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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

This is a very poor take. There is a marked difference between meeting people half way and openness to alternative view points, and allowing a mob to attack and derail the proceedings of Congress with the express purpose of overturning the legal election results.

This was a shameful display by the police charged with defending the rule of law in the USA, and even more than protesters, the police who plainly allowed this to happen must be investigated and tried. Whether those are the boots on the ground or the higher ups I have no idea, but this can't be left to stand.

Given what we've seen tonight, this could have easily turned into a putsch attempt, and it would have been very hard to stop it once the mob was allowed inside the building. They could have taken senators and congressmen hostage, they could have forced them to overturn the elections in a mock session, they could have killed dissenters - it was only by luck that it turned out they were disorganized and essentially there for a stunt.

View on HN

The real attempt at overturning the legal election results, "legally": https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1347169481689354240

> 138 representatives —65% of GOP caucus—and 7 senators voted to discard PA. PA rules were voted in by the GOP but even the guy who got elected by them voted to throw out the ones for the president. They would have stolen that election if they had the numbers.

(The riot was an alternative approach to throwing the election by destroying the electoral college ballots https://twitter.com/SenJeffMerkley/status/134693870593264845... ; it's not clear to me whether that would be a mere paperwork hiccup or whether it could provide a pretext to really invalidate the electoral college somehow)

Each state makes 6-9 copies of the certifications that get sent to Congress. And each house of Congress gets their own stamped/sealed and certified "originals". So I would say there was next to zero chance of the ballots being destroyed having any lasting impact, other than the sheer horror of it occurring, of course.

This is an overreaction because, as the OP mentions, legislatures around the world are often not heavily secured. Protestors forcing themselves into legislative buildings is pretty common worldwide even in stable countries, for example Taiwan and Germany recently, and there are no longterm consequences at all for rule of law.

There was meaningful security in place last night in Washington DC: the legislators were evacuated to a heavily secured facility nearby.

The difference is in this case the “attack” was announced and legislators had spoken to the police in advance and been told that they were prepared.

The other difference is that not even a few months ago, police used massive shows of force against people who were unarmed (other than cameras for the reporters among them) and completely peaceful, in the same area.

Protestors didn’t force themselves into the Reichstag in Germany. There were standing in front of it and were talking selfies.

If you think those three police officers at the Reichstag would have stopped those protestors if they action had wanted to storm the building, you are delusional.

Oh, and not too long before that Greenpeace members actually climbed the Reichstag and unrolled an anti-coal banner. Just that the media didn’t frame this into “an attack on democracy”.

To attack democracy is precisely the goal of this protest, though. The democratic election is complete, the results didn’t go their way, and in the midst of the final certification of results, these people broke into the Capitol to disrupt the process. That seems like an attack on democracy to me. If not that, what was their goal?

Well to be fair, isn't it their apparent belief that the results did go their way, but <.. something conspiratorial..>? So they presumably at least notionally feel that the attack on democracy has already happened, and they are... I don't know, defending it?

Perhaps, but to what end? So they breached the Capitol and disrupted Congress. Then what?

They believe what they believe and they also hold the idea that if that belief is threatened by facts, there must ALWAYS be an alternate narrative that allows them to continue to believe what they believe. This is because Trump himself is strong in this means of building an internal fantasy reality and then presenting it to others (irrationally) which then either causes them to believe it or come to understand his ego is the issue here.

If you listen to him, he's constantly negating what he just said, which comes across as open to interpretation (or completely insane).

No one man or woman is above the law.

Factual information is arrived at by consensus of people. That a certain group of people in this country refuse to accept or participate in the consensus mechanism (or threaten or dismiss that mechanism) then those people are against whatever it is that forms the consensus, such as the constitution, the US Govt., etc.

This is how dictatorships are born and it would do these people well to understand that replacing their made up fears with a dictator is not going to help anyone.

The protestors in front of the German Reichtags clearly wanted to get into the building, but were stopped by the reinforced glass doors and the three police officers, who acted very differently from what I saw until now from the Capitol Police [1].

In the end the three officers in front of the Reichtag were able to act this way, because they knew that reinforcements in the form of 100 riot police were only 200 meters away. Badly positioned to prevent the initial compromise of the perimeter, but still there to handle a protest like this.

[1] Video of the incident in Germany. I think the intent of the protestors to enter the building is visible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdX5952CFTU

Is it common for that to happen while the legislative is meeting to confirm the next head of the executive? Were these protesters in Germany or Taiwan taking selfies with the police there? Were they also there with the expressed intent of convincing their legislature to overturn the results of the election?

Context is important.

The protesters in Germany actually didn’t enter the building and were just taking selfies outside the building.

Second that. Once was visiting the German parliament and just strolling around the waiting area. Suddenly a (unarmed) guard rushed from a hallway and asked for my ID. He seemed not too amused with me going through these automatically opening glass doors...

