This article was published in the Weekend Australian newspaper of 1 January 2022.

What poses the greater threat to American democracy—the riot at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, or the political and institutional response to it?

This is a question well worth asking as the first anniversary of this episode approaches, especially given that we now have much more information on which to base an assessment than was available during the saturation media coverage in the immediate aftermath.

The American left-wing columnist Glenn Greenwald, who co-founded the online magazine The Intercept, is in no doubt. In several lengthy articles, he compares the response to the riot with what followed the 9/11 attacks two decades earlier, of which he was—and is—extremely critical.

A frequent claim made by political figures and in the media is that the Capitol riot is, if anything, more serious, than the 9/11 attack. As such, it requires special legislation and special measures to refocus the "war on terror" on those depicted as domestic terrorists.

The Democrats have proposed a rewriting of the law pertaining to domestic terrorism that alters the focus almost entirely to the "white supremacist" threat. According to former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, the legislation actually has the bizarre effect of excluding jihadist terrorists from its ambit.

Who are these potential domestic terrorists, who need to be subjected to close surveillance, curtailment of their civil liberties, exclusion from any role in the military, or even be banned from airline travel?

It is not just the obvious candidates, like those involved in right-wing militias. According to the impeccably left-liberal American historian and journalist Anne Applebaum, the net should include anyone who continues to harbour or express doubts about the fairness of the presidential election.

In an article in The Atlantic magazine, Applebaum ruminates about the appropriate term for those who remain sceptical about the election, according to polling a majority of Republican voters. Here is her preferred term and who it should be applied to:

For want of a better term, I’m calling all of them seditionists—not just the people who took part in the riot, but the far larger number of Americans who are united by their belief that Donald Trump won the election, that Joe Biden lost, and that a long list of people and institutions are lying about it.

Seditionist? Just for holding an opinion? Reading this you have to wonder if Trump Derangement Syndrome really is a thing, if one of the most respected and scholarly liberal writers can come up with this kind of stuff.

There seems to be a complete loss of perspective. Applebaum's most recent book Twilight of Democracy surveys what she sees as the main threats to the liberal democratic order.

And who would that be? The "deplorables" of course, and their equivalents in other countries, the working class people who in bygone times were a core part of the Democratic coalition—and those who speak for them. Applebaum devotes an entire chapter to the conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

Yet the book makes no reference whatsoever to the encroaching threat posed by the growing power and influence operations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime—undoubtedly the greatest threat to the liberal democratic order since WWII.

So, how to characterize the events of 6 January 2021?

Trump's decision to call the mass rally for that day was reckless and futile, and his temporizing before calling on the rioters to withdraw was culpable.

Indeed, his entire conduct after the election was idiotic. Once the Supreme Court decided on 11 December 2020 not to hear the detailed challenge filed by the Texas attorney-general, joined by other states on the ground that the state "lacked standing", the realistic options for overturning the election result were over.

All that ploughing on after that achieved was the loss of two Senate positions in the Georgia runoffs, giving the Democrats a majority with the casting vote of vice-president Kamala Harris.

As to the riotous conduct—the forcible entry into the Capitol building—it is hard to think of a single figure of any political prominence who has defended it. These were criminal acts that led to deaths and serious injuries that warrant the appropriate and proportionate use of the criminal law. The disruption, albeit only for several hours, of the proceedings of the Congress as it formalized the election outcome was a very serious matter.

Almost everybody can agree on that much. But that is not nearly enough for what the Democrats need to justify their war on "domestic terror". This requires the inflation of what occurred to an insurrection, indeed an "armed insurrection", a veritable coup d'état, instigated by Trump and his supporters, a greater threat to American democracy than the 9/11 attack, some claiming the greatest threat since the Civil War.

What would not be justified to stop an army of "seditionists" (in Applebaum's terms) trying to violently overthrow the government? In the weeks that followed there was a succession of scary reports of likely further incursions, including on Inauguration Day. To ward off this possibility 26,000 troops were deployed around the Capitol—more than at the height of the Civil War when the Confederate capital was a mere 200 kilometres away.

