I'd be much more interested in the people who look like they were there with intent - like the one stepping across seats (in a gallery?) carrying a bunch of restraints and wearing tactical gear, a very concealing mask, a hat with flaps completely covering his ears, etc. That's a person expecting and prepared for trouble and likely working to not be recognized (fully and concealingly masked with no identifying marks in the middle of a crowd of anti-maskers). I suspect if he had a phone with him it was turned off.
Typically investigators will comb photos of the event for him and note additional identifying information and who he seems to be hanging around that they can identify.
If they haven’t already identified him by that point, they figure out where he came from and start combing through “Patriot” events in his area of origin.
He has got tons of identifying traits, he’s wearing fairly particular clothing items with patches in a certain configuration. These people tend to have their "event uniforms" and don’t change it up much.
He will be IDed. He probably has been already.
Edit: Upon another look, I missed the completely obvious on him. His Blue Lives Matter emblem is shaped like Tennessee. There we go.
To add to this: once the suspects are picked up, they will likely be given a long rap sheet and the potential for very long prison sentences. After a consultation with their lawyers and at some future date, the insurrectionists will likely be given plea deals in exchange for 'flipping' on other suspected co-insurrectionists. These deals will depend on the information and testimony quality they can provide. The networks built by social media and police work are likely to be exploited by prosecutors to build cases against the suspected insurrectionists that will result in long sentences for many people. Combined with ample digital evidence, the cases are likely to be very tough to beat.
That is, assuming anyone in law enforcement actually cares about identifying these people. Given that they could have simply not let them out and arrested them as was done with black protestors instead of politely showing them the door, that seems a bit unlikely.
> assuming anyone in law enforcement actually cares about identifying these people
Law enforcement is hardly a homogenous group. We're not talking about a State Trooper deciding whether or not to go after him here. We're talking about the Secret Service and FBI who probably feel accutely embarassed this happened on their watch, and are about to be run by allies of the man these protests were essentially targeting.
How homogeneous of a group they are is irrelevant when they are all driven by the same incentives. The first people that benefit from increases in Authoritarianism are the police. The insurrectionists they are supposed to persecute are the very ones fighting the people that are calling for limiting the influence of the police. Police unions almost universally support Trump. They have everything to gain and little to lose from this.
> The first people that benefit from increases in Authoritarianism are the police
This is not historical. Regular police are usually marginalized pretty quickly in favour of paramilitary goons, while still having to deal with the people, and then having to enforce very unpopular laws in the communities they're from. If you think being po-po in China, Russia, Iran, or Belarus is a high-status or job filled with perks, I have a bridge to sell you.
I'm sorry, where were you when the authoritarian shift from the "war on terror" and "war on drugs", spearheaded by the american right, balooned police budgets and was used to justify massively arming the police and giving them the right to stop and detain nearly anyone?
If you don't agree with that, I guess there's still the fact that the US left has vocally called for a major dismantling of the police and removal of many of their protections this summer. If you don't believe the scales were tipped long ago, that should definitely have done it.
I like your extremely selective responses, just responding to a strawmanned half sentence.
Of course, it's only ever authoritarianism when the others do it.
Interestingly, the George Floyd protests actually caused an order of magnitude more deaths by police than the months of protests in Hong Kong. That isn't the whole picture of course, but it is enlightening how only one of these events is regularly described as authorization. Always the exception.
> but it is enlightening how only one of these events is regularly described as authoritarianism
That's because authoritarianism is:
"a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting"
Hong Kong has great police. The problem for Hong Kongers is that they're in service of an authoritarian government. The US has terrible police, but that's not because of authoritarianism.
Trump has suggested that the FBI may have helped rig the election against him, and has generally been pretty critical of them for years. A lot of the insurrectionists think the FBI is part of the anti-Trump deep state that the insurrectionists want to tear down, at least judging from what I've seen from the talk on sites like Parler among people who were saying they were going to be going to the Washington event.
I doubt that the FBI is going to have any sympathy for the insurrectionists.
Ah, but the feds are involved, and arrests for this seems like a great way to win points with the majorities in Congress. Budget season is coming up, gotta pad your accomplishments!
That's a good point, the ideal strategy might be to do little to stop the events and then later start public high impact investigations and arrests for a few of the involved.
This is what will happen. Arresting them on the spot would have been a mistake for a few reasons (optics for a larger, volatile group, muddying the waters for condermnations of the invasion). Trump is still president for two weeks. I think we'll see action on this on January 21st.
No aerial surveillance was in the air at the time—at least, none of the typical aircraft that show up on OpenADSB during protests in D.C.—so one hopes that there are ground-level IMSI catchers or something similar in use around the Capitol.
> the people who look like they were there with intent
I've heard some of the interviews with them, and almost all of them claimed they were there to undo the stolen election, and some also mentioned wanting to hang all democrats... so it's not like their intentions were hidden.
Elizabeth from Knoxville, TN looking very sorry for herself for getting maced in her attempt to -- in her words -- "storm the Capitol, it's a revolution"
> JOE: The people in this House who stole this election from us hanging from a gallow out here in this lawn for the whole world to see so it never happens again - that's what needs to happen, four by four by four hanging from a rope out here for treason.
I want to know what accounts they're following online, who they might be taking direction from - and whether those people are domestic or foreign.
It's possible these things are entirely home grown, but it's also possible that there were foreign operatives in the crowd or operating behind the scenes.
This is what makes it infuriating that all of them were not immediately taken into custody.
This was, in fact, an insurrection, fighting between the President and the Congress. And the local police took the President's side. This is the sort of crazy nonsense we used to laugh about happening in Third-World countries during the Cold War. Even the Soviet countries were better than this.
Actually we had something similar happen last year in our third world country, when a group of soldiers and supporters led by the president occupied our congress.
Those actions were publicized using our government's verified social media profiles, that have kept attacking every other institution since taking power: Media outlets, Legislative Branch, Judicial Branch, Universities, Electoral System.
Sounds familiar?
Unfortunately we have not had those "fact checking alerts" or limitations on inaccurate posts of their profiles.
Any chance someone from FB, YT or TW reading this? Could you escalate it internally. Country name: El Salvador.
That is demonstrably false. The overwhelming majority of officers did their duty, and physically cleared rioters from the building. Many were injured fighting the insurrectionists. One officer was hit on the head with a fire extinguisher and remains in critical care. Mayor Bowser and the DC Chief of Police said this in their morning press conference [0]:
>"There was a lot of valiant fighting by members of the Metropolitan Police Department," Acting D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee said. "Just a tremendous amount of heroic acts. I have one officer who's still in the hospital right now. He was snatched into a crowd, he was beaten, he was kicked, he was Tased several times. So, yeah, they fought. They fought very hard yesterday."
Apparently our foreign allies intelligence groups don't find it so farfetched. It does help explain the incredible lack of forces, baffling to many in law enforcement, and why Congress has already started firing capital security personnel and accepted resignations of others for such a screw up.
That link is a collection of anonymous quotes speculating on circumstantial evidence. Let's confine ourselves to statements supported by facts.
The injuries sustained by dozens of Capitol Police officers, including one who remains on life support, suggest that if a pro-Trump conspiracy existed then it didn't extend past the Chief. There is zero evidence (so far) for such a conspiracy. On the other hand, the footage of officers fighting huge crowds, dispersing rioters with teargas and pepperballs, and even shooting one Capitol invader dead at close range all suggest they did not "side with the President." [0][1][2][3]
Officers were overmatched and overwhelmed as the result of poor planning by leadership. The AP suggests complacency was to blame, not collusion or conspiracy [4]:
>Both Acevedo and Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner who led the department during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, said they did not fault the responses of clearly overmatched front-line officers, but the planning and leadership before the riot.
>“Was there a structural feeling that well, these are a bunch of conservatives, they’re not going to do anything like this? Quite possibly,” Davis said. “That’s where the racial component to this comes into play in my mind. Was there a lack of urgency or a sense that this could never happen with this crowd? Is that possible? Absolutely.”
And this is just to focus on the US Capitol Police. If we look at the DC Metro Police, "local" cops in the truest sense of the word, they're not at all aligned with President Trump. Mayor Bowser and Acting Chief Contee are not Republicans. See my comment above for a recap of MPD's conduct yesterday.
I am sick of the ACAB mentality which leads to assumptions like "capitol police sided with the President." It is generally untrue, predicated on lies, and counter-productive. I hope my analysis demonstrates that in this case.
EDIT: the US Capitol Police officer who was on life support has just passed away. He died from injuries sustained while fighting off violent Trump supporters [5]. Do you still think that he and other officers “sided with the President?”
Also from the Associated Press - the National Guard was oddly absent from all of this, when they are normally involved [1]. Can that be a fact?
Here's Congress already asking the same questions, and a few more facts supporting surprisingly bad and out of character police behavior [2]. This is only 1 day after the event - give it a few to see if it takes off.
The statements by trained intelligence professional are not facts? Sometimes by looking at evidence and seeing there is likely more going one leads one to dig and find more facts, right?
Many in law enforcement have called what happened ridiculously surprising. Assuming it was all just random bad luck and not investigating it in detail is a sure way screw up again, whether it was bad luck or had some component of insider issues.
Certainly Congress has fired some people over it, some have resigned, and it looks like Congress is certainly going to investigate.
Just a few months ago capitol police certainly had multiple layers of police around the Capitol building, so it's clear they can do that. This time they didn't, despite being given ample warning many in the crowd have been posting for weeks they will storm the building.