As to the infosec problems: legislature is run (even more in the US) by mostly senile, corrupt lawmakers and a staff of technically inept party groupies (or so I guess, clicking random aides linkedin-profiles). I doubt that any nationstate actor needs a raid of their offices to get to their computers (and that's why these people probably get the real national-security stuff on paper...)

That’s the problem. The “protestors” just stole a bunch of those papers.

Even in Switzerland was a shooting some years ago (a man shot 15 people in the parlament of Zug). Things just can happen fast und just by surprise. For me it was more surprising how long it took to get more police force to the place, I mean, it can happen suddenly are a lot of people there, but it took hours for the police.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zug_massacre

The context is wildly different. One deranged man with a gun on a completely normal day can easily surprise security and cause surprising harm.

A well known protest on a specific day, protesting a contentious issue, while all of the legislative branch is gathered together to confirm the results of the election, which the crowd believes was fraudulent, is an entirely different thing.

Not to mention, the crowd was allowed on the steps near the entrance with no opposition, with reports of policemen taking selfies and even opening a door. Had this happened with the shooter in Zug, would the policeman doing so have been investigated? Would his superiors?

I heard a former Chief of Homeland Security of Obama's on the radio and she had an interesting take. She was surprisingly forgiving of the actions of the security staff.

The argument being that they do training exercises all the time, but there is no playbook for what to do if the president incites violence against his own Capitol. Split-second decisions made in a state of confusion and chaos which make sense from a security point of view could have enormous long term political implications. Up to a point, the risk of acting outweighs the potential reward.

I'm on the fence about this type of explanation. Individual police, I can agree were overwhelmed and were not trained or ready for this.

But as organizations (Capital Police, Metro Police, FBI, etc.) this event was broadly known to be happening all over social media well in advance of Wednesday's event. There should have been a response as soon as that crowd made it to the steps of the building.

What concerns me is how this could have played out if that rioting group was even 10% more organized than they were. Or if they were intending to destroy/damage the building beyond windows and doors. Could you imagine if instead of just taking selfies in the senate president's chair, they piled up the desks and lit them on fire?

I hope this event sparks some changes in security protocols, because now any extremist group intending to disrupt government or make a bold statement know exactly how to do it and know they'll get far enough to do some serious damage.

I think you might be missing the subtlety in argument I was relaying.

The security staff know how to deal with extremist groups. But they were not dealing with an extremist group in the traditional sense - where the overwhelming majority of the population are in agreement that their actions are wrong e.g. 9/11, Boston Marathon, Orlando nightclub. They were dealing with a group claiming to act on behalf of the leader of one party in a two party system - in other words, a very significant percentage of the population.

It wasn't failing to act, but confusion about choosing whether or not to act and to what extent. They were not prepared for a scenario where taking action could genuinely be a trigger for wide scale insurrection, violence and even civil war affecting millions - the trolley problem on steroids.

> Or if they were intending to destroy/damage the building beyond windows and doors.

They were - pipebombs and molotov cocktails were recovered. But as uncomfortable as it feels, it might not have been as simple as shooting the bad guys.

> But as organizations (Capital Police, Metro Police, FBI, etc.) this event was broadly known to be happening all over social media well in advance of Wednesday's event.

Exactly my take on this. And why I got so baffled it actually happened. I, a Brazilian living in Sweden with a passing interest in US politics (just due to its repercussions to my life and countries), was aware of the radio chatter that something like this was bubbling. How can security forces of the most powerful country on Earth's history let this roll?

Given that this was an entirely predictable series of events, I think it's pretty damning in itself that there was no playbook to deal with this sort of uprising.

While at the individual level it probably makes sense to err on the side of inaction, at the organizational level this is a massive failure.

Capitol police allowed selfies with them as protesters were leaving

Good?

People used to call this “deescalation” and considered it the prime example of how to deal with protesters. When protesters are taking selfies with the cops then something is clearing going right.

On the other hand, an unarmed protestor was shot and killed, but almost certainly there will be no riots or sacking of small town centers in response.

The Federal courthouse was under constant siege for weeks in Portland, but that was “mostly peaceful”. This on the other hand was clearly a “mob” according to NYT.

I just want to see people be consistent with how they describe and respond to protesters regardless of the political affiliation of the protest.

Relative to the scale of rioting throughout 2020 this was objectively pretty tame, minus the fatal shooting. At least you can say it wasn’t a targeted assassination unlike other cases last year.

'Objectively pretty tame'? That's a pretty rich. It's only 'tame' because of the police treated these (mostly white) protestors with kid gloves, and because the barricaded doors allowed a safe retreat of the congresspeople. Your portrayal of the shooting of a woman actively trying to smash into the floor of the senate with the senators and VPOTUS inside as equatable to police brutality is laughable. These people were trying (fruitlessly) to stage a violent subversion of democracy and openly threatened the highest elected officials in the nation.

