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What are you talking about? DOJ Attorney Matthew Graves has even announced this week that they are looking into prosecuting J6 Protesters who did not enter the Capitol building but might have entered other restricted areas -- the entire J6 campaign by the DOJ is inventing new applications of existing laws. If they can't find anything to prosecute Ray Epps for, it's because they don't want to. Why else would motivate the judge not to reprimand Epps at all, but to instead say he was a good boy who got caught up in unfortunate conspiracy theories?
I don't understand why these are two irreconcilable positions: "The feds entrapped MAGA in a sting." Not only does that reconcile your two positions, but it is in fact the argument being made by just about every J6 truther.
What do you expect those lesser offenders to be charged with? I expect they will cop charges very similar to the ones Epps got - "disorderly conduct" and suchlike.
The positions are irreconcilable because they disagree on the fundamental question of whether or not J6 was actually a bad thing. There's an incoherence to saying "the Jan 6rs did nothing wrong, and also, the feds made them do it". If they did nothing wrong, how were they "instigated" into doing it? Conversely, if the feds instigated an insurrection, that means that Jan 6 was an insurrection.
If MAGA was entrapped in a sting, it was a "sting" where they were "entrapped" into conducting what the majority of Republicans now consider a legitimate protest.
The normie Republican position is that J6 was justified because it was not an insurrection. The government's position is that J6 was an attempt to overthrow the government. The "sting" theory is that the Feds took justified protest and tried to make it look like an attempt to overthrow the government, so they could persecute it.
Who decided that Ray Epps was a "lesser offender"? The feds are charging lots of people with more for less. Ray Epps was egging people on into entering the Capitol, and the media and government are all talking about how this poor guy has been targeted by a smear!
How did the feds make J6 look like an attempt to overthrow the government without getting anyone to do anything wrong?
The Supreme Court of the United States, in 1969, when it decided in Brandenburg v Ohio that the First Amendment protected speech so strongly that it became nearly impossible to convict a person of inciting a riot. Alternatively, the framers of the First Amendment itself.
I agree that the feds are charging people with more for less, but the rules they have to play by say they probably can't convict Epps for inciting a riot. Personally I think the First Amendment should be abolished which would make it much more possible to prosecute the kind of egregious behaviour Epps engaged in. But a lot of Americans disagree with me and it's their country.
I'm going to repost the original Revolver News article here, since I posted it in another comment. Ray Epps did a lot more than exercise his First Amendment rights:
https://revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/
Epps orchestrated the breach of the capitol, announced before J6 his intention to breach the Capitol, incited protesters during J6 to join him in breaching the Capitol, and then was put on the FBI's "Capitol Violence Most Wanted List," from which he was quietly dropped as soon as investigative reporters started asking questions. And there's more.
They are not playing by any rules, a claim I have repeated several times now to which you seem not to have said anything.
You're posting on a website that was created to escape censorship. Are you trying to look silly?
Which crime do you think he could be convicted of, what are the elements of that crime, and what evidence exists to prove all elements beyond a reasonable doubt?
I think the best way to contest that claim is to talk in detail about the actual rules that are observably being applied, which I am doing.
I have a longstanding view that the US bill of rights was a big mistake, which I have articulated multiple times. It has put judges in the position of having to effectively make policy decisions about what constitutes due process or equal protection or free speech that are always going to be somewhat arbitrary and politically controversial, and that in turn has made it very important to staff the judiciary with judges that interpret these very vague provisions the way your side wants, which has created a highly politicised judiciary.
I think a much better system is to allow democratically elected governments much more latitude in making the laws they want, for policy choices to be explicitly legislated, and for judges to have a much more restrained and uncontroversial role in applying the law. Sometimes governments will pass bad laws, but there is a much more direct and workable system for the public to rectify those cases than when judges make bad constitutional rulings.
If the same standard was being applied to everyone (which is different question from what I think he should be convicted of), I see no reason to not at least try to pin "seditious conspiracy" on him, like the guy that got 20 years without ever being present in Washington.
This is not a valid criterion to prove or disprove the point being debated here. The attempt to prove something beyond reasonable doubt happens after the charges are made, in court, not before. Rittenhouse was charged with murder despite exonerating evidence being public before the charges were made, for example.
It's not accurate to suggest that the existence of evidence is irrelevant to the charges that get laid. Yes, sometimes bad charges get laid despite the evidence not supporting a conviction. Rittenhouse was a dramatic example (and rightfully acquitted). But it's not the norm.
The normal process is investigate, then charge. It doesn't always happen that way, but it's the normal process. And particularly for US federal prosecutors (who tend to be both good lawyers and fiercely protective of their reputations as good lawyers), they will very much want to win the cases they bring.
Epps spent a long time without being charged. I don't know why, but it's at least possible that was because there was a lot of time being spent investigating him to see if they could find evidence to make harsher charges stick, and they couldn't. While it's certainly possible that mining a person's history and communications will turn up evidence of lawbreaking, it's also possible that it doesn't.
But it is accurate to suggest people get charged before the charges are proved beyond reasonable doubt, because that's a thing that happens in court, rather than during the investigation. Therefore putting it forward as one of the criteria in this discussion is unreasonable.
Maybe, but we don't actually have a way to determine whether this portrayal of how the system works is accurate. Taking Rittenhouse as an example again - his prosecutor is on record saying that if it was one of the rioters that killed him, rather than the other way around, he would not have prosecuted. If we lived in that world, how could a member of the public even begin to argue that the BLM rioters are handled with kid gloves? We'd have no access to the internal communications that could shed light on the decision making process, and no evidence to dispute the claim "trust me bro, there just wasn't enough evidence to push for a conviction".
Also, people who believe Epps is a fed are explicitly arguing that this is not a normal case.
Sure, it's possible. If you have enough trust in the system to believe the rules are applied fairly, it's natural to dismiss any discrepancies in how he was treated as "I guess they were investigating him, but didn't find any evidence". My issue with the discourse around Epps, is that the idea that he's a fed is being treated as unreasonable, when there's more than enough circumstantial evidence to raise eyebrows. While there's no smoking gun that he's a fed, there's no grounds to criticize people for coming to the conclusion that he is.
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