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How the halls of Congress were overtaken


DanteEstonia

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What Should Happen to the Capitol Invaders?

https://reason.com/2021/01/08/what-should-happen-to-the-capitol-invaders/

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Much of America came to a screeching halt on Wednesday as supporters of President Donald Trump, driven by unfounded conspiracy theories that the election had been stolen and unwilling to accept his defeat, invaded the U.S. Capitol, shattering windows, storming congressional offices, and fighting with police.

Words like insurrection, sedition, and domestic terrorism were tossed about with angry abandon. Many noted that the Capitol Police seemed a lot more careful and polite about getting the angry mob out of the building than law enforcement in general treated Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, D.C., though police did shoot and kill an unarmed woman during Wednesday's riot. Arrests were few during the incident itself. Afterward, the FBI began to search out people who participated in the trespassing and vandalism for prosecution. Many more arrests followed.

While it's abundantly clear that America is deeply embedded in a populist culture war, it's dangerous to respond to emotion-driven criminal behavior with emotion-driven legal enforcement. After a year of calls to reform America's policing so that officers don't respond to every problem with violence and to reform our justice system so that we don't lock people up for long periods of time unnecessarily, now is not the time to backslide into bad habits.

The desire to "make examples" out of people charged with crimes out of the belief that this deters future criminals has long contributed to America's extremely high incarceration rate. And yet, as we see with incredibly harsh mandatory minimum sentences as part of America's drug war, the cure is often crueler than the crime and is not particularly effective in controlling people's behavior.

And in this case, given that the rioters weren't exactly following pandemic safety protocols, the risk here is that these people may bring COVID-19 into jail with them, potentially exposing guards and other inmates.

Seek restitution, not jail time, whenever possible.

The damage to the U.S. Capitol can be repaired. The responses to the Capitol invasion have echoed reactions to violence and looting that cropped up during Black Lives Matter protests, heavily fueled with whataboutism. Some see media quick to tar all these participants as threats to public order while dismissing the violence and destruction that took place over the summer. Others see police treating these angry white folks a lot more nicely than they do protesting minorities, even attempting to justify the behavior of the vandals.

To the extent that these claims are true, they represent ongoing cultural criminal justice concerns that are part of reform efforts. The Justice Department's response to crimes that took place in the Capitol should align with these efforts to make America a country that incarcerates at far lower rates than it does now.

Resist the urge to pile on more crimes based on a sense of outrage. The U.S. Capitol is not, in fact, some sort of sacred, unsullied fortress. It's a big building that serves as one of many laboratories of democracy. It should not be treated as somehow more valuable under the law because of what takes place in the building. It's the people that make democracy function, not architecture.

For those responsible for organizing and encouraging violence, those who apparently planted pipe bombs, and those who directed their violence toward other human beings (not buildings), tougher penalties should apply, but we should still, when possible, strive for restitution rather than incarceration, making them pay for the costs of setting things right, repair or replace what was vandalized, and cover the medical care of anybody they injured. Federal prison terms should be considered for those we believe will continue to attempt to cause harm or try to foment further violence if they remain free.

Hold people responsible for what they did, and only what they did.

On Thursday evening, Capitol Police announced that an officer on the scene, Brian Sicknick, had died of injuries he had received while trying to respond to the assault on the Capitol building.

The response to Sicknick's death brought out some of the worst instincts of Twitter users, with some people saying that anybody who participated in the invasion of the Capitol should be held accountable for the man's death.

Take note of this tweet from Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.) on his personal account:

Every single #MAGA rioter who committed a felony in relation to the death of the US Capitol police officer can be charged with felony murder.

Also, @realDonaldTrump needs to resign immediately. https://t.co/ViviuQOyik

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 8, 2021

 

He's referring to the rule of felony murder, a legal doctrine that allows prosecutors to charge a person with murder if somebody dies during the commission of a felony, even if the offender played no role in the person's death and did not intend for anybody to die.

The felony murder rule is terrible. It's not justice. It should be eliminated. We should not be convicting people of murder when they did not, in fact, commit murder. I bring up Lieu's tweet here because California, the state he represents, mostly eliminated its own version of the felony murder rule in 2018 (though it is worth noting that killing a police officer remains its most significant exception, and so it would still apply here if this all took place in California).

There are many, many penalties we can throw at these people, and federal prosecutors habitually charge defendants with any possible violation they can unearth in order to intimidate them into plea bargains. The only people we should consider charging with murder are those who are actually responsible for Sicknick's injuries.

We have enough laws to address this invasion and don't need more.

There have been dozens of arrests related to the assault on the Capitol. Everything any of these people did that harmed a person or property at the Capitol is a violation of an existing law.

It feels important to point this out because, in the wake of any outrage-inducing criminal event, politicians will quickly come forth to try to take advantage of the situation to introduce laws to make the government more powerful and increase the punishment and incarceration of citizens.

President-elect Joe Biden says he is open to passing more laws to address domestic terrorism, possibly including "red flag laws" that allow the government to forbid citizens from possessing guns even if they haven't been convicted of crimes out of fear of what they might do.

If Trump's presidency has taught us anything at all, it should be that the federal government is extremely powerful. What happened on Wednesday is a result of poor planning and police control, not a result of the government not being powerful enough to stop it.

Fox News pointed out that these trespassers could face long federal prison sentences thanks to Trump's call to prosecute anybody damaging federal monuments, an executive order he put in place to go after antifa members.

Nobody should face 10 years in federal prison for breaking windows, or stealing a bust, or destroying chairs. That's not a proportionate response. That's anger and disgust channeled through the halls of authority, not justice. It will not create peace. It will create martyrs. It won't prevent future violence—it will foment it.

Make sure these people are aware of the mercies extended to them.

There is an irony, of course, that many of these same people believe in the same extremely harsh forms of justice that Trump does. They see antifa everywhere. Some cynically attempted to blame the invasion on antifa. They refuse to accept the harshness of the criminal justice system because they aren't typically the targets.

Resist the instinct to "teach them a lesson" by making them the targets. But do make sure they know exactly what could have happened. Make sure they know that it's only because of the activism of the very criminal justice reformers they dismiss that they're not being treated the way the federal government treated criminals in the 1990s.

In a country that values liberty, what does "justice" look like for the men and women who trespassed in the U.S. Capitol? We should consider what's appropriate on the basis of the reforms some Americans have been pushing for years.

Limit pretrial detention to those who may be planning more crimes.

