I understand why some here think the J6 pardons issued en masse were “foolish,” though I suspect that opinion undervalues the basic understanding of fairness those Americans that don’t view all issues through “Progressive” lenses—lenses that only see horribly stacked decks comprised of grossly inconsistent standards applied in a manner that injures anyone that doesn’t unquestionably adopt their views and rewards violent behavior in support of “Progressive” ends as appropriate and indeed required—Americans in flyover country celebrated and embrace. This piece does a good job of exploring those nuances:
The Capitol riot fueled the war on wrongthink. Clemency for Capitol rioters should represent the start of the end of that war.
Author Ben Weingarten profile
BEN WEINGARTEN
In the four years since the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, Democrats have crushed and disenfranchised their political opponents in a bid to achieve total power by waging a whole-of-society war on wrongthink. This war encompassed, among other elements, the lawfare apparatus, the broader weaponized administrative state, and the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
Now, with President Trump’s many corrective actions during week one of his second term, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of this tyrannical war — the first step toward restoring liberty and justice in this country.
Trump began by issuing an executive order called “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.” Under that order, the president declared it U.S. policy to “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”
The directive tasks the attorney general, alongside department and agency heads, with investigating weaponized acts by civil or criminal enforcement authorities over the last four years and presenting a report to the president “with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions.” The order calls on the director of national intelligence to initiate the same review for weaponized acts of the intelligence community.
The devil will be in the details. But if these reviews result in a comprehensive accounting of the malfeasance that transpired, the punishing of those who abused their powers, and the replacement of personnel and reform of policy to prevent future such corruption, this order alone would constitute a massive “W” for the republic.
But the president was not done there. He also issued an executive order on “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which prohibits federal employees from engaging in, facilitating, or using taxpayer dollars for “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” Like the weaponization order, it also calls on the attorney general and relevant agency heads to probe censorship activities during the last four years and present recommendations for remedial actions.
Given that the federal government provided much of the direction, coordination, and funding that fueled the censorship regime — which was imposed upon Americans over the past decade and intensified over the last four years — this order represents a potentially crippling blow to its entire foundation. As I detailed at RealClearInvestigations, President Trump has telegraphed that this is likely just the opening salvo in a broader effort to dismantle and destroy the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
The actions to end the war on wrongthink even extend across the globe. President Biden issued an unprecedented Executive Order 14115, under which his administration targeted ally Israel’s citizens and threatened its leaders with sanctions for daring to oppose White House policies that would imperil Israelis’ life, liberty, and property — beginning with rewarding the Palestinians for Oct. 7, 2023, with a state. That order was predicated on a sort of blood libel that Jews living in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria were engaging in rampant violence against their Arab neighbors. President Trump revoked the despicable order on his first day.
In addition to setting policies to provide accountability and prevent go-forward malfeasance, the administration has already started righting past wrongs. The Trump Justice Department immediately began dismissing outrageous lawsuits, like the one against whistleblowing doctor Eithan Haim, who had exposed that Texas Children’s Hospital was illegally giving children transgender procedures. Likewise, it ended prosecutions against pro-lifers for alleged FACE Act violations and pardoned the overwhelmingly peaceful protesters persecuted by the Biden Justice Department under that law. The administration announced it would reinstate service members booted from the military for refusing to get the Covid jab, with back pay and benefits.
But perhaps most notable of all was Trump’s decision to dismiss all pending cases against Jan. 6 defendants — with prejudice — and provide blanket pardons and a limited number of commutations to the more than 1,500 J6ers already prosecuted for the riot used to launch the war on wrongthink.
That decision took courage. It would have been more politically correct to do a bifurcated set of pardons based on the nature of alleged offenses. But the administration evidently considered Jan. 6 in its totality in deciding to end the entire lawfare inquisition.
Reports suggest the administration weighed the vigorous and seemingly vengeful J6 prosecutions against the leniency granted to Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters who assaulted cops, murdered people, and burned down cities during the summer of 2020. It likely considered the grave defects to the cases: D.C. judges heaped collective guilt on the defendants and treated them with hostility, authorities violated their due process rights, and defendants faced perhaps the most anti-MAGA jury pools in America while judges refused to let them change venues.
The administration surely recognized, as the Supreme Court confirmed, that prosecutors twisted and tortured laws like the Enron-driven “obstruction of an official proceeding” charge to hang felonies around the necks of protesters. It understood that some without any prior criminal records were subjected to pretrial detention for months on end, with many subjected to alleged abuse in squalid jail conditions. It also appears to have acknowledged the complexity of judging people’s offenses given the presence of informants who may have entrapped some and the reported provocations, if not brutality, of individual police officers.
In short, the president seemingly surmised that the prosecutions were the fruit of a poisonous tree — and were themselves poisoned. Punishment had already been more than meted out. Law enforcement resources were better allocated toward not treating grandmas wandering the Capitol grounds like jihadists, and the American people had rendered their judgment on Jan. 6, 2021, which justified ending the entire sordid lawfare effort. Outgoing President Biden’s cavalier and corrupt pardons and commutations only made the decision easier.
The Capitol riot fueled the war on wrongthink. Clemency for Capitol rioters, perhaps above all other opening actions, should represent the start of the end of that war.
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/29/trumps-j6-pardons-signal-the-end-of-the-war-on-wrongthink/
