January 7, 2022

On the one-year anniversary of the January 6th insurrection – an event during which four people died, the crowd chanted that it wanted to lynch then-Vice President Mike Pence and more than 700 people (so far) have been arrested, Dennis Prager described the horrific event as a “cathartic experience” for the insurrectionists.

“None of them had daggers, none of them had guns,” Prager said about the catharticized, conveniently ignoring that they were armed with stun guns, pepper spray, baseball bats and flagpoles wielded as clubs.

No, he wouldn’t have joined the crowd entering the Capitol building that day, Prager assured us. “However, they had the precedent of all these leftists taking over state capitals,” he added. Prager only cited one example: a 2011 protest takeover of the Madison, Wisconsin Capitol, which was an overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration against anti-labor legislation. I'm pretty sure no “leftists” have ever stormed any state capital to overturn an election much less brandishing weapons and chanting they wanted to kill anyone.

But all in all, the real significance for Prager is how we should think of President Joe Biden as Hitler. Media Matters caught Prager’s Nazi fiction:

PRAGER: January 6 is a smokescreen like the Nazis used the Reichstag fire. That's all it is. OK? Half this country knows that, half this country doesn't.

Actually, January 6th is nothing like Reichstag fire. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains, the Nazis used the arson of the German parliament (Reichstag) building to claim that communists were planning an uprising to overthrow the state and Hitler used that claim as an excuse to seize absolute power.

So far, Biden has done nothing of the sort. But we know that the January 6th insurrectionists wanted to overturn the presidential election and cause a coup. But Prager is not alone in comparing January 6th to the Reichstag fire. Hitler-admirer Candace Owens made the same crackpot assertion on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show, with approval from the host.

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