By Ray Hanania

On the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 demonstrations at the Capitol, which included violence on the part of some of the protesters, President Biden spoke to the American people.

The first part of the speech made a lot of sense, but the last half plummeted into typical partisan politics that only served to fuel the polarization that divides America.

Yes, there are two sides to the protest if you don’t include the extremists on the far right and the far left. Through support of the mainstream news media, Democrats made their points very clear, accusing President Trump of inciting the protesters to violence in an “insurrection” intended to overturn the American government.

Republicans have opposed the characterization that the violence symbolized an “insurrection” and have found themselves in a partisan political battle with Democrats, whom they accuse of exploiting the violence for their own personal agenda.

Ray Hanania

This year is critical to both parties, as the party that doesn’t hold the White House usually loses control of the House and in almost as many cases, the Senate.

I also listened to then-President Trump’s speech he gave on the morning of the Capitol protests. He did not tell his followers to use violence. He did not tell his followers to undermine the government. He did accuse Biden and Democrats of stealing the election, and he wanted the confirmation of Biden’s win delayed.

In fact, during his speech to the growing protesters, Trump urged them to be peaceful.

I absolutely believe that any of those protesters who engaged in violence should be prosecuted. The Justice Department has so far charged and prosecuted 800 of the pro-Trump protesters for violence, and plans to charge and prosecute 400 more.

That’s 1,200 people who engaged in violence. But that is a small part of the overall protesters that supported Trump. Their numbers range between 30,000 and 120,000, the latter number coming from an unreleased report from the Secret Service and FBI, reported by Newsweek several weeks back.

More importantly is the hypocrisy of the issue from the left and the major national mainstream news media.

Yes, I did support Trump over Hillary Clinton, and I am proud I voted against Clinton. She and her husband represented the worst of the Democratic Party.

But Trump turned out to be a bad president. Last November I voted for Biden, mainly because he campaigned on the promise to bring the two sides of America together using his skills as a longtime member of Congress.

The hypocrisy prevents Biden from bringing people together, and so far he has failed.

The hypocrisy reflects the forcefulness in which Democrats pursued the five hours of Capitol violence, and the weakness in which they defended the three months of even greater violence following the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

Some of the violent post-Floyd rioters, arsonists and looters were arrested and charged, but many protest leaders and Democrats in Congress and the Senate defended the violence of the protesters, asserting they had a right to express their frustrations with racism. Had that been Trump’s argument, they would have filed criminal charges against him.

The mainstream news media played criticism of the left down while exaggerating criticism of the right.

For example, the pro-Floyd protesters turned the tables on the police, using their justified violence to fuel the defund the police movement. Many politicians, like Mayor Lori Lightfoot, ordered police not to confront the protesters as they burned down businesses and brutalized many innocent civilians.

One Orland Park restaurant owner was brutally attacked by protesters, but nothing was done about it. The intensity of pursuing his attackers didn’t even come close to the intensity of the pursuit of the Jan. 6 protesters.

In his speech on the anniversary of the violence, Biden did the same, turning it into a campaign stump to help Democrats survive the expected off-year election losses.

Biden campaigned on bridging the gap. He promised to end the pandemic, setting a date in July. Instead of mounting a forceful campaign against the defund police movement, Biden has shown no real leadership doing a balancing act to keep his party together.

That’s not leadership.

The worst part is that the critics on the left never address the issues. Instead, they attack the person, as they do attacking me, accusing me of being a pro-Trump supporter. I’m an anti-Hillary “Reagan Democrat”; and if Biden doesn’t get his act together, I will support someone else against him in three years, too.

Check out Ray Hanania’s columns and political podcasts at hanania.com.