So, let's try and get a sense of proportion here, starting with the "armed insurrection" claim that CNN and other parts of the media continue to affirm.

On CNN's Facts First web page, they point out that of the over 700 people charged over the riot, three (3) were charged with bringing a firearm into the Capitol precinct. Others brought items like flagpoles, a hockey stick, and pepper spray. In earlier Congressional testimony, the FBI stated that no firearms were confiscated on the day.

Contrary to some early reports, the only use of firearms that day, and the sole death due to anyone's deliberate action, was the shot that killed Trump supporter and military veteran Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt, all of 120 lbs and 5'2" tall, and unarmed, was shot in the throat without warning and at close range by a Capitol policeman as she crawled through the shattered door of the Senate chamber.

The treatment of this shooting by officialdom and the media was remarkable. Was serious consideration given to whether the shooting was remotely warranted, especially given that two heavily armed police were clearly visible directly behind Babbitt? Could the shooter really have felt he was in imminent danger? After an inordinate delay, and next to no media pressure, the Department of Justice issued a perfunctory statement that the shooting was justified—no Grand Jury investigation, no nothing.

As far as most of the media were concerned, this was a non-event. Indeed, some articles implied that she deserved it. Babbitt should not have been there, doing what she was doing, but did she deserve a bullet to the throat? Clearly deplorable lives do not matter much. Imagine the reaction to a similar scenario where a white cop shot a black person, rather than the reverse.

The sheer dishonesty of mainstream media coverage in the days and weeks that followed the riot was extraordinary. It went beyond distortion to outright lying, exemplified by reporting on the death of Officer Brian Sicknick of the Capitol Police.

On the day of his death, media reports claimed he had been bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by Trump supporters. This was known to be false almost immediately as his family reported Sicknick spoke to them on the night of the riot, stating he felt OK.

Yet the media persisted with the battered-with-fire-extinguisher account for weeks thereafter, belatedly switching to another lie that his death was caused by "bear spray" when it was revealed that he had suffered no physical trauma whatever. The lying only stopped with the very late release of the autopsy report, which indicated Sicknick died of a stroke two days after the riot.

So if this was an attempt at a violent insurrection or coup, it would have to be the most incompetent such attempt in the history of the world. What do those who assert this imagine was the plan? Maybe they thought the QAnon shaman, the clown with the bearskin cape and wooden spear, could hold out with his companions and their three handguns against the might of the US military, like the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae.

There was, undeniably, violence committed by a small minority of protesters. However if you look through the list of charges (over 700 in all) the great majority are for things like "disorderly conduct", "parading, demonstrating or picketing", or "remaining in a restricted building".

The sentences being handed out for these offences so far have been at the top-end of the possible range, in some cases exceeding even the penalties proposed by the prosecutors.

Furthermore a large number of those charged have been held without bail in the most appalling conditions, including solitary confinement, prompting a DC judge to demand an investigation:

“I find that the civil rights of the defendant have been abused. I don’t know if it’s because he’s a January 6th defendant or not, but I find this matter should be referred to the attorney general of the United States for a civil rights investigation into whether the D.C. Department of Corrections is violating the civil rights of January 6th defendants . . . in this and maybe other cases.”

Alone among her colleagues, even Senator Elizabeth Warren was moved to comment:

“Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging".

The "armed insurrection" claim is just too ridiculous for words—especially given that, according to a reporter for the liberal New Yorker magazine who embedded himself amongst the "insurgents", they had been instructed by the rally organizers to not bring guns.

At this stage, the main goal of the Democrats is to use the House committee inquiry into the riot currently underway to implicate Trump in the breaching of the Capitol, despite his words urging the crowd to make their voices heard "patriotically and peacefully".

And what did the cunning Trump have in mind when he authorized the deployment of the National Guard several days before the riot?

After Ohio representative Jim Jordan signalled his intention to ask why these troops were not requested or deployed on the day, along with other potentially difficult questions, Nancy Pelosi used her authority as Speaker to ban Jordan and his colleague Jim Banks from serving on the January 6 committee.