So I don't know either way, and neither do you, but these questions are from reputable sources, not some far out left wing rag, so it's worth looking into them.
You should have started and ended here. The officer who died to protect the Congress was still clinging to life when you accused him and his colleagues of treason.
We will find out soon enough if the Capitol Police Chief took part in any real or imagined conspiracies. That has no bearing on the demonstrated actions and loyalty to the Constitution of the vast majority of DC police officers.
I don't think anyone is accusing the officers who were doing their jobs of failures, but military sense demands we investigate why the other security personnel were not on site. That's just security 101.
NATO is just connecting the dots, which is what they are trained to do. Even as an American I have to concede that the conclusions they are drawing are measured and reasonable. Allies losing faith in the reliability of your security personnel is Exhibit A in the case for being extremely careful about who you hire as security personnel.
I can't speak for your country, but in the U.S., this is a well-known phenomenon. The media choose nouns according to their connotation, depending on how they intend to shape the narrative (regardless of the facts).
Our allies have "governments". Everyone else has "regimes". It's interesting to see it turned inward.
Because, almost insanely and extremely worryingly in itself, it seems the Mueller investigation concurred with the controversial opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Presidents are above the law. So he has to be impeached first, then indicted.
There is a theory that a lot of his desperation to remain president is due to a tsunami of legal problems that are all waiting for him to leave office. Not sure what veracity that has but his desperation to stay in power certainly is consistent with it.
Trump is already impeached - which is not removal, but a judgement at the impeachment trial that he is not fit for president. Unfortunately, the senate did not act on the impeachment judgement and thus did not get removed from office.
Impeachment is simply an indictment. We all know indictments work. The famous ham sandwich.
The senate then takes up the indictment and as in every case to date, acquits the president. The bar to a successful removal from office is quite high and is so for a reason.
There is no “impeachment trial” that results in an impeachment. There is a majority democrat house who decided to vote on an impeachment and send it to the senate for a trial. The senate the held a trial and acquitted.
Alan Dershowitz: “The case cannot come to trial in the Senate. Because the Senate has rules and the rules would not allow the case to come to trial until, according to the majority leader, until 1 PM on January 20th an hour after President Trump leaves office. And the Constitution specifically says, “The President shall be removed from office upon impeachment.” It doesn’t say the former president. Congress has no power to impeach or try a private citizen, whether it be a private citizen named Donald Trump or named Barack Obama or anyone else.”
The instinct to arrest political enemies is one of the really bad telltales of authoritarianism, so people generally steer well clear. Unless you think that an example needs to be set so Biden and future presidents know not to act similarly, I see very little good that could come of martyring such a lightning rod... You could get an insurrection that looks hard to defeat, rather than one that merely embarrasses law enforcement.
The real reason that no one ever goes after an exiting president is because there is an unspoken agreement not to.
The moment that the incoming party mounts a legal case against an exiting president, they ensure that the other team will do the same to them.
Also, all other members of congress would become targets. So many of them are enriching themselves through their office that it's best for everyone to just look the other way and move on for the sake of "bringing the nation together."
Edit to add: Imagine the indecisiveness that would be brought to the topic of war. Values are constantly changing. What if in 20 years, your extremely popular decision to invade a country for "democracy" is seen as being built on lies? Many of the wars we enter are unpopular when viewed years on.
Some might consider this a feature, as it may reduce war. But what about that critical moment when you believe war is necessary and justified because a dictator is taking over half a continent? I despise violence, but wouldn't want a leader afraid to step up before a situation is potentially too late for fear of doing time.
Political leaders ending up in prison is not that rare [1]. The United States has historically had better leadership than the sort of nations where that happens, but it's been on a bit of a decline recently.
No sitting president has ever tried to marshal his influence to steal the results of a certified election, because there is an unspoken agreement not to.
That unspoken rule has been broken. Not punishing him to the fullest extent possible ensures that this will happen again. The next time a personality like him gets elected, it might be successful.
I would consider it a feature if the next guy who gets the idea to start an insurrection to think twice, before he pulls the trigger.
By all means, go after Obama or Biden if there is merit.
Go for it.
In fact, let's have ALL the presidents be presidents and not kings. How does that sound to you?
Also you are ignoring the fact that Trump DID go after his political opponents after the 2016 election (and again in 2020). Yet somehow, Hillary Clinton remains free, despite his best efforts.
Trump didn’t “go after” Hillary or any other political opponent in any form whatsoever after he took office. He said a lot of things on the campaign trail and then left it at that.
They are also sending a message to radicalized leftists and progressives that are active in the streets in DC, that they are the enemy and Trump supporters are not.
It clearly does. In some videos, rioters and terrorists can be seen damaging the barricade and police officers scuffling with them and preventing them from getting inside.
But there is at-least one video, that I have seen, no such thing takes place. They just allow the terrorists inside.
Couple this with upcoming news that DC police guard were severely restricted from acting or keeping a presence around the capitol, its really concerning.
In that video, you can clearly see that the police lines had already been breached. Continuing to hold that particular line would have been both pointless, and potentially dangerous. Also read the thread. The person who took the video refutes your point.
"Stop spreading lies": I insist that you retract that. I am giving my observations from the footage I've seen.
"at least one video"
I will take you at your word (more than you seem to have done for me). As it turns out, police officers are individuals, who make individual decisions. The question that is important here is whether they were following orders in doing so, and what the intent of those orders were. Leaping to conclusions seems premature.
You state authoritatively that the video footage supports your statement when you haven't seen all of the video footage. He shouldn't retract anything. You are the one who should retract your statement. Regardless of if they were following orders or not taking actions that benefit the rioters actions is supporting them.
as evidence that the police let them in. But I don't think that that video supports his contention that police just let these people into the capitol building. Do you?
Police officers maybe individuals. But in a uniform, they are supposed to follow orders. If they are ordered to put up a barricade, it obviously is for keeping people out.
Not make "individual" decisions and allow them in, considering the context.
I’m sorry I am extremely concerned that you’re right, that the police did let them in, but how do you know they were not instructed to fall back? There is at least one account, from a journalist, linked in this thread, that suggests they were about to be overwhelmed and therefore were tactically abandoning the post.
And God willing there will be investigations (see Karen Bass’, Claire Mckaskill’ tweets), but shouldn’t we wait for those before we proclaim the police guilty here? By all accounts they were woefully outnumbered at the barriers, the chief resigned under pressure already for the clusterfuck he oversaw and so let’s hope more heads roll if they did wrong, but let’s not say people are spreading lies when we don’t have the full picture. Doesn’t make “us” any better than the obviously-lacking-the-full-picture rioters and insurrectionists when we do that.
A second point. Here you acknowledge that an alternative explanation for the evidence you have seen is plausible, and recognize the need for investigation, but that is not what you said to me. Why not?
I don't have a set point of view. You don't even know me. I am guilty, however, of writing poorly.
I said that it was a meme, and that the evidence in video footage does not unambiguously substantiate the meme. I didn't deny the possibility of the police being complicit. A few confusing videos of a few officers acting in ways that I don't understand in stressful situations (in a police department with over 2000), or the speculation of (so-called) experts that it might have been, just is insufficient for me to accuse that police department of participating in a coup.
In fact, I am urgently concerned that there was a conspiracy by the police department to commit insurrection. I am desperately afraid that it was a coordinated coup. Trump's reticence to provide National Guard support, and the fact that Pence actually gave the order, is very troubling. But I'm not gonna believe catchy easy narratives that push all the buttons. That's how millions of Trumpers got to believing that the election was stolen in the first place.
First, the video you post does not "clearly show" that the police were letting protesters in.
Second, even if in some instances police were letting protesters through, why they were letting them through is a question that must be answered. The most pressing question, from the perspective of the interested public, is whether there were standing orders to let them do so or that there was some kind of conspiracy among the officers to disobey orders in order to do so.
So, do you see the disconnect? you have some (dubious) evidence that some group of police officers let people approach the capitol building, and on the other you have an accusation that the Capitol Police Department took the side of Trump and made a decision to endanger the lives of Congress.
This is not covering up the complicity of an institution. Neither is it shifting blame, because blame hasn't yet been assigned. It is simply a requirement that accusations be backed up by evidence.
I think it is fairly obvious that wrt BLM, the police officers responded the way they did because they the protests were directed at them. BLM threatens police legitimacy, police power, and demanded that those same police be held accountable for the wrongs they commit.
Oh, it's a psyop, but not for that reason. It's to use these morons. To do… this, as hard as possible. This is exactly why QAnon exists, it's the payload for the entire operation.
If your goal was to not get caught, maybe. These people genuinely believe the lies they are constantly fed, in their eyes they will be praised as heros and want the credit. They WANTED to be seen there.
And remove your work ID badge. No joke, the guy with the flag in the picture in this article was identified by people on social media and fired... because he had his company ID badge on.
These people are giving peosecuters a field day, displaying clear proof of multiple federal crimes.
That guy in Pelosi's office who stole her mail (and posed for pictures of both) also gave his name.
"A friend" was detained in protests and illegal parties multiple times, the police will make you identify yourself when you don't have an ID and they radio in or verify your identity with the terminals on their cars. You are obliged to identify yourself when you are "detained", and if you don't in cases like this were there's ample evidence of _at least_ breaking and entering they will arrest you and move on to the next person. They had basically all of the the DC police at their disposal for this, plus the national guard. They can't say they didn't have the resources to identify 100 protesters, I've seen them do it with 20 police officers with bigger groups.
