DC is more than capable of handling rowdy protests, we have first amendment activity every day. Capitol Police chose not to be prepared and declined backup from the other police agencies for over an hour after they were overrun.
This was not a joke.
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/13472922020835123...
(Also, before calling me a fool, consider that your own link says that it's not confirmed whether these devices were real bombs, or fake ones.)
Does that matter in the slightest for whether or not to condemn the actions? If I plant a bomb in your house, that is an action designed to cause terror, and should be condemned. If I plant a fake bomb in your house, that is an action designed to cause terror, and should be condemned.
It doesn't. It's also not the topic.
With the coup failed, it was important to look like they weren’t complicit and knowingly stood by to allow a terrorist attack.
The national guard response was indeed delayed. The actual reasons for that, who was directly responsible, and any evidence for why they made that call, have not come out yet to my knowledge.
As a reminder, the national guard in dc tear gassed an _actually_ peaceful group of protestors last summer so that Trump could take a photo op in front of a church. I wonder what the difference is between the two times?
So ironic that this drivel is what gets linked and shared. Both sides are clearly entirely capable at this game.
- https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/01/08/...
- https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/533403-sasse-says-trump-...
- https://apnews.com/article/capitol-police-reject-federal-hel...
- https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/08/congress-democrats-...
Facts:
- Capitol Police refused multiple types of reinforcements that were offered ahead of Jan 6 specifically because of wide-spread credible threats and discussions of violence
- hours elapsed with NG on stand-by and were not deployed because they lacked authorization
- Trump refused to give authorization
- Pence and Pelosi and a few others had to give (can they even?) authorization for the NG to come in
- Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Friday that he heard from senior White House officials that President Trump was "delighted" to hear that his supporters were breaking into the Capitol building in a riot Wednesday that turned deadly.
- A growing number of House Democrats say they’re concerned that tactical decisions by some Capitol Police officers worsened Wednesday’s riots and have raised the possibility that the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol might have had outside help.
I'd really like someone to try and give the more charitable interpretation of the facts so far. You can literally make up whatever you want, try and explain it.
Again, it’s unquestionable they were unprepared. It’s obvious it took too long to respond once shit went sideways.
The question is why, the answer to which you will not find in any of those articles, because it’s simply not yet publicly known.
The Military Times link you provided concludes there was a delay, but;
> “I can’t tell you what was going on on the other end, on the decision-making process. There’s been lots of speculation in the media about that, but I’m not privy to what was going on inside the White House or inside the Pentagon,” Hogan said.
The Hill cites an anonymous Whitehouse source to tell a completely unsubstantiated tale.
The only explanation the AP can muster in thousands of words is the following;
> This was a failure of imagination, a failure of leadership,” said Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, whose department responded to several large protests last year following the death of George Floyd. “The Capitol Police must do better and I don’t see how we can get around that.”
The Politico article is merely paragraph after paragraph of speculation (you might say conspiracy theories), culminating in;
> Somebody must get to the bottom of [this]!”
I also have an archive of this summer’s events. Let’s not use this moment to downplay the violence of people who may share our political sympathies.
25+ people were killed in the riots this summer. Over $2B was done in property damage. Police stations, post offices, libraries, and courthouses were stormed and set on fire.
In Portland, rioters with guns and knives threw bombs at a courthouse and tried to burn down the Mayor’s condo building. In Seattle, militants with assault rifles took over part of downtown for a month, killing and assaulting people. In DC, a mob tried to storm the White House. In Wauwatosa, a mob fired shots into the home of a police officer. People in many cities were dragged from their vehicles and beaten. Hundreds of protestors and police were seriously injured. Many similar incidents which I don’t have the time to dig up and link right now.
There were also many incidents of police brutality, such as the clearing of peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square, which likewise should not be minimized.
Mind you, most of those rioters had the sense to not live stream their crimes.
The pro-Trump people saying “antifa stormed the Capitol!” are less surprising to hear when you recall the those who this summer said, “protest violence is the work of far-right agitators!” Arrest records and livestream footage prove both groups wrong in the vast majority of cases.
[0] https://www.deseret.com/utah/2021/1/7/22219733/utah-activist...
