@mjfree, you called January 6 an insurrection. Here's what a science teacher can't get past: the party that tells everyone the Second Amendment exists to check a tyrannical government supposedly tried to overthrow that government and forgot to bring the guns. I graded the whole claim. Start with the word you leaned on. Insurrection is a federal crime, 18 U.S.C. § 2383. Number of people charged with it for January 6, Trump included: ZERO. Not by Merrick Garland. Not by Jack Smith, who wanted Trump the way a toddler wants the cookie jar. The House impeached for "incitement of insurrection" and the Senate acquitted, 57-43. So the label is all hat and no cattle. It's an opinion wearing a judge's robe. Now the guns. Roughly 1,500 people were charged. Prosecutors went through phones, hotel rooms, and trucks. They found a handful of people who carried a pistol onto the grounds, and they charged them. A handful. In a country with more privately owned guns than people. And the only person shot dead that day was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Air Force veteran, shot by a Capitol Police officer. The weapons prosecutors kept describing were flagpoles, bear spray, a fire extinguisher, and a hockey stick. Real violence against real cops, and those people earned their charges. I spent two decades as a paramedic and deployed as an Army medic. I've seen what armed people do to a human body. It does not look like bear spray and a hockey stick. A coup kit it is not. Think about who supposedly showed up to overthrow the government. These are the folks Obama said "cling to guns or religion." The folks who quote Federalist 46, where Madison counts on citizens with arms in their hands as the check on a federal army. Biden's Autopen told them they'd need F-15s and maybe nuclear weapons to take on the government. And your story is that they finally decided to do it... and left the rifles at home. Morgan, gun owners don't forget their guns. I know these people. Some of them carry to the mailbox. So by your logic, flagpoles and bear spray are now weapons of revolution. Fine. I propose the Flagpole Safety Act: every flag in America ships on an 18-inch dowel, and buying a pole at Hobby Lobby requires a background check and a 10-day wait. Fourth of July parades need an ATF permit. This is not a radical idea. Now let's talk about the things your side DOESN'T call an insurrection. May 28, 2020. Rioters burned the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct after officers evacuated it. A police station. Burned. June 2020. Protesters took over six blocks of Seattle, including a police precinct, and declared it an autonomous zone. The mayor went on CNN and said it could be a "summer of love." People were shot inside that zone before the city cleared it. Summer 2020. The federal courthouse in Portland got hit night after night for weeks with fireworks, fires, and lasers aimed at officers' eyes. A FEDERAL building. Attacked on purpose. For weeks. August 2020. CNN ran a graphic reading "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" while Kenosha burned behind the reporter. I teach physics. Fire is not peaceful. That's an exothermic reaction. Insurers estimated the 2020 riot damage at $1 to $2 billion, the most expensive civil disorder in American insurance history. Meanwhile, a future Vice President was asking her followers to chip in to a Minnesota bail fund for people arrested during the unrest. October 2018. Kavanaugh protesters flooded the Hart Senate Office Building, and Capitol Police arrested about 300 people in one day. Nobody called it a coup. October 2023. Protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace staged a sit-in inside the Cannon House Office Building rotunda, and Capitol Police arrested hundreds. Peaceful protest, we were told. And since you like borrowing fights from overseas, France, summer 2023. After a police shooting in Nanterre, riots ran for nights. Rioters rammed a burning car into a mayor's home with his wife and kids inside. France's top leftist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, refused to call for calm. He said he was calling for justice instead. That's Quinn's Law Number Seven: it's different when you're a Democrat. Same broken windows. Same assaulted cops. Different jersey. If you're confused right now, that's by design. Your side has been muddying the water for five years to make it look deep. Next claim: he "refused to honor the peaceful transfer of power." Biden's Autopen was sworn in at noon on January 20, 2021, right on schedule, on the same Capitol. Congress finished certifying the count that same night of the 6th. Trump flew to Florida. That is what a transfer looks like. And the speech everyone clips? Trump told the crowd to march "peacefully and patriotically." Yes, he also said "fight like hell." Senators say that about appropriations bills. "Refused to accept defeat"? Let's check the other team's homework. On January 6, 2017, House Democrats stood up and objected to Trump's electors, Jamie Raskin among them, until Vice President Biden gaveled them down and said "It is over." Stacey Abrams lost Georgia in 2018 and made sure to tell everyone her speech was not a concession. Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate president" in 2019. Al Gore fought the 2000 result in court for over a month. In 2020 Democrat Rita Hart lost Iowa's 2nd District by six votes, skipped the state courts, and asked the Democrat-run House to overturn it, with Marc Elias as her lawyer, before backing down under pressure. Not one of them got called an insurrectionist. Slight oversight! Want to talk about a side that wouldn't accept an election? Rewind to 2016. The FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on the Trump campaign and got four FISA warrants to surveil campaign adviser Carter Page, leaning on the Steele dossier, opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The DOJ Inspector General found 17 significant errors and omissions in those applications. An FBI lawyer altered an email to hide that Page had helped the CIA, and he pleaded guilty. Special Counsel John Durham concluded the bureau opened the case without "any actual evidence of collusion." Page