If they are overwhelmed they don't do the verification but they always always always at least write the given identities on a notebook or the car computer.
If they didn't do that when they emptied this building is because someone on the chain of command told them not to. Otherwise they _have_ to do it.
The Metropolitan Police are good at kettling; see, for example, the Swann Street Siege during protests this summer. The objective was to arrest every protestor. That so many people just walked away is mind boggling.
There are videos showing cops waving people in, cops taking selfies with people inside the Capitol, cops gingerly walking hand in hand with insurrectionists.
Underestimating the police necessary is a form of allowing this to happen.
Yeah, maybe there were individuals holding the line, but the police definitely, irrefutably allowed this to happen.
About those selfies. The only ones I've seen are those where the Trump supporters were holding the cameras. Have you seen any where the police were taking shots of themselves with the protesters? A police officer standing passively by while someone takes as shot that includes them seems less ... outrageous.
Yeah, this is the video everyone shows. I don't know what the cop's demeanor is. He's wearing a mask.
As a practical matter, what should the police officer have done in this situation, outnumbered in a potentially hostile crowd?
I'm agnostic on what was actually going on here. I feel cautious about how narrative quickly outpaces the evidence to support it. And I'm honestly not so concerned here about what individual cops do, but whether there was a coordinated conspiracy to insurrection. A coup.
Here is what I believe. This is really very Trump. He riles up the crowd, says he'll go lead them up to the steps of the Capitol, but then gets in his limo and goes to the White House instead. Perhaps he gets the assistance of the capitol police, but that is not established. But he is slow or refuses to provide them National Guard backup (apparently it was Pence who got it done, going around Trump).
All of this is to get a coup with plausible deniability.
If last summer is the standard to live up to, he should have been maiming as many random people as possible, with special emphasis on the photographers and any children that might unfortunately be present.
The Metropolitan Police don't have jurisdiction on Capitol grounds. So perhaps they weren't allowed to do anything without the consent of the Capitol Police.
The way that works with national building is always that they establish a perimeter outside the building and act with that perimeter as a base of operation or whatever is their name for that. A lot of national monuments, reserve areas, national parks, etc... have the same issue where they have their smaller police that never does anything and only patrols inside.
If there's evidence that you broke into a building anywhere in Washington, like, your face or outfit matching 100% the one of someone that was seen on national TV desecrating the building, the Metro police has cause to arrest you anywhere in Washington. There's so much precedent to this it's completely mind-blowing they didn't do anything. If it was so easy to get away with storming the Capitol we would already have a hippie commune in there. The Capitol Police is a joke.
It's even more mind boggling when this protesters were inside a building that the secret service has multiple ways to completely lock down, and the police had the full support of the national guard to for example establish a second secure perimeter. They basically could have pointed two assault rifles at each protester while having a third police office per protester telling them to identify themselves.
This was the chance for the government to show a response of hollywoodesque proportions and they didn't. This makes the US government look like a joke, it's not a functional democracy. If the government actually relied of this nut-jobs to function, as in like if Trump was actually throwing a coup, it's understandable to act in this way. But the fact that no one on the Metro decided to go all in against this clowns is something that I can't understand.
The crazy progressives that think that Trump is literally the reincarnation of Hitler are saying that it's because they are white and this is Trump's paramilitary. I thought that they were crazy living in their own reality but after seeing how they got away with storming the Capitol I'm starting to think that the woke conspiracy theories are truer than I thought.
Yeah I know, but this is not just a protest. If I were a right-wing activist I would already be planning a BBQ on the Rose Garden for Trump's last day on the White House.
They already are. Also, Trump refused to send in the National Guard claiming “his people” were peaceful and that no one was paying attention to the rioters. You may want to do some digging. All of those woke conspiracy theories being spread by crazy progressives like myself usually come from Trump or QAnon supporters directly.
That's what's written but it's not how it works, because "being detained" is usually not stipulated in laws. If you are detained, which the police have ample power to do so if you for example just broke into the Capitol, if you don't identify yourself usually you _will_ get arrested.
So yeah, if you are not arrested you don't have to identify yourself. But if the police show up and you are clearly committing a crime if you actively refuse to identify yourself you will get arrested and you will have to identify yourself.
1. There are laws in every U.S. state regarding what grounds the police have to detain someone. In most states, it boils down to reasonable articulable suspicion that someone has committed, is about to or is in the process of committing a crime. Suspicion alone isn't enough. The police don't need to tell you what their reasonable suspicion is during a detainment, but if the matter ends up in court, they will.
2. There are "stop and I.D." states. If you are in one of these states, you are required to identify yourself if detained. If you're not in one of these states, such as California, you are not required by law to identify yourself when detained. That being said, if you are lawfully detained and subsequently arrested you'll be jailed until you do identify yourself no matter which state you're in.
That is only true in stop and identify states. Being in the building is not itself a crime. Unless there is enough evidence to actually arrest an individual they can just sit there and not say a damn thing until the police are required to release.
There's no city state in the US were the police don't have as part of their operational procedure on a breaking and entering to arrest an individual that exercises their right to silence. That doesn't exist. No Police Department in the US will just let you walk away after they just kicked you out of a building that was violently stormed if you just refuse to identify yourself.
In this case it's even more bizarre and out of the ordinary. The police executed a kettling maneuver but didn't even try to identify the individuals. They don't train police officers with the ACLU "how to act if you are being detained manual" dude, it's the other way around, they train them to try to dissuade you from committing property crimes by actively trying to make you not exercise your rights and identify yourself.
Being in the Capitol while it's on lockdown is enough evidence to get arrested if you can't produce a bagde or something. Letting this people walk out is completely unjustified from the usual DC Metro procedures.
To arrest an individual there would have to be evidence that they were responsible for damage or actually breaking in. That is a handful of the people that were there. The police cannot just arrest you if you haven't broken any laws. If a person just entered after somebody else broke in they didn't break any laws.
It's some kind of wild foolishness here. The guy participated in what's likely legally somewhere in the neighborhood of insurrection and then he stood there as international media was snapping photos and he didn't think to hide his giant nametag...
I'm sure most who ended up inside were just "following the crowd" and didn't actually plan to be there or murder anyone so it's probably not an "insurrection" in how I would personally define it, (as in, some planned execution of a coordinated intent to seize control of the government), but yeah, probably not the legal waters anyone wants to be swimming in.
In the history books, usually a failed coup is followed by either lining the plotters up against the wall without trial and shooting them or a public execution. It's no good
If I was there I'd be assuming that there'd be a whole slew of undisclosed trackers everywhere in that building - RFID readers picking up my credit cards, BTLE and WIFI sniffers picking up my phone, a cell phone interceptor recording my IMEI, facial detection and tracking, etc ... simply dripping in spy devices. I also wouldn't be surprised if they had some special artillery room with military grade weapons. It seems horrendously dumb to enter that building following a mob.
There's a fair bit of evidence to support the hypothesis that these weren't the brightest people.
The police can't ask for your cellphone while you are in the limbo of being detained but not arrested. Once you are arrested they can get a warrant for your cellphone, but getting it unlocked can be a whole different issue. If you are arrested they will usually identify you via face recognition or fingerprints.
Yes most definitely. They also have the infrastructure to do so, but not sure they have the infrastructure to keep them arrested until everything is sorted out.
I don't think parent comment was about confiscating phones rather than identifying which phones were in the area during the infiltration. If you can sort out the ones who had reason for being there, everyone else is a possible culprit.
Legally getting that information from cellphone towers or tech companies and then acting on it would take at least one week, even if they had killed multiple people. A three letter agency could probably get it clandestinely and act para-legally for example putting people on surveillance or getting a flash arrest warrant for an unrelated but quickly to parallel-construct crime, but I don't see that happening in this case.
If there's going to be arrests based on cellphone tower or mobile app data I would expect them to happen by the end of next week.
I think a lot of wannabe insurrectionaries are having a real emotional hangover this morning. Realizing the the FBI is asking uncomfortable questions cannot feel good.
The guy who sat in the speakers chair said through his lawyers he has “regrets” and “got caught up in the moment”. Uh huh, sure. That’s a long way to say “I got caught”.
The funny thing is that a few years ago they would’ve all proudly worn scary masks, but now that performative anti-masking is a purity test on the right a lot of them decided to go and conspicuously show their faces.
Not true. There are multiple previous group pardons where this did not happen, such as Lincoln blanket pardons for Civil War soldiers and Carter's pardons for Vietnam draft dodgers.
From looking at previous pardons, it can simply be "Anyone in DC on Weds or Thurs has any and all crimes pardonded during that time spand and location".
The President actually has the power to simply write "I Pardon Every US citizen of all crime for all time," and it would work.
Go read on some previous large group pardons. There is no limit on what can be done, as the Constitution gives none. There is only question about if the President can pardon himself, which may be tested soon.
With the death of a USCP officer tonight, they are all possible accomplices/accessories to the murder of a federal peace officer, should the prosecutor decide to press charges as such. That's big boy prison time. In DC (though the Capitol is likely different) you are looking at 20-Life minimum for an accomplice to murder in the first degree. With such long time on the docket the pressure to 'flip' on other insurrectionists would be very high. Though the 'average' sentence may be low, the prosecutor has vast resources at their disposal and likely a lot of pressure coming in from Congress to make arrests and show strength.