This was an unprecedented step, nullifying the longstanding convention that party leaders select their representatives on committees. In protest, the Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy withdrew all his party's nominees. The only GOP representatives who agreed to serve were Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both vehemently hostile to Trump.

The result, not surprisingly, is that the committee hearings have amounted to little more than a propaganda exercise, a media circus, typified by the solemn reading out by Liz Cheney of a series of text messages sent at the height of the chaos between various pro-Trump figures and the president's chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The texts were released by Meadows in compliance with a congressional subpoena and were treated by parts of the media as a smoking gun implicating Trump. As I noted above, Trump's conduct on and in the leadup to the riot was futile, reckless and culpable. However, ironically, the texts actually exculpate him from the claim he conspired in and intended the breaching of the Capitol.

For example, a text from his eldest son Donald Trump Jr reads as follows:

"We need an Oval address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far and gotten out of hand. He's got to condemn this s**t ASAP."

It would be strange, to say the least, if this was all planned by Trump, yet Donald Jr, reportedly one of his closest confidants, was kept out of the loop.

It is striking, and lamentable, that among the left-wing media the aforementioned Glen Greenwald is almost unique in his preparedness to take up the issues described above. What has become of the civil libertarians and human rights activists, who would normally be the first to challenge and expose the kind of abuses described above.

This has not been without consequence for Greenwald. He was effectively forced out of the popular online journal, The Intercept, which he co-founded. The reason? He insisted on reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story which blew up in October 2020, shortly before the election.

The standard media narrative about this, at least at the time when it might have mattered, was that this was a Russian disinformation campaign designed to discredit Biden. If so, why did neither Joe nor Hunter Biden repudiate it at the time? How to account for the fact that the CEO of Hunter's business confirmed the veracity of the incriminating emails?

Instead, they both went to ground, refusing to respond to questions about it—and the media, at least those members who were allowed anywhere near Biden, played along dutifully, failing to even ask Joe Biden any questions about the laptop (except for one brave soul who shouted a question, and was excoriated by his colleagues for doing so).

The laptop story, which we now know to be based on accurate information, indeed effectively confirmed by Hunter Biden in a later interview, appeared first in the New York Post. The Australian journalist Miranda Devine was closely involved, recently releasing a book on the subject. If corroborated, it would be a genuine bombshell, indicating that candidate Biden could be seriously compromised with the US, and the West's, most significant geopolitical adversary—the Chinese Communist Party regime.

Yet it was comprehensively suppressed, not only by other traditional media, but by the social media censors who prevented its transmission and sharing. The effective blackout meant that, according to one poll, 36 percent of Biden voters were not even aware of the laptop story.

This bespeaks a mainstream media more concerned with running protection for the Bidens and undermining Trump than honest reporting, a departure from the traditional principle of journalistic objectivity that even the venerable New York Times makes no bones about, indeed defends.

This was demonstrated earlier during the Muller inquiry into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. What transpired during this episode is profoundly disturbing, and not just because of media behaviour, but for the role played by key state instrumentalities like the FBI, CIA and the Department of Justice.

For over two years, the media relentlessly amplified any story supporting the Russian collusion narrative, which was finally put to rest when the Muller report stated they were unable to find evidence of any such collusion.

This included the salacious allegations in the "Steele Dossier", prepared by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, a piece of opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign. Yet it was the key piece of evidence provided to the court empowered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to issue warrants to conduct surveillance on the Trump campaign.

More recently, as a result of indictments issued by special counsel John Durham, we now know that the key information source for Steele had been interviewed by the FBI in January 2017, in the course of which he acknowledged that the Steele allegations were basically just rumours and bar talk. Yet the FBI continued to rely on this spurious information when filing two further FISA warrants that certified that the information in the Steele dossier was verified and corroborated.

The Capitol riot was an abomination, perpetrated by several hundred idiots. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an armed insurrection or a coup warranting a new "war on terror" directed at a section of the domestic population subject to vilification because of the opinions they hold.