As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Select Committee plans its colonoscopy-like partisan investigation, few have been held to account for the violent riots that laid waste to a once vibrant, dynamic Minneapolis and many other cities. According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association report in 2020, an estimated 574 violent riots took place in the weeks after Minneapolis burned, resulting in damage of up to $2 billion.

Pelosi made sure the capital was locked down and surrounded by the National Guard and coils of concertina wire, city leaders and governors left citizens at the mercy of thugs hurling Molotov cocktails, helpless as their homes and businesses burned to the ground.

America’s preeminent revisionist historian Nikole Hannah-Jones perfectly encapsulated the elitist mentality in a June 2020 CBS interview: “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” //

In his Tuesday op-ed, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “What happened last Jan. 6 was much bigger and more important than politics.” Of course it was, because it was about the elitist political and corporate media establishment. They continue to inflate the severity and lasting effects of the Jan. 6 riot because they have an outsized idea of their own influence and importance. The disparity of concern and reaction is telling: when their lives are inconvenienced, it’s a national disaster; when our lives are destroyed, they hand us a shovel.

Any suggestion of a threat to America’s credentialed class is presented as an affront to democracy and a sin equal to the worst treason in our nation’s history. Meanwhile, the destruction of dozens of cities and thousands of lives in middle America has been accepted as a necessary airing of grievances, a reactionary event in the name of social justice that inflicted pain on those who probably deserved it anyway.

It is an iteration of the divide between those who see themselves as rulers and the people over which they rule. It extends from the leftist media that needs to perpetuate democracy’s threat to fight off the ratings implosion since President Trump left office, to sanctimonious politicians who view the public as nothing more than the masked, faceless unwashed who should be grateful that the 2020 riots exposed their racist ways and now can correct them.