Very serious prison time is well within the chances for a large number of people.
Imagine if every time a protestor or police officer died in a riot all last year, that people suggested or even expected that everyone there upon present would be charged as an accomplice.
> On Monday June 1, 2020, four police officers were shot in St. Louis City.
The far left rioters threw gas on police. The 7-11 downtown was looted and torched. Across town retired Police Captain David Dorn was shot dead while protecting a pawnshop.
> June 2, 2020: 23 police officers were injured in the protests in Las Vegas, Nevada. One Metropolitan Police officer was shot in the back of the head while struggling with a rioter and is on life support. In Salt Lake City, Utah, 21 police officers were injured and a police car was flipped over and set on fire. Some of the injured officers suffered broken bones. One of the officers was hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat.
The gateway pundit is not a real source, it exists to launder false claims so larger right wing media can say "it is being reported that [misinformation]".
It's not original reporting by the Gateway Pundit. They just happened to rank high on a quick Google search.
Are you actually contesting those two examples? The police officer shot in the head in Las Vegas was international news, as was the 4 police officers shot in St. Louis riots the day before.
Trespassing and walking around a building taking selfies is insurrection, but burning police stations to the ground and torching federal court houses is justified peaceful protesting.
This whole thing is one giant political flame war. There is no logic, only partisanship. Its good that people are realizing how messy politics is, and how it largely comes down to who accepts whose leadership as legitimate.
If the comments in this thread are anything to go by, I'd say they are not realizing it and just doubling down. Its downright disturbing to watch the double standards and hypocrisy.
We will now watch the full force of social media, traditional media, populist talking heads, CEOs, reporters, activists, group leaders, politicians, etc all jumping on this thing to milk it to it's full extent and amplify its negative aspects and blow it way out of proportion. Just like the same power structures were last year used to amplify the "positive" message of certain other protests.
> jumping on this thing to milk it to it's full extent and amplify its negative aspects and blow it way out of proportion. Just like the same power structures were last year used to amplify the "positive" message of certain other protests.
Armed people stormed the US Capitol, after being incited to do so by the current US President, in order to overturn a legal election result. People died as well.
You can't "blow this out of proportion" the same way you can't blow something like Chernobyl out of proportion - it was huge, it has huge ramifications, it impacts a lot of people. There are zero positive aspects and there's nothing redeeming in the whole story.
Update: New reporting seems to indicate that no USCP officers have died this day. Thank Heaven I am wrong in my parent posting.
That said, assaulting USCP officers may also be on the table, though I am completely unsure what the laws are about being an accomplice to such a crime may be. Such a crime likely includes less prison time.
EDIT: My word! Things are still moving fast and I need to reverse my reversal. Per the latest news reports, a USCP officer has died as a result of the insurrection:
Even in a case were someone's life is at risk or an individual is armed, if you get kicked out of a building it usually takes one day until they arrest you at your house. So maybe arrests will happen on Friday.
That arrests didn't happen _on the spot_ in a case like this is utterly bizarre. Arrests happen on the spot for stupider things like people partying on a parking lot and someone trying to hide or run away when the police show up to stop the noise or responding to a breaking and entering.
I know of cases were actual hostages were taken or shots fired or things lit on fire, and it took the DA and the police three days to actually show up at a guys house to arrest him. His identity was all over the newspapers.
Apparently Raphael Warnock, the Senator elect for GA, was arrested in the Rotunda a few years ago for praying there as a protest of GOP efforts to overturn the ACA. [1]
>The delegation, including Pastor Cynthia L. Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, was arrested in the rotunda in the Russell Senate Office Building
It was a trespassing group of chanting protestors that "breached" the lobby of a federal office building and refused to leave. They were arrested because their mob was only a few dozen people.
Technically, interfering with a federal employee's ability to work is a felony. If the letter of the law were followed, that congress woman should be in prison. I think that law is unconscionable.
Yeah, a bunch of people on one hand are saying that they'd all just get pardoned, and another bunch of people are saying that it's weird how nobody is getting charged yet, but for some reason not very many people are putting the two facts together.
You don't need names, or even a list of crimes, for blanket pardons. Examples include Lincoln Civil War soldier pardons and Carter Vietnam draft dodger pardons.
Assuming that you're being sarcastic, your logic is great as long as people who share our beliefs and convictions own and control important platforms. What if something like parler were to gain dominance instead and they start censoring? That said I believe in private property and FB, Google, and Twitter have every right to do what they want on their respective platforms. If people don't like it, then market forces will create alternatives.
Wondering what politicians come up with regarding social media in general, as this incident plus above-average social media presence now finally demonstrate without any doubt their polarizing and amplifying effect, not to speak of foreign influence.
For more than a decade now people on the mainstream parts of the internet have been casually joking about the getting on lists, the feds glowing and generally being mindful that the internet is well monitored and if you're gonna do something stupid you should leave your phone somewhere it can ping a tower to produce an alibi.
I don't think anyone who's more than a spur of the moment participant on either side of things is making the dumb opsec mistakes that the author and these comments are portraying as typical.
Law enforcement people constantly tell us that you can never underestimate the stupidity of criminals. Whether or not they're correct I don't know, but they keep saying it.
What's troubling to consider is that the casual nature of their brazenness really does indicate that they believe either they are doing nothing wrong, or that they are just that unconcerned with the law. During the George Floyd riots, you knew that the BLM people who protested in the morning were a bit different than the people who came to attack at night. This indicates that the people at night knew they were breaking the law. By contrast, these people, in the attack on the Capitol, were so unconcerned with law and order that they didn't even consider hiding. Things like ID tags never even crossed their minds.
I think most people underestimated how stupid hard core Trump supporters are. 90 percent couldn't tell you the square root of 4 or name a single city in India.
Not that I was that worried that "revolution" was currently happening but when I saw nice juicy high-res face pics my first thought was 2-3 days max before HRT or the US marshals are kicking down doors. The effort was so low.
This is precisely it. There have been insurrections before with zero consequences, such as in Wilmington where white supremacists were upset that Black people were allowed to be elected and take positions in government:
Yesterday there was a confederate flag in the capitol halls, something that didn't even happen during the US civil war. Pictures abound of neo-nazi symbols, like a T-shirt celebrating Auschwitz.
These people expect no consequences, and they are probably right. They are still upset that Obama got into the White House.
You should probably mention Portland, Seattle, Kenosha, Chicago, New York as well. The other kind of insurrectionists seem to also have little to fear from the law.
There's a bit of a difference between people gathering and protesting or even rioting in <various big cities around US> and actually storming the US Capitol Building during the tally of Electoral College votes with the intention of, somehow in their twisted minds, preventing that tally and succession to the next democratically elected president.
Why is it that the left is allowed to express themselves through protest and civil disobedience but the right can't plant bombs and try to kidnap senators when they don't like the outcome of an election?
Because of the difficulty of seeing sarcasm on the internet, I think it's worth pointing out that it was a far-right Boogaloo Boy that murdered a cop in California during a standoff, and was in text communication with another Boogaloo boy that is charged with arson in the burning of the Minneapolis police precinct:
The one in 2016? Yes, that was really awful. But when talking about the specific pair of burning down a police precinct and murder of law enforcement I think the reference is to the Boogaloo Bois. Unless your "what about" has a more specific point that you could make more clear for me.
So you are saying that the difference is such that one group should not be prosecuted and the other group should? What criteria are you using to differentiate? Storming government buildings other than the Capital is OK?
How about we just prosecute everyone who breaks the law?
> So you are saying that the difference is such that one group should not be prosecuted and the other group should? What criteria are you using to differentiate? Storming government buildings other than the Capital is OK?
I said nothing of the sort and I don't know how you would interpret my words that way.
From the poster I responded to:
> The other kind of insurrectionists seem to also have little to fear from the law
My response was about the notion that protesters and rioters this summer were "insurrectionists", they were not. At least not as a general rule. Some of them, maybe, probably always are in political protests. But most of them were there to either create havoc (rioters) or protest for change to the way policing is conducted in the US (the protestors).
The people who went into the US Capitol Building on 6 January, 2021 were intending to prevent the carrying out of a legal process to certify the results of a democratic election and, in their minds, prevent the succession of the presidency. That makes them insurrectionists, not just protestors anymore, at least as regards the US Constitution and democratic process.
Besides, protestors and rioters in 2020 were prosecuted. And it's moronic or ignorant to say they weren't.
> Besides, protestors and rioters in 2020 were prosecuted. And it's moronic or ignorant to say they weren't.
That some people were prosecuted doesn't negate the overall acceptance by the left of the violent activity as legitimate political activism because it was in support of particular favored political opinions. The very clear message was that as long as you were spouting the approved political mantras the violent activities were OK.
Attempting to discern who is or who isn't an "insurrectionist" is a distraction.
Trespassing, breaking and entering, looting, vandalism, destruction of property, arson, assault are all crimes that should be prosecuted and not excused if you are committing them while having the correct political thoughts.
BTW, yesterday's opportunists have to be the saddest lot of "insurrectionists" I've ever seen. They seemed more interested in posting selfies than overthrowing anything. They should be mocked mercilessly and prosecuted vigorously.
> No, they were threatening and intimidating lawmakers that were in session to try to manipulate the election. This is an enormous difference.
Sure, it is a difference -- as in not identical. But what do you conclude from that difference? That crimes that are less serious than this should be excused when committed as an act of protest but these crimes are different and should not be excused?
