After last Wednesday’s joint session of congress, held to count the electoral votes and interrupted when demonstrators entered the capitol building, Senate chaplain Barry Black, a Seventh-day Adventist, delivered the closing prayer.
He prayed:
“Lord of our lives and sovereign of our beloved nation, we deplore the desecration of the United States Capitol building, the shedding of innocent blood, the loss of life, and the quagmire of dysfunction that threaten our democracy.
These tragedies have reminded us that words matter and that the power of life and death is in the tongue. We have been warned that eternal vigilance continues to be freedom’s price.
Lord, you have helped us remember that we need to see in each other a common humanity that reflects your image.
You have strengthened our resolve to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies domestic as well as foreign.
Use us to bring healing and unity to our hurting and divided nation and world. Thank you for what you have blessed our lawmakers to accomplish in spite of threats to liberty.
Bless and keep us. Drive far from us all wrong desires, incline our hearts to do your will and guide our feet on the path of peace. And God bless America. We pray in your sovereign name, Amen.”
First, I would argue that “desecration” is far too strong a word to use about the incursion into the Capitol building. The Capitol is not a church, a sacred space, or even a grave or tomb. It is a public building in which our elected representatives pass laws and dole out pork by the billions (and, lately, by the trillions). The building is entitled to no more solemnity than the business done inside it, which lately has been pretty shabby.
For starters, Congress is not a parliament that actually debates issues. When C-Span began broadcasting in 1979, a secret was exposed: most speeches given in the well of the House and Senate chambers are giving to a completely empty room. They are read into the record so that the representative or senator can tout them to his constituents back home. Seldom does Congress engage in any real debate about anything.
Second, Congress does not actually write laws anymore. No congressman has written a law since sometime in the mid-1990s. The actual process of “lawmaking” is that a special interest lawyer drafts legislation designed to put money in the pocket of his client; he then hands it off to lobbyists—often retired representatives themselves—who sell it to Congress with a variety of sweeteners, including campaign contributions, insider stock tips (yes, Congress has exempted itself from the laws prohibiting insider trading), all-included weekend junkets to resorts, etc.
Third, Congress does not actually read the laws they pass. It is not possible to read them, because they are too long, and not enough time is given before the legislators must vote on the bills to read them, even if they were of mind to do read them, which they are not. The gigantic pork-laden bill they passed the other day was almost 5,600 pages long; the House copier broke down trying to produce a physical copy of that monstrosity. When Nancy Pelosi said of the thousand-page Obamacare bill, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it,” she was merely acknowledging the reality that no congressman reads the multi-thousand page bills they vote on before they vote.
So we have a pseudo-legislature in which our elected representatives do not write the bills, do not read the bills, and do not debate the bills. They are there to be paid, bribed, threatened, and cajoled to pass the bills. After a long career of this type of “lawmaking,” a congressman paid a salary of $170,000 per year retires with a net worth of around—if he or she is not particularly ambitious or enterprising—forty or fifty million dollars. The U.S. Capitol is not a sacred space; it is a public building that has devolved into a den of thieves. Arguably, it was high time it was “desecrated.”
But while we are on the subject of treating public buildings rudely, Barry Black somehow never managed to condemn the “desecration” of the approximately 150 public buildings that Antifa and Black Lives Matter damaged or destroyed in a long and destructive series of riots last summer. Antifa goons in Portland repeatedly attacked, graffiti’d, and attempted to burn the Mark Hatfield Federal Courthouse. After 100 days of these attacks, Trump sent in Federal officers to protect the courthouse: Nancy Pelosi called them “stormtroopers” and “secret police.” The rioters in Minneapolis looted, burned and destroyed a police precinct house there, and the rulers of Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” occupied the East Precinct headquarters for weeks and covered it with graffiti.
So it is okay for the Democratic Party’s masked and black-clad professional rioters to attack scores of public and other public buildings for months on end, but a brief incursion into the Capitol is an “insurrection” and the worst thing to happen to America since 9-11? That is exactly the media narrative.
Does the Capitol building have great historical value, more so than some precinct house or federal courthouse? Yes, of course it does, but so did the approximately 200 statues that Black Lives Matter rioters destroyed last summer; many of which were of the same people who have statues in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. I never heard Barry Black complaining about the “desecration” of those hundreds of statues of historical figures, including Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant who freed the slaves.
