Janaury 14, 2021 saw the AP publicly hashing out what to call the Capitol riot of January 6. In an article entitled "Riot? Insurrection? Words matter in describing Capitol siege," the AP ran through a list of potential words to describe the events in Washington, DC on that day.
Apparently words still matter—but only when convenient to the left.
After running through a list of words used to describe January 6, from rally or protest to assault, riot, insurrection, domestic terrorism, coup attempt, they determined that mob, riot, or insurrection were the appropriate terms.
The definition of the word insurrection? The AP writes: "an act or instance of revolting against civil authorities or an established government."
But now that riot is coming from the other side of the aisle, the AP wants to make sure that everyone knows when Democrats engage in "an act or instance of revolting against civil authorities or an established government," it is absolutely not an insurrection.
Montana legislator and trans activist Zooey Zephyr was at the center of an insurrection–by AP's definition– when rioters stormed the state capitol this month to stop the House from censuring the controversial state rep.
Riot police had to be called in along with the Montana Highway Patrol to control the rebellion, and many of those who disrupted the House proceedings were arrested.
The AP wants readers to know that that's not an insurrection.
Earlier in April, three state representatives led an angry mob to disrupt the workings of the Tennessee House. They were calling for more gun control after a mass shooting carried out by a trans-identified female against a Christian private school. State troopers had to be called in, an arrest was made.
But for the AP, this, also, was not an insurrection.
In fact, the AP trots out and entirely new definition of the word insurrection to back their idea that storming the capitol and distrupting legislative sessions is absolutely not an insurrection.
"Legal experts say the term insurrection has a specific meaning — a violent uprising that targets government authority," they say. And then the reach back into the 18th and 19th centuries for a definition, though in 2021 a perfectly contemporary definition would do.
"That’s how dictionaries described it in the 18th and 19th centuries," the AP writes deserately, "when the term was added to the Constitution and the 14th Amendment, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University."
The AP states that despite the arrests, those little protests in Montana and Tennessee "didn’t involve violence or any real attempts to dismantle or replace a government," and quote the Harvard professor again to say that "it's wrong to call them insurrections."
Another "keen" legal mind, UNC law prof Michael Gerhardy, told the AP that "Disrupting things is a far cry from insurrection. It’s just a protest, and protesters are not insurrectionists."
In 2021, however, the AP sang a very different tune, saying that the term protest for January 6 was too mild. At that time, they quoted a CBS News exec who said that January 6 "was a lot more sinister than it first appeared," by way of explaining that this is why–at first–terms like protest and protesters were used, though they changed, at the AP's urging, to be more incendiary.
The AP seems stunned when other journalists, it turns out, have not gone along with their definitional change simply because they were told to. Despite the AP defining events in Montana and Tennessee as a protest and not an insurreciton, they write that:
"...conservative social media commentators and bloggers have used the word insurrection alongside videos of protesters at state capitols in attempts to equate those demonstrations to the Jan. 6 attack...
And they claim that the only reasons the term insurrection is being used to describe the disruptions and arrests at the two state capitols is undertake "demonizing Democrats as violent and implying that the accusations against Trump supporters on Jan. 6 were exaggerated."
The AP is used to setting the industry standard, and clearly they are appalled when others don't jump right on board and accept their directives. In support of their own progressive ideology, the AP is changing the defintions of words.
They said that the work black should be capitalized in when used in "a racial, ethnic or cultural sense," but that the capitalize white in the same context would be white supremacist. They demanded the remaking of language to accomodate gender ideology, and claimed that biological sex is assigned by those who see a baby post birth.
They're doing it publicly, and they are explaining very plainly that their rationale for doing so is to diminish their politial opposition and to control the narrative not only of January 6 and Trump, but of Democrat led violence and aggression as well.
Over the course of two years, the AP revised the definition of the word insurrection to go from "an act or instance of revolting against civil authorities or an established government" to being "a violent uprising that targets government authority."
But the truth is that for the AP, one definition of insurrection is admissable when Democrats are undertaking the aggression, but an entirely different standard applies when it's the GOP staging the protest.
Let us not forget the multiple lies that the Democrats and their media lackeys have had to continually spread to justify their use of the term "insurrection" in the first place. After January 6, it was almost as though Democrat lawmakers and media pundits were in a competition to see who could compare the riot to the worst thing.
Kamala Harris compared it to Pearl Harbor, the event that brought the US directly into World War 2. An FBI agent said that the events of 9/11, when American commuter jets were highjacked by terrorists and flown into the World Trade Center in New York as well as the Pentagon, was "nothing compared" to the events of January 6.
The liberal media echoed these deceitful sentiments.
The 9/11 attacks took the lives of more than 3,000 people. January 6 resulted in more than 1,000 arrests, many of them for misdemeanor trespassing charges. President Biden continued to call it a "deadly assault," citing Capitol Police Officers who died after that day for non-riot related reasons, despite the fact that the only person who was killed during the riot was Trump-supporter Ashli Babbit, who was shot by police.
The left lies in order to justify their manipulation of language. When conservatives use the terms they've manipulated, it highlights their hypocirsy and that's why they're so triggered.