The assertion is that there is a double standard between these types of events. That some riots are excused and yesterday's are not. You seem to be asserting that there isn't a double standard because the events were different in the way that you described and so it sounds like you are saying the different treatment is justified. No one is excusing yesterday's rioters but you seem to be excusing previous incidents of rioting because they were different.
I do think we should prosecute people who break the law. Maybe not every single one of them, but a lot of them. I personally find the cause of BLM to be just and the cause of MAGA tremendously unjust, so if it were up to me I would show more leniency (within the bounds of the law) to the BLM group. Probably fortunately for all parties, though, it's not up to me.
I do think sometimes the intent of a person matters when they've committed crime. This is codified in U.S. law. Killing someone in self defense, killing someone because you're angry with them, and killing someone because they're gay and you don't like gay people: each the same crime, but treated differently in U.S. law. I don't know about arson, but I do think that for example occupying a government building because you want the elected officials there to take action on supporting human rights should be treated differently than occupying a government building because you want your favorite candidate to be president despite losing the election.
The MAGA flavored anarchists and nihilists who stormed the US Capitol Building will hopefully be brought up on as many felonies as possible, tried in court, and ideally spend some real time in a real jail. Even better if they can also track down organizers - who perhaps weren't there - and charge them with racketeering or sedition. It was evil and it needs to be halted.
I also think the same thing needs to happen to the antifa flavored anarchists we were witness to throughout the summer. The endless attacks on businesses (big and small), federal buildings, lawlessness, looting, storming police precints, portland city council buildings, and general destruction should also result in as many felonies as possible.
Both groups "think" that sheer muscle and raw emotionalism in the street is a legitimate way to bully your preferred changes through. It's the same evil mindset and it needs to be called out and punished regardless of what flag they appear to operate under.
I think we’re making the same point, but “organizers of a fascist coup” is a bit rich.
What we saw yesterday will be properly charged as entering a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct on capitol grounds, in limited cases assault on a federal law enforcement officer, and in a single digit number of cases, second degree murder.
No charges will be laid for sedition, treason, or insurrection. Despite what you might read on CNN.
I would say the same thing for all the rioting that happened last year. Even though city blocks were illegally cordoned off and occupied for weeks. Just my prediction.
They stopped an election process at behest of the loser, by invading Congress - a branch of government that was seen as not sympathetic to Trump's desire to overturn the election.
He literally spoke to them right before the event, and insinuated they should take direct action, then waited for hours until he asked them to leave (while still claiming fraud and that their country was being stolen).
It's really annoying to have to point out this obvious context over and over to the people who are minimizing what happened.
If you have the transcript of what Trump said in his address before the protesters marched to the Capital building, I’d appreciate you pointing out the part which you think violates strict scrutiny under the 1st Amendment for “fighting words”.
The word “coup” doesn’t mean what you think it does. Interrupting a political process is not a coup. Protesting an election result is not a coup. Trespassing in the Capital building is not a coup. Posing for selfies and stealing Peliso’s lecturn is not a coup. And doing all 4 of these things at once is not a coup.
What it is? Mostly? Just extremely embarrassing for the people in power and the people who were supposed to protect them.
Calling it a coup mostly just covers for the raging embarrassment of being owned by Half Naked Viking Man.
You’re mistaken if you think I’m defending what happened at the Capital yesterday. I am an ardent supporter of the right to peacefully protest.
I am against any form of violent protest, and as a matter of scale, I’m much more offended by the dozens killed, hundreds maimed, and billions of dollars of damages over the summer than what happened yesterday.
The framing of this particular riot as a coup is nothing but a duplicitous political flame war, and I see the politicization of this riot is a coup versus that riot is a mostly peaceful protest as a dangerous gaslighting of the American people.
1. The overwhelming majority of protests in city blocks did not at all prevent the lawful operation of government or businesses (And those that have did so in a rather limited way). So far, this one is batting one thousand. Congress had to be evacuated. Its operations had to stop, as its members were instructed to shelter in place.
2. I disagree that those are proper charges. Context matters. A mob showing up at the capitol and smashing a few windows from the outside when nothing of note is happening is disorderly conduct.
A mob showing up at congress in the middle of a certification of an election, spurred on by cries that the election is stolen, and we need to do something, where members of the mob think they are participating in a revolution... Is a coup.
It's a naked attempt to prevent a lawful transfer of power. Just because it's a failed coup doesn't make it anything less than a coup.
If you really think that no buildings had to be evacuated during BLM protests I’m not sure what news you’ve been watching or why you want to participate in this discussion.
1. Police stations were burned to the ground. Federal courthouse under sustained assault for months. $2 billion in property damage, thousands of police injured.
2. Those are what people have actually been charged with yesterday. Similarly, just because a BLM protestor is screaming kill all cops! while throwing rocks at a police car, it doesn’t make an attempted murder charge appropriate. Nor should everyone standing around chanting the same thing in the vicinity be charged with attempted murder.
All I ask is for a little logical consistency instead of the absurd political flame war.
The looting was pretty much a direct consequence to how the police handled protests. When you have every cop in the damn city staring at people protesting police brutality with shield and beating stick in hand, opportunists quickly realized they could hit up the Nieman Marcus and make a few hundred on eBay or craigslist because all the police were focused on was testing the limit with protestors and using their shiny toys on people's eyeballs.
Oh for crying out loud. Is it not obvious that in both cases people should go to freaking jail? We do not need to agree on which is the worst crime. Are we so blinded by irrational partisanship that we allow criminals a pass if they are in anyway adjacent to whatever political tribe we belong to? God damn it. This sort of stupidity, of blind, intellectually dishonest allegiance to parties that could not care less for America is what is destroying the country. We are well on our way to at best paralysis and at worst civil war if we cannot step out of our bubbles and condemn bad behavior on its merits. What a pathetic ending for the greatest country of the last 100 years.
Did I say they shouldn't be in jail? Seriously, where in my words did I say that? Is it a coded message that I can't read but everyone else can?
I was commenting on your use of the term insurrection to describe what were, mostly, protests against police brutality (which were often met with acts of police brutality) and trying to establish that those actions were not the same as literally storming the Congress to prevent/delay the presidential election process (a much clearer act of insurrection, even if it was completely moronic and doomed from the start)>
This summer, and in previous years, law enforcement did in fact follow up later using videos and such to try to track people down. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-02/not-so-f... One easy-to-find story discussing both this year and past situations in other cities. And it notes that many looters were wearing masks - because they knew they could face consequences.
If we take one step back, though, to what led to those protests this summer... we see police killing a black man for a minor offence.
Let's compare THAT police action with the police response to yesterday.
Are you suggesting that there weren't lots of arrests of rioters and looters this summer? I believe that many people were arrested any time the protests turned violent or in cases of significant vandalism. I know there were many highly reported arrests in my part of the country from the parts of the protests that went out of control.
Still, they weren't insurrectionists. They weren't trying to put someone in power who lost the election. That's an important distinction. Maybe we shouldn't compare them at all, but if we're going to, what MAGA did was worse.
Indeed, that is why they protected their identities, covered their faces and were arrested on spurious charges by the ten thousands and key figures mysteriously ended up in burnt up cars half a year later.
Thanks for sharing. A lot of the narratives about police helping them did seem a bit over the top. The videos don't look great but it's also easy to cherry pick videos and photos to make it look like that. That being said, it still doesn't explain how lenient they were on the mob, while in other instances during summer protests they were far more aggressive.
In the very scene where the girl got shot, if you look from a different angle, you see there were a dozen riot police behind them doing basically nothing [0]. I have yet to find a satisfying explanation for it, considering the protesters were literally smashing doors and windows. [1]
Sometimes people interpret explanation as justification. Particularly when they are upset.
To say that the police felt threatened by protests aimed at the police, and that because of that, the police acted more brutally than they otherwise might have, is not a justification of police brutality. It is an explanation.
That's the relevant point, not whether or not the cops removed the barrier. The cops knew that hundreds of protesters were planning in on breaking into the capital building to assassinate senators, and purposely didn't send anyone to stop them. The whole thing was literally planned in public on social media.
The capitol police shot one of them in the head, teargassed and wrestled with the others, so they have exactly every reason to believe otherwise.
But sure, some short video of cops removing a 3' tall baby gate, circulating on social media without context, makes a great basis for suggesting that the police and these hooligans were collaborating.
I know you're being intentionally obtuse, as is the fashion right now, but I'm going to give a straight response to this for anyone genuinely engaging.
We don't know what went through that officer's mind. If you're standing watch and someone stands next to you and clicks a photo, is there anything you can and should do? Should you, as the officer, wrestle him to the ground, knowing there's a riotous mob right behind him?
But even if it's the case that the officer enthusiastically posed for the photo, it's probably best not to understand police like a monolithic entity operating perfect information, but rather as a group of heterogeneous actors working in a fog that limits their awareness. Otherwise, if you extend the "one officer did X therefore the motives of all officers are established" logic you quickly get really stupid contradictions. Over the summer, I saw several photos of officers kneeling in solidarity with BLM protesters -- I guess that means all police everywhere support the aims of the BLM movement now?
Probably not, because police aren't a monolith, and subsequent police actions contradict that solidarity. Likewise, police teargassing, manhandling, and shooting these other protesters also paints a more complex landscape than "one officer took a selfie, therefore they're all collaborating."