> Your portrayal of the shooting of a woman actively trying to smash into the floor of the senate with the senators and VPOTUS inside as equatable to police brutality is laughable.

Well, another recent example of "police brutality" was shooting a guy holding a knife who was trying to get into a car with kids, after attempting nonlethal takedowns. I think that's quite comparable.

> These people were trying (fruitlessly) to stage a violent subversion of democracy and openly threatened the highest elected officials in the nation.

You're giving them too much credit. They got in. Then what? It was like a carnival, walking off with furniture, posing for pictures, smiling while sitting in important chairs. Lots of screaming, a few broken windows.

In a country where you can buy guns in supermarkets, they didn't fire a single shot. They could have set fire to the place, taken people hostage. It could have been so much worse.

Most of those people probably couldn't subvert or overturn anything more than a paper bag.

Perhaps if the insurgents had faced the same violent police response as BLM protestors the outcome would have been very different. But if the police let you in instead of engaging in violent escalation, why not pose for pictures and have a chat?

That is irrelevant. The intent was to overturn the election. The fact that they were incompetent or not sufficiently dedicated to their cause to be willing to die for it is no excuse for letting it get to where it did.

> In a country where you can buy guns in supermarkets

You can also buy ps5’s in supermarkets. Is the absurd part that you could buy non food related items in a supermarket or that supermarkets have devolved into a one stop shop for everything?

It’s not just related to guns

>They got in, then what? they didn't fire a single shot

Then: four people killed

There are lots of ways to do harm without shooting. Many politicians are elder. Somebody could have suffered a heart attack, Biden for example... and then what?.

And some of the rioters were trained professional soldiers. Do they had access to harmful substances?, chemical poisons?, Nobody knows. Do we remember the 2001 Anthrax mail attacks to democrat senators and journalists finally linked to a Fort Detrick employee?.

In fact is even easier, in the middle of a pandemic just collaborating to spread a lethal virus between smiles and selfies would do the job. Videos show people touching three times each inch of the same knob door in a minute for no evident reason.

Those people was armed, organized, directed and manipulated.

They shot one, hosed them all down with tear gas and OC to the point of a police officer needing medical attention for too much OC exposure, and 3 other protestors are dead for unlisted causes.

If that had happened when protestors burned down a police station, destroyed miles of shops, threw molotov cocktails at a federal courthouse or any of the other riots in the past few months, there would be half of our politicians shouting to end all policing.

Are you genuinely arguing that the show of force displayed here was greater or more disproportionate than that displayed last summer?

How many unarmed protestors got shot center mass with 9mm by cops in those protests?

About as many as were trying to violently break into an in-session senate floor accompanied by an angry, armed mob intent on overthrowing the government.

Sorry, were the protestors who burned down a police station or occupied a block of Seattle unarmed? I'm pretty sure they had rifles, compared to our insurrectionists which had.. flagpoles?

Or is trespassing on federal property worth a death sentence now?

She was literally charging at the people the police were protecting.

You could not come up with a more justified police shooting.

It’s always a tragedy when police have to kill a assailant instead of apprehending them. Particularly when the assailant is unarmed.

There have been countless situations more dangerous to the lives of police or bystanders than this, where the assailant was not killed. But perhaps none with so many “important” people in the same room.

Edit: Graphic video of the police shooting. [1]

They could have easily arrested her. They shot and killed her instead. She had no weapon and had made no physical contact with any officer. Just shot as she came through the door.

At the same time, there are a half dozen well armed officers on the same side of the door as the protestors who are not being attacked and freely arrive at the scene within seconds of the shooting.

[1] - https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1347076676342185984?...

And what do you call the attempts to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland, with people inside of it?

"I just want to see people be consistent with how they describe and respond to protesters regardless of the political affiliation of the protest."

You want people fighting in the streets for social and racial justice in the face of quantifiable repression to be treated the same as people storming the national Capitol to overturn an election result they don't like based on provable lies?

> with the express purpose of overturning the legal election results.

I guess the answer is... calm down? A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US.

The event was for show. Although, unfortunately, one of them died. But it should remain that way and there is no reason to escalate further. (I guess we already have precedents of how escalation usually lead to innocent deaths).

> A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US.

This is not the issue here. It is not even that the outgoing president very deliberately provoked the attack, as well as a much wider opposition to the democratic process. The biggest problem is that the president was actively supported, in his provocation, by more than a few US senators, along with elected officials of several states (some of whom are plausible presidential candidates themselves.)

There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état.

Even if the supreme court put a stop to it - which is not a certainty - much damage would have been done.

>There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état.

You could describe the 2000 election as a successful bogus attempt to overthrow an election. Has America already had a coup d'etat?