America has a pretrial detention problem. We have half a million people who are behind bars who have not yet been convicted of a crime. This is, fortunately, much less common on the federal level, where there are fewer than 50,000 people being detained prior to trial (this isn't counting immigration holds).

Pretrial detention is intended to be used when there's no other option to make sure defendants show up for court dates or prevent them from committing other crimes while awaiting trial. But the reality is that our justice system has been throwing people in jail because they couldn't afford bail requirements or because prosecutors exaggerate dangers, and then apply pressure on defendants to accept plea deals so that they hopefully stop languishing in jail. Pretrial detention has turned justice on its head by punishing citizens before they've been convicted.

We are also in the midst of a pandemic that has hit jails and prisons hard. We do not need to be filling up jail cells with people who, emotional responses aside, were acting out a deluded fantasy and are likely not an imminent threat. Throughout 2020, Reason covered prisons' mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deaths that followed. Twenty percent of the prison population across the country has been infected with the virus.

 

 

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Your Rioters Are Worse Than Our Rioters

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/your-rioters-are-worse-than-our-rioters/

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This is not the most important observation that one might make after what happened last week, but it’s one that stands out to me: A lot of people seem very keen on litigating whether the attack on the Capitol was worse than last summer’s rioting. That says something depressing about political polarization in this country.

 

Both of these events were horrific, with consequences that will last for years. Must we really assign points to see which side “wins”?

In one corner you have riots — connected to protests against police violence, especially the appalling death of George Floyd and the more complicated shooting of Jacob Blake — that destroyed businesses in cities across the country. This caused upwards of a billion dollars in damage, and if past is precedent, the places that suffered the riots will take years to recover economically. Somewhere around 20 people died. In response, some media outlets ran stories about how effective rioting is, and a liberal data analyst lost his job for tweeting a study finding that riots are actually politically counterproductive. As for the cops’ reactions, there are images of officers kneeling in solidarity with protesters, but also examples of unjustified aggression against peaceful demonstrators, and police killed a man armed with several guns in Las Vegas. 

In the other corner, you have a storming of the nation’s legislature, which interrupted the counting of Electoral College votes, on the false grounds that the election was stolen. Five people died, including a police officer, and the building was ransacked. And things could have gotten much worse: Two explosive devices were found nearby, and some rioters had zip ties. The president himself urged his supporters to walk to the Capitol and failed to aggressively condemn the assault as it took place, but few journalists, on either side of the political spectrum, made excuses for what happened. There’s abundant video of the crowd assaulting police officers, and the cops used tear gas and killed one woman as she climbed through a window to the Speaker’s Lobby — yet some videos appear to show cops opening doors for the invaders and taking selfies with them, and by all accounts law enforcement was disturbingly outmanned.

Sure, you can have a scintillating late-night dorm-room discussion about how to weigh the rioters’ purported political motivations, the damage they did, the respective police responses, and the behavior of elites who should have known better. But in the end, these were both failures at all levels, and our first priority should be to make sure neither happens again, rather than to score partisan points.

 

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The Left’s Reichstag Fire

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/left-reichstag-fire-soft-totalitarianism-social-credit-system-live-not-by-lies/

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n 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler took power, a Dutch communist allegedly started a fire in the German Reichstag building. Hitler used this act as a pretext to begin seizing dictatorial powers. The term “Reichstag fire” in popular culture refers to an event, possibly a false flag (historians can’t agree on whether or not the Reichstag fire was started by a lone communist, a communist acting with others, or was a false flag by the Nazis) that serves as a pretext for repression.

If you are only just now coming to this blog via social media, you should know that I have been a sharp critic of the Stop The Steal movement from the beginning — you can look it up on this site — and that I am disgusted and appalled by what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday. Yesterday, I predicted that the Left and the liberal Establishment would use the failed Beer Belly Putsch as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people.

 

Well, here we go. Here’s commentary by Oliver D’Arcy at CNN. Excerpt:

“Fox and Newsmax, both delivered to my home by your company, are complicit,” NJ state Assemblyman Paul Moriarty texted a Comcast executive on Thursday. “What are you going to do???”

“You feed this garbage, lies and all,” Moriarty added to the executive, according to a screen grab of the texts he provided me. Moriarty was referring to the fact that Comcast’s cable brand, Xfinity, provides a platform to right-wing cable networks that have for weeks been disseminating disinformation about the November election results to audiences of millions.

Moriarty has a point. We regularly discuss what the Big Tech companies have done to poison the public conversation by providing large platforms to bad-faith actors who lie, mislead, and promote conspiracy theories. But what about TV companies that provide platforms to networks such as Newsmax, One America News — and, yes, Fox News?

Somehow, these companies have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation. That should not be the case anymore. After Wednesday’s incident of domestic terrorism on Capitol Hill, it is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth: that he lost an honest and fair election.

Yes, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin and others are responsible for the lies they peddle to their audiences. But the TV companies that beam them into millions of homes around the country also bear some responsibility. And yet we rarely, if ever, talk about them.

When Black Lives Matter protests turned into mass riots, where were the calls to suppress CNN, The New York Times, and other media that constantly repeated the BLM message, and the general message that America is a bastion of white supremacy, whose regime lacks legitimacy? They didn’t exist. They didn’t exist because this is a free country. I read the Times every day, and on some issues, it’s more or less a propaganda sheet (its Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project is clearly intended to delegitimize the American founding). But the state and any other authority had better keep its hands off the Times, and all other left-wing media.

The idea that a journalist, Oliver D’Arcy, is calling for a discussion on whether to deplatform and suppress other journalists — including a direct competitor — is chilling. But I am certain that it is a sign of things to come.

Yesterday Simon & Schuster cancelled a deal with Sen. Josh Hawley, who was under contract to pen a book about the tyranny of Big Tech. I was bothered by this, because I don’t like to see anybody lose a book deal, and because I think Big Tech deserves a hell of a lot of scrutiny by Congress. But then Hawley issued a statement calling it “Orwellian” and a violation of the First Amendment, and I decided not to participate in defending Hawley’s book deal. It is not “Orwellian” or a violation of the First Amendment. All publishers retain the right in their contracts with authors to cancel books pre-publication (trust me on this; I’ve written five books). Whether or not it is morally correct for a publisher to do so is a different question. I stood up for Woody Allen in his fight with his publisher last year over this issue. Hawley is free to shop his manuscript around, and any other publisher is free to buy it and publish it. To call this “Orwellian” and unconstitutional is cynical, manipulative hype. While I wish S&S had stuck by its commitment to publish what I expect will be an important book, the fact is that Josh Hawley, by his own actions post-Election Day, has made himself a uniquely controversial figure, one central to one of the most shameful events in American political history. What Simon & Schuster did was regrettable, from my point of view, but within the bounds of reason.