was never charged with anything. Then came the push to flip electors and impeachment talk before he'd even taken the oath. Nobody went to jail for an insurrection over any of that either. Asking hard questions about an election isn't treason. It's homework. In New Jersey, a motor vehicle software error registered about 6,600 people who had told the state they were NOT citizens; the governor's own preliminary count says fewer than 400 of them voted. Ohio's secretary of state sent DOJ 1,084 apparent noncitizen registrations, 167 of whom appear to have voted in a federal election. Right now DOJ is in federal court asking California to set aside about 20,000 mail ballots it flags as likely noncitizens until somebody checks. That's an allegation, not a conviction. But the same party that calls every question "election denial" is fighting not to look. Quinn's Law Number Seven, back for an encore. Since you brought up getting shellacked: 2024. 312 electoral votes AND the popular vote. Now the part you left out. In December 2024 the DOJ Inspector General reported the FBI had 26 confidential human sources in D.C. that day. Three were tasked by the FBI to be there. Four went inside the Capitol. Thirteen more went into restricted areas. The IG found no undercover agents and says none of those sources were authorized to break the law or told to egg anyone on. Fine. Then answer two questions. Why were grandmothers who walked through open doors charged while none of the sources who went inside were? And why did Director Wray, asked under oath whether he had sources dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol, tell Congress not to read anything into his refusal to answer? I teach teenagers. When a kid won't answer a yes-or-no question, I read something into it. Then the pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC. Years of "corrupted" phone data and no suspect. The House Administration subcommittee report says the trail went cold within months. It took a new FBI director to arrest Brian Cole Jr. in December 2025, a man who showed up on cameras the bureau had the whole time and who, per the affidavit, bought bomb parts with a credit card. In April the Trump DOJ added terrorism and weapons-of-mass-destruction charges, and prosecutors say he confessed and claimed he did it for people who thought 2020 was stolen. His lawyers say he didn't do it, want Trump's January 6 pardon to cover him, and say the FBI once treated a former Capitol Police officer as a person of interest. That's for a jury, so nobody gets a victory lap. But a bureau that needed five years to find a guy with a receipt wasn't protecting democracy. It wasn't looking. And the committee's star witness? June 28, 2022, prime time, Cassidy Hutchinson told the country Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his SUV and then lunged at the head of his own protective detail. She wasn't in the vehicle. She said Tony Ornato told her the story. Sources close to Ornato and the agent said both were ready to testify under oath that it never happened. In 2024 the House Administration subcommittee released the driver's testimony: he never saw Trump grab the wheel or lunge toward the front seat, though he said Trump sounded irritated. The committee let that driver's offer to testify sit for months. Even Jack Smith told the House her account was secondhand, and that if he were the defense attorney, the first thing he'd do is try to keep it out as hearsay. Per Jim Jordan, the committee's final report cited her 185 times. Reports this month say DOJ is asking a grand jury to indict her for lying to Congress. Nothing has been filed as of today, so she gets her day in court like anybody else. A former ABC News president producing the hearings, a secondhand steering wheel, and a driver nobody wanted to hear from is not an investigation. It's a script. And while you were worried about Trump grabbing power, here is who was using it. Jack Smith's team subpoenaed the National Archives and read text messages involving 44 members of Congress, per DOJ records released by Sen. Grassley. Arctic Frost put 92 Republican groups and people under scrutiny, Turning Point USA among them. Smith told the House he only sought toll records; his lawyers say that answer was truthful because the question was about toll records. On September 29 the Senate read him the receipts anyway. You wanted a government that went after its political opposition, Morgan? I found one. It just wasn't wearing a red hat. One more receipt, and it's the one your side should frame and hang in the hallway. In February 2021, TIME ran Molly Ball's "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election." In its own words, it describes "a well-funded cabal of powerful people" working behind the scenes. The article lays out how they changed voting rules and laws, steered media coverage, leaned on Facebook and Twitter over what counted as "disinformation," and lined up labor bosses and business groups to manage the outcome. To be fair, it does not say they planned the riot. It says they told their own people to stay home that day. Now look at that with a teacher's red pen. If a Republican group had bragged in a national magazine about secretly rewriting election rules and pressuring the platforms that control what you see, you would call it an insurrection before you finished the headline. When your side does it, TIME calls it saving democracy. A cabal working the refs is saving the election, and a grandmother with a flag is a coup. Your definitions need a recall notice. So here is your graded paper. Insurrection: never charged. Armed overthrow: the only person killed by gunfire was unarmed, and police fired the shot. Refused to transfer power: left on time. Burning precincts, seized city blocks, and a federal courthouse under siege for weeks: "mostly peaceful." "What will he try this time?" Probably winning again. He's done it twice. Go sell your crazy somewhere else, Morgan. We're all stocked up here. But what do I know, I'm only a retired Army medic who knows what an armed assault looks like, and that wasn't it. So, Morgan: which one was the insurrection? The police station on fire, or the grandmother with the flag?