Is Parler usually anonymous or something? What were these people thinking posting videos of themselves committing a crime?
Now, there doesn't seem to have been any path to victory for them, and that casts doubt on the rest of their judgment. But at least in the moment, they believed they were heroes.
Plenty of the rioters streamed themselves live on Youtube, Twitch, and Facebook, while shouting their own names on camera.
Some of them even had their work-badges and IDs displayed during the riots, and bragged about their "accomplishments" on Facebook publicly under their own name.
This standard ("does anyone feel unsafe") should always be used as a check against ones haywire common sense.
For example:
- Kavanaugh confirmation hearings: did people feel unsafe? No.
- AOC leading a take over of Pelosi's office: No, probably the opposite. People were likely laughing about it and mildly annoyed.
- Mobs of people ransacking the capitol? Yeah, people felt _terrified_, and multiple people died.
See the difference? There's non-violent peaceful protest, and there's threats of violence, or actual violence, that one can feel in their bones, and which color the situation and subsequent charges should events fall out of line with our tradition of protest. Though events can't be known ahead of time, it's fairly easy in retrospect to judge intent -- i.e, AOC didn't enter Pelosi's office dressed in tactical gear and holding zip ties, with a mob of angry "Squad" members calling for the Senate minority leader's death.
It's offensive to common sense and morally dubious to compare these things, or to even bring them up in this context.
No, maybe not, but perhaps there's something to be said when you look at the shirts people were wearing ("Camp Auschwitz") or the flags people were holding (Confederate, many), or the words people were speaking ("Hang Mike Pence!")?
> Is there any indication that the vast majority had any idea of the intentions and the contents of the pockets of those who sought to do harm
There's an enormous amount of testimony everywhere, in every major publication, on every news channel, about the feelings of those on the inside experiencing the mob enter from the outside. Your attempts to defend this are disingenuous.
This is entirely not true in the real world. When a prosecutor brings a charge against someone, all sorts of factors are taken into account, based on prior law. The charge of "menacing" is a great example. How about "making threatening statements"? Or any number of other obvious examples that rely on subjective interpretation within a context.
The topic is "what were these people thinking in taking these actions?" My reply was "there were similar actions in the past which resulted in trivial punishments." Would amending my reply to "there were similar actions in the past which resulted in trivial punishments and no one took seriously anyway" somehow have made the group that entered the Capitol less likely to have done so? If so, please explain.