“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” the proudly insufferable British-born Charles C.W. Cooke told Megyn Kelly on her Jan. 21 podcast.
A senior writer for National Review, Cooke was drawing a comparison between Joe Biden’s 8,000 pardons, many of them preemptive, and President Trump’s pardon of 1,600 or so J6ers.
From Cooke’s perspective, the January 6 protesters “behaved in a way completely unbecoming of a republic, with the encouragement of the president.”
National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry was less critical but still objected to the “sweeping pardons” and thought they should have been applied on a case-by-case basis.
Although her heart was in the right place, Kelly did not have command enough of the facts to quiet her guests. Said Kelly, for instance, “The only person who died that day was Ashli Babbitt.”
In fact, four protesters died that day, three as a result of police action. Although the attack was captured on video, neither Kelly nor her guests knew that policewoman Lila Morris repeatedly struck the head of the dying Rosanne Boyland with a tree branch.
They were unaware, too, that Kevin Greeson suffered a fatal heart attack when an illegally discharged flash-bang exploded near his face.
When Kelly spoke of the false reporting around the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, Cooke and Lowry had nothing to add.
This sleight-of-hand began when “two law enforcement officials” told the New York Times that “pro-Trump rioters” struck Sicknick with a fire extinguisher.
The Times added this chillingly fraudulent detail: “With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
House Democrats sold the hoax by staging a memorial for Sicknick in the Capitol Rotunda and burying him with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
For more than a hundred days, until forced out by a Judicial Watch lawsuit, authorities suppressed the medical examiner’s report that Sicknick died of natural causes on Jan. 7 unrelated to the events of the day before.
The “murder” of Brian Sicknick was the most ghoulish hoax in American political history, and the two NR guys showed no sign of even knowing about it.
The J6 jurors fell for the hoax. Pulled from an already poisoned pool – Trump got 5% of the D.C. vote – they heard at trial how the J6ers were responsible not only for Sicknick’s death, but also for the deaths of four other police officers who subsequently committed suicide.
In truth, the most serious injury sustained by a police officer on January 6 was the loss of a fingertip, most likely sustained by the mishandling of the munitions promiscuously unleashed on a still peaceful crowd.
The courts uniformly denied J6ers a change of venue. Afforded full media protection – and the silence of entities like the National Review – prosecutors boldly suppressed evidence and manipulated facts to make their cases.
The ACLU didn’t care a whit about this violation of citizen rights. On the first anniversary of January 6, for instance, all 51 ACLU chapters signed on to the kind of letter the ACLU chapter of ancient Rome might have written about the Vandals or the Visigoths.
“On January 6 of last year, the residents of D.C. were traumatized as an insurrectionist mob roamed our streets, harassed our neighbors, and violently broke into the Capitol Building, killing at least five people – all in an attempt to overthrow the counting of American citizens’ votes.”
The only thing the ACLU got right in this letter was the date.
D.C. juries acquitted exactly zero J6 defendants. Knowing their fate should they go to trial, most defendants reluctantly accepted plea deals, only to hear prosecutors and the media boast of how the accused admitted their guilt.
“A huge number of people on the left … don’t know much about the country they live in,” said Cooke accurately enough, adding, “they are constantly fed this narrow set of news.” Lowry, too, spoke of this “media bubble.”
Neither seemed aware that they operate in an only slightly more expansive bubble of their own. In fact, the National Review staff always has.
Their strategic caution became obvious in 1960 when NR condemned the obstreperous John Birch Society. Rationalized an editor in an internal memo, “We can’t afford to jeopardize the grudging status we’ve earned in the liberal community.”
Not to deny the dazzling National Review founder William Buckley his due, but Buckley established a modus operandi that has endured to this day.
During his tenure, National Review editor Rich Lowry has never stopped worrying about this imaginary “status.” As Lowry once noted, “Mr. Buckley’s first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks.”
From the NR perspective, the hundreds of thousands of patriots who descended on Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, were “kooks.”
Only kooks would be so naive as to say the obvious out loud, namely that the election was stolen. Were NR staffers to support these people and their unbecoming conduct, they would jeopardize the grudging status they labored to earn in the liberal community.
Better to remain ignorant and to prove it by insisting “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Jack Cashill’s newest book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is available in all formats.
* * *
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
