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The insurrectionists were there because they falsely believe the election was stolen, and half of that video was him saying "yep, you guys are correct". He's done this shit before where he vigorously fans the flames but then gives a half-assed concessionary call for peace that his followers know to ignore.

They were there in the first place because of his message

Also the video wasn't the only thing removed either; the other was this tweet:

> These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

That message is self-inconsistent, but not actually that unusual. A key plank of religious tolerance is people peacefully accepting they are governed by, potentially, literal heretics. Or religious crazies in the case of the atheists.

It is possible to simultaneously believe that the election results are illegitimate and to live peacefully in society. It requires a bit more mental flexibility than I like to give myself, but there is precedent.

The call to action (go home with love & in peace) trumps the frame.

But that's not what he's saying. He's not making any sort of transition or explanation for why people should go home. It's clearly tacked on afterwards, and the protestors know it. Then they can blame it on "the deep state." He's sandwiching go home with two statements legitimizing what the protestors are doing.

This actually shows a difference in how fascists and nationalists use words versus how the rest of us use words. For most people words are a truthful declaration of intents and ideas. But fascists often use words for a different purpose. They don't use them in their common meanings, but rather as tools to inflame and to denigrate others.

Take use of the word "socialism" or "nationalism." I've seen a disturbing tendency on the right to call anything they don't like "socialist." Nothing makes that clearer than Trump's call to the Cuban expatriates in Florida to vote against the "communist" Joe Biden.

If you know anything about Biden's policies you would recognize them as pretty standard Progressive policies. I have never once heard him discuss taking private property and distributing it as a public good. He's not once talked about erasing private enterprise. He is manifestly not communist. So the only conclusion I can draw is that Trump is using "communist" to mean "person you don't like" so he can fan the flames.

Given that, I don't think we can take anything he says at face value. This is actually a common tendency on the right, and it's why they're so good at fanning the flames. They see what our words mean and they disregard that meaning.

Even if you believe it to be true, starting the conversation by telling people that their opinions are illegitimate is a bad first step when asking them to do something.

I recall one pundit on TV saying he was taking a log off the fire while simultaneously pouring gasoline on with his messages, that was pretty apt.

>they falsely believe the election was stolen

Or they know the truth, but respect and follow the forceful power, which Trump wants to represent.

Edit: I guess people misinterpret what I mean. The truth is that Biden has won honestly, but insurgents just don't respect that.

It appears that the Americans woke up, mods

I think you meant to write "treasonous, brainwashed terrorists," instead of insurrectionists. Right?

The people he was talking to did not need more convincing about election being stolen, they needed to be told to go home. That is what Trump did. That video alone had more historical value than 99.99999 content on Twitter.

I expect there’s been some increasing call at Twitter to basically ban trump since 2016. I expect it’s mostly grown since the summer or so. I think of this move as being less about the specifics of the event than it is about that event making more people agree with the group that want to ban trump, allowing them to take a stronger action.

I feel like the “Twitter internal politics” explanation is more convincing than eg some small committee of expert moderators looking at trumps tweets and carefully deciding if they break the rules, balancing that with public interest considerations, and deciding if some restrictions should be placed on them

Gee, you kinda forgot about the 80% "I totally understand why you do it noble warrior" part in your summary.

>The violating content they removed was trump repeating the same stolen election crud he's been saying for a month and then __urging the protesters to go home peacefully, preserve law and order, etc__.

There were two more tweets that led to the definitive suspension of the account, per the NYT. This is one tweet that was taken down almost immediately around 6:00PM.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he tweeted. “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

I mean, 'Remember this day forever'? Like it's the Alamo? Really?

> (...) and then __urging the protesters to go home peacefully, preserve law and order, etc__.

Considering the way Trump, during his infamous Georgia phone call, fell back to weasel words to allow him to claim plausible deniability, such stating that "in my opinion they are shredding votes" after fellow Republicans made it very clear that there was absolutely no doubt that no vote was shredded... Those statements sound like nothing more than further weasel words to allow him to weasel himself out of any responsibility for his own actions.

As someone with no horse in this race, I agree it seems _very_ odd to remove this.

This even seems a lot tamer and more to the point than Trump usually is.

This was also removed (which he sent shortly after the video):

"These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"

I agree with the premise. If your vote is stripped from you then force may be justified as you have no other option. The problem is that votes were not stripped and he knows it.

It's classic case of double talk. Everyone is free to interpret it as they will, he washes his hands of all this. If he really wanted to send people home, he could just have said: please go home. Or even: look, we've tried everything, we were wrong. I'm sure president Biden will take best care of this country. Please go home.

Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter unless he wants the stirrup to continue. He's supposed to be a politician, or even just a grown up person after all, not a child who cannot control himself.

Living in Hungary, living through this very same shit for 10, or maybe 14 years now, I've watched the whole Trump story in horror, but also thinking most of the time: yeah, this is kind of expected. This double talk thing is something our PM (Viktor Orban) does a lot of time. So yeah, Trump didn't want to calm these guys down, or to be more objective, that's not what he DID (even if we believe he's totally childish and dumb).

yes, it's double-talk, but...