Last summer’s rioters were motivated by resentment at supposed police brutality; those who carried out a brief incursion in to the Capitol were motivated by the belief that the election was stolen by massive election fraud in six Democratic strongholds in swing states. I would argue that the fears of the latter group are far better founded than the concerns of the BLM rioters. There is universal condemnation of police brutality by absolutely everyone who matters in our society, without exception; there should be universal concern that our elections are conducted lawfully and with absolute honesty and integrity, but I observe that there does not seem to be much concern about election integrity in the U.S media, which is completely controlled by the Left and is the more radical wing of the Democratic Party.
Election integrity is the foundation of our whole system of self-government. Without it, our government has no legitimacy whatsoever. The lawmakers who work in the Capitol derive their right to be there from having been elected in lawful, fair, and honest elections. If they have been “elected” in a fraudulent election, they have no more right to be in that building than the people who stormed it last Wednesday afternoon. Fraudulently elections and illegitimate “elected” official desecrate the Capitol far beyond the frail power of last Wednesday’s demonstrators.
It is completely unsurprising that a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands who came to Washington to protest a rigged, stolen election thought that storming the Capitol might advance their cause. Last summer’s Black Lives Matter riots, which destroyed billions of dollars worth of property and killed around 50 people, were spectacularly successful in forwarding the rioters’ aims. Far from being punished, Black Lives Matter has raised hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.
The rioters’ social and legislative agenda has been rapidly forwarded as well. Their call to de-fund the police has resulted in police budget cuts in almost all large Democratic Party-controlled cities. Marxist Critical Race Theory, which Black Lives Matter promotes, has rapidly expanded into corporate and governmental work-places as well as public and private schools at all levels. And Congress just overrode a presidential veto to enact another BLM demand: the renaming of several military bases named after Confederate generals, including the largest and most historically significant ones: Ft. Hood in Texas and Ft. Bragg in North Carolina.
One can only conclude from this astonishing recent history that rioting works, that rioting is a highly effective and successful means of achieving one’s goals.
As Mark Steyn said Wednesday evening, “it’s always interesting to me that people are surprised when a tactic that’s proved effective for one group of people is then suddenly taken up by other people of whom they don’t approve. So I’ve listened to all this blather for six or seven hours now where people from the Vice President on down are saying ‘oh, this is not who we are.’ Have you switched on a TV since Memorial Day? This is exactly who we are”:
(More on Steyn’s contempt for America’s “Potemkin Parliament and Pseudo-legislature” here.)
Leaving aside my objection to the use of the word “desecration,” the most offensive part of Chaplain Black’s prayer was his none-too-subtle implication that President Trump incited the riots with his speech earlier in the day:
“These tragedies have reminded us that words matter and that the power of life and death is in the tongue.”
That statement feeds into the media narrative that President Trump somehow instigated or egged on the incursion into the Capitol, which is a vicious lie and a slander. The president did not call for entry or incursion into the Capitol building. He did not call for violence of any kind. He called on the protestors to be peaceful.
His speech lasted an hour and 12 minutes; eighteen minutes into the speech, Trump said, "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol Building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."
The speech was not a “red meat” type of speech. It did not stir up the crowd. To the contrary, those who were there complained that it was a somewhat low-energy re-tread of rally speeches given in the lead up to the November 3rd election combined with a recitation of the election illegalities and evidence of fraud in the six swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—on which the election turned. Hundreds of thousands had been waiting in the thirty degree weather since 7:00 a.m., and many got up and left when as the speech began to drag.
According to many witnesses, what most agitated the crowd was when, late in the speech, the people became aware that Vice-President Pence had released a statement saying that he would not disallow the electoral votes from the six contested states. Had he done so, it would have resulted in a contested election under Art. II § 1 of the constitution, which would be decided by a vote in the House of Representatives by state delegation, which Trump would have a good chance of winning, since Republicans control several more state delegations than do the Democrats.
Trump had not even requested that Pence disqualify the contested electoral votes; rather, his lawyers had requested that Pence return those electoral votes to their state legislatures—state legislatures control the selection of electoral college electors—with a request to re-examine the evidence in their state and either re-certify the Biden electors or certify Trump electors. (The state legislatures were not in session in December, when Trump’s lawyers were collating and presenting much of the evidence of Fraud and illegality.) But Pence would not do that, either.
