The Senate has entered into a recess as the Capitol Police lock down building
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/congress-electoral-co...
Since their liveblog software makes it difficult to link to individual posts, I'll quote the specific post here:
> The Capitol has been breached, and the House is in recess > From Ted Barrett, Manu Raju and CNN's Capitol Hill team
> The US Capitol has been breached during a tense situation with demonstrators, according to Capitol police officers.
> The House doors have been locked and an emergency alert from the Capitol police just transmitted the same thing:
> "Due to an INTERNAL threat in the building, take shelter in the nearest office and stay quiet." Capitol Hill police are also blocking anyone from moving from Senate office buildings into the US Capitol building. There are underground tunnels that link the office buildings with the Capitol building that senators, staff, and journalists use to travel back and forth.
People are in Nancy Pelosi's office taking pictures of her email client and posting them on Twitter. Nothing about this is normal.
But the mods have also said that exceptions will be given to political events that are particularly historic. I'm not a mod, and I have no power here, but I'd like to think this counts as historic enough. Personally, I haven't been anywhere near this scared for the future of my country since 9/11. Not even 2016 gave me this feeling.
It's too "political", not enough technology, and from dubious sources. Unlike, say, some blogpost complaining that civilisation is being threatened by people no longer being allowed to be racist in peace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25011757
And yet, if one were to try to name the top three problems of US society based solely on what was discussed on HN over the last four years, it'd be "cancel culture", social media companies' half-hearted attempts to rid themselves of these people, and the New York Times being terribly biased against this mobs' grievances of... something, I guess.
Guns drawn in the chamber. Fascists attacking reporters.
Video from inside the capitol makes it clear that the police are in on the coup.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/01/06/us/electoral-vote/tr...
All of these "Stop the Steal" conspiracy theorists are going to start primarying any Republican officials who still have any integrity and replacing them with people who don't. For example, Brad Raffensperger is a man of integrity. Despite my personal distaste for his politics, he is thoroughly committed to accurately counting the vote and having a peaceful transfer of power despite immense pressure from his party's leader, the most powerful man in the country. He is up for reelection in 2022, and he will almost certainly be primaried by someone who believes in these conspiracy theories. If that succeeds, we can kiss election integrity in Georgia goodbye.
I don't think this coup attempt right now will succeed. But the stab-in-the-back myth being created as we speak is going to set the stage for a future coup later this decade, which may very well be successful.
And even if our election integrity safeguards continue to work in 2024, we will be left with an electoral system where we can only safely elect one party, because the other party will certainly perform a self-coup if they ever end up in power again. We will either have a de facto one-party system (keep electing Democrats because the Republicans are an existential threat to the republic) or a government-enforced one-party system (Republicans in power will refuse to certify any future elections they lose).