I bring this up to say that not every attempt to marginalize a dissident-right voice is unjustified. Take too the case of Paul Davis, a Texas corporate lawyer who Instagrammed a photo of himself on Capitol Hill, at the riot:

ErJiTO7XYAIkJ2G.png

 

His company fired him. I can’t blame them. He is a lawyer, and he participated in a riot. To be fair, if he did not enter into the Capitol, I would have given him the benefit of the doubt. But the fact that he was tear-gassed means he was at least very close to the action. The event itself was a shameful act, and I can’t blame a company for wanting to separate itself from one of its house lawyers, especially one stupid enough to put evidence of his participation in it on social media.

That said, will it stop with Paul Davis? I doubt it. I expect many companies to pink-slip employees who were photographed at the Trump event, even if they were nowhere near the invasion of the Capitol. If it happens, it will be extremely unjust, and dangerous. If photographic or other hard evidence existed of an employee participating in one of last year’s race riots existed, a company would be justified in firing that employee. But not everybody who marched in those protests intended to riot, or be at all tied to criminal activity. There would be no grounds to fire them.

Nevertheless, I expect corporate America, goosed by left-wing activists, to undertake a purge of any employees who publicly expressed sympathy, on their private social media channels or anywhere, with Trump, MAGA, or the election protest. This has already been happening in some hospitals over gender ideology. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. Similar politically correct loyalty oaths are required at leading public and private schools.

De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America. … A Soviet-born US physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that he never posts anything remotely controversial on social media, because he knows that the human resources department at his hospital monitors employee accounts for evidence of disloyalty to the progressive “diversity and inclusion” creed.

That same doctor disclosed that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.

Do not think that your many years of service or your expertise will save you if your company or institution’s HR department finds evidence that you are now or ever were a sympathizer with MAGA. We are about to enter into a full-blown political and moral panic, led by the institutional power-holders. Glenn Greenwald is a man of the Left, but yesterday spoke out courageously against the coming repression. Excerpt:

There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses.

This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.

Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized.

I argued that not because I believed the threat was nonexistent or trivial: I lived in New York City on 9/11 and remember to this day the excruciating horror from the smell and smoke emanating throughout Lower Manhattan and the haunting “missing” posters appended by desperate families, unwilling to accept the obvious reality of their loved ones’ deaths, to every lamp post on every street corner. I shared the same disgust and sadness as most other Americans from the Pulse massacre, the subway bombings in London and Madrid, the workplace mass shooting in San Bernardino.

My insistence that we look at the other side of the ledger — the costs and dangers not only from such attacks but also the “solutions” implemented in the name of the stopping them — did not come from indifference towards those deaths or a naive views of those responsible for them. It was instead driven by my simultaneous recognition of the dangers from rights-eroding, authoritarian reactions imposed by the state, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. One need not engage in denialism or minimization of a threat to rationally resist fear-driven fanaticism — as Barbara Lee so eloquently insisted on September 14, 2001.

I hope we listen to Greenwald, but I doubt we will. The disgusting assault on the US Capitol, and on the constitutional process of certifying an election, by Trump fanatics was a great gift to the authoritarian, repressive Left. After last year’s riots, the Establishment accelerated the implementation of race-radicalism as re-education within US schools, universities, and other institutions. And now, that same Establishment can be expected to accelerate even stronger ideological measures to suppress anything it regards as dissent — and that will eventually mean the expression of ordinary social, religious, and political conservatism, even by people who never liked Donald Trump.

This is what it means to live in a pre-totalitarian society.

But turning to the Right, you know what it also means to live in a pre-totalitarian society? Read Declan Leary’s TAC account of being at the MAGA rally on Capitol Hill when it went off on Wednesday. Excerpts:

Another chant begins, though I can’t tell if it’s the same woman. Whoever it is, she calls out, “Where we go one…”—more than a moment’s pause as she waits for a reply—”…we go all.” As the day goes on the chant becomes a staple, and as the crowd becomes familiar the pauses disappear. It’s a slogan closely associated with QAnon.

As I approach the Capitol I see a big man standing at an empty wheelchair, snapping pictures of the scene; I wonder if I narrowly missed a miracle. Just past him a young black man with a bullhorn and a carefully groomed Afro chants “Biden loves minors” over and over as the crowd streams by. A young redhead—with a nose ring, a mustache, and black clothes adorned with a subdued American flag—is the first person I see who looks ready for a fight.

There’s scaffolding set up for the planned inauguration, and protestors have already climbed it in one spot, a narrow stand facing the building in line with the police barricade. There’s a rainbow flag up there, and I wonder if it’s the same one I saw earlier, or if they’re scattered through the crowd. An old man is dressed as Uncle Sam; the climb up a chained ladder can’t have been easy for him.

The crowd is packed in tight, and a cacophony of competing shouts merges into a stereophonic roar. I pick out bits and pieces. To my left I hear “We don’t need Gitmo,” and I’m not quite sure what’s meant by it. From the same general area comes “I’ll donate a vaccination—.223 hollow point.” A little less ambiguous. Somebody with a megaphone is in the middle of a speech: “If you stand for nothing, you gotta stand for something.” Close enough. A young woman with a bullhorn of her own lets out a lone motherfucker. An older man looks at me with a smile and asks if she kisses her mother with that mouth. A few seconds later the same voice drones at nobody in particular: Pussy, pussyyyyy, pussy, pusssaaaaaaayyyyyy.

More:

While thousands leave, at least as many linger. Though Pence has been gone for quite a while—he evacuated when Congress did—one of those who stays is taunting him in a singsong voice: “Mikey, I’ve heard rumors about you.” Chatter in the crowd indicates it’s an accusation of pedophilia—a running theme among the gathered demonstrators.

On the train ride home—the car packed for the first time in months—one woman tells an attentive audience that she’s seen video online of John Roberts raping a young girl then shooting her in the head. Meanwhile, another—well-dressed, in her 60s, and sitting with her husband—reads aloud from Facebook on her phone. The rioters who invaded the Capitol building were not Trump supporters at all, she says. They were Antifa and BLM infiltrators, each and every one of them. Nothing violent or illegal was done by any of the thousands whose indignation was so clear, so forceful all around the building. This can’t have been us. We should not believe anything to the contrary.