Instead, Pence would simply follow the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which prescribes a joint session of Congress in which the vice president reads out the votes, and if one congressman joined by one senator objects to the electoral votes from a given state, the Senate and House each retire to their respective chambers for two hours of debate followed by a vote. Only if both chambers separately vote to sustain the objection would the electoral votes be disallowed. This process was certain to be a waste of time, since it had long been clear that neither the Democrat-controlled House nor the Senate was going to vote to sustain the objections.
Many in the crowd saw Pence’s statement as a betrayal. The news of the statement—and the fact that the certification of Biden’s fraudulent win was now a foregone conclusion—raced through the crowd. One witness said he “had seen slower-moving grass fires.” Since it was cold and he was losing the crowd’s attention, President Trump cut his speech short.
The vast majority of the crowd did not interpret President Trump’s speech as a call to enter the Capitol building. There were at least 500,000 Trump supporters present; some estimates placed the size of the crowd at two million. At most, a few hundred people were involved in the incursion into the Capitol, less than one tenth of one percent of the Trump supporters who made the trip to Washington D.C. to protest the theft of the election.
There have been persistent statements by many of the Trump supporters there that the worst elements of those who entered the Capitol were Antifa and Black Lives Matter types who were sprinkled into the crowd as agitators and hooligans. This has been confirmed in one instance, but that man had a camera with him and claims that he only went in to document the goings on.
When evaluating claims that the incursion, or at least its worst aspects, was a “false flag” operation led by Antifa or an Antifa-like cadre, it helps to ask cui bono, “who benefits?” Certainly not President Trump. The incursion sucked all the air out of the process of objecting to the electoral votes from the six swing states where it seems certain that massive electoral fraud took place. The process of counting the electoral votes continued long into the night and into the early-morning hours of Thurdsay, and every legislator who got up to give his allowed five-minute speech spent at least a minute of it decrying the incursion.
Since last Thursday, it has become clear that the Left intends to use the Capitol incursion as its Reichstag Fire moment. On February 27, 1933, a month after Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, a Dutch communist set fire to the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin. The Nazis used the fire as a pretext to impose sweeping and draconian curtailment of civil liberties. The day after the fire, the Reichstag Fire Decree was passed:
“It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom [habeas corpus], freedom of (opinion) expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for House searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
The lie that President Trump instigated the Capitol incursion was immediately used to deny him freedom of speech. Throughout his presidency, Trump has used Twitter as a way to communicate with his 80 million followers without having to be filtered through the “mainstream” (really Marxist) media. Twitter first suspended the President’s twitter account, then permanently banned him. When he switched to an official government POTUS twitter account, they suspended that one, too.
Over the last year, Parler has emerged as a conservative, free-speech social media alternative to Twitter; after Twitter banned him, the President announced plans to switch to Parler. The tech oligarchs immediately moved to destroy Parler. Apple announced that it would discontinue downloading the Parler iphone app if Parler did not introduce “full moderation” (full censorship) within 24 hours. Google immediately discontinue downloads of the Android app. Even if you do not own a smartphone or tablet, you could go directly to Parler’s website, but it turns out that the website was hosted by Amazon Web Services. So Jeff Bezos decided he would turn out the lights on Parler by de-platforming the website.
This was all done for no reason other than to isolate President Trump and prevent him from communicating freely with his followers, all on the pretext, which Barry Black agrees with, that Trump’s words were the cause of the Capitol incursion.
The real reason why the tech oligarchs and the Washington D.C. uniparty (the Democans and the Republicrats) want to shut Trump up is that he will not accept the theft of the election. He keeps complaining about it and that enrages them. He knows they’re guilty; they know they are guilty, and that enrages them, too.
Barry Black, being the canny politician he is, quickly decided to throw in with the oligarchs. As you might expect, the Review and Spectrum are both thrilled with Chaplain Black’s decision to side with the received Leftist media narrative. We are not.
UPDATE:
Several commenters have mentioned Chaplain Black’s interview with Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt and openly gay CNN host. The video is below. Near the end, he does impressions of Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Anderson Cooper talks to Senate Chaplain Barry Black who closed the joint session of Congress with a short prayer.