By now everyone acknowledges that the federal government lies to Americans as a matter of course. It’s no longer just the so-called “conspiracy theorists” who think that. Anyone who’s been paying attention over the last couple of decades has come to that conclusion. After COVID, after the recession that wasn’t really a recession because they changed the definition of a recession, after the wars in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Ukraine and so on — there’s no reasonable person left in this country who trusts the federal government on faith, and rightfully so.
What this means is that, if you’re a Washington bureaucrat, toiling away in, say, Joe Biden’s Justice Department, you have to adapt. You can’t just feed people bald-faced propaganda, because no one will buy it. You have to work to sell the deception. So naturally, that’s exactly what the DOJ has been doing. They’re coming up with inventive new ways to lie that are difficult to detect, at least on the surface.
Here’s one example that went totally unreported by the mainstream press. Kevin Benjamin Weier is a California man in his mid-30’s. During the canonization of Saint George Floyd three years ago, Weier took it upon himself to light a federal courthouse in Portland on fire. There’s no dispute about that. Weier pleaded guilty to, “repositioning a piece of lit wood” against the walls of the courthouse. And Weier wasn’t the only one who tried that tactic. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s some of the footage from the siege of the federal courthouse in Portland:
Kevin Benjamin Weier was one of the handful of militants who was arrested after this attack on a federal courthouse. After Weier pleaded guilty, Joe Biden’s DOJ made a point to issue a press release about the many years in jail that this domestic terrorist was facing. Specifically, the DOJ’s press release stated that Weier’s intentional destruction of federal courthouses was, “punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”
Admittedly, ten years in prison is a little light for trying to torch a federal courthouse with people inside of it. But at least it’s something. It’s a long sentence — long enough, you might think, to deter other Californians from trekking to Portland for the purpose of burning down courthouses.
What’s interesting is that Joe Biden’ DOJ never released a follow-up press release, after Weier was actually sentenced. They sent the message that this arsonist would serve some hard time. But they failed to inform the public about Weier’s actual sentence. Why is that? It’s not hard to answer that question. As it happens, Weier ultimately received a sentence that was nowhere near the 10-year term the Biden DOJ suggested he might serve. Instead, on the recommendation of federal prosecutors, Weier received a sentence of two years’ probation. For trying to set fire to a federal courthouse. And indeed, Kevin Weier never served a day in prison. He did have to pay a $200 fine, though. So there’s that.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
If you’re a former GOP congressional candidate by the name of Enrique Tarrio, this is all very confusing. Tarrio was just sentenced to 22 years in prison for his “involvement” on January 6th. Prosecutors had sought a 33-year sentence for Tarrio, but the judge brought them down a bit. What was Enrique Tarrio’s crime? He didn’t try to set fire to the Capitol building on January 6th. Unlike Kevin Weier, he didn’t place a flaming piece of wood up against a federal building. We know that because, on January 6th, Enrique Tarrio was nowhere near any federal buildings. He had been arrested for vandalizing a holy BLM banner a few days earlier, and was ordered by a judge to stay far away from Washington D.C.
Nonetheless, yesterday, Tarrio received the single longest sentence of any January 6th defendant. Watch:
It’s a surreal news report, in a lot of ways. For one thing, neither the reporter, nor the two anchors, seem remotely concerned by the fact that Enrique Tarrio was just sentenced to 22 years in prison for “orchestrating” a riot that he didn’t even attend. There’s no discussion whatsoever about what Tarrio might have done, or how exactly he facilitated what happened on January 6th. No one cares.
So let’s talk about it. According to the government, Tarrio told his followers on January 6th to, “Do what must be done.” He also told members of the Proud Boys to organize a big crowd in Washington to storm government buildings. The scheme was known as “1776 Returns.”
Sounds pretty ominous. Storming government buildings? Where have we seen that before? If you’re not a goldfish, and your memory extends longer than a few minutes, you know the answer to that question. Here’s what the Supreme Court and the Capitol complex looked like during the Kavanaugh hearings:
So these people bang on the doors of the Supreme Court, they storm a Senate office building. And their punishment is — absolutely nothing. They get zip-tied, at most, and let go immediately. Their explicit purpose was to derail a government proceeding. In fact, some of these activists barged into the Senate chambers. None of them suffered any real consequences.
In fact, Left-wing activists who have committed acts of violence — even homicides — have received far more lenient sentences than Enrique Tarrio just did. Consider the case of the BLM arsonist back in 2020 who lit a pawn shop on fire, in the name of civil rights. Three days after Saint George Floyd overdosed, Montez T. Lee decided to commit an act of arson that killed Oscar Lee Stewart. Stewart’s body wasn’t found in the rubble for nearly two months. What was Montez Lee’s sentence? He got less than ten years in prison. That’s less than half the sentence that Enrique Tarrio will face, for sending some naughty text messages.
