The riots of January 6 were a shameful day in American history. Thousands of Trump supporters descended on the Capitol in a futile attempt to keep Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Six people ended up dead—the most high-profile of these being rioter Ashli Babbit, who was shot as she attempted to climb through a window—and four police officers took their own lives in the aftermath.
The people who Donald Trump told to, “fight like hell” soon faced consequences for their actions. Thousands of people were arrested and charged with federal crimes. And Trump, predictably, is displeased about this—displeased in the most offensive way possible.
On Friday 18, Trump did an interview with right-wing commentator Dan Bongino and said of the rioters, via AP News, “Nobody’s ever been treated like this. Maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly. But you know, they were held too.”
Yep, Donald Trump thinks that being incarcerated for a crime you very much committed is the same as men, women and children being forced into concentration camps because of their ethnicity. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered this in 1942 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it’s another shameful day in American history.
Japanese Americans are rightly furious to hear Trump insult them in this way. Ann Burroughs, the president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum, released a statement on the museum’s website stating, “This is an egregiously inaccurate and flawed historical analogy. There is no comparison between the treatment received by the January 6 rioters and Japanese Americans who were denied due process when they were forcibly removed from their homes, systematically dispossessed and incarcerated for the duration of the war. Now more than ever, the lessons from the Japanese American incarceration must never be forgotten, ignored, minimized, or erased.”
Sharon Yamato, the daughter of two people whose normal lives were stripped from them when they were herded into a camp, told the Associated Press, “Japanese Americans are not and should not be compared to insurrectionists who committed major crimes and in which people were hurt and killed. And I think that that is just so horrible to try to even make that comparison or allege that there’s any similarities between the two.”
Donald Trump has made it clear time and time again that he’s happy to gaslight the American public over Jan 6. During a town hall event in Florida on October 17, he claimed there was “nothing done wrong at all” and that, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.” He then bafflingly called the riot a “day of love.”
Obviously the many people who lost their lives were thinking about nothing but “love” at the time, then. Trump continues to be an ignorant buffoon, and if he gets elected this year we’re looking at, guess what, yet another shameful day in American history.
Published: Oct 22, 2024 11:28 am