You may be right, but I disagree. I think most of the people involved knew quite well that what the were doing was illegal. I mean, I think even stupid people realize that smashing through barricades and vandalizing the Capitol and threatening legislators is at least technically illegal. You'd have to be dumber than dirt not to realize this.
I would agree that most thought it was justified, and expected that, like the revolutionaries they imagined were their brethren, they'd be cheered for it. Those old revolutionaries, though, knew that they were committing crimes that would hang them if they failed. If the new ones did not, it's because they were conned by their leading idiots and their own ignorance into thinking their cause equivalent, and conned again by the same factors into thinking the idiot in charge would not forsake them.