More than ten months after the Jan. 6 breach (oops, “insurrection”) of the U.S. Capitol, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Trump Derangement Syndrome-driven January 6 Committee continues its “investigation” (show trial) in a never-ending attempt to do as much damage to Donald Trump and Trump supporters as her delusional self can do before finally riding off into the San Francisco sunset — God knows when.

Or is damaging Trump really Pelosi’s main goal?

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald thinks not.

In a Substack column dropped on Sunday, Greenwald argues that the real objective of the radically changed Democrat Party is to exploit the so-called “insurrection” as an excuse to further “trample” on the civil rights of America and its citizens. The Jan. 6 committee, wrote Greenwald, “may be the worst abuse yet.” In the opening paragraph, Greenwald sets the stage —as eloquently and forthright as we’ve come to expect from one of the best investigative journalists on the planet. (Emphasis, mine.)

When a population is placed in a state of sufficiently grave fear and anger regarding a perceived threat, concerns about the constitutionality, legality, and morality of measures adopted in the name of punishing the enemy typically disappear.

The first priority, indeed the sole priority, is to crush the threat. Questions about the legality of actions ostensibly undertaken against the guilty parties are brushed aside as trivial annoyances at best, or, worse, castigated as efforts to sympathize with and protect those responsible for the danger.

When a population is subsumed with pulsating fear and rage, there is little patience for seemingly abstract quibbles about legality or ethics. The craving for punishment, for vengeance, for protection, is visceral and thus easily drowns out cerebral or rational impediments to satiating those primal impulses.

Enter: Nancy Pelosi and her show trial.

The events of Jan. 6 could not have delivered a more perfect opportunity to Pelosi and her party. Here were Trump supporters, waving Trump flags, wearing Trump gear, “angrily” marching on the Capitol of the United States.  The photos and videos could not have been better for exploitation — and nobody in D.C. hates Donald Trump more than Nancy Pelosi. Perfect foil. Perfect storm. Let the trampling begin.

“The aftermath of the 9/11 attack provided a vivid illustration,” wrote Greenwald. The perfect comparison.

Everything should be done to crush the terrorists who — directly or indirectly were responsible for [the] traumatic attack.

The few dissenters who attempted to raise doubts about the legality or morality of proposed responses were easily dismissed and marginalized, when not ignored entirely.

Typically, they were vilified with the accusation that their constitutional and legal objections were frauds: mere pretexts to conceal their sympathy and even support for the terrorists.

It took at least a year or two after that attack for there to be any space for questions about the legality, constitutionality, and morality of the U.S. response to 9/11 to be entertained at all.

Greenwald then pointed to the obvious, which we began to see and hear on CNN and MSNBC — and from Democrat lawmakers — even as the Jan. 6 “riot” was in progress, and we have heard, ever since:

For many liberals and Democrats in the U.S., 1/6 is the equivalent of 9/11. One need not speculate about that. Many have said this explicitly. Some prominent Democrats in politics and media have even insisted that 1/6 was worse than 9/11.

And the hapless new president-to-be?

Biden’s speechwriters, when preparing his script for his April address to the Joint Session of Congress, noted Greenwald, laughingly called the three-hour riot “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Democrat hyperbole. Don’t you love it? The histrionics and all?

And let’s not forget Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney [rolling-eyes emoji] — nor did Greenwald:

Liberal icon Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), whose father’s legacy was cemented by years of casting 9/11 as the most barbaric attack ever seen, now serves as Vice Chair of the 1/6 Committee; in that role, she proclaimed that the forces behind 1/6 represent “a threat America has never seen before.”

The enabling resolution that created the Select Committee calls 1/6 “one of the darkest days of our democracy.” USA Today’s editor David Mastio published an op-ed whose sole point was a defense of the hysterical thesis from MSNBC analysts that 1/6 is at least as bad as 9/11 if not worse. 

S.V. Date, the White House correspondent for America’s most nakedly partisan “news” outlet, The Huffington Post, published a series of tweets arguing that 1/6 was worse than 9/11 and that those behind it are more dangerous than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda ever were.

This exchange with The Washington Examiner’s Byron York illustrates the insanity of Dáte and “journalists” like him.

On George Will’s desire ‘to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11 because it was that scale of a shock to the system.’ No, it wasn’t. There is simply no comparison in scale or motivation between the two. For some perspective: 1/5

— Byron York (@ByronYork) May 24, 2021

Trump Apology Corps in full apology mode.

The 9/11 terrorists and Osama bin Laden never threatened the heart of the American experiment.

The 1/6 terrorists and Donald Trump absolutely did exactly that. Trump continues that effort today. https://t.co/cDcOkXFeio

— S.V. Dáte (@svdate) May 25, 2021

There you have it. Donald Trump and his “terrorists” were far worse than Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

Greenwald continues, making several more comparisons between the aftermath of 9/11 and Jan. 6 — in the minds of today’s radicalized Democrat Party — before concluding with several examples of the subsequent trampling of civil rights.

The no-fly list was widely regarded as one of the worst civil liberties abuses of the first War on Terror: unseen bureaucrats putting people on lists with no due process. It was imported onto US soil, but many are so petrified of 1/6 that nothing was saidhttps://t.co/WrTAGtTupT

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 18, 2021

Excerpts:

Almost immediately after the Capitol riot, some of the most influential Democratic lawmakers — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who also now chairs the Select 1/6 Committee — demanded that any participants in the protest be placed on the no-fly list, long regarded as one of the most extreme civil liberties assaults from the first War on Terror.

And at least some of the 1/6 protesters have been placed on that list: American citizens, convicted of no crime, prohibited from boarding commercial airplanes based on a vague and unproven assessment, from unseen and unaccountable security state bureaucrats, that they are too dangerous to fly.

I reported extensively on the horrors and abuses of the no-fly list as part of the first War on Terror and do not recall a single liberal speaking in defense of that tactic. Yet now that this same brute instrument is being used against Trump supporters, there has not, to my knowledge, been a single prominent liberal raising objections to the resurrection of the no-fly list for American citizens who have been convicted of no crime.

Yet, “half” of Americans believe “the big lie” of Jan. 6. Why? Because they want to. 

In a 2017 article titled Why We Believe Alternative Facts, the American Psychological Association argued that “the natural tendency to cherry-pick and twist the facts to fit with our existing beliefs is known as motivated reasoning — and we all do it.” (Operative word being “all.”)

“Motivated reasoning is a pervasive tendency of human cognition,” says Peter Ditto, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how motivation, emotion and intuition influence judgment.

“People are capable of being thoughtful and rational, but our wishes, hopes, fears and motivations often tip the scales to make us more likely to accept something as true if it supports what we want to believe.”

Incidentally, the above doesn’t apply to us, of course. Just the other guys.