This is a complete misunderstanding or misrepresentation of what happened on January 6th. The protests/protestors themselves are the least interesting/consequential part of what happened that day, and the fact that people keep focusing on the protest itself and not why it happened and who caused it to happen is either intentional ignorance or malicious misdirection.
The protest was not organic. It was entirely astroturfed and organized from the top down. On the day of the event, there was an organizing committee at the Willard Hotel directing the entire plan, which had been laid out over the span of weeks to happen on a very specific day at a very specific time. A handful of ringleaders, taking direction directly from political operatives of the sitting president, set in motion a riot with the express intent of delaying the certification of the election and to force the evacuation of the vice president to a secure location, aka kidnapping. The plan was always to use the riot to get the Secret Service to remove Mike Pence from the Capitol, ostensibly for his own safely, but in actuality so they could stop the certification indefinitely and force a constitutional crisis. Approximately 150 elected representatives in congress went along with all or part of this plan, either knowingly or unknowingly.
Many of those political operatives have since been deposed under oath that they knew the things they were saying were lies, up to and including Rudy Guliani. There are text messages saying they knew what they were doing was a crime at the highest levels imaginable and requests for expedited and/or pre-emptive pardons. If Pence hadn't returned to the joint session to complete the certification that evening, there would have been a constitutional crisis on a level never seen before in American history.
The protestors were just pawns of an extremely dangerous political game of historic proportions. Never in the history of this country have operatives of a sitting president conspired to stop the certification of an election or the peaceful transfer of power. Had they been successful, it would have been the most significant political event in US history and one of the most significant in the history of the world, something people would have talked about for centuries. But it was very clearly a political game puppeteered by a handful of people, and the protestors, being merely pawns, should have all been immediately granted full pardons by the new administration, while the ringleaders and political operatives should have been immediately tried for treason. In the time of our founders, those people would have been executed for this shit.
