‘We Just Wanted Our Voices To Be Heard.’ Capitol Protesters Speak Out

Why did hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country show up in Washington, D.C., last week to protest the presidential election? What were all those people doing there, and what did they hope to accomplish?

The corporate press, Big Tech monopolists, Democrats, and quite a few Republicans and right-of-center media outlets aren’t at all interested in those questions. They don’t care. To them, the people who rallied in support of President Trump last Wednesday and marched to the U.S. Capitol—whether or not they took part in the violence—are nothing more than traitors.

It doesn’t matter that the vast majority didn’t so much as jostle a barrier, let alone smash a window or throw a punch. Didn’t you hear? Those people tried to stage a coup. Trump incited them. They’re terrorists and insurrectionists, and all we need to know about them is where they live and who they work for.

That’s how you respond to the horrible events of Jan. 6 if you want to deepen the divisions in America and make it impossible to live together in peace. But if you want to fix what’s wrong and salvage our broken republic, you at least have to try and understand why so many Trump supporters gathered at the U.S. Capitol last week. And yes, you can do that without condoning or excusing the idiots who attacked the police.

That’s not hard to do, although the left has had trouble with it this year. When it was Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists demonstrating and rioting in the streets and attacking police, corporate journalists churned out essays and commentary that either tacitly or explicitly endorsed the violence, while insisting that we understand and sympathize with the ideology and outrage fueling it. Some argued that we must kneel, literally, and profess BLM dogma, or be branded a racist.