“There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6…. But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 event,” writes Chris Hedges in SheerPost. “Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.”
After recounting the overall scale of the Jan. 6 prosecutions—1,003 people have been arrested, 476 have pled guilty, 220 have been sentenced to incarceration, an additional 100 to home detention, and many cases of pretrial detention for months or years—Hedges quotes defense attorney Joseph D. McBride, who became a lawyer after his brother was sentenced to 15 years for a crime he did not commit.
“The post-9/11 model is being applied to American citizens,” McBride told Hedges. “That model is the 19 hijackers. Everyone who is a religious Muslim is a suspect for the next 20 years.... The same thing is happening, except it’s being applied to a new group of people, primarily white Christians, Trump supporters, for now.”
Hedges then turns to the case of Ryan Nichols, living under house arrest in Texas after nearly two years of pretrial detention, much of it in solitary confinement. He cannot use his phone or the internet, except in matters related to his case. Ryan ran a non-profit group dedicated to search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters and had no criminal record. His life has been forever altered by his period of detention, his family is struggling financially, and his case is still not over.
“The cheerleading, or at best indifference, by Democratic Party supporters and much of the left to these show trials will come back to haunt them,” Hedges warns. “We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas.”
“We are moving ever closer towards tyranny,” he concludes. (https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/05/chris-hedges-lynching-the-deplorables/ )
