Photo via @therecount/Twitter, TapTheForwardAssist/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
May 18, 2021, 1:55 pm
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene predictably spoke in opposition to a commission that would study the events at the Capitol on January 6 and what led up to a situation that left five dead and a good deal of poop outside of the building’s bathrooms. In addition to her “whataboutism” over the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd, she claimed that the Capitol rioters who are currently in federal custody awaiting trial for their crimes are facing abuse in jail, but couldn’t cite anything more than the typical abuse faced by incarcerated people.
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“While it’s catch-and-release for domestic terrorists in antifa and BLM, the people who breached the Capitol on January 6 are being abused,” she said. “Some even being held for 23-hours-a-day in solitary confinement.”
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In reality, there were very few arrests made on the day of the Trump-ordered attempted coup, with the vast majority of rioters allowed to walk out, some openly carrying stolen items. In contrast, many thousands of protesters were arrested at the scene at George Floyd and general Black Lives Matter protests across 2020. Though most of them were released because there were no charges that could possibly stick, plenty have remained in jail or been sentenced to prison terms where they also face the threat of solitary confinement, in which 23-hour per day detention is standard.
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Over 10,000 of these protesters were arrested by June 8, according to The Guardian, which was merely two weeks after Floyd’s death, with police kettling and mass-arresting people in cities across the U.S.
On the subject of inmate abuse and solitary confinement, it has been the political left in the U.S. who has been fighting against these problems as Republicans claim that not treating incarcerated people like absolute garbage is being “soft on crime.” Luckily for the insurrectionists, the vast majority of them have not been arrested and there have been many indications that of those who have seen the inside of a jail cell, most will be let off with minor sentences.
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Little of this or other forms of reality seem to matter to Greene, however, who was more interested in parroting Trump talking points for the camera.
“When will the witch hunt of Donald J. Trump and all of those who support him come to an end?” she asked.
Greene further called for a study into what she called “the violent BLM and antifa mobs,” ignoring the fact that there have already been studies done around the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality. In fact, in September 2020, conservatives used one such study for alarmist tweets claiming that hundreds of these protests were “violent” in spite of 93 percent of them containing no violence whatsoever.
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Thankfully, we don’t need a study to confirm that 100 percent of Trump-supported assaults on the Capitol resulted in many injuries and five dead, but it might be nice to look into how such a thing could be prevented in the future.
*First Published: May 18, 2021, 1:55 pm
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