The Real Precedent for J6 Restitution Was That For Japanese Internment

And the J6ers suffered much more

PBS News headlined a recent article, “Why legal experts say Trump’s new ‘anti-weaponization’ fund is unprecedented.” The $1.776 billion settlement for victims of Obama-Biden weaponization, law professor Adam Zimmerman told PBS, “is in a totally different solar system than any past government settlement on record."

Except it is not. As a result of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government paid more than $1.6 billion in compensation to more than 80,000 eligible individuals of Japanese origin or descent. Almost no one thought that settlement unfair.

In February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing his subordinates to designate “military areas” on the west coast and exclude from them anyone deemed a threat.

Those so deemed included roughly 120,000 people of Japanese origin, roughly 2/3 of them American-born. The government provided camps for the displaced who had no place else to go. Many lost their property and their homes, but families were kept intact, and most of those interned were treated humanely. This was a raw deal, but it compared favorably to the treatment of the J6ers.

In 2020, Democrats in Washington deemed Trump supporters a comparable threat. So intense was the demonization that the Democrats in the Capitol that day convinced themselves the protestors were going to kill them. The ever vain AOC thought she was going to be raped.

According to super analyst Mike Benz, the major DNC apparatchiks war gamed a plan designed “to go after Trump's entire base, to quote, demobilize them.” To neutralize the base, understandably livid after what appeared to be a stolen election, some “legal predicate” was necessary, and January 6, 2021, provided an ideal opportunity.

The details of the feds’ role in stimulating a riot continue to emerge. Already well established is the way the feds, much as they did in 1942, defamed those considered a threat and weaponized justice to persecute them. It started with rhetorical overkill. Less than 90 minutes after the first bicycle rack fell on January 6, 2021, Rep. Ted Deutch tweeted, “This is a violent insurrection. An attempted coup by Trump supporters at his encouragement.” At 4 p.m., President-Elect Joe Biden gave the word his blessing. “It’s not protest,” he said. “It’s insurrection.”

Following the rhetoric came the fraud. On January 8, the New York Times lent its imprimatur to the lie told by “two law enforcement officials,” namely that “pro-Trump rioters overpowered [Capitol Police Officer Brian] Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher.” The lie stuck. A month after Sicknick’s death by stroke, for instance, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was calling Trump a “cop killer” and demanding impeachment.

Following the fraud came the censorship. That same day, January 8, Twitter permanently suspended sitting president Donald Trump and purged Twitter of some 70,000 Trump supporters. Facebook followed suit.

The internment process began simultaneously. On January 8 some 20 law enforcement officers, search warrant in hand, ransacked the Ohio home of 49-year-old single mom Christine Priola, leaving her shattered, embarrassed, and jobless. Protestors and a gleeful media had shown up at the house even before the authorities did. Priola’s crime was to walk into the Capitol through an open door with the sign reading, “The Children Cry Out for Justice.” For this felony, she would serve nine months in a maximum security prison.

Comparable scenes were taking place all across the country.Many of these arrested were held without bail in the DC “Gulag.” Some would serve nearly four years until pardoned in January 2025.

Inside the “patriot wing” of the DC gulag

Within 10 days of January 6, Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris showed just how orchestrated was the weaponization. In a pre-recorded CBS Sunday Morning interview that aired on January 17, Harris told Jane Pauley, “I was at the Capitol that morning, and then I was in a meeting, and I was told that I should leave.” Likely believing the pipe bomber an ally, she led the viewers to think she had to leave the Capitol because of the riot. In fact, she had to leave the DNC because of the pipe bomb.

For nearly a year after January 6 prosecutors were telling J6 judges and juries that Harris “remained within the Capitol building” throughout the riot. As a Secret Service protectee, any site Harris visited was considered “restricted.” The hundreds of defendants who violated this restricted space had their charges amplified.

To enable even more imprisonments, Merrick Garland’s prosecutors abused an obstruction law designed to prevent record tampering. They used it instead to punish people for simply wandering through the Capitol. The charge came with a maximum 20-year prison sentence.

Juries pulled from a 90-plus percent Democrat jury pool convicted every single J6er who went to trial. No changes of venue were allowed. Seeing this injustice play out, most protestors accepted plea deals. Not until 2024 did The Supreme Court reject the DOJ’s procrustean take on the obstruction law, but not before prosecutors had used it to punish 350 or so protestors with extended prison sentences.

Although the ACLU had actively fought against Japanese internment, it championed the mass imprisonment of J6ers, getting all 51 of its chapters to sign on to the following: “On January 6 of last year, the residents of D.C. were traumatized as an insurrectionist mob roamed our streets, harassed our neighbors, and violently broke into the Capitol Building, killing at least five people.” The only thing the ACLU got right in this letter was the date.

In recent years, no other protestors/rioters were prosecuted the way J6ers were. In 2018, for instance, more than 200 people were arrested for obstructing the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. As reported by NPR, “Most of those charged this week with disorderly conduct, crowding or obstructing paid fines of $35 or $50.”

During the rampant violence nationwide following the May 2020 death of George Floyd, rioters suffered nowhere near the judicial abuse heaped on J6ers. A record review by UK’s left-leaning Guardian found that the “vast majority” of charges in these cases were “dropped, dismissed, or otherwise not filed.” Even for felonies like looting and assault, local authorities dropped the majority of charges.

By the time the Biden regime slithered out of Washington, its prosecutors had arrested and charged more than 1575 January 6 protestors, the largest and most complex federal prosecution in U.S. history. Of those more than 700 were incarcerated. At least five committed suicide. Many, if not most, lost their homes, their jobs, their friends, their families, their professional licenses, their right to vote and bear arms.

Not all of them deserve restitution, but to read their many posts this past week or two is to realize that all of them deserve a fair hearing.