I mostly kept it brief because I was browsing on a phone.
I'd have no concerns had that selfie pic been taken outside at the original rally, but once that group had broken into the Capitol building everyone there was present illegally. That is not the time to pose for pictures, even if the situation or orders are such that you're not able to make arrests or expel them.
I'm not sure the one who shot is from the same organization. He was wearing very different gear, and the rest of the police force was not cooperating with him.
Here's the video of right before the girl got shot [0], you can see a dozen riot police behind doing absolutely nothing as the mob smashes the windows and doors. I'm not claiming they were helping, but they also were nowhere as brutal and aggressive than the riot police we saw in the summer.
I'm not aware of any BLM protesters being shot by police during the summer protests, so right off the bat, this is a really weird comment you've written. Shooting a protester in the head is already worse treatment, isn't it?
I'm also not aware of any BLM protester smashing through a barricade while there were a handful of armed guard on the other side repeatedly warning them to back off or they would be shot, but still jumping through despite the warnings [0].
During the protests, the police had no issue shoving people to the ground [1], but at the capitol it looked very different [2].
> I also don't recall BLM protesters threatening the leaders of our government in a real and material way
Accepting your description of events for the moment -- is it your real, sincere belief, that this is the distinction that matters? I find it very hard to believe that, if these protests had been relocated around the corner to the Supreme Court -- or maybe to the DOJ building, or the Lincoln monument -- yet producing the exact same results, that you or anyone would just shrug their shoulders and write it off.
But that's what I'm reading from your comment. And if that's right, it's fucking insane.
Political violence is political violence, full stop. If your instinct in this moment is to rationalize how the violence going towards ends you support is different from that which goes towards other ends, put your phone away and seek help. You're part of the problem.
The women got shot for breaching the the final barrier into the Capitol building, where a security detail was protecting the Vice President and members of Congress.
It's impossible for me to believe you are unaware of the circumstances surrounding her death.
Getting shot with a lead bullet is different than a rubber bullet. Of course the crime is different etc, but you can't really compare lead bullets with rubber bullets. Rubber bullets can be lethal, yes, but lead bullets many orders of magnitude more lethal.
It's elementary crowd control. When there's too many people to manage, you block the largest cohesive groups from coalescing any further and ignore small pockets instead of letting the big groups into the zone you're trying to protect.
Seems like Capitol police should have covered that in their first day of training.
Are you professional trained in crowd control, or just an armchair speculator like me? I imagine that at some point, they are trained to fall back if at risk of being surrounded.
Either way, my point is that it is that there isn’t evidence to support conspiracy theories that the capitol police were somehow in on it, which are circulating.
In those cases the defendants didn't know they were talking with government agents, whereas in this case they knew the person telling them to do this was the president. And it's much harder to claim that these people were criminally predisposed when it was Trump who was telling them that the election was stolen. I realize that proving entrapment is a very high bar, but I don't you can infer anything relevant here from those FBI cases.
> “This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
> He had spent so much time among like-minded people who hated Lincoln, and he had read so many accounts denouncing Lincoln as a tyrant bent on destroying the Constitution and "personal liberty" that he expected to be hailed as a hero.
This is the sad truth. And it is for this reason that those who instigated the riot, who lied to them, be held accountable.
(the Proud Boys, Nazis, right wing militias etc. who were involved have no such sympathy from me. but the people who showed up because they believed the election was stolen do--I cannot blame them for their credulity, and ignorance, our society has failed them. democracy does have to be defended, after all)
To understand why people do the things that they do, it is necessary to consider things from their point of view.
It seems that you think I am disputing the outcome of the election. I am not. I am merely pointing out that different people see things differently, that differences in belief can be sincere, that acting on those beliefs can be honorable, even if those beliefs are mistaken. And finally, I made the point that Trump, his enablers in Congress and in his administration and in the media, perpetrated this lie and must be held accountable. For they turned what is a noble impulse--to defend democracy--into a threat to our democracy.
(I also wanted to distinguish these people from the organized extremists who appear to have been carrying out a planned operation with the probable intent to carry out violence)
1. U.S. elections aren't decided by popular vote.
2. Biden won narrowly in swing states.
3. The dispute is whether or not the votes cast were legitimate.
You can dispute whatever you want, but by every legal process, your "dispute" has been settled. When does it end?
That's of course ignoring the fact that Republicans actually gained seats in the house, that Trump would have to overturn the results in multiple states, that said states have Republican leadership overseeing the election.
But here we are.
Fact is, at some point (now) your claims of "dispute" are no longer worth entertaining.
Literally have not had a single victory in court (but over 60 losses). These cases are being thrown out by Republican judges, judges appointed by Trump even. What is your standard of evidence?
> You can dispute whatever you want, but by every legal process, your "dispute" has been settled. When does it end?
The Constitution sets no statute of limitation under the First Amendment to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
> That's of course ignoring the fact that Republicans actually gained seats in the house,...
How often do you think this happens? That a president will gain seats in Congress and still lose re-election?
> Fact is, at some point (now) your claims of "dispute" are no longer worth entertaining.
Are you not entertained?
> Literally have not had a single victory in court (but over 60 losses). These cases are being thrown out by Republican judges, judges appointed by Trump even. What is your standard of evidence?
Almost all of these court cases were dismissed for procedure, jurisdiction or standing reasons and not for the merits of the case. Is that your evidence? [0]
But since you asked, here's an exhaustive compilation. [1]
In almost none of those cases did the Plaintiffs actually present evidence of fraud. In fact, in many cases, when asked, the lawyers explicitly denied that they were fraud cases. So if the evidence was so strong, why wasn't it presented to the court? Your 2cd best bet is to blame incompetent lawyers, but my money is on the crappy quality of the so-called evidence. Like where they said Michigan counties over-counted but they counties were actually in Minnesota.
>> That's of course ignoring the fact that Republicans actually gained seats in the house,...
>How often do you think this happens? That a president will gain seats in Congress and still lose re-election?
Given the non-linearity of the Electoral College, Trump's historically low approval numbers, the difference in geographic and institutional levels between Presidential and House elections, and over-the-top gerrymandering, I don't think that its so unlikely to be suspicious.
In the last 100 years, only four or five incumbents lost re-election, so empirically there just isn't enough data to establish a frequency (and even then, lots has changed, in the last 100 years, so who knows, right?). So what you really have is a mental model that says if a party wins in Congress they should win in the Presidential too. Well, in 1960, John Kennedy won, but the Democrats lost 21 House seats, and in 1992 Bill Clinton won the White House and the Dems lost 9 seats in the house, and in in 2000 George Bush won the White House and the Republican Party lost 2 seats in the House, in 2016 Donald Trump won, and the Republican Party lost six seats.
I might also mention all those Republican governors in blue states...
I know what you are going to say. That doesn't match the exact scenario where an incumbent lost but their party gained seat. But you need to justify why that particular scenario is relevantly different than ones that have already been known to have occurred.
Yes - this is the root of most evil. It's perfectly possible to be far from center on most topics and still not "pick a side", but this is lost on more and more people.
Also, no outrage in the MSM about police shooting and killing an unarmed female protester. This summer I was told that this was a very bad thing indeed.
I guess the situation here is different than what happened in Minneapolis because...well...its different.
The circumstances were completely different. I feel quite bad for the lady that died yesterday, but she put herself in a dangerous situation. That pig shouldn't have shot her in the neck.
You mean how quickly the right wing media made up some completely made up narrative with altered and misleading photos trying to rebrand known white supremacists and QAnoon followers as antifa and BLM protesters? And how quick these people who constantly complain about "MSM fake news" were to spread it all over the internet without any fact checking on their end?
It wasn't even a mistake, it was clearly intentional. The photo of Q Shaman was intentionally cropped to remove the QAnon sign, and the phillyantifa website was clearly listing white supremacists. The people spreading that knew all this, yet they still decided to spread it.
I wasn't, all of them were spamming the "they were antifa and blm" on every single platform yesterday. Youtube, reddit, tiktok, etc. You couldn't go to any discussion about the events without seeing hundreds of them spreading this exact debunked talking point above.
So if the cops shoot and kill an unarmed protestor, as they did yesterday, then the protest is bad. Otherwise it's good. That's... an interesting rubric.
Four people that died in yesterday's insanity were protestors themselves. Three were "medical incidents" and one was an unarmed woman who served her country shot by the police.
The woman who was brainwashed into storming the capitol, forcing police to shoot her, is equally a casualty.
Show me a BLM event where 5 people were killed. You are comparing how many events to 1 event?
And let's not forget the reason BLM were protesting and the aggressive response from police, versus whatever the fuck that was yesterday.
From your link:
> Nine of the people killed during protests were demonstrators taking part in Black Lives Matter protests.
So your number is actually 9. Not 25.
Also, how many police were killed by BLM? My count is zero.
Funny to see you rush to defend the liars and the conspiracy theorists.
From your link:
> ACLED found that the overwhelming majority of the more than 9.000 Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took place across the US after the killing of George Floyd have been peaceful.
Over 9000 protests compared to 1. Interesting! Are you sure you are making the case you think you are making?
Maybe we should consider addressing real issues before they become violent protests. The BLM protests called out real injustices with some being more clear-cut than others. The violence at protests was often used to discredit the movement. This gave conservatives cover to brush aside any demands for change. I understand condemning violence, but if you use the other hand to enforce the issues that lead to protest it seems insincere. I think this is why the Obama admin had some success quelling BLM protests while they became worse again under Trump. I think the general dismissal, and backtracking on Obama's reforms resulted in what we got.[0] Some might even attribute those changes to manufacturing an "other" in order to solidify political support.