In 2000 it was unclear who actually won because the Florida vote count was very close. No one was alleging that one side or the other was cheating, and everyone was in agreement that whoever got the most votes should be president. Also, Al Gore, as the outgoing Vice President, presided over the same certification proceeding that Trump and his followers disrupted yesterday. In January 2001, that proceeding went without a hitch even though the loser of the election was in charge of it.

What would have happened if they had pushed into the room? What would have happened if they had had firearms on them? What if they had been able to grab just a few congressmen at gun point?

Sure, I'm not proposing to escalate and it's wonderful that it is over with no real effects. But the security handling was atrocious, and the results would have been much worse if the mob were only slightly more organized and intent on bloodshed.

I'm not claiming that they would have succeeded to actually install Donald Trump for a second term. But I do believe that they could have forced a mock result to eb proclaimed on the senate floor, creating a much larger problem for the future and giving much more power to their narrative.

Also, note that the quote from me was supposed to reinforce the idea that there were compelling reasons for the police to take their presence as a serious threat. These weren't protesters chanting to save the whales, they were protesters asking for the election to be overturned (even if I agree with you that they had no real chance of achieving this goal).

> it is over with no real effects

I admit to being a little shocked at the glibness of this statement. As a non-USian, I see a profound shock among other thoughtful non-USians that it has come to this. Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard. However, I’m more certain than ever that this ideal has now been firmly relegated to a historical oddity. A 200 year blip in the record of human governance, with a forthcoming return to mean. Watching this slow motion disaster unfold has mad me very, very sad.

I'm not so much shocked as tired. This is like 9/11 with a four year warning of the planes arriving and being able to watch them on Flightradar, towing a huge sign saying "we're going to crash this baby into the Pentagon". And nobody doing anything about it because that would mean that "both sides" weren't in fact equal.

Pleasantly surprised that the death toll was only four, of which only one was shot; much better than the regular death toll of single mass shooter incidents.

How is it a 9/11? In 9/11 thousands of people died, postcard-symbolic buildings demolished by foreign terrorists. Here... A few hundred people strolled around in the Capitol and 4 people died.

Ah, but how many of those people died of 9/11 or just with 9/11? How many of them had pre-existing conditions? Besides, that's just one day of COVID. Was it worth closing the skies and invading Iraq for a mere three thousand people some of whom would have died anyway?

... no, I probably shouldn't joke about this, however dark, but if there's one thing that last year has made clear is that death tolls barely move the needle politically and that symbols stick in people's heads and effect real change. Even if the symbols aren't tied to underlying reality. The revenge of Baudrillard.

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201210/covid-19-deaths-sur...

The symbolism of protestors in the capitol was "shocking" upthread. I worry that next month we'll have forgotten about it because something worse will have happened. We've already moved on from the guy who blew up a telephone exchange, and the other occupations of state capitols, and those guys who tried to kidnap a state governor despite being infiltrated by the FBI.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I am with John Donne that anyone's death diminishes us, but avoidable and preventable deaths doubly so, which is why I'm in favour of responsible politics and the politicisation of preventable deaths)

People care about whatever they are told to care about by the media or whatever social media algorithms shove onto their feed.

Whole countries can freak out about the disappearance of one child or a car accident caused by some random intoxicated person and then everybody talks about their names, there are political leaders chiming in etc. Whole countries can come together to donate millions for the treatment of a rare disease of a single child. It's kinda random.

Humans are not calibrated to care about actual stats, just stories. A good story of one person can weigh more than a boring story of millions.

It's all theater, nothing more, whichever party wins... It's circus.

> Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard

Where are you from, how old are you? Watching too many Hollywood hero movies?

I think the above attitude is less common outside the US than within. It's usually Americans who view themselves as through the lens of American exceptionalism, the rightful police of the world, just bringing democracy everywhere out of altruism and a care for people everywhere etc.

In Europe, the US is definitely seen in a more ambivalent light with lots of corruption etc.

I live in Europe, and the universal reaction I saw in my circle was shock. People don't think the US is perfect, but the events of yesterday are completely outside the range of what they expect to see in the US.

What exactly? They broke into a building and wandered about a bit. They didn't take any politician hostage, didn't burn down the building, etc. They were like unruly children.

Aren't you shocked to see thousands of cars burned in France over NYE? About seeing the American riots last summer?

It's blown out of proportion. This Trumpist crowd was disorganized. They didn't have a plan, didn't have leaders, didn't have demands or any credible way to win. Life goes on.

They had a plan, albeit an insane one, a leader, albeit an insane one, demands (change the election result), and a credible way to win (abduct or kill senators in order to change the outcome of votes). It's all very "we took six of the seven control rods out of the reactor and nothing happened!"

Fundamental disagree. They didn't even scratch the surface. These buildings, the senators etc are all symbolic. They are expressions of the power relations, not the originators of it. Even if they do say stuff under threat, that would not have a real effect. It would be overturned by the Supreme Court or whatever.

