Jan. 6, 5 Years Later—Were We Played?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I wanna return to the Jan. 6 demonstration that turned into a riot. Everything that we’ve been told by that narrative from the Left seems inaccurate. They told us it was an organized insurrection. They used the word insurrection.

Remember, in the second impeachment, indictment of Donald Trump, and the trial, remember, was held after he left office and he was acquitted by the Senate, but the word was insurrection. And we know that special counsel Jack Smith wanted to use that term, insurrection, but he felt that since no one had been charged with insurrection for a hundred years, he dare not do it.

But we were told that it was a pre-planned armed takeover, a coup, but there was always something wrong about the left-wing narrative of Jan. 6 because we knew there was a massive demonstration. We knew it turned violent outside. And we knew that people were sort of invited in maybe because they, the guards inside the Rotunda and the Capitol, had no other alternative.

But everything after that was too clear-cut. The Democrats had the Jan. 6 committee, and then we know that some of the tapes and testimonies were not kept safely, they’re not accessible. Now, some of the witnesses were kind of berated. Then we also learned that Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s nominations were not accepted for the first time in House history.

And the only way you could get on the committee, if you were Republican, were if you either had no political future, like Adam Kinzinger, or you were doomed to defeat in your next election, like Liz Cheney.

So, there was something weird about—now we’re hearing more weird things. They just arrested the so-called pipe bomber, and this was very strange because we were told by the Biden Justice Department they didn’t know who he was, there was no information, but he was probably a, you know, a participant in the right-wing terrorist activities that day. So, it was to their political advantage, apparently, not to really pursue the investigation.

A new administration comes in and they just start tracing the cellphone imprint of various people and they look at their sales records where they bought this particular item in the pipe bomb, and they came up with a Brian Cole Jr.

He’s a young African American man from a middle-class family. He says he’s an anarchist. Initial reports seem to suggest he was on the left and had empathies with Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but the evidence is so fragmentary, we’re not sure. He had four hours of testimony in which he purportedly today confessed. And now he says he thought Trump was robbed of the election.

So, we don’t know exactly what his empathies were, but it was, apparently, incumbent upon the Biden administration not to investigate who this pipe bomber was and to leave it out there as if he was a part of a violent resistance. And that is consistent with the misinformation that we had and the fake news about the entire day.

Remember, Kamala Harris, when running for president, she said Jan. 6 is the same thing, it rests with, it’s parallel to, it’s comparable to Pearl Harbor, 2,400 dead, or 9/11, 3,000 people dead. And of course, how many people died? Well, we know five people died, but how many people died violently? That’s the key.

The key thing to remember, that the violent deaths were one, maybe two—a Trump protester that was caught in the scramble and the pressure between the crowd and the police. but really one, Ashli Babbitt, a 14-year veteran who was unarmed and was committing a misdemeanor of entering a broken window.

She was shot by Officer Byrd lethally, and then, all of a sudden, we never really knew who Officer Byrd was, we were told it was a justified shooting. We never learned that he had a checkered record, that he was, you know, clumsy, lazy with his gun, that he was—had left it and people had found it in a Capitol restroom.

So, they wanted to suppress the information and suggest that she was an insurgent. That was complete misinformation. Then we were told there wasn’t really any FBI informants, and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said he didn’t know. And only with a change of administrations did FBI records come out that there was probably somewhere between 250 and 275 actual FBI agents or informants in the crowd.

And remember that Matthew Rosenberg, the Pulitzer Prize reporter for The New York Times, had told us at the time, in an ambush interview by Project Veritas, when he nonchalantly was talking to someone he didn’t know was associated with Operation Veritas, he said there was a ton of informants there and he knew them.

And then, of course, Donald Trump said assemble peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol. Not like Kamala Harris, who, in the year before, 2020, had told people that the George Floyd riots should not stop, they will not stop. She called them demonstrations, but they were riots. And she said nor should they stop, they’re gonna go onto the election.

Add it all up, and the latest revelations that there is a pipe bomber and he was angry at the Democrats because he left something at the Democratic Party, a Republican, we don’t know. We don’t know whether his anarchist sympathies mean he is on the left. It’s very improbable to think that they would be on the right, even though he thinks Donald Trump got robbed of the elections.

But maybe he wants to pose as a right-wing person and confirm the predestined narrative that this man must be a right-wing, violent person, and he thinks maybe the Left will be go easy on him, or maybe he thinks that Donald Trump will pardon him. I don’t know. But the whole thing is mysterious.

And to sum up everything we’ve been told about Jan. 6 from the congressional committee to Kamala Harris’ description of it, to comparisons with the four-month, $2 billion, 35 dead, 1,500 police officers, prior riots, arson attacks on courthouses, police precincts that was never really mentioned as a comparable crisis in the republic, all of these things, a number of FBI informants, a number of FBI agents, any effort to find the pipe bomber, the treatment of the January—it was all never transparent. We never got the honest story.

So, that begs the question, why? Why didn’t they just come out and say, “Here’s all the information”?

And the reason is, they wanted to cement a narrative in everybody’s mind that a reckless demonstration that turned into a riot was a pre-planned insurrection by Donald Trump, who ordered it, and therefore, should forfeit his political career, and he should never be allowed to run for office. And they impeached him and they wanted that narrative to stick. And it was a complete fabrication.

There was a demonstration, there was a riot. It was wrong. But everything else was a Democratic narrative, as we’re seeing most recently with a strange case of Brian Cole that suddenly, suddenly, after four years of Biden DOJ in action, within 10 months, the Trump FBI found out who he was, and that he confessed to that crime of leaving pipe bombs at the DNC in the RNC headquarters.

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