Few turn out to support Nazis, white supremacists and Confederate sympathizers in Washington D.C.

If you wanted to show your support for the right-wing Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on January 6th, today was your day.  But the crowd that turned out for the “Justice for J6” rally in front of the Capitol this afternoon was pathetic.  There were fewer supporters of the insurrectionists than there were police or members of the media, both of which appeared to outnumber those attending the rally. 

The Washington Post reported that a total of four people were arrested and two weapons were confiscated, one of which was a knife. 

Matt Braynard, who was a staffer on the 2016 Trump campaign, heads up a group called “Look Ahead America” which organized the rally.  He has been giving interviews all week making the case that those arrested on January 6th were simply exercising their First Amendment rights and are being punished for their political beliefs. He has called the arrestees held in federal custody “political prisoners.”

A total of 643 January 6 insurrectionists have been arrested so far. Fifty of them have pled guilty.  Sixty-three are currently being held without bail pending trial.  All or most of them are being held on charges of assaulting police, physically destroying federal property by breaking through doors and windows, theft of government property, or being involved in organizing the insurrection.  Rioters who entered the Capitol but were not involved in violence against police officers or the Capitol building itself or accused of theft are not being held in federal custody pending trial.

Cable news shows have been remarking all day on the fact that none of the usual right-wing suspects, many of them members of congress, showed up for the rally.  Among those absent were Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mo Brooks (who spoke at the January 6 rally), Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.  All voted on January 6 to object to the certification of electoral college ballots in an attempt to overturn the election.

But the failure of the right-wing rally at the Capitol today is just a small bump in the road for these authoritarian assholes.  Voter suppression continues apace in Republican-controlled states across the country. The entire Republican Party is on a campaign to claim that the assault on the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t an insurrection at all, but rather a legitimate protest against the theft of the election from Donald Trump.  A large majority of Republicans, 66 percent, believe the election was “rigged and stolen from Donald Trump” according to a recent Yahoo poll.  Just 18 percent of Republicans believe Joe Biden won the election “fair and square.”  

The tiny right-wing rally today in Washington may have been a joke, but the un-democratic nature of the Republican Party is not.  All these lunatics had to do was announce they were holding a rally at the Capitol today for the entire area to be turned into a military-style fortress.

This is the world we live in now: A world in which one of our two major political parties now stands firmly behind violence as a legitimate political tactic.  If this were not true, we wouldn’t have had to defend our nation’s Capitol building with anti-riot fencing and hundreds of police today.

Joe Biden didn’t cause this.  The Democratic Party didn’t cause this.  Supporters of Donald Trump and the Republican Party once again caused Capitol Hill to be turned into an armed camp.  Politics was not on display in Washington D.C. today.  It was evidence of a civil war.