There is no way to make Trump win this way and actually get obedience from the institutions of the country. They would just not recognize Trump, even if somehow senators, under duress, said he won.

It was 0 rods of the 7. Power is not in the buildings. It's in the network of interests of powerful people in the background across the country.

They stormed the Capitol, trying to disrupt the process by which the President is chosen. How many times have you seen this happen before in the US? For me personally, it's zero.

France has famously unstable politics, which is why they are on their fifth Republic. No one was surprised to see something like BLM because the US has long-running problems with racism. But this? This was new.

If anything, yesterday's event should reinforce your opinion of

> the American democratic system and its resilience

because there was a half-hearted attempt at a coup, and it failed miserably, even when indirectly backed by the current president.

I meant 'no real effect' in terms of modifying the results of the election itself, or loss of life.

You're absolutely right that the symbolic effect is huge and will likely be long-lasting - both inside the US and outside.

> What would have happened if they had had firearms on them?

They (some) did have guns on them, along with knives, restraints, bombs (allegedly) and probably other weapons hidden on their person.

You don't get it.

It was for show, but the police allowed it to go way too far. Not to mention, where was all the surveillance power of the NSA to provide advance warning?

The disturbing part of what happened yesterday was not that a bunch of assholes formed a mob to disrupt Congress. The disturbing part is that they were obviously allowed to do so.

The NSA is officially not supposed to be spying on the citizens of the USA. That’s the FBI’s job technically... as the USA has no dedicated domestic intelligence agency. There are a number of agencies with limited domestic intelligence roles tasks with specific kinds of intelligence work such as the intelligence branches of the US Treasury, the Department of Energy, and the Coast Guard... but there’s no USA agency equivalent of the United Kingdom’s MI5.

To extend the comparison, the CIA is roughly the USA’a MI6 and the NSA is very roughly equivalent to the GCHQ but not exactly as the NSA are not meant to spy domestically while the GCHQ don’t have that explicit limitation.

They didn't need to spy. They already knew and didn't care. The president held a speech in the morning, addressing his supporters who had traveled from all over the country to come to Washington. He told the crowd to storm the Capitol over the loudspeaker, and that he would lead them in doing so. He didn't. Instead he returned to the White House. But the crowd did what they were told anyway. (People do that a lot these days. They do what they're told.)

Regardless of what it officially is and is not supposed to do, the NSA and not the FBI is the organization that developed programs like PRISM.

The point is that the US federal government has a huge intelligence organization, with a huge amount of resources invested in dragnet data collection and surveillance on anyone and everyone.

The specific 3-letter organization that is technically supposed to be looking at and taking action based on that data isn't that relevant.

No offense, but I don’t think you understand the gravity of what happened. The fact that a mob of people, attempted to overturn the results of an election, is in itself a pretty serious event. That they were unlikely to succeed doesn’t cancel out the fact that they could have easily started a shootout with Congress people inside, that law enforcement seemed so unprepared to deal with a situation that had been telegraphed for so long, that as the article points out this has serious infosec implications, and that the sitting president of the US helped instigate an attempted coup.

It is symbolic, but I have particularly little sympathy for their stunt.

It wasn't a protest of a bill, or a protest for a particular legislative action. It was a protest against the election of the President itself - against all evidence, all facts, and all testimony from just about every official except the President, who egged this on.

I didn't want to see heads rolling, but I was shocked at how delicately they were handled - cops even let them through barricades.

Contrast this with left-wing protesters and their treatment by cops, and you see a much different picture, of people walking or sitting down getting pepper sprayed, or 70-something men getting shoved to the ground in a public square by a team of armored officers.

There are a number of reasons to be angry at this stunt, and a number of conclusions to draw from it. First thing is first, if we had any kind of collective conscience, Trump would be impeached today.

> I guess the answer is... calm down?

Rioters inflamed by years of Trump's gross lies storm the Capitol, demanding to overturn the results of the election, four die, and your response is, "Calm down"?

What's the alternative? Escalate and inflame emotions even more?

What good would come of that?

The right thing to do here is to break the feedback loop and take some energy out of the system.

One consideration here is that lack of consequences enables escalation - if it turns out that this disruption is not prosecuted and punished, then (as their core reasons for doing so have not changed) they are going to be emboldened and repeat similar acts with more force.

Breaking the loop requires a deterrent, not only verbal "we will not stand for this".

That’s my take. A lot of smoke but no fire. The chance of these people actually overthrowing the change in presidency is pretty much 0%.

It’s over let’s move on.

There needs to be some consequences here. Maybe it was just for show, and turned out harmless, whatever. Regardless, the people who participated in this, and those who incited them, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Otherwise this sort of thing will happen again, and next time it may not be so harmless.

I agree 100%. Of course that is what lots of people have said previously about similar incidents coming from the left but calls for prosecution and stronger police tactics were dismissed in favor of the less-than-peaceful actions because "reasons".

