Hacker News Reader

Comment by LordHumungous | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the real issue is that the President of the United States was giving them marching orders. The platform that they happened to use is secondary.

View on HN

How? (Not a trolling question)

Edit for clarity: How did the president give marching orders?

If he actually said anything directly calling for violence CNN and MSNBC would have had that clip on repeat for the last week.

I'm going to assume you are serious, so there was a really good bestof on Reddit that explained the way Trump communicates very well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/kq9rcu/trump_face...

If you expect me to read anything from r/politics with any level of seriousness...but aside from that...

Okay, he lied a lot (A LOT!), and ultimately turned up the temperature in the room, but at no time did he say "go invade the capitol". In fact in the last speech right before the event he mentioned that "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." The key word being peacefully. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he's been voted out. But let's tell the truth.

I mean, that's like saying: "C'mon he lit a match. Matches can't burn down houses, that's crazy talk. Look how small that fire is!"

Okay, but let's set a consistent standard then: all the rioting and looting over the summer should be blamed on politicians who didn't condemn them and in actuality pushed protesting over COVID lock downs and the shooting of Steve Scalise is the fault of Bernie Sanders. All of which of course is insane and should not happen.

I don't remember Dem politicians lying for years about how the police had children locked up in pizza shops (Republicans get to own this now that they ran and had elected a full-on QAnon congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene), how much police hate America, how much the police are stealing from you, how much the police want to destroy America, how the police are un-American, how the police are socialists trying to turn America into Venezuela. And then suggesting they take a stroll to downtown Seattle. You know, for some peaceful protest.

Frankly if they had, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. I've watched a ton of Fox over the last few years, and what the Republicans and also very explicitly Donald Trump are saying, is genuinely terrifying.

I wish the Democrats would speak out about how 0.7% of America is in prison right now - the world's leading jailer per capita, how the long-term recidivism rate is over 80%, about civil asset forfeiture turning small-town cops into literal highway robbers to fund their departments, about how private prison contracts have minimum occupancy clauses, about how socioeconomic dysfunction leads minorities to interact with police 7X as much as white folks. How police shoot 10X as many people per capita in America as in Canada. They didn't say a thing early on. If anything, some of this anger towards the police came from Democrats not saying what they need to early on. Not doing what they need to early on.

From that perspective, I do believe Democrats share some of the blame.

If you don't mind reading something in the liberal media, the Wall Street Journal had an article "Trump and His Allies Set the Stage for Riot Well Before January 6" that might shed some light [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-his-allies-set-the-st...

Wait, the WSJ is 'liberal' media now? I thought they were as bejowled-old-conservative as you could get.

Depending on which branch of conservatism you subscribe to, it very well may be. I’ve seen many conservatives heavily imply (or outright say) that even Fox is untrustworthy now that they dared say something negative about Trump. And even before that, Fox, RT, Breitbart, etc. were the “go to” conservative outlets. Never WSJ. Of course, my experience may not be yours.

I get the impression that `tzs is being sarcastic with that adjective.

Correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com