Read it all.  Leary says that

When Congress reconvenes at night, the establishment will be openly hardened against the right-wing resistance that boiled over today. Some will declare it dead, banished from the GOP. But there is something here that will not go away.

He’s no doubt correct. I’ve been looking at the social and other media of some of the people involved in the fanatical Jericho March, and there is not the least contrition or second thoughts about what they have done. To take an especially sad case (for me, personally), here is a piece I did about the hysterical post-election rhetoric from Eric Metaxas. Excerpts:

“It’s like stealing the heart and soul of America. It’s like holding a rusty knife to the throat of Lady Liberty,” Eric says, of the election.”

“You might as well spit on the grave of George Washington,” he says.

“This is evil,” he says. And: “It’s like somebody has been raped or murdered. … This is like that times a thousand.”

This. Is. Hysterical. But there’s more.

“This is trying to kill the American people. This is everything.” And he says to believe otherwise is listening to “the voice of the Devil.”

Think about that. An Evangelical broadcaster is saying that Donald Trump’s election loss is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, equivalent to the murder of a nation. And if you don’t believe it? You are demonized.

And then this:

“Everybody who is not hopped up about this … you are the Germans that looked the other way when Hitler was preparing to do what he was preparing to do. Unfortunately, I don’t see how you can see it any other way.”

More from that December post of mine:

Eric Metaxas doesn’t care what the courts have said. In a clip that starts right here, he says,

“So who cares what I can prove in the courts? This is right. This happened, and I am going to do anything I can to uncover this horror, this evil.”

Evidence, or the lack of it, does not matter. He is declaring as a matter of faith that Donald Trump won the election. How can you argue with that? You can’t. It is a statement of faith.

So, when he talks about doing “anything” he can to fight this thing that is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, what does he mean? Quote:

“We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.”

There is no way around it, and it grieves me to say it: Eric Metaxas is calling for violent bloodshed to defend Donald Trump’s presidency, and he doesn’t care that Trump’s lawyers have not been able to prove in court that Trump had the election stolen from him. He told Charlie Kirk that he is willing to kill or be killed for a political cause for which there is not enough evidence to advance a court case, even among friendly judges.

This is fanaticism. But according to Eric, to disagree with him is to be under the sway of the Devil. Actual quotes:

“This is sacred. … Every American should say I really don’t care what it takes, we will not let this happen in America.”

“The fact that Republicans would shrug, it’s just despicable, it’s very clarifying, and I just believe God is in this, what can I say?”

“I still feel that those of us who know this is massive fraud, we have no choice but to fight.”

He knows because … he just knows, is all. God is in it, after all. It’s holy war. He says too:

“Everything’s at stake. America’s at stake.”

“If we don’t get our people in … we go over the cliff, and we don’t come back.”

If you really believed that, then of course you would be willing to kill and be killed for the cause. My God.

You can hear and see Eric say all these things in this Charlie Kirk interview from December 9. 

Well, now five people are dead, including Trump fanatic Ashli Babbitt, who was as rabid about Trump as Eric Metaxas was. Here’s a link to a New York Post story about Babbitt, including a barking-mad video she posted about Kamala Harris. You should watch it, and consider whether you want this country to be ruled by people like that. I went back to read her Twitter feed from early December until now. It’s full of QAnon garbage, such as:

Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-2.23.15-PM.png

Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-2.21.51-PM.png

And so forth. Lots of this stuff. And, of course, this:

Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-2.11.52-PM.png

The Washington Post has published video from one of the protesters, showing the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. You really should watch this. She was at the forefront of an angry mob that had reached the doors of the Speakers Lobby, which, had they gotten in, would have given them access to the House Chamber. The WaPo has this map:

Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-5.28.32-PM.png

That’s how close the mob was to the Chamber. At the start of the video, you can see, behind the closed doors, members of Congress. Police are trying to keep the mob from going through the doors, but the mob chants, “F–k the blue! F–k the blue!”, and starts bashing the glass on the doors. Eventually the police move away, and the crowd keeps bashing. The doors begin to give way. An officer inside the door points a gun at the mob. Someone yells that he has a gun. The mob does nothing. Then the police officer fires. A bullet hits Ashli Babbitt, who later died.

The only person responsible for Ashli Babbitt’s death is Ashli Babbitt. The officer who shot her was doing his duty. But there is on MAGA media talk about how she is a martyr, and was assassinated by the Deep State, etc. Such rot.

See, though, Eric Metaxas spoke openly about how “we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” And now this lunatic woman, hopped up on this kind of rhetoric, died assaulting the US House of Representatives. For what? This is how her life ended. She alone is responsible for her death, but I wish that people like Eric, who juiced up their listeners with talk about the necessity to shed blood to defend Donald Trump, would feel even the slightest bit of remorse for their rash rhetoric.

Not gonna happen. Not yet, anyway. He’s doubling down on the MAGA-mob mentality:

Screen-Shot-2021-01-07-at-8.23.36-AM.png

He is not the only one. As I said, this is painful to me, because Eric is a longtime friend. He has given over his fine mind and sweet spirit to madness — madness that has now resulted in the same bloodshed that he was telling his listeners they needed to be prepared to submit to as recently as last month. Notice, though, in this tweet of his from Thursday, he is already deflecting blame for the event onto Antifa. This is all over MAGA social media, this idea. Nope, couldn’t be them. All this bad stuff was surely Antifa. Friends and readers report hearing this from their own social networks, and family members.

Listen, if you have been a regular reader of this blog for a while, you know that I have been hell on the ideological Left for pushing its fanatical theories. My book Live Not By Lies goes into detail about how the identity-politics Left is laying the groundwork for a form of totalitarianism. That has not changed one bit as the result of events this week — in fact, as I claim in this post, these events have almost certainly accelerated the Left’s plans.

But no honest person can deny that Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees have also accelerated it by their actions. And they too are going along the totalitarian path. In Live Not By Lies, I have a chapter on Hannah Arendt and her study of how Nazi and Communist totalitarianism came to power. A sign that totalitarianism is at hand is the willingness of large numbers of people to quit caring about the truth, and to prefer ideology. Excerpt:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

Add “for Donald Trump” and “for ‘Make America Great Again'” to Kovaly’s list. This is not a left-vs-right thing. This is about the power of ideological narrative to conquer hearts and minds — and nations. Ashli Babbitt’s road to her own violent death began when she opened her mind up to the lies of QAnon and Donald Trump.

