Thread by @relevantmena

Now that people are getting sentenced for peacefully protesting on January 6th, and the establishment is calling Trump’s promise to pardon them “an unprecedented danger to our democracy,” I decided to do some fact-checking…

A brief history of attacks on the US Capitol:

In 1954, members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party - which had previously attempted to assassinate Harry Truman - shot 5 congressmen during an immigration debate on the floor of the US House.

Jimmy Carter commuted their effective life sentences, releasing them in 1979

These convictions were themselves the basis for a subsequent FALN bombing campaign.

Bill Clinton pardoned most of the perpetrators in 1999, but was rejected by Oscar Lopez Rivera, who later received a pardon from Barack Obama and a personal performance of "Hamilton" in his honor

Moving on...in 1971 the Weather Underground detonated a bomb in a bathroom below the US Senate chamber to protest the invasion of Laos

Nobody was ever arrested or convicted, but Bill Ayers, who led the organization, would go on to become a close friend and mentor of Barack Obama

Ayres and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, who led the Weather Underground together, would become professors, with Ayres getting a taxpayer-funded job in the U of Illinois education department

Mention of Ayres' ties to Obama during the '08 presidential campaign were denounced as racist

Ayres and Dohrn would also raise Chesa Boudin, former San Francisco DA and son of Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, then in prison for killing 3 people in an armed robbery

Andrew Cuomo commuted Gilbert's sentence in 2021. Boudin later became a professor at Columbia

In 1983, the Resistance Conspiracy - a spinoff of the Weathermen and many of whose members were involved in the earlier Boudin killings - again bombed the US Senate as well as several other government buildings in protest of American military action in Lebanon and Grenada.

Bill Clinton pardoned the perpetrators on his last day as president in 2001

One of these, felony murderer Susan Rosenberg, would go on to receive various activist jobs, including as a fundraiser for BLM and a taxpayer-funded teaching position at City University of New York

On January 6th, 2021, a crowd of protestors illegally entered the US Capitol. One was shot by a security guard.

To date, none have been pardoned, honored, or provided with taxpayer-funded academic sinecures. This event was widely described as “The Worst Day in American History.”