I’m focusing on Enrique Tarrio here because his sentence is the most egregious, but there are many more examples of this obviously unequal justice we’re seeing. Consider the case of Joseph Biggs, a man with no criminal record whatsoever. Biggs is an Army veteran who didn’t hurt anyone on January 6th. But he did walk around the Capitol building and he did help pull down a fence on the periphery of the building. And for that, judge Tim Kelly — the same judge who sentenced Tarrio — decided that Joseph Biggs needs to spend 17 years in prison.
Where have we seen political demonstrators ripping apart fences in front of government buildings before? Oh, that’s right. We saw it during the BLM riots that torched St. John’s Church across from the White House, and sent Donald Trump to the bunker. No one involved in tearing down that fencing and setting the church on fire was ever frogmarched in front of the cameras, or sentenced to 22 years in prison. In fact, it doesn’t appear that anyone involved in that incident, or the burning of St. John’s church, spent a day in federal prison.
We see relatively light or non-existent sentences like this all the time. A serial child rapist in Ohio just got ten years in prison. A drunk driver in Phoenix — at four times the legal B.A.C. — just got 12 years in prison for driving 135 miles per hour and killing someone. A terrorist train engineer in Los Angeles who tried to run his locomotive into a U.S. Navy hospital ship during COVID received just three years in prison. A man who burned down a Minneapolis police station, live on national television, during the George Floyd riots received just four years in prison. Another man who lit a molotov cocktail and threw it at the police station got just three years in prison. You get the idea.
On the other hand, anyone remotely involved in January 6th — including nonviolent offenders — is being hunted down right now. We’re talking about American citizens, well over two years after January 6th, who are being ambushed by heavily armed FBI agents playing hero. This is how the FBI just approached one small business owner in Arkansas, named Nathan Hughes:
🚨 Last week, a friend of ours was raided by the feds over J6, his name is Nathan Hughes and he’s from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Nate was raided by the FBI and arrested at gun point. His girlfriend (who just had a miscarriage) was held at gun point and put in handcuffs. The FBI… pic.twitter.com/LOpMQ28eUJ
— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) September 5, 2023
What was Nathan Hughes’ crime? According to the DOJ, he wore an Infowars shirt while “pushing” against the police line in the Capitol. To be clear, if Nathan Hughes actually did “push” against the police line on January 6th, that’s a crime. It would be comparable to the crime BLM rioters committed in the footage we just showed you.
But Nathan Hughes’ case is not being handled remotely the same way as those BLM rioters. Nathan Hughes did not get off without any consequences whatsoever. Instead, he’s now facing more than five years in prison on “felony civil disorder” charges. The feds showed up to arrest him with body armor and rifles, in full view of customers, as if he was some kind of terrorist. In fact, the feds also raided Hughes’ home, and opened his safe. The company “Liberty Safe,” for some incomprehensible reason, complied with the feds’ demands and used a backdoor mechanism to open it.
There is no conceivable argument that can possibly justify all of this, for the simple reason that nothing remotely like this has ever happened to Left-wing terrorists like Antifa, or BLM. None of those thugs have ever received anything like this treatment, even when they murder people. If we lived in a country in which every “lawbreaker,” however that’s defined, faced extremely harsh punishment, then maybe the treatment of the J6’ers would be tolerable, because it would be consistent. That’s how the rule of law is supposed to work. It’s supposed to guarantee equal punishment for equal crimes. But we don’t live in that kind of country. Most criminals are treated with kid gloves, even the most violent and dangerous kinds. It’s only with Trump supporters, and Trump himself, and other political dissidents that suddenly we become a land of strict enforcement and merciless punishment.
This is a point that’s been made again and again over the past couple of years, as Trump supporters are sent to prison for memes, as U.S. service members are dismissed for refusing to take the COVID shot, and so on. But the prosecution of people like Enrique Tarrio and Nathan Hughes marks an escalation in the Biden administration’s tactics.
So does the Biden DOJ’s handling of the raid on Craig Robertson a month ago. Robertson was the elderly invalid Trump supporter in Utah who shared threatening memes about Joe Biden on social media for months. Weeks later, instead of picking up Robertson while he was on his motorized scooter at Walgreens, the FBI decided to surprise Robertson with a 6 AM raid at his home. Then they shot him after they say he raised a pistol. We reached out to the FBI to obtain the body camera footage from the raid. Yesterday, the FBI refused to provide it, citing ongoing “enforcement proceedings.” That justification makes no sense, because they’ve already killed the 70-something-year-old man who was posting the memes they were so concerned about. But the FBI said it anyway, because they’re confident no one in the mainstream media will look into it any further.
On that point, if we’re being honest, the FBI is probably right. We may have actually reached the point where the federal government can imprison and even kill its political enemies without any oversight, even as it gives a pass to terrorists on their side of the political spectrum. If that’s the case, then we don’t have a society that’s governed by the rule of law anymore. We have a society that, like every dictatorship, enforces the will of the ruling class with raw power. You’d hate to think that might be what we’re dealing with. But unless a real opposition forms — unless conservatives start electing leaders who are ready and equipped to deal with this problem, for starters — then it will be our future. There’s no question about that.