January’s storming of the Capitol was a unique evil in our nation’s recent history. Never before had a sitting president spent two months trying to brainwash millions into believing the lie that the election was actually rigged, then invite an armed mob to Washington, D.C., to direct them to march to the Capitol to “stop the steal” right as Congress was finalizing his opponent’s victory.
As a matter of historical precedent, the Capitol siege is second only to the pandemic in terms of national crises of the last decade.
But in an attempt to shut down dissenters pointing out left-wing hypocrisy over the encouragement of civil unrest, politicos such as Joe Scarborough have forcefully tried to slam any equivalences between the Capitol storming and the Black Lives Matter riots of last summer. In a livid diatribe, the MSNBC host misses the point.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says that local businesses being vandalized in antifa/BLM riots over the summer is not equatable to the Capitol building:
“No, jackass… I’m not going to confuse a taco stand with the United States Capitol.” pic.twitter.com/Za4X1uGuL9
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 16, 2021
The violence itself was hardly the worst part of the storming of the Capitol. Rather, it was what the violence was intended to do — in this case, to intimidate lawmakers into overturning our election. If we were determining which was worse solely based on the level of violence, we would come to the opposite conclusion — the BLM riots were undoubtedly more violent.
Five people died during the Capitol storming. In just two weeks of the BLM rioting last summer, at least 19 people died. The Capitol is already operational and well on its way to being completely repaired. BLM rioters, in contrast, caused a record-setting amount of property damage to the tune of at least $1 billion, much of which will not be covered by insurance. Cities such as Kenosha and Minneapolis are still feeling the reverberations of the violence, which has forced hundreds, if not thousands, of the businesses destroyed by BLM rioters to close for good.
If we’re ignoring the intention of the Jan. 6 terror versus the intention of the BLM rioters, the only difference between the attacks on the Capitol versus the attacks on a taco stand is that the taco stand owner lost his livelihood, whereas the senator will be just fine.
The storming of the Capitol was a scary event — a stain upon our national commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. But the violence in both the Capitol attack and the BLM riots were both evil in their own ways. Scarborough would do well to acknowledge that point.