As you watch that video on the Post’s site — the one of the events leading up to Babbitt’s shooting — think of this passage from Live Not By Lies:

The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

Or maybe because they saw in these mobs a wave that they could surf to political power. This, I think, explains Sen. Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz. You read Declan Leary’s account of embedding himself in that MAGA mob on Wednesday, and you will see examples of baseness masquerading as liberation.

This has long been a facet of the Left. It is now undeniably a facet of the Right. I have long complained in this space that responsible liberals have allowed totalitarians to thrive on the Left because they lack the courage, the wisdom, or the conviction to stand up to them. It is now undeniably true on the Right as well.

The difference is this: Trump and his fanatics have been unmasked. We know where their brand of ideological madness leads: to a mob attacking the US Capitol in an attempt to stop the constitutionally mandated certification of an election. The Establishment will now use everything in its power to suppress anything related to Trumpism — including plain old conservatism. Because the left-wing extremists have honeycombed Establishment institutions with their sympathizers, the Left will now benefit from popular disgust with Trump’s legacy, and use this moment to consolidate power.

The social credit system is coming. Repression is coming. Guilt by association is coming. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I feel sure that any real opportunity the Right had to stop it was trampled underfoot by Donald Trump and his mob, who were willing to throw everything away to live by the lies of QAnon, Stop The Steal, and late-period MAGA. We on the Right who were not part of this movement are going to have to pay a steep price for what they have done. Don’t misread me: we have to fight it as hard as we can, and hope we can prevail.

To my Christian readers, I say again: read the signs of the times. We are in a Kolakovic Moment. Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the Croatian priest to whom I dedicate Live Not By Lies, escaped the Nazis and hid out in Slovakia, in 1943. He immediately set himself to preparing the Slovak church for the persecution he knew was coming. From my book:

By the time Father Kolaković reached Bratislava, it was clear that Czechoslovakia would eventually be liberated by the Red Army. In fact, in 1944, the Czech government in exile made a formal agreement with Stalin, guaranteeing that after driving the Nazis out, the Soviets would give the nation its freedom.

Because he knows how the Soviets thought, Father Kolaković knew this was a lie. He warned Slovak Catholics that when the war ended, Czechoslovakia would fall to the rule of a Soviet puppet government. He dedicated himself to preparing them for persecution.

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. … The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

Father Kolakovic’s bishops denounced him as an alarmist, but he did not listen. He understood what was happening, and what was going to happen. He taught the Christians who were willing to listen not to be passive, to assume that it couldn’t happen there. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the might of the Red Army. He taught them how to use their freedom to prepare for what was coming.

This is what we have to do right now: use our freedom to prepare to resist. Do not listen to the lies of the MAGA diehards, whose fanaticism has been a blessing to the would-be totalitarians of the Left. Do not allow yourself to think that you will be protected because you never supported Trump, Stop The Steal, or any of it. The attack on the Capitol — which was unquestionably a MAGA affair — is the Left’s Reichstag fire: a pretext to begin the systematic oppression of all opposition.

If you thought the Left’s soft-totalitarian rhetoric of smashing rights and liberties for the sake of creating a “safe space” was bad before, oh baby, just you wait.

UPDATE: Since posting this, I learned that Twitter has permanently banned Donald Trump. I feel exactly as Denny Burk does. Trump deserves it — but this will not stop with Trump. Don’t you believe for a second that it will.

I have two feelings at once:

1. I’m really thankful the daily bile infecting the national consciousness will not have a platform anymore.

2. This is a really bad precedent. Really bad. This will likely lead over time to banishment of non-PC speech on social media platforms. https://t.co/JBoU5wSynC

— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) January 9, 2021

 

UPDATE.2: More:

1. NEWS

Apple has given Parler, the social network favored by conservatives and extremists, an ultimatum to implement a full moderation plan of its platform within the next 24 hours or face expulsion from the App store.@RMac18@JohnPaczkowski report https://t.co/eP3AF9o7FZ

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 8, 2021

 

Let me repeat, in case I was not clear enough: resisters and dissidents against the coming soft totalitarianism cannot afford to waste themselves listening to QAnon and MAGA lies. This is real, and this is serious. We need to think as clearly as we can.

UPDATE.3: This is true:

Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-6.46.32-PM.png

UPDATE.4: Five minutes ago, I thought that the problem is not really going to be Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer, but the faceless people in corporations and institutions. Then I read this new in the WSJ:

President-elect Joe Biden characterized the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday as domestic terrorists, referring to the violence as “one of the darkest days in the history of our nation.”

“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Mr. Biden said in remarks from Wilmington, Del. “They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”

More:

Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.

Well, here we go. Do we not have laws now capable of dealing with the thugs who invaded the Capitol? Do we need more laws? Of course we don’t — but we are going to get them, because we have to made America a Safe Space™.

UPDATE.5: A Catholic reader e-mails:

Big tech controls information. I have a pseudonymous Twitter account. The only information that comes up automatically is left wing ideology and anti-conservative views.

Lyotard predicted this in his Postmodern Condition, that information would become a commodity and in the postmodern world information, like everything else would be used for power. Perhaps this isn’t new, but when a small number of people control the information the power becomes centralized.

I used to think that money could stop these idealists from shutting down differing views, but I think they are going to go after everyone from Fox News to conservative radio. Even if they don’t shut them down, they will neuter them.

The Girardian mimetic snowballing is occurring and the Left now views almost half of Americans as the scapegoats.

Catholic bishops have been practically silenced. Many of them have already capitulated to Biden, most notably the Cardinal of Washington. Even within the USCCB there will be dichotomous distinctions between the “good” left and the “seditious” right.

Priests will be silenced by their bishops who will not allow them to speak out for fear of retribution. Or bishops will use the tactic of allowing priests to speak boldly until the mob comes for them, then the bishops will sacrifice the courageous priest and do a “Pontius Pilate.”

Keep writing for as long as you are allowed.

UPDATE.6: This really is astonishing footage. It is infuriating, what that MAGA mob did to this country. I hope every one of these people who can be positively identified are arrested and charged. They are no patriots.

Unbelievable footage from ITV News @robertmooreitv who went into the Capitol with the Trump mob as they stormed it pic.twitter.com/N1wXbWgxOA

— Matthew Garrahan (@MattGarrahan) January 6, 2021

 

UPDATE.7: Columnist Debra J. Saunders is correct, I’m sorry to say:

One thing the right always had claim to was the belief that — unlike Black Lives Matter and social justice protests — tea party and later MAGA rallies were peaceful, if at times profane, political speech.

