“And there wasn’t a person watching at home who didn’t know why that was.”

Representative Lamb spoke some truth earlier this morning, getting a predictable reaction from the Sedition Caucus:

Full thing is even better 🔥 pic.twitter.com/KLwx7guWRy— Reily @ 🏡 (@reilyseanconn) January 7, 2021

The double standard in treatment of yesterday’s seditious rioters with past protestors is trivially obvious:

Horrified onlookers including President-elect Joe Biden could not help but notice the striking contrast between the police response to Trump’s insurrection and the hard fist that met Black Lives Matter protests in June. During largely peaceful protests on June 1, D.C. police officers arrested 289 people, with federal officers tear-gassing demonstrators in Lafayette Square to clear the way for Trump’s infamous Bible photo-op at St. John’s Episcopal Church. By comparison, local police in Washington, D.C., who secured the Capitol grounds on Wednesday and enforced the 6 p.m. citywide curfew have made only 68 arrests as of Thursday morning. 

Other scenes illustrated the chasm in the police response: A TikTok clip appeared to show Capitol Police opening barricades for pro-Trump agitators. One officer in riot gear helped a Trump supporter down the steps. Even as police fired tear gas and flash grenades into the churning crowd, others gave departing Trump supporters directions to their cars or hotels. 

“The dichotomy in treatment is plain to see,” D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine said in an interview. For the BLM protests, Trump “made a huge deal of calling in real tough guys’’ from other government agencies “to absolutely intimidate and be a force against rioters and looters,’’ Racine said. At the Capitol, police used “kid gloves’’ and let protesters pass, he said. The incident shows that the system of criminal enforcement and policing isn’t fair and that Trump and his supporters are wrong to claim there is no systematic racism, Racine said.

“There is no doubt that BLM protesters would not have been treated with the respect and deference that has been shown here,” former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick said in an interview. “President Trump, and his advisers and lawyers, and those members of Congress who encouraged this, should be shamed and driven from public life for all time.”

Hawley, Gohmert et al. can pretend they don’t have blood on their hands, but they knew full what they were doing. Speaking of which, the Kansas City Star says what needed to be said:

No one other than President Donald Trump himself is more responsible for Wednesday’s coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol than one Joshua David Hawley, the 41-year-old junior senator from Missouri, who put out a fundraising appeal while the siege was underway.

This, Sen. Hawley, is what law-breaking and destruction look like. This is not a protest, but a riot. One woman who was apparently part of the pro-Trump mob was fatally shot by Capitol Police as lawmakers took cover. Some of those whose actions Trump encouraged and later condoned brought along their Confederate flags.

And no longer can it be asked, as George Will did recently of Hawley, “Has there ever been such a high ratio of ambition to accomplishment?” Hawley’s actions in the last week had such impact that he deserves an impressive share of the blame for the blood that’s been shed.