What Do We Expect The January 6 Riots At The US Capitol To Change?

By Yvonne Sam
Contributing Columnist

First we had the riot/protest/insurrection on January 6, but if it escaped attention or concern, three things happened, within a day of each other, that not only speak volumes, but also tell a great deal about why the Capitol riots won’t change a darn thing.

In Iowa, Judge Paul Miller announced that White terrorist, Michael Ray Stepanek, who deliberately plowed his car through a group of police-abuse protesters, would not spend a day in prison for his deadly act, and, in addition, will have the incident erased from his record, if he stays out of trouble for three years.

The accused had told police that he had driven his Toyota Camry through the crowd, last August, because the protesters needed “an attitude adjustment”. Judge Paul Miller also suspended a $1,025 civil fine. www.chicagotribune.com/midwest/ct-iowa-man-drives-into-blm-protest-20210108-lt6ssq37qzc2ngnqa2eclgqpca-story.html

Talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, bragged that he deactivated his Twitter account, in blatant protest of Twitter permanently suspending former President Donald Trump’s account out of the risk that he could incite further violence. www.businessinsider.com/radio-host-rush-limbaugh-deactivates-twitter-account-2021-1

Despite running for their safety from the Capitol when the rioters attacked, a core of GOP senators still continued their challenge of the Electoral College tally.

In the same week that the attack on the Capitol took place, District Attorney, Michael Graveley, in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, decided not to prosecute white Police Officer, Rusten Sheskey. On Aug. 25, 2020, Jacob Blake, 29, an unarmed Black man, was shot in the back, seven times, while his three sons were also present in the car. Blake is now paralyzed for life.

The District Attorney said he would not seek charges against Sheskey. It is not enough for prosecutors to sabotage their own cases against police officers. Some prosecutors, like Graveley, are not even asking a Grand Jury to look at evidence. They refuse to go to trial. www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/01/05/kenosha-officer-rusten-sheskey-not-charged-jacob-blake-shooting/6554345002/

The volumes of angry editorials about the riots, the frenzied handwringing about the lawlessness, and the calls for impeachment and invocation of the 25^th Amendment to have Trump dumped from office, all mask another harsh reality. In addition to the handful of arrests of the rioters, and more anguished editorials, there is little to no evidence that the Republican Party and the millions of Trump supporters have had a Saul-like on the road to Damascus epiphany. The reasons for that remain the same.

White suppression of Blacks is the foundational pillar of state power in America — embedded in the Constitution and the founding of the Republic.

Lamentable, but nonetheless true, the Capitol riots will not alter the opinion of more than half of Republicans, who claim the election was stolen from their President. They are so infuriated that they continue to spin every kind of ridiculous conspiracy theory about the alleged theft, at the same time, making it absolutely clear that they will never acknowledge the legitimacy of the Biden presidency.

Their shock troop demonstrators, the legions of hard-right conspiracy agitators and activists, still make combative threats about open and stealth protests of incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Trump’s vote numbers and the hysteria of his supporters are the life support of the GOP. Without them, the GOP is in grave danger of losing one, or more, of the nearly two dozen Senate seats that it must defend in the 2022 mid-term elections. Any Republican fall off the cliff here, would kiss good-bye, for years to come, any chance of a GOP retake of the Senate.

Much has been made that by 2050, America will no longer be an old-White-guy-run country, that there has been a steady decline of White male voters in national elections, and that Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women and young people will be the new breed of majority voters. But that is still a way off, maybe a long way off. White males still have outsized voter clout in the crucial Heartland states and the South. There is more.

Much has been made about the gaping inequity in the Capitol police’s kid glove management of Trump’s white rioters versus the bare knuckles, no nonsense repression of Black Lives Matter protestors in Washington D. C months earlier.

Former Attorney General, William Barr, ordered a militarized attack on peaceful protesters. “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) and others were viewed as threats to the government.

According to the National Guard Media, the deployment of the National Guard, 82nd Airborne and Infantry regiments against widespread protests was the largest military operation other than war, in U.S. history. www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/politics/barr-protests-white-house/index.html

This was no accident. It was not flawed police intelligence. It was not police unpreparedness. It was not the police being overwhelmed. It was passive complicity on the part of more officers, than many care to admit. Let it not be forgotten that every major police union backed President Trump.

It was endemic White privilege on naked display. White males control, and always have controlled, police, courts and everything from education, to business to wealth.

White suppression of Blacks is the foundational pillar of state power in America — embedded in the Constitution and the founding of the Republic. Simply put, and plainly stated, the smiling benevolent, look the other way Capitol cops and the white Trump rioters are cut from the same political cloth in their angered view that an unresponsive, liberal-leaning government unfairly tilts toward minorities and shafts them.

It will take more than angry, head scratching editorials, tough talk about crackdowns and haranguing Trump, and a handful of arrests, and sadly, a riot, to change that.

Yvonne Sam, a retired Head Nurse and Secondary School Teacher, is the Chair of the Rights and Freedom Committee at the Black Community Resource Centre. A regular columnist for over two decades with the Montreal Community Contact, her insightful and incursive articles on topics ranging from politics, human rights and immigration, to education and parenting have also appeared in the Huffington Post, Montreal Gazette, XPressbogg and Guyanese OnLine. She is also the recipient of the Governor General of Canada Caring Canadian Citizen Award.