The following was posted directly to the legacy posting site on three days ago (Sunday, March 12). As always, it needs to be posted here for longer term documentation:
Despite the concerted efforts to place the stain on others two days earlier, it will be Friday, January 8, 2021 that history should rightfully record as the moment “The End” went hot. – A forgotten Ricochet dissident (January 8, 2021)
While I have reused that line more recently (A Self-Check on Intellectual Honesty and Consistency: Where Were You When Tyranny Flexed Its Muscle?), it actually comes from the first of two posts written during that ominous weekend following the events simply known today as J6. (N0, that evidently doesn’t include the long forgotten “pipe bombs” and the uncatchable “bomber.”) It was on that evening mentioned above that the unmistakable chill descended on the expression of unpopular truths here in the land of the free. I bring this up now to note the reference I made in the comments of that quoted post the following Monday evening:
This is interesting,..I read this RedState post this morning, now the title reads:
and the text has been replaced with:
Overnight, this article about January 6th was published. Many details, opinions, and analysis contained in the piece were either incorrect or inappropriate. It has been retracted and we regret its publication.
Based on his participation in the comments, I don’t thing the author of the piece agrees with the retraction.
There was an additional update shortly thereafter:
UPDATE 2:
RedState Retracts and Apologizes for Op-Ed Saying ‘There Was No Riot’
The piece was widely lambasted on Twitter throughout the day Monday. CNN’s Jake Tapper posted a screenshot of the headline and quoted George Orwell’s “1984” along with it: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” …
The author of the RedState piece, Mike Ford, declined to comment on the grounds it’s not his policy to “badmouth [his] own team because of an internal disagreement.” On Twitter, he wrote he was “laughing [himself] silly” as users wrote to him about the redaction. …
Just when I was starting to come back around on RedState. Next thing you know, they’ll bring back Erickson.
Well, it seems it is now time to hear at bit more of The Rest of the Story behind Mike Ford’s ordeal with a little help form the new blood at Powerline, Elizabeth Stauffer:
Days after Jan. 6, 2021, Army Col. (Ret) Mike Ford, a highly decorated infantry officer and a former colleague of mine, was sitting in church with his wife. …
Mike and his wife stood up and left the church. He rattled off an op-ed about the “egregious gaslighting of the American public” surrounding the events that had occurred days before and published it on the conservative blog he wrote for at the time.
Hours after the post went up, Mike received a phone call from his managing editor. He was informed that “under financial threat” from the social media platform that provided their “ad revenue aggregation services, he was forced to retract the article and disavow its content.” …
Due to the explosion in the number of fact checks, lawsuits, demonetizations or cancellations over statements deemed to be racist, censorship by editors of many right leaning online publications has become a reality.
Following the 2020 election, large portions of my posts were cut out entirely or watered down to insignificance by conservative editors. A few posts were deemed too controversial to publish. ..
It is worth your time to go read the Powerline article in its entirety. Also noteworthy, there is a link to Mr. Ford’s article that has the original text of the disappeared RedState post from January 11, 2021. On that day, he began:
Enough! Enough of the gaslighting by the press. Enough of the gaslighting by the party of slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK, want, deprivation, envy and murder of the unborn in the womb. Most especially, enough of their “Republican,” enablers, who believe they can gain political favor or DC cocktail circuit invites, by promoting blatant lies about President Trump’s rally held in Washington DC..
More:
I am beyond disgusted at just how quickly we’ve been gaslighted into a narrative that Just. Is. Not. True. …
But in no way were the events in DC something even close to what ANTIFA/BLM have been inflicting on our cities and neighborhoods (many of them minority) for the past year. The piddly amount of property damage and injuries (yes, standard caveat, even one is too many) that occurred in DC pales when compared to the ANTIFA/BLM riots, arson, looting and outright assassination of police officers and other Americans who had the effrontery to show support for a duly elected President. …
Returning to the final portions of Mr. Ford’s current post:
For two years we’ve been deliberately and maliciously lied to. Through hearings and a second impeachment, Democrats, ably supported by their media enablers have continued to foist this garbage on the American people. Those intrepid enough to push back were labelled “conspiracy theorists,” or outright censored/cancelled to one degree or another as I was. …
For now, those of us who have been been the targets of some pretty harsh language and even taken some financial hits for telling the truth, hope your will forgive us as we exercise a little well deserved schadenfreude as the left is forced to eat its words.
Part of my always present agenda here is to note that, while large swaths of We the People seem to suddenly see the light with the video images now making their way into the public discourse, the truth was completely seeable, and in fact clearly seen, by those willing to see. Unfortunately, too many chose the guided “cultivated mass delusional hysteria” tour by the reliably incurious / compliant media (and many enablers and stoolies) that played on their teenage-style emotionalism…they preferred the shortcut to actually thinking for themselves.
For the record, I imagine it was off of this deeper chill that the shallow fluffers at Forbes were looking to leverage some conspicuous virtue signaling on the cheap. But we’ve covered that already today.
___ ___ ___
MARCH 13, 2023 UPDATE: For the record, I do believe there were localized elements of a riot at the Capitol that day. Without a full and honest assessment of the video (and other) evidence, I hesitate to go much beyond that. I will defer to Mr. Ford and his comment from under his own post:
“Riot” in many ways is a relative term. Compared to what ANTIFA and BLM were inflicting on our cities and as James above said, “The 1983 bomb in the capital and the 1950s gun attack were far more dangerous than Jan 6,” looking at all the footage…nahhh…not really a riot (IMnsHO).
side note: When I was an instructor at SWCS @ Bragg, one of the subjects was how to start and how to quell a riot (depending if you were doing UW or FID). If I was grading this “riot,” the student would get a low “D,” at best.
Thanks for commenting…it’s good to have the discourse.
Regards,
Mike
As they say…Sitting here trying to come up with something to add, but nah. Seconded.
the philo t. custis institute 