Amnesty for J6, not covid

Democrats consider the protesters to be worse than the Confederate Army

Emily Oster, Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, wrote in The Atlantic that we must declare a pandemic amnesty in which we forgive what she and her friends did and said about covid.

Oster wrote, "Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

"The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward."

I am not gloating. How can one gloat over the lives ruined and the people hurt by Oster and her elitist crowd’s pandemic panic? I opposed shutting down the economy. I spoke out against arresting lone surfers in California and New Hampshire. I supported HCQ. I knew masks wouldn’t stop covid. I got the shots because of my wife’s comorbidities but I told readers you do you. Pretty much, I got it right.

Most conservatives did. We were right. The government was wrong. And that is why we cannot grant amnesty because amnesty is “a general pardon for offenses, especially political offenses, against a government, often granted before any trial or conviction.”

Thus, by definition there can be no amnesty. They were not draft dodgers avoiding the Vietnam war. They were promoters of draconian, unconstitutional and ineffective measures to fight covid.

The government grants amnesty; it does not receive it. Make no mistake, Oster worked for the government. Her paycheck may have said Brown or some Goldman Sachs foundation which sponsors her chair at the college. But she did the Overlord’s work by promoting policies that were at best of no use in the battle against covid. At worst, they were unconstitutional acts dictated by a deep state hellbent on destroying and ending Donald John Trump’s presidency.

She wasn’t alone. Twitter, Google, Facebook and other online entities enforced the censorship of anyone who questioned the vaccines or championed alternatives. Corporate Media fell in line. The late night hosts obeyed Big Brother as he trampled the rights of people to dissent. Big Brother trampled religious rights. Our government defied the Geneva Conventions against forcing people to take an experimental drug.

And the know-it-alls on late-night TV promoted this with self-satisfaction.

What they called vaccines were not vaccines because they neither stopped the spread of covid nor protected anyone from covid. They may have mitigated the damage from covid, which is a good thing. But there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest a link between these shots and the sudden death of healthy people.

Even if we could, we should not grant amnesty for people who shut down churches, closed schools and ruined small businesses. Oster and the rest sent people to jail. They got people fired. They ruined the education of a generation of children. Prison is more of what I have in mind.

Mary Harrington wrote, “those who drove covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority. Doubtless the laptop class would prefer that we judge covid policy by intention, not results, lest too close an evaluation result in their fingers being pried from the baton of public righteousness.

“But the rot goes deeper still, for the very foundation of that moral authority is a shared trust in the integrity of scientific consensus. And covid has left us in no doubt that there is a great deal of gray area between science and moral groupthink. Where science shades into the latter, British care workers and American soldiers and police officers dismissed for refusing a vaccination that doesn’t stop transmission can attest that science is sometimes real more in the sense of institutionally powerful and self-righteous than in the sense of true.”

It was their smugness that really annoyed me because I knew they were ignorant and making guesses, something Oster finally admits. Now they shrug their shoulders and say, well, everyone make mistakes. There is no apology for killing grannies in nursing homes, no apology for denying them proper funerals, no apology for firing people who refused vaccines and no apology for a dozen lesser evils.

The people who deserve covid amnesty are the truck drivers who protested in Canada. The elitists piled upon them and made an example of them to silence anyone who dares question authority. The Atlantic demanded their peaceful (if noisy) protests be stopped by the police state before the protests spilled over to America.

It said on February 11, 2022, “This drama is unfolding on Ottawa streets, framed on television screens by the skyline of the Canadian federal Parliament. Canadians will not blame the chief of the Ottawa police force if the blockades continue. They will not blame the Ontario provincial police, or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the provincial premiers. It’s the authority of the national government that is being challenged—it is the national economy that is being disrupted—and it’s the head of the national government to whom Canadians will look for a resolution. If Trudeau does not or cannot deliver that resolution, he will pay the price.”

In that same article, The Atlantic had no problem with the destructive George Floyd riots going international because it was not a protest; it was a flexing of muscle. The Atlantic got its wish for a crackdown on covid protesters.