Personally I'm exhausted at trying to "score" the actions of two teams when in fact I really don't want either team to win. It has become an absurd attempt to decide which team is less awful while each side fools itself into thinking it exclusively represents political virtue.

I'm hoping that events don't escalate further and that perhaps there is some opportunity for the emergence of some alternate political parties and more thoughtful political leadership in order to let the existing parties fade into history.

I wonder if the Trump administration will enforce their executive order calling for maximized penalties for anyone damaging federal property [0]

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

"A mob overtook the capitol, four people died, the police did nothing and let them go, let's move on"?

Literally shaking my head. I just can't fathom how this is so unremarkable to you.

3 people died not at the capital building. Why are you including them?

Are those 3 people not related in any way to this incident? As far as I can tell the 4 deaths were directly related to the protest. The one person in the US Capitol was shot and was pronounced dead later on. Does it make a difference that not all 4 were shot in the same place?

> This was a shameful display by the police charged with defending the rule of law in the USA

Defunding the police doesn't seem like a great idea anymore now, does it.

"Defund the police" doesn't mean eliminating the police, or reducing their ability to respond to in-progress violence.

It means reducing the scope of the police so that they aren't the ones dealing with things like homelessness and mental illness, things that they usually are not trained to deal with.

Here's a good explanation [1].

[1] https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/a33024951/defund-the-p...

It does mean reducing their budget though, and with a potentially long lasting insurrection ahead you either need public police or private...

I mean, as we saw yesterday the USCP doesn't seem to be doing much good with their $460 million budget.

I don't think the reason for their ineptitude was lack of funding.

>Given what we've seen tonight, this could have easily turned into a putsch attempt

No, not really.

The US government isn't a dictatorship, and power is not held by a narrow few people. More importantly, the whole government is structured to prevent someone making themself king.

Let's say that the worst case scenario had happened, and the terrorists had taken members of congress hostage and used the situation to demand that Trump be retained in power indefinitely.

They wouldn't have any leverage beyond the ordinary because in the US, our political officials are easily replaced. In fact, the problem we usually have is that they aren't replaced often enough.

Holding the capital building and the entire congress hostage doesn't mean they have control of the US... it only means they control a building and some hostages.

That's the thing that so many anarchist/white supremacist/revolutionary plots in the US fail to consider... that you can't decapitate the US government and then just take the place of the people you killed, because the rest of the country will just refuse to follow you.

The only way a Germany-style takeover of the government is really possible is with years of slow changes... that has been happening, but hopefully now that it's out in the open we can do something about it.

Say they somehow successfully forced congress to hold their meeting and vote not to certify the elector vote; then, they would force them to hold a vote for the president and 'officially' nominate Donald Trump.

What would happen next? Who would cancel these acts of Congress? What if the Supreme Court (filled with partisan judges) decided to accept the results as well?

IANAL, but i think there's an argument to be made that a congressional vote held under duress (like any other contract) is invalid.

Ultimately, the question of who controls the US government (and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force) falls to "who can order the army to collect taxes from the states". In the absence (or ambiguity) of guidance from the representatives of the states, the decision would come down to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US armed forces, to decide whose orders he takes and to give the nuclear football to somebody.

HN desiring more authoritarian rule simply because it was the other side. I think the election fraud accusations are completely bogus, but holy shit, do you people listen to yourselves??

Who here is asking for authoritarian rule? Demanding that police protect democratic institutions from fascist mobs is not 'authoritarianism' by any stretch of the imagination.

It is not acceptable for the certification of the legal election to even be delayed as it has by a mob.

I assure you that I would believe the same if pro-Hillary crowds would have amassed in hopes of convincing or forcing Congress to overturn the electors vote in 2016. Especially if police had done little to deter them.

You have to remember we spent most of 2020 being gaslit by the media about “mostly peaceful protests” where people were being assassinated, $2 billion in property damage, a Federal courthouse attacked for weeks, and entire city blocks seized for days by protestors.

After spending the last 4 years hearing that Trump conspired with the Russians to steal his election.

But this suddenly is a mob committing treason and sedition.

The protests were mostly peaceful, which still leaves room for plenty of looting and killing. Don't forget that a lot of the killing was actually performed by policemen and fascist groups/individuals AGAINST the protesters.

The attacked federal courthouse is also a nice contrast - despite weeks of trying, the protesters never made it inside the courthouse. The fascists trying fruiessly to overthrow the election last night however made it inside Congress while it was in session.

The Russia conspiracy theory was a massive red herring, but it also didn't succeed in motivating people to try to overturn the election. Hillary Clinton conceded her election immediately following the result estimates, and Obama immediately started the transition process with Trump's people. There were no lawsuits seeking to disenfranchise 5 million voters for vague reasons.

The democratic quibbling about Trump's legitimacy was just that - quibbling. To compare this to what Trump and his cronies have been doing since the election is laughable.