The protest in the capitol yesterday was based on a fantasy: Trump's refusal to accept his loss, and continued reinforcement of election conspiracies. How can you address what has already been explained, but one side refused to accept?
> Maybe we should consider addressing real issues before they become violent protests.
> The protest in the capitol yesterday was based on a fantasy: Trump's refusal to accept his loss, and continued reinforcement of election conspiracies. How can you address what has already been explained, but one side refused to accept?
You don't see the problem here? Maybe you don't see the election dispute as a "real issue". But approximately 40% of the country does.
A significant portion of the country opposes BLM, too, by the way.
I saw it as a real issue. The problem was Trump kept bringing up already discredited theories. Then when disputes came to court they weren't even about those theories. After the third or fourth time this happened I quit following along, and decided the courts would settle it. I'd guess that 40% skipped the little research I did, and has only been following the discredited theory part. Get rid of Trump and we're on the way to reducing the spread of unfounded theories though. I don't know how to fix the rest. Good education maybe, but higher education is looked down on as liberal elites.
I'm aware BLM has become a wedge issue. There are issues they took up like civil asset forfeiture, and reforming mandatory minimums that have widespread appeal. These could be implemented if we had both parties willing to work together to find common ground. Instead Trump calls Kaepernick a son of a bitch, and Pence walks out of a game for a stunt. Then a whole movement is demonized so the issues can be dismissed outright.
Ah yes, the both-sidesism next. Next you’re going to tell me that since right wing terrorism results in so many more deaths than left-wing terrorism does, that we should discount those murders to make the sides seem “equal” still.
You are assuming the intentions of the rioters yesterday were just "antigovernment" when they were really "pro-Trump," who is head of the federal executive branch, last I checked.
He has been whipping them into a frenzy for the last 4 years. Do you not see the irony in Trump calling out the government constantly when he sits in the most powerful seat?
Is that why John Sullivan - founder of the far-left organization "Insurgence USA" and BLM of Utah was there filming and participating? Who would have thought he was a Trump supporter.
It's well known that there were many Anarchists there along with Antifa and BLM activists. It's just the media won't feed that story since it doesn't fit their narrative.
You and I will never know the whole story or the truth...
That's less plausible than the most likely scenario, which is that these idiots voluntarily attached their social security number to their pathetic insurrection. The FBI happened to just recieve all this valuable information for free.
Sometimes I wonder if people have any original thoughts anymore or if free will is a lie and we are all just an amalgamation of memes that came before us.
70+ million voted for Trump. This is a widely supported populist movement, which is only going to get stronger in the next few years as people rebel against further lockdown and having their livelihoods destroyed.
The left should be careful about who they label as terrorist and insurrections. People generally don't admit to being wrong. And backing his supporters into a corner, by projection will not go well.
As far as populist movements go, trump lost both times.
He got the presidency due to Electoral Collage.
>The left should be careful about who they label as terrorist and insurrections. People generally don't admit to being wrong. And backing his supporters into a corner, by projection will not go well.
"We are huge in number. We will riot and tear down the capitol. The others need not interfere with us because we are dangerous and we will act." - Is this the gist?
Man, you are too eager to cast aside your country and countrymen because you only think about you winning.
>The left should be careful about who they label as terrorist and insurrections. People generally don't admit to being wrong. And backing his supporters into a corner, by projection will not go well.
So... we should be careful not to call the Trump movement terrorists or what they did insurrection, otherwise... what? What does "backing his supporters into a corner, by projection will not go well" mean? Violence? Sorry, more violence?
Sounds an awful lot like a threat of terrorist intimidation to me. But I don't know. I mean, I don't want the Proud Boys to slip an IED under my car so I guess I should go along with it? For the good of the country?
In fact we probably shouldn't arrest any of them. What insurrection? What pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails? Let's just make it so nothing they do is illegal - we don't dare threaten them or their self image, after all. Who knows what they might do? They can storm the Capitol as many times as they want. Hell, the next time they run a car into some protestors, we'll even cut their auto insurance premiums!
You are not going to arrest millions of people. Thats just fantasy, unless you want full on civil war. For all the contempt you feel for Trump voters, they feel the same for you.
This thing escalated when it could have been resolved with just a proper audit of the vote totals by and independent panel in the disputed states. The supreme court should have taken the case, and resolved it. Unfortunately the Supreme court chickened out. And the disputed states governors fought tooth and nail a proper audit.
As a result Trumps people protested a contested election because they feel cheated. Some of them breached the barricades in the legislature. A Small group of them entered just for kicks and selfies. There's no reason to label all of them terrorists, there was no violent intent for most of the protesters. Its called "The Peoples House" after all, and Democrats have occupied legislatures too during protests.
You need to consider that human being are very sensitive to being treated unfairly. Right now its looking like an extreme double standard will be applied with how the BLM protesters were treated and how these protesters will be treated.
The audits were done. Polls were watched. Close elections recounted. Discrepancies explained. None of it matters to Trump. He stuck to the same narrative. We heard it in the Georgia phone call. Even now he won't back away from it, and as long as he maintains the election was stolen a large number of his followers will too.
If you do this "full audit" he will just find more things to string it along just as he has done the whole time.
The system investigated itself and found no wrong doing, is not the same as a third party audit. Its possible that Trump would continue to dispute after a proper third party audit, but that would have lost him a lot of support from reasonable people and republicans.
Right now millions of people still feel the election was rigged, even democrats and independents. They just chose to move on.
> You need to consider that human being are very sensitive to being treated unfairly.
You cannot treat someone fairly if they refuse to acknowledge basic evidence and decide that no matter what things are unfair. At some point society has to decide that fair is not a moving target defined by a group with a martyr complex.
>Right now its looking like an extreme double standard will be applied with how the BLM protesters were treated and how these protesters will be treated.
They are - peaceful BLM protestors faces multiple layers of federal law enforcement on the steps of buildings, yet Trump sprayed them anyways. They did not smash and enter the Capitol, which would have likely gotten them shot. On the other hand, this group tried to stop the lawful counting of electoral votes and overthrow the US government, they broke in to the capitol building and attacked congress, and the police did not stop them going in or going out.
So yes, there was a double standard. The right wingers as usual got much softer treatment than black people did.
Do we let Enron audit its own books?
Its not a martyr complex to ask for a proper independent audit of a closely disputed race. Especially when paper mailed ballots, huge vote spikes and computers are involved.
You are arguing from conclusion.
It's a martyr complex to ask for more and more and more audits after many have been done, all according to law. You do want to follow the law, right?
There were all audits requested as done by law, some states had multiple recounts done, all with the same result. At some point asking for more and more recounts when you don't like the original several becomes ridiculous. These audits were done in many cases by lifetime Republicans.
Trump had 60+ opportunities to present fraud in court. He did not provide actual fraud in any single case, this he lost them all. He presented nonsense and no evidence and hearsay and handwaving, which is why every judge, even Trump appointed judges told him so. In PA, Trump appointed federal judge even dismissed the case with prejudice it was so ridiculous, and now in multiple states the lawyers presenting those cases without evidence are facing legal consequences.
And, no matter how or what happened, there is also a legal time window to resolve it in. That window is over. There is zero legal method to do so now - consider the statute of limitation has passed.
At some point you become an adult and realize this is the law. Claiming to be the law and order party should give you some respect for the law, but apparently it does not.
So - do you now want to no longer follow the law when it doesn't suit you?
I'm not an american, so I only care tangentially. But the election was shady as F. Over 1000 sworn affidavits from witnesses. Video evidence of votes being pulled out in middle of the night, from under tables and scanned multiple times while observers told to go home, crazy one sided spikes. and so on. But lets say I take every plausible explanation they came up with at face value.
What exactly is the point of voting in your state running legit by the book fraud proof elections, if another state isn't going to verify signatures to make sure there are no fraudulent ballots? Even if your legitimate election state is won, the unsecure election state will nullify your state with their electoral count. Specially if the state has more electors than your state. Because the Supreme Court said it doesn't matter.
You are also making appeals to law, which is fallacy because all kinds of Rogue states have laws too that they follow.
The number of affidavits is a rather meaningless number. The quality of the affidavits is much more important, and those have been found much less impressive by courts.
> What exactly is the point of voting in your state running legit by the book fraud proof elections, if another state isn't going to verify signatures to make sure there are no fraudulent ballots?
If that other state's laws don't allow signature matching or make it optional, then that's their prerogative; states choose how to run their elections, after all.
It doesn't mean you have to be happy with their choice, by any means, but it's still their choice.
> Even if your legitimate election state is won, the unsecure election state will nullify your state with their electoral count.
How do electoral votes from one state "nullify" electoral votes from another? One state's electoral votes will get counted regardless of what other states do.
> Because the Supreme Court said it doesn't matter.
The US Constitution says states get to choose how their elections are run. If one state doesn't like how another state runs their election? Too bad.
>if another state isn't going to verify signatures to make sure there are no fraudulent ballots
Because states don't have that right, in the same way France cannot reject an election in the UK. States are independent in this sense.
