What actually happened on January 6th?: Political persecution frame
The grandmother
On January 6, 2021, a sixty-year-old grandmother from Indiana walked into the Capitol through a door that had been opened. She did not break anything. She did not assault anyone. She was inside for ten minutes, took photographs, and left. She was charged with four federal counts. She spent months in pretrial detention. She was sentenced to sixty days.
Six months earlier, rioters in Portland set fire to a federal courthouse on multiple occasions. Molotov cocktails were thrown at federal officers. The majority of those arrested had their charges dropped.
We are not arguing nothing happened on January 6. People broke windows. People assaulted officers. We are arguing the prosecution was not applied equally, and unequal application of the law has a name.
The asymmetry
The DOJ deployed over 600 FBI agents. Defendants were tracked through cell tower data, facial recognition, social media. Some were held in substandard pretrial conditions for months. For trespassing. In a building that is, in theory, the people’s house.
In the summer of 2020, riots caused $1 to $2 billion in insured damage. Police precincts were burned. A portion of Seattle was declared autonomous for weeks. The incoming vice president promoted bail funds. Portland’s protest-related charge dismissal rate exceeded 90 percent.
The insurrection frame calls it the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War. We call it the most selectively prosecuted event in modern American history. When the law punishes one faction’s riot with maximum force and another’s with studied indifference, it is no longer functioning as law.
The institutional stress test calls the pardons a constitutional mechanism. We ironically agree. The pardon power exists to correct unjust application of the law.
Where we concede ground: The blanket clemency covered people who assaulted officers. We needed a scalpel and got a sledgehammer.
What would change our mind: An independent sentencing comparison showing January 6 sentences matched comparable 2020 civil disorder cases.
Read the full synthesis: What actually happened on January 6th?