THE HOAX IS ON US: "... To understand the Jan. 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other longrunning hoax, the Russia collusion narrative.".

• Author: Kimball, Roger
• Position: AMERICAN THOUGHT

NOTWITHSTANDING all of the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of Jan. 6, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it was not an insurrection at all.

An "insurrection," as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority. Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020--riots that caused some $2,000,-000/XX) in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives--the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. It was, as Fox News host Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that "got out of hand."

At the rally preceding the events in question, Pres. Donald Trump had suggested that people march to the Capitol "peacefully and patriotically"--these were his exact words--in order to make their voices heard. He did not incite a riot; he stirred up a crowd. Was that, given the circumstances, imprudent?--probably. Was it an effort to overthrow the government?--hardly.

I know this is not the narrative that we all have been instructed to parrot. Indeed, to listen to the establishment media and our political masters, the Jan. 6 protest was a dire threat to the very fabric of our nation: the worst assault on "our democracy" since 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and even--according to Joe Biden--the Civil War.

Note that phrase "our democracy": House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Pres. Biden, and various talking heads have repeated it ad nauseam, but you do not need an advanced degree in hermeneutics to understand that what they mean by "our democracy" is their oligarchy. Similarly, when Pelosi talks about "the people's house," she does not mean a house that welcomes riff-raff like you and me.

I just alluded to Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed Trump supporter who was shot and killed on Jan. 6. Her fate brings me to the second critical thing to understand about the Jan. 6 insurrection hoax. Namely, that it was not a standalone event.

On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the longrunning effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trump--as well as what Hillary Clinton might call the "deplorable" populist sentiment that brought Trump to power.

In other words, to understand the Jan. 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other long-running hoax, the Russia collusion narrative. The story of that hoax begins back in 2015, when the resources of the Federal government first were mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump Administration.

From before Trump took office, the Russia collusion hoax was used as a pretext to create a parallel Administration shadowing the elected Administration. Remember the Steele dossier, the fantastical document confected by the "well-regarded" former British spy Christopher Steele? We know now that it was the only relevant predicate for ordering FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page and other American citizens.

In truth, though, the Steele dossier was just opposition dirt covertly paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. From beginning to end, it was a tissue of lies and fabrications. Everyone involved knew all along it was garbage--rumors and fantasies fed to a gullible Steele by shady Russian sources, but it nonetheless was used to deploy, illegally, the awesome coercive power of the state against a presidential candidate of whom the ruling bureaucracy and its favored candidate disapproved.

The public learned that the Democratic National Committee paid for the manufactured evidence only because of a court order. James Comey, the disgraced former director of the FBI, publicly denied knowing who paid for it, but emails from a year earlier prove that he knew all along--and what was the penalty for lying in Comey's case? He got a huge book deal and toured the country denouncing Trump to the gleeful satisfaction of his anti-Trump audiences.

What was true of Comey also was true of the entire intelligence apparat, from former CIA Director John Brennan to Rep. Adam Schiff (D .-Calif.) and other...