Can East Coaters Distinguish America's Corn Palace from Wall Drug Though?

Compared to what other cities experienced last summer, Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington DC was a picnic in the daytime.

Jonah Goldberg@JonahDispatch

When I hear people trying to spin up the rioters as patriots and decent Americans, I wish they’d take a few minutes and consider the fact that at least some of these people were so profoundly stupid and ignorant that their “patriotic” knowledge didn’t even reach 2nd grade level.

WTVG@13abc

Video captured Jensen referring to the Capitol building as the White House. The judge said he didn’t believe that Jensen could have coordinated with others or planned an attack in advance “when he had no basic understanding of where he even was that day.” 

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 Jonah Goldberg's wife's family is from Alaska, and he takes a camper cross country with the dogs and family a few times a year, it seems, so he can likely pass the headline test, but honestly?  How many East Coast Americans do you think could distinguish Wall Drug from the Corn Palace?

It's not the same thing, you say?  Ticky-tacky South Dakota attractions compared to the structures in the Nation's Capital?

Thing is:  That's the same mentality though that tells Americans across the nation, in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago and Portland, that the "riots" on Jan. 6 and the resulting (few) deaths and relatively small levels of property destruction and theft in DC were somehow more important than the local "riots" and random violent incidents against civilians that they saw occurring all summer long in the nation's big city nearest them...

(ie/ the Dakotans, whose "big city" is often Minneapolis, "saw" night after night after night fires burning a police precinct, a post office and library, and hundreds of small businesses.  National Guard troops had to be brought in to put down the unrest. That matters more to them because it is closer -- and there was real danger -- compared to what happened in DC, where advance warnings about violent protests were dismissed, and local and national leaders allegedly turned down help offered in advance to bolster the Capitol Police.)

Now DC residents and leaders are allegedly the biggest victims in the nation, according to the partisan and pundit spin, and those "criminals" deserve to be locked up without bail awaiting trial because of their danger to the DC community?  After so many partisans on the coasts simply shrugged off the violence and destruction done by similar types -- on the opposite side of the political spectrum -- in our cities last summer?

The amount of taxpayer resources for "protection" paid to protect DC residents and officials from (can we be honest?) a very low level of actual threat and destruction that day has significantly outpaced the amounts of money and attention bringing other national cities under control.  Are your lives worth more than ours? 

The American people as a whole are ready to move on, as Jan. 6, 2021 fades from national memory and more pressing regional threats persist. We've got bigger problems to spend taxpayer money on, more credible threats in the future. 

By continuing to cry wolf and overhype the actual danger to DC that day, the partisan pundits in DC are showing they are losing their grip on controlling the narrative spin, and becoming increasingly desperate as the judicial branch rightly sorts through the cases and determines who is an overzealous but non-violent protester/trespasser and who actually posed a physical danger to others that winter day....

A healthy 21st century democracy will listen to more voices than the traditionally dominant ones whose wealth and connections maybe buy them a bigger microphone, but don't make the words spoken through it any wiser or more authoritative for the purchased, oversized voice.

(Imagine if the anti-Trump neocons had been properly confronted -- via more voices, not more violence -- in the early part of the century when they were selling us on all those Middle East wars that in the end did not benefit America's national security but helped tank our domestic economy.  Back then, the pundits and mainstream media controlled the narrative.  Now, there's a bit more independence, room for independent thinkers who don't have a product narrative to sell, and platforms to support them too.)

You don't have a prominent parent in the news or political business, or be willing to serve an ingratiating internship, to be a player in those political pundit circles.  Truth be told, much of the DC and NYC press people have inherent conflicts of interests in covering so many of these stories as their friendship, family and professional circles overlap.  DC is actually small-town incestuous like that, if you look closely.  (and I don't mean literally necessarily, like in Gore Vidal's book, or the Biden boy's wife sharing/widow comforting/ special uncle lovin'...) So many offspring aren't educated or qualified to obtain independent careers in independent industries, so their parents trade favors with others they do business with, and pave a comfortable path for their own, while others are actually acting as independent trailblazers  for their own lesser compensated, but intellectually richer (and did I mention more independent?) careers...

Not too many inside-industry, ego-stroking prizes to win, either.... Just real-life results. Which is more valuable in the long run?

A bit of intellectual competition this time around -- actually think-testing their ideas with natural realistic constraints before they fail in reality -- and the ability of American news consumers across the nation to pick and choose what they consume as the mainstream news monopolies dissolve, will help ensure that the aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021 spins out very differently than the costly overmath of September 11, 2001, where the pundits successfully sold us a false narrative 20 years ago to advance their own interests, nor our shared national ones.

That's a good thing for America, even if those entrenched partisan interests in DC don't recognize it yet.