Not All Terrorists Are Created Equal

So Much Depends on Who's Dishing Out The Justice

It is as if Christine Priola and Dara O’Connor (above) lived in different countries. On January 6, 2021, Priola “entered the restricted area on the east side of the Capitol building with a large sign expressing her views.” On February 12, 2026, O’Connor, pictured above, tried to burn down a warehouse thinking it an ICE facility.

Priola’s community and its media shamed her instantly and publicly. O’Connor’s community and its media shielded her from the public spotlight and possibly from the authorities. Biden’s DOJ invented a crime to secure O’Connor’s imprisonment. Trump’s DOJ chose not to hold O’Connor accountable for her most obvious crime, namely arson. I write this not to fault the Trump DOJ but rather to show the mercilessness of the Left and the legal cruelty of the government it elected.

Priola (above) is one of the ten women I profiled in my 2024 book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6. Two of the ten did not survive that fateful day. About O’Connor I know much less, but much more than I did during the three months she remained invisible following her February 12 TV debut on “Name That Arsonist!”

Up until a few days before the attack, O’Connor, who just turned 30, worked as a registered nurse for North Kansas City Hospital. She graduated from Shawnee Mission East, a large suburban high school, and the University of Missouri. What this means is that hundreds of people in the Kansas City area would have recognized her from the video that KMBC-TV shot and that other TV stations aired as well.

When I spoke with KMBC’s on-scene reporter Andy Alcock a couple of weeks after the incident, he was as clueless as I was about the woman’s identity. Apparently no acquaintance of O’Connor’s reached out to KMBC. The Kansas City Star obviously did not try to find O’Connor despite the fact that its editors had been beating their drums about the impending sale of this warehouse to ICE for weeks.

Priola, 49 at the time of her arrest, had a different experience. She walked in through open doors on the relatively calm east side of the Capitol. During the twenty or so minutes she spent inside, she talked to a police officer or two looking for guidance but got none. She spent much of her time there admiring the architecture.

Wandering alone into the vacated Senate chambers, Priola was photographed with the sign reading, “The Children Cry Out for Justice.” The one officer present was just watching people come and go. Not until Priola exited through the west side did she see the chaos outside the building or sense it.

On January 8, “tipsters” within the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) alerted the FBI. Christine’s CMSD employers promptly sent out a statement condemning this veteran occupational therapist for her role in “the forcible takeover and willful destruction of our government.” In the process, they doxxed her.

The Cleveland Teachers Union was quick to abandon Christine as well. “We are aware of reports of a Cleveland educator who engaged in rioting at the Capitol. We take these allegations very seriously. If true, they [sic] must be held accountable.”

On January 8, some 20 law enforcement officers came to the door of Christine’s suburban home with search warrant in hand. This was impressive work. Within 48 hours, the FBI had been able to satisfy itself that the woman pictured on the CMSD ID card was the woman photographed in the Senate Chamber of the Capitol.

On their January 8 visit, agents ransacked Christine’s house, leaving her shattered and embarrassed. Protestors and the media had shown up at the house even before the authorities did. WKYC 3 News was one of many local outlets to report breathlessly from the scene. This was a story, the news anchor told the audience, they had been “talking about all day.” Standing outside in the cold, he treated the search of Priola’s home as enthusiastically as he might have that of the Unabomber.

A week after the search, the FBI came back to Priola’s house to arrest her. Despite the cold, they led her away coatless in handcuffs and transported her to the federal courthouse in Cleveland. Priola spent the day in a cell. It would not be her last day behind bars.

As I reported earlier, Dara O’Connor did a bit more than carry a sign. She “threw two incendiary devices, colloquially known as Molotov cocktails” at the building she believed was to be used as an ICE detention facility. Before the plea deal was announced, O’Connor “paid full restitution in the amount of $43,612 to the victim of her crime.” From the records, it appears that her suburban family is affluent enough to have picked up the tab.

Last week, O’Connor pleaded guilty “to one count of knowingly possessing two destructive devices that were not registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record,” namely the molotov cocktails. She did not, however, plead guilty to arson. In that her Obama-appointed judge was once head of the local Democratic Party and his wife a leader in the city council’s subversion of the ICE sale, O’Connor will not likely share Priola’s fate.

That fate was a grim one. In July 2022, Priola pleaded guilty to “obstructing an official proceeding,” a crime the Biden DOJ willfully misinterpreted to punish the J6ers. In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that the obstruction charge “must include proof that defendants tried to tamper with or destroy documents.” Priola was one of 350 people charged under this corrupted law, only. a handful of whom violated the law as written.

The Supreme Court intervention came too late for Priola. In November 2022, she started serving her 15-month sentence at Hazelton in West Virginia, the state’s highest security prison for women. Upon arrival, prison officials put her in the SHU, “the hole.” For much of that time Priola had to share the tiny cell and its open toilet with a man, a sexual predator who claimed to be a woman. Life in the general population was simply a different kind of hell.

As to O’Connor, her story has already disappeared. No local media outlet followed up after reporting on O’Connor’s plea deal. No national media covered the story at all. No photo of O’Connor can be found in “Google images.”

Repeat after me, boys and girls—Trump is weaponizing justice, right wing extremism is the real problem, and men belong in women’s prisons.