Newsweek reported a week later, “Police officers on horseback allegedly plowed through a crowd of Canadian protesters known as the Freedom Convoy as they continued to protest the government's COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates in Ottawa.

“A video posted to Twitter appeared to show Ottawa Police officers making their way through a crowd and trampling over two people with their horses. As the horses step on the individuals, the crowd quickly surrounds them to help.”

Now The Atlantic wants these acts of tyranny — which it demanded — to be forgiven and forgotten. As I said, governments and their agents do not get amnesty. They are supposed to grant amnesty to dissidents.

The 900 people linked to protests inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, deserve the amnesty Oster and company would bestow upon themselves. The J6 dissidents suffered a cruelty worthy of King George III. They and 200,000 other people had attended President Trump’s rally at the National Mall. The FBI and Capitol Police lured a few hundred into the Capitol and opened the heavy doors to them hoping for chaos.

It worked. Instead of an actual peaceful protest at the mall, the DC-based media hysterically reported about a riot that they later labeled an insurrection. This was from a media that had six months earlier called Democrat riots that caused billions of dollars in damages “mostly peaceful protests.”

The excuse for those riots was the death of a black junkie in the custody of white police officers. The media went on and on about police and racism. When a black Capitol police officer shot and killed an unarmed white woman, Ashli Babbitt, in the Capitol on January 6, the media praised him as a brave hero.

In previous protests inside the Capitol, the Capitol Police acted as if they were mall security. When 300 Democrats paraded in the Senate Building to protest Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, the police asked celebrity protesters if they wanted to be arrested. Amy Schumer said yes. She was booked and released and the charges dropped.

The J6 protesters were sent to jail and treated like convicts. Some were placed in solitary confinement. The FBI used facial recognition to track down others.

But this regime and its flunkies in the media will never grant the amnesty that these protesters deserve. Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard and Elizabeth B. Wydra of something called the Constitutional Accountability Center wrote a piece that the Boston Globe published on March 11, 2022, “Confederate Amnesty Act must not insulate the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.”

That is correct. A Republican Congress passed and a Republican president signed an act in 1872 granting amnesty to all but a few Confederates. Grant, the very man who fought and subdued the Confederate insurrection, granted amnesty to roughly a million Democrats — and all Confederate were Democrats who denied Lincoln’s election — who waged war against the United States and killed 300,000 American soldiers.

Democrats say Trump supporters who killed no one (and in fact were killed) do not deserve amnesty. The duo in fact threw shade on the act that granted Confederates blanket amnesty.

Tribe and Wydra wrote, “The 1872 law was primarily a replacement for another in a long line of extraordinarily long bills listing individual Confederates. It was not the product of any considered judgment about the wisdom of letting potential future insurrectionists hold office but simply a practical solution to an administrative problem. Indeed, the campaign materials of Republicans and Democrats from that year’s presidential election indicate that both parties understood the 1872 Amnesty Act to be applicable only to former Confederates. Republicans celebrated the fact that they had passed a bill ‘extending amnesty to those lately in rebellion.’ And while Democrats wanted the 1872 law to go further, even their imagination did not extend beyond ‘disabilities imposed on account of the Rebellion.’”

150 years after Republicans gracefully forgave those Democrats who took up arms against the United States, Democrats show no mercy toward those who paraded in the Capitol to protest an election that they believe was not on the up-and-up.

On top of that insanity, Democrats are demanding amnesty for their draconian, unconstitutional and ineffective measures against covid.

But they cannot get amnesty because they were not opposing bad government policy; they were enforcing it. They turned America into a police state in the name of stopping the spread of a virus with cloth masks. Even witch doctors know better. And we all know they did it to discredit and unelect President Trump, which allowed them to install a meat puppet in the Oval Office.

There is no amnesty for the petty tyrants and their useful idiots in the media and the academia. The best we can offer Professor Oster and her fellow travelers is a pardon but only after a year in solitary confinement. If such a punishment is good enough for J6 protesters, it is good enough for the Branch Covidians.