During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin declared falsely that the January 6 breach of the Capitol Building was driven by white supremacy, not a protest against the fraudulent results of the 2020 presidential election.
“We must not forget the horrors of January 6th or allow revisionists to rewrite what happened that day,” he said, ironically attempting to rewrite the history of that day himself. “The hate on display that terrible day is not a new phenomenon in our country. America’s first domestic terror organization the Ku Klux Klan was born in the aftermath of the Civil War to terrorize formerly enslaved African Americans.
“The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th did not wear white robes and hoods,” he continued. “They might as well have. They are the latest incarnation of violent white supremacist movements that has terrorized fellow Americans on the basis of their race, religion, and national origin for more than 150 years.”
Fact check: there is no evidence whatsoever that white supremacy had anything to do with the Capitol Hill chaos that day.
He then outrageously called comparing left-wing violence to the January 6 violence a “false equivalency”: “I join my Republican colleagues unequivocally in condemning left-wing violence, but let’s stop pretending that the threat of Antifa is equivalent to the white supremacist threat. Vandalizing a federal courthouse in Portland is a crime. It should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But it is not equivalent to a violent attempt to overturn the results of elections, nor is it equivalent to mass shootings targeting minority communities.”
Durbin is correct in a way: there absolutely is no comparison. Random instances of white supremacist violence over the last several years do not even remotely compare to the wave of left-wing rioting, looting, burning, and murders of police officers that swept the country in 2020, led by the domestic terror groups Antifa and Black Lives Matter and given cover by the leftist media and Democrat leaders like Durbin who lent their support to such organizations and their “mostly peaceful” nationwide destruction.