There have been instances of violence from partisans on both sides, but it was left-wing protests that left cities torched, small businesses in ashes, police forces terrorized and once-vibrant city centers a dystopian mess.

That’s gone now.

When Trump supporters marched from The Ellipse in front of the White House to storm the U.S. Capitol, they went beyond where the black-mask anarchists have gone. President Donald Trump’s front-line troops assaulted Capitol Police.

UPDATE.8: This is important. This was always coming — we just didn’t know what would kick it off.

Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.36.23-PM.pn

UPDATE.9: A reader just sent in a screenshot of a young woman outing the names of her mother, uncle, and other family members on social media, as Trump supporters. She claims that she is a lesbian, and that her family kicked her out for going to BLM marches. I’m not going to post the photo, but of course Twitter is thrilled that she’s turned her family over to the mob. I’m not going to add to the outing by posting the screenshot (my reader did not ask me to, note well). The reader writes:

It’s unfortunate (if true) that she’s been kicked out of her family over politics. But now she’s gone way overboard, outing her whole family to the world, to strangers who are literally out for blood right now. I have issues with some of my family members, irreconcilable ones. But I would never do this. If we’re not loyal to our family, who are we loyal to?

I came across this picture on social media and the person who posted it said:

If y’all ever looking for somebody GOOOO TO TWITTER Cause THEY GONE FIND THT ASS.

They then went on to say they were looking forward to finding out who was at the Capitol Hill protest.

It’s like every specter of Hell’s been unleashed. Combined with the very clear message from every corner of the left today that they intend to crack down on anyone they deem as problematic, it’s obvious where this is going. I hope this all stops soon, but I’m not optimistic at all. There’s going to be blood and it’s going to go both ways. I can’t believe we got to this point.

UPDATE.10: Reader Barlaam of Weimerica writes:

In a former online life, I used to write, from time to time, of the growing sense of dispossession and alienation felt by many Americans, a sense that could assume many forms, and did, many of them undesirable, twisted, and grotesque. Q is one of those forms, obviously. So is Antifa, the allegedly antifascist movement that has at least tacit corporate and foundation support, and supports policies, in many instances, that are at least proto-fascist, formally and substantively.

The contradiction between the ideal America and the reality of life in actually-existing America is the heart of this anomie. That ideal, and that contradiction, are parsed in different ways by different factions. But what the Establishment is doing now – and no, it’s not actually socialism, let alone communism; rather, it’s a technocratic feudalism having strong resemblances to fascism, in a postmodern mode – essentially says to many of these alienated and dispossessed, some on the Left, but mostly on the Right, is that they will never be permitted to resolve this tension, that the contradiction for them will never be lessened, that they will only ever experience a sort of mounting internal exile.

The Biblical metaphor is ‘by the Waters of Babylon’. We should avoid sacralizing the country. The country is not a repository for the deepest yearnings of the spirit. It should, though, at least not stand athwart those yearnings, nor those yearnings for a way of life that feels a bit like *home*.

There are really only two ways this ends: either the population is gradually subdued and torpified in a VR/UBI/social credit dystopia, the way the Japanese were broken after WWII and transformed into bland consumerists with bizarre anime porn fetishes, or some segment of the population revolts, on behalf of the whole. The problem with the former is that the technocrats win, at the cost of every higher value. The Spirit departs. The problem with the latter is at least threefold: you cannot dictate the forms the resistance will assume; most of the forms of resistance will be incommensurable; and most of those with memories of what once was will execrate the resistance, which will appear strange and horrifying to them, because they cannot admit that they failed, and that what they loved about what once was is no more.

I would that some of the good elements of liberalism survived. Civil liberties. Free Speech. I cannot see that they will. Not merely because the social consensus is shattered, but because liberalism was the frame of the Ideal America that died, the Ideal America that her elites killed with three generations of vicious self-dealing and neglect of the country and its people. Associated with what died, what failed, liberalism will probably die, too. Worse still, liberalism was the womb of the Promethean drive for progress, for the material mastery that begot our modern technologies, which are the instrumentalities of our domination by the social credit surveillance state; that drive for mastery was the quest to possess the Ring, and we shall suffer bitterly for it. The potentialities inherent in those technologies entail the death of liberal norms and rights. Power never goes unused. Either someone will use that power for whatever ends he deems fit, and liberal freedoms will be gone, or, somehow, those technologies will be destroyed; but in the latter case, the cataclysm and whatever remains afterwards will have no place for the elements of liberalism that made possible the specific drive for mastery that generated the crisis. At least for a good long while.

The Old Gods have been awakened. Not in the sense of pagan religion. Chthonic forces of darkness and chaos. Just listen to the insane utterances, as of shamans and oracles, of our tech elite, as they ramble on about their transhuman dreams of overcoming Man. They are a fusion of the occult and the highest levels of science. Whatever one thinks of all that, it cannot generate a human politics, a world that will be *home* to human beings. It’s not meant to provide that. And the world that begins with what the tech elite are doing *now*, censoring and canceling and controlling, is the first glimmer of that venereal dawn, the first death in the death of all *human* dreams yet to come.

Florid language, sure. But not without purpose: because if you don’t understand the trajectory of the technocratic elites’ world, or don’t want to see it, for whatever reason, you will never understand why those who resist it do so, and you will never understand why those who resist it resist it in the ways that they do – confused, incoherent, terrifying, often hopeless. You will never understand that you have to let the dead bury their own dead. That the world you loved is dying, or perhaps already dead and gone, and the Resurrection isn’t coming.

To come full circle, Q was a symptom. Antifa is a symptom. They are not the crisis. Last summer was not the crisis, Wednesday was not the crisis. The problem is the world the elites are building, a world that has no place for most of us, is profoundly antihuman, and must be imposed by force, and embodies the death of Spirit. To use the Platonic metaphor, it is a world in which the very thought of seeking to gaze at the Sun can no longer occur.

 
 

 

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https://nypost.com/2021/01/10/what-the-left-wants-to-ignore-about-slain-capitol-police-officer/

On Thursday, Brian Sicknick, an officer with the US Capitol Police, died from injuries sustained during the storming of the Capitol building. Democratic leaders have presented Sicknick as a martyr of the #Resistance against President Trump and his dangerous supporters. 

Reality is more complicated.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described Sicknick’s death as a reminder of the need to “protect our country from all threats, foreign and domestic.” President-elect Joe Biden suggested that whoever backed Trump supports “an all-out assault on our institutions of our democracy.” The day’s violence, it seems, has become an all-purpose excuse to denounce and ­silence anyone not sufficiently anti-Trump.

