Witness, for example, how the Biden administration and corporate media have treated the January 6 riot as if it were some kind of military coup,\u00a0demanding that draconian sentences be handed down even to small-time vandals and trespassers.\u00a0<\/strong>Regime paranoia has led the Justice Department to ask for\u00a0a 30-year sentence for Enrique Tarrio<\/a>, a man who was convicted of the\u00a0non-crime of “seditious conspiracy”<\/a>\u00a0even though\u00a0he wasn’t even in Washington on January 6<\/a>. In recent months, Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,”\u00a0received a sentence of three-and-a-half years<\/a>, even though prosecutors admit he did nothing violent. Riley Williams was given three years for simply trespassing in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Members of the Capitol Police force have been lionized in the media as great protectors of “sacred” government buildings, and any threat to the property or persons of Washington politicians has been equated with an assault on “democracy.”<\/p>\n Yet, had these supposed insurrectionists inflicted these same actions against an ordinary private individual, there’s a good chance the perpetrators would not even be\u00a0arrested, let alone given years of prison time.\u00a0<\/strong>Consider, for example, the\u00a0mobs that ransack private businesses in American cities, stealing tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise while police and prosecutors\u00a0consider it all to be low priority<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Violent crime<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0property crime<\/a>\u00a0surge in many areas of the United States, with violent crime\u00a0rising 30 percent in New York City in 2022<\/a>.\u00a0Unsolved murders in the US are at a record high<\/a>.\u00a0Meanwhile, progressives and social democrats are looking for ways to\u00a0reduce\u00a0<\/em>criminal penalties<\/a>\u00a0against violent criminals. Police departments often devote only\u00a0tiny portions of their budgets to homicide investigations<\/a>, and if your property is stolen, odds are good you can forget about ever seeing it again.<\/p>\n The situation is quite different when it comes to protecting the state, its agents, and its property from any threat.\u00a0During urban riots, such as those which occurred in\u00a0Ferguson, Missouri\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0Minneapolis, Minnesota<\/a>, the police went to great lengths to protect themselves and government property. If you were just a private shopkeeper or ordinary citizen, however, you were on your own.\u00a0<\/strong>At the Uvalde School shooting in 2022,\u00a0hundreds<\/a><\/em>\u00a0of law enforcement officers from all levels of government<\/a>\u00a0chose to protect themselves rather than the children who were being murdered inside. When Uvalde parents demanded the police act, the police attacked the parents.<\/p>\n We find similar phenomena at the federal level. There are, of course, special federal laws against violence perpetrated against federal employees. Ordinary taxpayers receive no such consideration. Note how federal agencies move to\u00a0arm themselves to the teet<\/a>h while also seeking to disarm the private-sector. Federal agents will spare no expense finding someone who\u00a0put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk<\/a>, but it’s another matter entirely when we’re talking about serious violent crime against regular people. \u00a0Federal agents, of course,\u00a0allowed 9\/11 to occur right under their noses<\/a>, they refused to investigate known rapist Larry Nasser, and shrugged off reports about the man who would end up slaughtering children at a high school in Parkland, Florida.\u00a0Contrast this with how long the federal government has been conniving to get revenge on Julian Assange for merely telling the truth about US war crimes.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Naturally, law enforcement officers rarely face any sanctions for their failures to bother themselves with\u00a0private<\/em>\u00a0property, life, or limb. The federal courts have\u00a0made it clear that law enforcement officers are not obligated to actually protect the public<\/a>. In other words, the taxpayers must\u00a0always\u00a0<\/em>pay taxes to hold up\u00a0their\u00a0<\/em>end of the imagined “social contract” or face fines and imprisonment. But the other side of that “contract,” the state, has no legal obligation to make good on its end.\u00a0This, of course, is not how\u00a0real\u00a0<\/em>contracts work.<\/p>\n The state’s fastidious devotion to protecting itself, compared to its casual concern for\u00a0the safety of mere taxpayers, illustrates an important principle of state behavior.<\/strong>\u00a0In his essay\u00a0The Anatomy of the State<\/em>, Murray Rothbard\u00a0notes\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting\u00a0itself<\/em>\u00a0rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely\u2014those against private citizens or those against\u00a0itself<\/em>? The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State’s openly assigned priority to its\u00a0own<\/em>\u00a0defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed\u00a0raison d’etre<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This double standard has been repeatedly on display in recent years as the regime has increasingly been\u00a0consumed with paranoia over threats to itself\u2014propagandistically termed “threats to democracy”<\/strong>\u2014while attention given to\u00a0real\u00a0<\/em>crime against private citizens is apparently not a priority at all.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/assets.zerohedge.com\/s3fs-public\/styles\/inline_image_mobile\/public\/inline-images\/crime1_2.jpg?itok=9OYRmw8e\")
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