> "Even if he didn't think it, as what he thinks shouldn't matter..."

no, that's called lying, and we don't want presidents (or any person with even a modicum of power) doing that, even if we disagree (sometimes vehemently) with what he says. we have checks and balances on what the president can do, which is what matters. it would be great if trump were gracious, but he's not, and the people have (admittedly narrowly) spoken against him. our system has actually shown that it can tolerate a presidency like his intact.

I'm not really sure what you are arguing against. I just pondered the case what if he's intent wasn't to continue fuelling the unrest and concluded that even then he can still be blamed.

i'm arguing against advocating lying, which is what saying one thing while believing another is. it's preferring a truthful, if self-serving and vindictive, trump over a lying, self-serving and vindictive trump.

Gee, it’s as if Twitter benefited from the Capitol situation.

It also seems odd, that they were unable to protect the capitol. It was not a storm out of nowhere.

A bit orchestrated? To show the less radical Trump supporters, this is what your president is responsible for, chaos and anarchy in the capitol. Disturbing the democratic process.

But I guess, don't assume evil, what can be explained with incompetence.

Don't assume incompetence at the top of the most powerful military country.

I don't think anyone is exempt from Hanlon's razor.

Certainly not the current president.

trump stupid!

Trump had a lot of levers he could have pulled in order to ensure the security of the Capitol building. Should I take the fact he didn't pull them to mean that he sought to discredit his own movement?

I am not a US resident, so lack detail knowledge, but I did not know, securing the capitol is the job of the president? Aren't those seperate sectors?

He can certainly influece it, but did he? If not, who is responsible for the lack of defensive preparations, the local police? The FBI?

> I did not know, securing the capitol is the job of the president? Aren't those seperate sectors?

DC is not a state, it’s a district under federal control. There is a mayor and a police department, but responsibilities that would normally fall to a state-level government are handled federally.

This is a contentious issue in the US right now, because it means that the residents do not have representation in the house and senate.

Primary policing duties are conducted by the Capitol Police, which are controlled by the Congress. However, they aren't really equipped for managing armed insurrections. So, in situations such as these they depend on the executive branch to provide support which may come from the FBI, national guard, or other agencies, which generally requires authorisation from the President.

I find the weasel word insurrection is being inserted quite a lot. It was suspiciously absent when other federal buildings were breached and vandalized earlier in the year. Calling it an armed insurrection is stretching it pretty far considering none of the videos show any armed conflict between the protesters and capital security... except for the unarmed woman who was shot in the neck and killed by security. It reeks of narrative building.

Find me an example of something happening on this scale at any point in 2019. We're talking about the Capitol building being taken over by a violent mob during a join session of Congress while the Vice President was presiding.

Further, the insurrectionists were definitely armed, at least five guns were seized from among those arrested.

https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/13-arrested-5-weapons-reco...

insurrection : an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government

From Merriam-Webster

Armed protestors invaded the Capitol intent on disrupting the government from certifying an election. This was quite literally an insurrection.

> I did not know, securing the capitol is the job of the president? Aren't those seperate sectors?

In the case of Washington, DC they are not. The mayor has a normal municipal police force and the president has control over the equivalent of the state-level force, which would usually be called for such an incident. The Capitol specifically also has another force, independent from the municipal police, which is federally controlled.

There are numerous reports Trump explicitly refused to allow the National Guard to respond; governors of two adjacent states mobilized their state forces instead, and eventually Pence also mobilized the DC guard, which it's not really clear he had the authority to do (or if he does, also the authority to issue orders contravening Trump's refusal).

Well, Trump denied requests to send in the national guard multiple times according to reports. Pence later did when Trump didn't, and that's when things got under control.

This could've been prevented if the president (1) didn't incite this and (2) didn't deny national guard to step-in.

So what's left is the capitol police facing a mob invited by the president, without backup. And they stated they had two choices, barricade the capitol and prevent entry, or evacuate the people inside.

It could've gotten ugly if the people in the capitol got overrun, e.g. Pelosi facing people that think they're sent by Q to fight off a satanic coup by Pelosi, but they got evacuated to safety. Apparently capitol police chose to evacuate rather than to barricade, in hindsight that's clearly the least risky option to human health. If they break through with nobody inside, that's not as bad if they break through anyway with people inside. A bunch of idiots roaming the capitol building isn't a threat per se, shameful and sad yes, but not one that should've been met with violent force from a small number of capitol police at the expense of (and risk of not) evacuating the people inside.

>A bunch of idiots roaming the capitol building isn't a threat per se, shameful and sad yes, but not one that should've been met with violent force from a small number of capitol police at the expense of (and risk of not) evacuating the people inside.

Of course, if the mob were leftists or had any significant amount of minorities mixed in, there would have been rivers of blood outside the Capitol.

It seems this is the 17th time that the US uses the military against their own citizens. What is the death count up to now?

Can someone explain why the people trained in handling civilians, ie the police in the capital of the united states, is not enough in order to secure a building?