Yet neither Biden nor Pelosi reckoned with an uncomfortable fact: Sicknick was a Trump supporter himself, as his friend Caroline Behringer announced shortly after his death. Far from sharing the views of the #Resistance, he had written letters to his congressman opposing Trump’s impeachment.

Like many Trump supporters who are now being censored, he ­believed that the system is fundamentally rigged in favor of a narrow elite. He had used fiery rhetoric, even called for regime change in America. 

The people who claim to honor Sicknick have elided these facts. Acknowledging them would undermine their ­effort to label the 75 million Americans who supported Trump as a domestic threat. Already, unelected Silicon Valley billionaires are using Sicknick’s death to justify censorship of views he expressed. Liberals are cheering the limitation of free speech. Leftists are applauding the exercise of corporate power. 

What could lead a man like Sicknick to support Trump? Must it be white supremacy, conspiracy theories or one of the other reasons usually cited by the media? 

What we know of Sicknick’s views tells a different story. Six months after graduating from high school in 1997, he joined the Air National Guard. He was deployed to Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan. A series of letters he later wrote to the editor of his hometown paper give a portrait of his disillusionment with the leaders of the country he served.

In 2001, he described his ­attempt to gain help from his representatives in a dispute with his employer: “I have written a staggering number of letters to elected officials in both the state and federal governments. Only one state senator responded. This is one of the main reasons I will not be enlisting for a second term in the National Guard. I am no longer going to risk my life in hostile environments for a government that does not care about the troops.”

In 2003, Sicknick expressed his growing doubts about the War on Terror: “Our troops are stretched very thin, and morale is dangerously low among them. I’m starting to see an increasing trend of US soldiers asking, ‘Why are we still here?’ ”

He had come to believe that the United States was engaged in an “unnecessary war.” He ­denounced the “arrogant oil hacks that occupy the White House” and complained that the Bush administration had “its hands grasped firmly on the puppet strings of conservative senators.” His conclusion was stark: “I believe we should have regime change right here in America.”

In 2004, he poured scorn on Team Bush’s proposal to ­revive space exploration. Why go to space, he wondered, when “the health-care system is in shambles, and many Americans have simply given up looking for jobs”? 

His rage deepened after the ­release of the 9/11 Commission Report: “Proven ­intelligence failures regarding the war in Iraq and Sept. 11 are troublesome. Why is it that I doubt any jobs will be lost over this? Why is it that I doubt an impeachment would happen? Why do I think the issue will soon be forgotten?”

After serving his country and observing the workings of its government, Sicknick had come to believe that America is governed by a self-interested, unresponsive and unaccountable oligarchy. There is ample evidence to support his beliefs. Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer, both of whom voted to authorize the invasion, have suffered no consequences for their folly.  Nor have the countless other supporters of the invasion who populate Congress, K Street and the think tanks.

The same people who launched a costly and failed war in Iraq now hope to humiliate and silence Trump’s supporters. But the concerns that led to the rise of Trump won’t disappear until our failed elites pay for their mistakes. 

When they smear Trump voters, they dishonor Officer Sicknick’s memory.

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16 hours ago, Muda69 said:

What Should Happen to the Capitol Invaders?

https://reason.com/2021/01/08/what-should-happen-to-the-capitol-invaders/

 

How they used to treat traitors back in the day. They betrayed our country on that day. 

 

Also any GOP senator/house member that helped plan this or support this should be removed from the house and senate. 

 

Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Andy Biggs esp. 

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15 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Much like the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party betrayed the British monarchy?

The difference was that the colonies had no representation in Westminster, which was contrary to the Magna Carta. These seditionists have representation in Washington.

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7 hours ago, TheStatGuy said:

How they used to treat traitors back in the day. They betrayed our country on that day. 

 

Also any GOP senator/house member that helped plan this or support this should be removed from the house and senate. 

 

Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Andy Biggs esp. 

Image may contain: 1 person, crowd, text that says 'LOONEY LIBERALS These are images from February 2011 when 100,000 democrats stormed the Wisconsin State Capital and occupied it for two weeks. Democrat leaders told us "this is what democracy looks like". When Trump supporter do it democrats call it 'insurrection, sedition and a coup'.'

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3 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

The difference was that the colonies had no representation in Westminster, which was contrary to the Magna Carta. These seditionists have representation in Washington.

Perhaps they thought they had no real representation in Washington,  a sentiment I can completely see.

 

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7 hours ago, swordfish said:

Image may contain: 1 person, crowd, text that says 'LOONEY LIBERALS These are images from February 2011 when 100,000 democrats stormed the Wisconsin State Capital and occupied it for two weeks. Democrat leaders told us "this is what democracy looks like". When Trump supporter do it democrats call it 'insurrection, sedition and a coup'.'

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2021/01/08/wisconsin-act-10-protests-vs-capitol-riot-breach-4-key-differences-violence-arrests-deaths-damage/6584619002/

 

From the article:

Quote

Wisconsin's Act 10 protests were overwhelmingly peaceful.

There were some tense moments — including one in which then-state Sen. Glenn Grothman, a Republican, was heckled and surrounded by protesters until then-Democratic state Rep. Brett Hulsey stepped in to diffuse the situation.

Grothman, now a U.S. representative, was in his D.C. office when rioters broke into the U.S. Capitol.

"Obviously there were some of the more outright violent people here," Grothman said Friday. "It never reached that pitch (during Act 10)."

 

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A very well written observation....

https://nypost.com/2021/01/13/the-lefts-bare-faced-hypocrisy-devine/

What a difference a week makes. On Wednesday, we discovered that House Democrats actually support police. They are against mob violence. They believe in law and order. They believe in harsh punishment for rule breakers. They believe in accountability.

They care deeply about civility. They believe words matter. They abhor intemperate rhetoric. They are against coarse language. Fancy that.

They believe in a peaceful transition of power, at least this time, as opposed to 2016. They believe in the Electoral College. They believe in the legitimacy of the people’s vote.

They believe in walls, at least when it comes to protecting their own place of work. They even believe in bringing in the National Guard to quell civil unrest, at least when it comes to preserving their own peace.

They believe in guns, at least when their own safety is at risk.

They revere American history and institutional norms. They honor the Founding Fathers. Hah!

This is what we learned while watching the Democrats in the House impeach President Trump for the second pointless time in 13 months.

We learned that they, almost to a man and a woman, suffer from an acute case of hypocrite-itis.