Here’s a picture of DC, and not from last night:

https://twitter.com/unsafespace/status/1347273909280923648?s...

Turns out that Viking Man is actually a paid actor from Arizona. I don’t think you could make this stuff up if you tried.

First unarmed person shot to death by police in 2021 was Ashli Babbit.

I think you can choose to take a principled stand in support of protestors, or maybe you can call people who shutdown courts or congress and takeover city blocks domestic terrorists, but you don’t get to pick and choose one side or the other depending on whether you agree with the protestors or not.

You give these folks way too much credit. If they actually got power they’d have no idea what to do with it.

Yes, but that is just a stroke of luck, it's not something that should be relied on. Just like Trump's attempts to overturn the elections - they are scary as a principle, even though in practice they were so laughably incompetent.

The next fascist president may be less incompetent and achieve far more sinister goals.

While none of his objections had any legal merit, what exactly is scary in principle about using the law as it written to contest the results of an election? The laws are there for a reason and unless a law was broken I fail to see what the issue is?

I am comforted by the fact that our electoral institutions appear to be holding as they were designed to. It proves why separation of power is needed, and why it is critical.

Sadly it has been historically the democrats that want to tear down this separation for political expedience, one of the reasons Trump had sooo much power in the first place is decades and decades of consolidation of power into both the federal government and the presidency

The harm is elevating unfounded claims of a stolen election leading millions of people to believe something was actually stolen from them at a time when partisanship and distrust of people with different political views is already at a boil. It’s reckless and irresponsible.

I think Trump's legal team was completely incompetent

However to believe there was no legit legal claims in an election where the rules where being rewritten on the fly often times with no legislative oversight at all by governor executive fiat is completely delusional

What? A bunch of cases were declined because the laws were written months in advance about it and only now they sue claiming unfairness.

There are reasonable questions about the rules, process and procedures used in the last election.

There was a lot that was done over the last year that eroded trust in this election, the objections on the day of the electoral count being the final perfunctory domino.

Trust in a system has to be earned, and the way that we go about setting the rules for voting, counting valid votes, and reporting the count has been frankly a very chaotic process. It’s no doubt millions of people doubt the outcome.

But this isn’t really anything new. In 2016 50% of Democrats believed that it was somewhat or highly likely that Russians directly altered vote totals to elect Trump.

Harry Reid said there’s “no question” in his mind that Russian hackers covertly altered the 2016 vote count. “I think one reason the elections weren’t what they should have been was because the Russians manipulated the votes. It’s that simple.”

I hope you are being willfully disingenuous with those arguments. Parsing words in just the right way to make a partial point does not count as compelling evidence for your alternate reality.

Not at all. Here’s a good example, from AG of PA Josh Shapiro;

> @RepFredKeller LIE: PA officials violated the law in regards to signature verification on mail-in ballots.

FACT: Our Election Code-which a Republican-controlled state legislature revised in 2019-does not provide for rejecting mail-in ballots based on signature verification.

https://twitter.com/joshshapiropa/status/1347063329404178432...

I don’t see how this is supposed to build trust that the election was run fairly and securely, in fact quite the opposite.

My point is not to debate specific failures. My point is it’s the responsibility of the systems and processes in place in the electoral system to instill trust in the populace that there is no fraud in the voting or the counting.

Instead, people were lied to about how votes would be cast, lied to about how votes would be counted, and the rules were changed arbitrarily in many places up to the final days and even hours of actual voting.

Again, my point is not how much fraud was actually present. But you can have a system people mostly trust even if they don’t like the outcome, or you can do things like not even checking the signature on millions of mail-in ballots.

Signature checking is stupid and pointless. Disenfranchising someone because their signature doesn’t match some record on file is ridiculous. The signature verification itself has many many issues on its own.

The problem is stating without evidence that the signatures are absolutely fraudulent. The claims made by Trump and the GOP over the last decade about voter fraud are to blame.

The president and his cronies have repeatedly claimed in public that they have evidence of massive fraud. They have not even attempted to claim any of these in court, where these claims would have been immediately discovered as outright fabrications.

Also, Trump has sought to buy out election officials with 'gifts', has cajoled and petitioned various others to ask for votes to be thrown out or 'discovered', has tried to convince congressmen and senators to overturn the result of the vote, has cobtemplated invoking marshal law and redoing the election and so on.

In all of this he has been successful in conning a large number of people that the most important democratic institution, the vote, has been stolen from them by the federal government and several states. They were convinced enough that they tried attacking Congress to force it to overturn the results.

If these are not aspects of an attempted coup, I don't know how they should be interpreted.

> While none of his objections had any legal merit, what exactly is scary in principle about using the law as it written to contest the results of an election?

But that's not what happened. What really happened was that Donald Trump and his lawyers repeatedly committed perjury and barratry by deliberately filing cases that were either false or meaningless.