DC police have 3,800 officers [2] which is quite a few considering Washington DC has a population of 705,000 [3] (the national average is 470 people per officer, while DC has just 185 people per officer) and of course only so many of them can be on shift at a time.

A large protest can have 100,000-500,000 protesters [1]

So even if 95% of protesters are peaceful, a mere 5% inclined towards disorder can easily outnumber the local police. So it's not so crazy they'd need to call backup from somewhere. Why it's so common to deploy the national guard rather than cops from other nearby jurisdictions I don't know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_United... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Department... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.

Washington, D.C. is very much a commuter and tourist town. Its population might be 705k, but the average number of people in the city on a given day is much higher. Tons of people who work in D.C. live in Virginia and Maryland and commute. I don't think I need to really get into why its kind of a major tourist destination. It does not surprise me they have a much higher people per officer than the average town.

True - what I'm trying to say is: Although DC cops can easily be outnumbered by protesters, in pure numbers DC isn't under-staffed by national standards.

Even the most self-sufficient of cities would find their cops outnumbered in such a situation.

It's not that they couldn't secure the capitol, it's because they didn't want to and are sympathetic to the rioters. The same way us devs look at requirements we know how to do but don't want to and instead say:

"Nope, can't do that, not enough timeslices on mutex semaphore of a monadic type for me to transpile that functionality of changing the color of the background"

> And they stated they had two choices, barricade the capitol and prevent entry, or evacuate the people inside.

This seems really strange to me. So the capitol police isn't staffed and doesn’t plan for a situation where they need to do both of these things?

What struck me the most is that the rioters seem like just a few hundred/thousand. Definitely scary but should have been able to be controlled by law enforcement. It wasn’t a million people or a zombie horde.

Their web site [0] says they have 2,300 officers and staff. So even if only half are officers it seems like 1,150 armed, trained capitol police should be able to control a mob of this size.

Certainly rioters trying to stage a coup is a rare event but seems like something that the capitol police should have contingency plans for.

Them saying that they had to choose between evacuating lawmakers and protecting the building seems like they need a lot of help planning.

[0] https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/uscp-fast-facts

Crowd control is very, very tricky. What would these armed police officers do, in your opinion? Shoot everyone? Arguably not. So what other options do they have? Without riot gear, that very difficult, and even with riot gear, the insurgents were partially armed. So yeah, evacuate and wait for superior numbers to show up was the smarter decision once things already did go south. Now follow it up with aggressive prosecution of those i taking selfies in senator offices would be a good thing, too.

I would expect them to have a plan for crowd control. How do other security organizations handle this? I would expect they do have an armory with riot gear and crowd control equipment.

That’s what I mean about odd that they don’t have a plan for this. I live near a top 50 city and the local police has crowd control equipment. Seems like the National capitol police would have some capability for this.

Certainly not shooting everyone.

"Without riot gear, that very difficult"

Then there would be the question, of why there was no riot gear, when riots or riot-like situation could be expected. And since this was a planned event - and protestors openly planned to storm it - then maybe there should have been some better preparation?

And crowd control is indeed tricky, but it is still standard procedure for police.

You have fences.

You have lines of strong policemen with shields and tonfa.

You have tear gas.

Watercannon.

Beanbag.

Taser.

And ultimately, if rioters are indeed shooting or preparing to do so: there are guns with the police, too.

Many others brought the point: there probably would have been rivers of blood, if the black life matters movement, would have tried to storm the capitol.

Ok, that is very active from Trump, if the reports are true. And if not, well he still is the military leader. That surely influences forces moral on how to act.

But was this not known?

The FBI could not bring more people in?

But yes, could also very well explained by, "they would not really dare it" preparation.

The NYT homepage currently describes what happened as "Mayhem Incited by Trump."

If you were to read that and go to Trump's twitter feed and read the above quoted tweet, you would now be left with two competing ideas: Was Trump inciting the mayhem or trying to quell it?

On the other hand, if you go to his Twitter feed and just see what's currently there, two blank spots replaced with, "This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules," you will think, "oh, Trump was inciting mayhem."

So deleting those tweets helps construct a narrative.

Ah yes, because other than those two tweets Trump has never incited any mayhem before.

Certainly hasn't been shrieking that the election was stolen and that if Democrats control the government it's the end of democracy. Literal apocalyptic rhetoric that millions lap up.

Then of course at the rally yesterday telling people to march on the capitol building where they are currently stealing the election!

I'm not addressing the broader question of Trump's tweets, just the specific one of why Twitter might have chosen to censor those tweets in particular.

I wonder why they are attempting to force him on to a legacy TV network instead of using social media?

Can you think of any sitting president instigating a protest nevermind directing their ire at specific people (one of those tweets specifically targeted Mike Pence) and buildings (telling supporters to march down to the capital).

Anyone could see this was the most likely outcome of Trump's behaviour. I can't see how anyone could honestly argue otherwise.

"I'm totally not wondering why no one will rid me of that meddlesome priest. That would be wrong! Please do not rid me of that meddlesome priest. Although, I have to say, he is quite meddlesome, and I completely understand why it's strange that nobody has rid me of his meddling. I love you!"