Where have they been the past four years with these noble ideas that conservatives have been begging them to defend?

Perhaps if Democrats had not normalized and encouraged violence when organized BLM-Antifa mobs began rampaging through our cities, the tragic events of Jan. 6 at the Capitol would not have occurred.

As Republican Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas said Wednesday:

“Last summer the Antifa and BLM riots swept across our country. Businesses were destroyed, cities burned. It was not like the horrible hours we had on January 6. But rather, they went on for weeks and in some cases months. 

 

“So if there’s any silver lining in this dark cloud, it’s that our friends across the aisle have come to realize that riots are bad. We conservatives have known this all along.”

Perhaps if Democrats had not weaponized the intelligence agencies to spy on Trump’s campaign, perhaps if they had not used the Steele dossier to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency and accuse him of colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election, perhaps if they had not hobbled his administration with the three-year Mueller investigation, perhaps more Trump voters would have been willing to accept the legitimacy of a Biden presidency.

Perhaps if Dems had not already launched a spiteful partisan impeachment last year, their efforts to highlight the president’s shortcomings would have fallen on fewer deaf ears this time.

As Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said, it took just 19 minutes into Trump’s presidency for the Washington Post to trumpet: “Campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.” 

“And now with just one week left,” Jordan said Wednesday, “they’re still trying.”

Perhaps if Dems had reflected on their own culpability in the attempted assassination of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana by a Bernie Sanders supporter, their sanctimonious lectures Wednesday would be more credible.

“I’ve seen the evil of political violence firsthand and it needs to stop,” Scalise said Wednesday. “But all of us need to be unequivocal calling it out when we see it, not just when it comes from the other side of the aisle.”

Perhaps if Joe Biden had not spent two years muscling up to Trump, with threats like “I’d smack him in the mouth” and “I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” Biden’s pitch for civility might be more palatable.

Perhaps if Democrats had not spent the last four years calling Trump a dictator, authoritarian, Nazi, Hitler, white supremacist, anti-Semite, bigot, racist, hater, dangerous, demented and insane, then the hyperbole they used against him Wednesday might have been more effective.

The Aesop’s fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” comes to mind. Democrats and their media handmaidens have spent four years demonizing Trump, using the most outlandish hyperbole their fevered imaginations could dream up.

So when finally, at the bitter end, when he behaves in a way that angers even his most loyal supporters, there is nowhere left to go in the demonization department.

Hence the absurdity of Wednesday’s rhetoric in the House, as Democrats overreached yet again, traducing the president as a “white supremacist” — or “racist in chief,” as Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan called him.

Instead of impeaching the president, the House could have censured him and gathered a lot more Republican votes.

His refrain since November about having won in a “landslide” was reckless and deluded but it had nothing to do with racism, and his speech at the Ellipse in DC on Jan. 6 explicitly called for the crowd to “peacefully” protest.

How was he to know that the Capitol would not be adequately guarded, and the mob would so easily smash their way inside?

Capitol Police had been left like lambs to the slaughter in part because the cop-hating mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, wrote to the Department of Justice the day before the protests specifically to reject federal reinforcements.

The flexible morality and selective outrage of the Democrats and their media boosters is so dishonest, it makes your head spin.

Why wasn’t BLM probed like this?

 At a thunderous press conference Tuesday, acting US Attorney for DC Michael Sherwin said law enforcement officials are treating last week’s Capitol riot “like an international counterterrorism investigation. We’re looking at everything — money, travel records. No resource will be unchecked.” 

It is reportedly one of the “most expansive criminal investigations in the history of the Justice Department,” with all 56 FBI field offices involved.

Great, but where was that kind of gravitas when BLM-Antifa rioters locked Seattle police in a building and tried to burn them alive? 

Or when police were attacked with bricks and Molotov cocktails, whole blocks were looted and set ablaze at a cost of billions of dollars, and parts of some US cities were turned into lawless autonomous zones inside which people were murdered? For months.

There now are at least twice as many troops guarding the nation’s capital than the total number of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

Maybe it’s not overkill, but the optics also serve the purpose of further demonizing President Trump and his supporters to a worldwide audience. 

That’s why Nancy Pelosi posed merrily for photos outside the Capitol in front of rows of uniforms yesterday. All class, and subtle as a sledgehammer.

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https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a35201387/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-capitol-riot-incident-instagram-video/

When pro-Trump supporters breached the Capitol a week ago, many noted that progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was unusually absent from Twitter and hadn't confirmed she was safe during the riot. She eventually would post that she was okay on social media that evening, but in a new Instagram video last night, AOC admitted the truth behind her initial absent: She wasn't safe the entire time. In fact, she was afraid she would be killed.

AOC described the riots as "a pretty traumatizing event," going on to say, "I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die." Ocasio-Cortez added that she couldn't get into specifics due to security reasons. “I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive. Not just in a general sense, but in a very, very specific sense."

The Congresswoman added that she did not feel safe staying with other lawmakers in the protected “extraction point" because "there were QAnon and white-supremacist sympathizers and, frankly, white-supremacist members of Congress in that extraction point who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location and would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, et cetera. So I didn’t even feel safe around other members of Congress."

 

My first thought is "Snowflake"........Now maybe she can empathize with the many people whose lives, businesses and personal properties were destroyed during the "mostly peaceful" protests that lasted all summer long.

 

 

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8 hours ago, swordfish said:

Now maybe she can empathize with the many people whose lives, businesses and personal properties were destroyed during the "mostly peaceful" protests that lasted all summer long.

When a cop shoots and kills an innocent person in your town, you will then understand. 

I was actually nice enough to use the term "cop" this time. 

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8 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

When a cop shoots and kills an innocent person in your town, you will then understand. 

Nope.  You and I will rest eternally on opposite sides of this argument.  Not that they deserved to die, but so far ALL of the persons killed this past year by LEO's had one thing in common....and it wasn't compliance with orders.....

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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/national-guard-members-removed-inauguration-security-mission/story?id=75343308

A dozen Army National Guard members have been removed from the inauguration security mission, including two who were sent home after vetting for extremist links found an "inappropriate" text and comment, the Pentagon said oTuesday.

Each of the 25,000 National Guardsmen now in Washington assisting with security at Wednesday's presidential inauguration is being vetted by the FBI.

 

I kinda think the odds really favored the 24,988 troops should the 12 have started something........(It's spelled "Overkill" or "all for show")  It is pretty ironic how fast the left became believers in walls though......

 

 

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