But yes, yes, we live in mis-information-hell, so predictably the days following a conservative-led coup were ALWAYS going to contain these elements:
- whataboutism with literally anything to distract and derail (in this case, BLM)
- false equivocation (protesting numerous statistically significant killings of black folks by cops, VS trying to violently overturn the results of a democratic election)
- more false equivocation (implying that storming the nation's capital with weapons, and posting up one block away from the SPD East Prescinct with pink umbrelllas, are the same thing)
- outright lies that enough of their base will pick up and repeat (I've already seen it in multiple threads here), like, "antifa false flag blah blah blah nonsense".
Anti-fascist activists murdered an unarmed black kid in the CHOP. They shot him to death with assault rifles. Then they shot and pistol-whipped his critically wounded companion, an unarmed 14-year-old black boy (warning, video is disturbing):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K0tXOBPMHA&t=1m25s
This was one of at least four shootings in the CHOP. Bullets entered the homes of neighborhood residents, a group of whom are now suing the city for neglecting to provide law and order.
No excuse for violence or property damage. Prosecute them all.
But keep in mind that "this summer's events" comprise over 7500 protests, all across the country, over a three month time span. And it involved multiple "sides" in various states of cooperation or opposition.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/515082-over-90-perc...
This is a good point that deserves to be reiterated. At its worst you certainly had the stereotypical "pig" cops that everyone likes to ACAB at. The kind that intentionally incite an otherwise peaceful crowd; the kind that may shoot at erstwhile peaceful bystanders (including people standing on their own porch) with rubber bullets; the kind that aim their gas canister launchers directly at people standing nearby, against all common decency, and often department policy/law.
But you also had police departments that merely monitored a situation without forcefully intruding unless necessary. Some even that put away their weapons and peacefully marched with protestors.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/noose-hung-outside-capitol...
Guillotine at protests in france https://twitter.com/MissPile/status/952867661901389825?s=20
A different guillotine in france https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6477953/Yellow-Vest...
Guillotine at protest against Trump https://twitter.com/jadelson/status/1084881540256010241
BLM protesters guillotine a teddy bear https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/portland-p...
Guillotine at Jeff Bezos's house https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/08/jeff-bezos-guilloti...
Guillotine at protest in South Korea https://twitter.com/allyjung/status/797313740211253248
Guillotine at protest in Madrid https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-dignity-march-protes...
Guillotine at protest in Guatemala https://twitter.com/hezbolsonaro/status/1330250357801365508
There's plenty of things of substance to criticise these protesters for - the fact they hate democracy, the fact they believe things that are completely divorced from reality, the fact so many of them adorn themselves with symbols of racism. Merely having extremely bad taste is pretty trivial in comparison if you ask me.
Lynchings typically didn't employ gallows, they most often employed trees. The commonality between them was that both involved nooses.
I don't know if you're intentionally downplaying the violence or simply very, very misinformed, but killing a cop with a fire extinguisher is not "causally be[coming] a felon".
72 people were arrested in DC on weapons charges during the summer riots [1]. Protestors erected a guillotine in front of Jeff Bezos’s house [2]. Rioters threw bricks through apartment windows and accosted random people on the street [3] in scenes reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution.
Let’s not use the violent insurrection at the Capitol to downplay other violent episodes.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/politics/washington-dc...
[1] https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/may-2020-january-2021-unrest-relate...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-protests-guillotine-jeff-bez...
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-live...
The events of this Wednesday, a single (what I would call) medium-sized protest, got 5 people killed including one policeman, right? So just in terms of the ratio of deaths to participator-days, I think this Wednesday's event probably has last year's protests beaten by at least two orders of magnitude in the loss of life department. Even if you take away the two people who didn't die from the use of a weapon or a savage beating, I think they still got the high score by far.
To be sure, mob violence should be condemned wherever it appears. But in judging movements like these, I think it's important to keep in mind a sense of proportionality, among other things.
The three others died of natural causes - basically the strain of the protest tipped them over with heart-attacks and strokes.
What I find interesting is these details don’t seem to be communicated by the media - leading many to think that the rioters killed five people.
I’d say that poor woman died precisely because she was brainwashed by an amorphous, cult-like movement—the very same movement behind the entire event, more or less—to think that leading an armed mob to where the members of our government’s legislative branch were taking shelter wouldn’t result in the use of force against her. So maybe the rioters didn’t kill her on an individual level, but the riot certainly did—and that’s relevant in the quantitative comparison I made in my previous comment.
The actions of a group designed to deliberately create panic and terror caused the heart attack in the assaulted. Without the rioters this people would be alive today, therefore is obvious that they killed also those people.
Why what's the second closest they got to wiping out our government?
No affiliation, although I uploaded some that I archived.