The melodrama and theater of the January 6 anniversary in Congress will be hard to top in terms of hypocrisy. As Members of Congress spent the day telling everyone how traumatized they were about the little kerfuffle last year, the weirdest moment of all came when Nancy Pelosi invited Lin Manuel Miranda and the cast of the musical “Hamilton” to sing a song about democracy.
This was no accident. The Democrats always project their own sins onto their enemies. Lin Manuel Miranda is a supporter of a very real terrorist insurrection group that tried to overthrow the US government, unlike the Trump supporters who marched on the Capitol last year.
Before we get to Lin Manuel Miranda’s connections to this insurrection group, we have to take a look back at the actual group and what they did. Between 1950 and 1983, a Puerto Rican communist separatist group called the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation, or FALN) waged a hot war against the United States, with the explicit stated goal of toppling the US government. You might even call this hot war an… insurrection.
I’ve written about two of the major insurrectionist attacks that FALN carried out previously. In 1950, a pair of FALN gunmen tried to assassinate President Harry Truman at the Blair House in Washington, DC. They came within 30 feet of Truman as he watched the gunfight unfold from his second-floor office. One policeman and one of the insurrectionists were killed in the gunfight. Truman later quipped that he had been shot at by professionals during World War I, so he wasn’t too worried about these yokels. (Imagine any Democrat in today’s “Look at me, I’m a victim” culture saying something similar about a pair of attempted assassins.)
And in 1953, four members of FALN stormed into the US Capitol building, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and proceeded to shoot five sitting Members of Congress. You can still see some of the bullet holes in the walls of the House, which were left there to memorialize the attack. Funny how no one mentioned this incident on the Democrats’ January 6 memorial. All five of the Representatives who were shot survived their wounds. Truman was right: Puerto Rican communists were not known for their marksmanship.
Following the arrests of those four attackers, FALN went dormant for a couple of decades. But it resurfaced in 1974 when the group launched a series of bombing attacks. They blew up the historic Fraunces Tavern in New York City in 1975, killing four people and wounding 50. They bombed another five office buildings in New York City that year, injuring five additional people.
The following year, they bombed the Cook County Building in Chicago – right next to the mayor’s office. Fortunately, the bomb went off on a Saturday when no one was at work.
In 1977, FALN announced that they had planted bombs in 15 buildings in New York City. The first one went off at 342 Madison Street, resulting in no injuries. The second one killed an office worker in the Mobil Building. This prompted the NYPD to evacuate 100,000 employees at the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. Prior to 9/11, this was the largest evacuation of office workers to ever take place in New York City during an ongoing terrorist attack.
Bombings continued to alternate between Chicago and New York City after that. During the 1980 presidential campaign, separate FALN terrorist cells raided the campaign offices of Jimmy Carter in Chicago and George H.W. Bush in New York City. They tied up all the campaign employees and trashed the offices before fleeing.
Later in 1980, 11 members of FALN were captured while trying to rob an armored car at Northwestern University. Back in those days, the FBI was an actual law enforcement agency, rather than the personal gestapo of the Democrat Party. They put the screws to the 11 captured FALN members and managed to arrest nearly every member of the insurrectionist terror group. FALN set off 130 bombs between 1974 and 1980 in their attempts to overthrow the US government.
The leader of FALN, Oscar Lopez Rivera from Chicago, received the longest prison sentence out all the FALN members: 55 years for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the US government. But he didn’t serve the full 55 years of his sentence.
That’s because in late 2016, Lin Manuel Miranda pleaded with Barack Obama to commute the insurrection leader’s sentence. Obama never met a terrorist he didn’t want to immediately crawl into bed with, so he complied. One of Obama’s last acts in office in 2017 – right before Donald Trump was sworn in – was to commute Rivera’s sentence.
Lin Manuel Miranda was so happy about this that he told the Associated Press he was “sobbing with gratitude.” Miranda even put on a special performance of “Hamilton” in Chicago – just for the terrorist insurrection leader Rivera.
Imagine the brazen cynicism of Nancy Pelosi in inviting an actual insurrection supporter to sing about democracy at her January 6 memorial. FALN was still maiming and murdering Americans in terrorist attacks when Pelosi first went into politics. It’s almost as if Pelosi and the Democrats are daring Americans to challenge her on this. She knows that Lin Manuel Miranda is a communist sympathizer of a real insurrection group, and that the January 6ers were simply peaceful protesters. But what are “we the people” going to do about it?