Next - all this claim of fraud is simply ignorant nonsense. Every state has public records of who voted. Every election lots of govt agencies and research groups sample these to find this claimed fraud ignorant people keep claiming. Trump and co immediately went through these and found no fraud - how do you know this? Because immediately they started releasing names of a few they claimed were fraudulent votes, such as claiming a voter was dead but voted, and in each case the media showed the Trump team the claim was wrong - there was another with the same name, or the voter voted then died, etc. They got these names from looking at the lists of who actually voted and trying to find discrepancies. They could not. They likely even polled people on phones or email or whatever, and again found none. Otherwise they would have reported that statistical sampling shows the claimed outcome does not match statistical samples. This would be proof, easy enough to demonstrate, and irrefutable. But it didn't exist.
So, after team Trump didn't find any fraudulent votes from sampling, which is the correct and the most reliable way to demonstrate fraud, they turned to the smoke and mirrors claims, which you keep repeating.
Now, if you want to continue those claims, why not simply demonstrate fraud from the state voter lists? It's pure math that you can sample these, then poll people you sample, and see if there was fraud.
There was not enough fraud to remote affect the election. This is the proof, and it was tried (and is still being studied by research teams like after each and every election).
As a final point - Trump raised around $200M on the back of his fraud claims, supposedly to help fight legal cases, but the money went in to Trump pockets instead of cases. If he thought there was really fraud, why didn't he use this money for the cases? Because he knew it was a lie, but one that would raise money for him.
But yes, while I agree that those who actively attacked police officers will get more jail time, those who essentially treated it like a mob-tour of the Capitol will not.
The single individual or 2 who killed the cop will likely get decades of prison, yes.
But you are living in fantasy land if you think that hundreds or thousands of people who were in any way related to the rioting will get anywhere near the same amount of jail time.
So yes, for most of them it will be a couple months max and a felony in their record.
Just because they failed doesn't make their goals any less true. There are interviews of them openly saying they want to hang every democrat and undo the stolen election.
Once their name is found on social media through their photo, it would not take much effort to go from there to their LinkedIn and find out who their employers are.
As we've seen in the past, it's not hard to call a company out on Twitter with information about what their employee has been up to and I reckon it's likely that this will happen.
Trying to "fix" election by force when both EC and popular vote point to a different candidate than the mob wants isn't trying to do good for democracy.
I don't recall any governor who ran on a platform of, "here are all the possible scenarios that could impact anyone in my state and how I would approach them."
You vote for a governor because you believe they will make a decision you generally agree with when presented with facts. Your vote says that for the next little while you think this person would represent your interests, no matter what happens. Some governors have mild terms, others have catastrophes they have to navigate.
No governor lists all the powers granted by previous legislatures as things they are running on. If you don't like them having such powers, elect people to remove such powers.
That you don't like it does not mean the majority of civil society doesn't like it, and the price you pay to have civil society is having laws not every single person likes at all times. But the mechanism is there to pursue change.
If the voters had known that their governor would exercise virtually unlimited powers based on what amounts to a little known emergency powers dictatorship clause - would they have voted for him? If not, do these governors really have the consent of the governed to do these things willy nilly of the legislature's blessing?
List the state where you think governors used powers not granted to them by the legislature.
If you, as a citizen, are unaware of public laws passed by your legislature, then you cannot blame the governor for using them during an emergency. It's your fault for not knowing the law, which in probably every case, has been public knowledge for decades.
I know in the states near me, MI, IN, OH, all the states have various powers granted to the governors, and I have known about them and the powers granted for two of the states for over a decade.
When you get surprised by things you didn't know but could have easily known beforehand, don't get so upset that someone is tricking you. They are not.
>If you, as a citizen, are unaware of public laws passed by your legislature, then you cannot blame the governor for using them during an emergency. It's your fault for not knowing the law, which in probably every case, has been public knowledge for decades.
The publicity of a law among tens of thousands of other laws is irrelevant. Government authority comes from the consent of the governed. Citizens do not give consent to something just because its on the books. People have jobs and real things to get done in their lives. They cannot and should not be expected to waste their time crawling through hundreds of thousands of pages of legislation, let alone have the legal background to interpret all of it. Imagine how much of an asshole you sound like right now: "Oh, your family business went bankrupt because of lockdowns? You have no right to complain, you should have studied § 46.2-872. Didn't know about it? Too bad!"
Public polling and widespread non-compliance suggests that governors lack the lockdown orders lack the consent of the governed.
No politician ran a campaign on enforcing lockdowns. Nothing was put on the ballot, no votes were held. Where is the consent of the governed to all you who worship democracy?
Who voted for or against the lockdowns? If something this important was never held to a vote either directly or via representative, its not democratic.
I don't understand why this exact pattern of argument happens so much in online debate, but I really despise it.
Acrobatic_Road makes a reasonable point that they don't feel they were given the proper means to express their policy preferences, and reasonably calls it 'undemocratic'.
After all the reason we want democracy in the first place is so that ordinary citizens can influence the policy.
Chillwaves reasonably points out that America is a representative democracy and so you vote for candidates whom you trust to vote in accordance to your policy preferences.
That's two great points! We should be able to have an interesting discussion right? For example we could discuss ways in which the US system of representative democracy is failing Acrobatic_Road. We could also discuss why we might like it despite its failings.
But for some reason, online debate seemingly always end up in an inane discussion debating definitions with one side claiming X is not truly Y while the other side claims X lives up to standard definition of Y.
Nobody is any smarter. We entirely failed to learn anything from each others perspective.
You seem confused as to the purpose of democracy. It is not to capture the wisdom of the crowd. The crowd is intensely stupid (as a vote on lockdown would certainly reveal). It is an agreement that power will change hands peacefully.
You're just wrong about this. A democracy is the rule by the people. That's why the Declaration of Independence says rulers derive their just powers from the governed. Democracies aren't particularly good at ensuring a peaceful transition of power as history shows (just look at the Roman Republic). "Peaceful transition of power" is a phrase that's not even relevant to other forms of government where one administration rules indefinitely.
>The crowd is intensely stupid (as a vote on lockdown would certainly reveal)
Oh, thanks for admitting that lockdowns are undemocratic.
Do most people have linkedin accounts? For some reason, I thought it was mostly aspiring thought leaders and people trying to sell books or recruiting.
Genuine question: would you guys be saying the same “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” about the Boston Tea Partiers if you’d lived back then and they’d failed?
I think I would. IMHO either you cross the Rubicon or you don’t. None of this shaking your foot over the water’s edge at your enemy and then acting surprised when they shoot your foot off. Also I realize I’ve mixed historical events and I apologize.
Shouldn't the first question be "would you find the case for the insurrection against the British persuasive"?
I certainly see no reason to give these folks the compliment of comparing their movement to that one...
And then the second question would become "how competent were the people involved, and how effective was their action?" Where the answer to both seems to be "not very" for these idiots.
Why are people insisting on making ridiculous comparisons between things that have the same rough outline but wildly different material circumstances.
It's like some people can only see things in abstractions and not realize that individual situations are unique and need to be judged in their specific contexts.
The article addresses that in detail, but basically, this is people posting photos and videos of themselves there. In some cases, the photos were geotagged. As the article says:
> With all of that said, however, the DC Metropolitan Police and the FBI will probably need to look no further than a cursory Google search to identify many of the leaders of Wednesday's insurrection, as many of them took to social media both before and after the event to brag about it in detail. In short: you don't need fancy facial recognition tools to identify people who livestream their crimes.
If you think the only difference between these two stories is the tone then you didn't read them very carefully, or you're trying to draw a false equivalence between the people involved
> The ACLU in June filed a complaint against the Detroit police, alleging the department arrested the wrong man based on a flawed, incomplete match provided by facial recognition software. In the wake of the ACLU's complaint, Detroit Police Chief James Craig admitted that the software his agency uses misidentifies suspects 96 percent of the time.
> DC Metropolitan Police and the FBI will probably need to look no further than a cursory Google search to identify many of the leaders of Wednesday's insurrection, as many of them took to social media both before and after the event to brag about it in detail. In short: you don't need fancy facial recognition tools to identify people who livestream their crimes
It's not about the same thing. This article is about publicly visible people that advertised their actions in a way that was tied to their name. The article you posted is actually about facial recognition.
Only about 5% of published objections to any given use of this technology is grounded in real principle. 95% is situational based on which "side" will be tactically punished by the usage.
(Everyone will inevitably try to hedge their hedges with "But this situation is different/worse/xyz, it doesn't change the root objections. Elephant leading the rider.)
The article really has nothing to do with face recognition.
And in general, I'm having trouble coming up with any scenario or example where one "side" would see disproportionate impact from face recognition? Aside, that is, from the well-known generic problems with the criminal justice system.
As such your imaginary 5 % isn't just too low or too high... I don't think there is any realistic way for your argument to be anything more than some so-so story your brain came up with given a bunch of prior believes.
Yeah but a ton of people livestreamed themselves during the June protests + riots + looting + etc, and there were absolutely privacy objections to doing dragnets + facial recognition over the videos they posted on on Twitter (AFAIK very little was actually done to identify and arrest the bad actors, by the percentages).
you don't arrest legal protesters, that's you know legal. You do arrest, or defer (in the city that had the infamous CHAZ/CHOP) arrest people breaking the law.
You don't need facial recognition when you can go to duckduckgo and search for "QAnon guy with horns" and get his stage name, legal name, and city of residence. That sort of targeted investigation is a lot more palatable to me than the sort of dragnet surveillance that people normally thing of when you mention looking at faces and GPS