Any petitioner acting in good faith needs their day in court.

There are already penalties in law for people who attempt to abuse the court system for their own benefit and these penalties need to be applied with maximum force to the Trump administration and their legal "professionals".

I can't wait to see about this president how competent he is

Exactly the entire force should be dismissed (with no pension) and the senior leadership should be left alone in an office with a bottle of whisky and their side arm

I hate authority as much as the next, but when they keep people out we complain about their brutality, when they let people in we urge them to suicide. No one in their right mind would want such a job, thus we get the people who aren't.

That was dark humour - if the leader of that police force had any honour he would have personally apologised to both houses and resigned last evening.

Have you heard any information about any of the thousands of legislators, Capitol employees, media members or any of the other legitimate occupants of the Capitol building being hurt, killed, or even being in unwilling contact with the insurrectionists? If not, than the Capitol Police did their primary job effectively, which probably hurt their ability to do their other job (maintaining a secure perimeter around the building).

The GP is way off base suggesting both the dismissal and suicide of the entire police force responsible.

There is a massive difference between police keeping people out of a public building and police actively attacking even quasi-peaceful protesters like we've seen a lot of times during the BLM protests. I, for one, don't have a real problem with police launching tear gas at BLM protesters trying to enter the Portland courthouse. I do have a problem with police shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas at protesters on the streets chanting.

I'm really getting tired of the what-about-ism here. They should ALL be prosecuted. Any violent protestors. Anyone that does property damage. Anyone protesting in a non-violent way should be allowed to do so. What we are seeing instead is peaceful, non-violent BLM protesters and journalists are shot and teargassed. Violent protestors are allowed to get away without prosecution. And Trump insurrectionists are allowed to walk into the most important federal building in the country, and then walk out. This is insane. As a country, we no longer know wrong from right, or up from down, or true from false. That is the definition of a major mental pathology.

This is way out of proportion, and you're suggesting this without even waiting for a formal investigation, which is almost hypocritical.

The whole point is that we should re-establish the supremacy of the rule of law. What happened last night was an assault on this. Enacting your suggestion would be the same.

I wasn't suggesting do it without the law - Presumably the House and Congress are the employers and could pass the relevant motion/law very quickly

And collective punishment of employees is perfectly valid in law.

> This was a shameful display by the police charged with defending the rule of law in the USA

Considering congresspeople are also directly charged with defending the rule of law, the federal legislature could always take the Texas approach ..

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/us/guns-get-a-pass-at-tex...

would have been 'interesting' (albeit even more tragic) to see how this would have played out in that environment

How is this different than the very large and often violent protests that have been taking place around the country in major cities, often in front of legislative areas, yet law enforcement has by and large allowed the property damage and violence to proceed without intervention, precisrly because they do not want to escalate tensions? None of it is good, but we should be consistent in requesting law enforcement to draw down every such violent mob, not just the partisan favorite.

In what cities was there no intervention? There was sure plenty of intervention in Portland, even against journalists.

The problem is that law enforcement is incompetent. They are provocative against the peaceful and ineffective against the violent. Pretty much the worst of both worlds.

I think there's an argument to be made that the response at the Capitol was what you want from a police force. The Capitol Police have a dual role as bodyguards (for legislators, their staff, other employees of the legislative branch, and the journalists and media covering them) and as security guards (for the buildings of the Capitol complex). Given that as far as I can tell none of the people who were there to do the business of operating the US government were injured, and that almost all were successfully evacuated, it seems they did that first (and more important) job excessively well.

The second job is more difficult to do effectively (with the potential that some of the protesters were armed, any armed response could have escalated into an actual battle), and was almost certainly compromised by the absence of the personnel needed to evacuate and secure the legitimate occupants of the complex (I don't see any numbers at a quick glance, but almost certainly thousands of people on what was a normal workday until 2:30PM).

Not to mention the inexplicable absence of last summer's no-badge secret police in guarding this protest, and an unwillingness of the executive branch to provide requested national guard allocations to support the Capitol Police.

If I recall correctly, protestors were allowed to take over multiple city blocks for weeks.

Right, if invading the nation's capital building for a few hours is considered insurrection, then much more so is taking over the part of Portland around the mayor's office, along with property destruction and violence towards other citizens. If we want to get technical, the latter is most definitely the sort of insurrection that would allow lawful military intervention by the president.

I did not say that the police should have quashed the protest or attacked it violently.

That does not mean that they should have ever allowed protesters to attack the Capitol building while Congress was in session.

It's also important that the BLM protests were not about wanting to overturn the results of the election and install their preferred candidates. The cause that is at least proclaimed by a protest movement matters, it is not just a detail when considering a valid response to it. And even so, any police officers who fought BLM protesters to keep them from attacking democratic institutions, especially those in session, were fully justified.

Neither did I. In both cases the police should have shutdown the protests once things reached a certain point, regardless of cause.

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