the integrity of the 2020 election were the reason. But that made no sense, since she appointed Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, and he objected to Trump’s election in 2017. Pelosi herself objected to President George W. Bush’s election in 2004 and said there was “no question” that the 2016 election was “hijacked.”

The resolution establishing the committee requires the committee to follow House rules on the ranking member and minority party representation. But since Pelosi removed the ranking member, its subpoena and deposition activities are at best questionable, and at worst illicit.

Worse, the committee has been falsely claiming to witnesses to have ranking representation. Pelosi’s hand-selected “co-chair” is Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is expected to lose her re-election bid in a few months. The Republican Party of Wyoming does not recognize her as a member, and she lost her Republican leadership position last year because of her vindictive obsession with fighting Trump, whose less interventionist foreign policy she regularly opposed during his time in office.

Known for being a primary pusher of the false “Russian bounties” claim, Cheney has falsely been presented as the ranking member of the committee. She is not. She was chosen even before the Republican-appointed members were removed by Pelosi.

After Pelosi removed the choices of the Republican conference, she added another hand-selected “Republican” to represent her Democratic conference. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, also announced he would decline to run for re-election, rather than face defeat from his voters. No Republican-appointed member serves on the committee.

Pelosi wanted to run the commission as a star chamber, and that’s precisely how it’s being run. It’s being used to persecute political opponents, violate due process, and obtain the private communications of Republican members, citizens, and journalists. It has been exposed for repeatedly fabricating evidence. And Pelosi herself has blocked the release of evidence implicating her office in mishandling security at the Capitol.

Pelosi is expected to step down from Congress following her lame-duck term and expected loss of the majority in November. Her handling of her J6 Committee shows she has lost her leadership skills and lacks the confidence necessary to run such a political operation.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

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