9/11 and 1/6
snyder.substack.com
snyder.substack.com
Coupled with threats of violence: "Businesses that want to avoid chaos between now and 2022 and prevent system breakdown in 2024 would be well advised not to donate to politicians who repeat the big lie and suppress the vote."
_However_, just because I don’t agree with something doesn’t mean I can’t learn from it or use it as a basis for analyzing my own beliefs.
The thing that most struck reading this article is something that has repeatedly struck me while interacting with the “other side”: there is a complete disconnect between how Republicans and Democrats see the events of Jan 6.
Note that the following is my perception of each side’s position. I am not asserting this is what anyone in particular believes, only that this is what they seem to believe, when filtered through my own biases.
Democrats are using the words “insurrection” and “domestic insurgency” to describe it. They seem to be assuming that the people in DC on Jan 6 intended to overthrow a legitimate, elected government through force. Meanwhile, I see Republicans most often use the word “protest”. The strongest word I’ve seen used on that side is “riot”.
Having spoken with a couple of people who were at the Capitol rally, I’m confident that the vast majority of those present there did not see themselves as “insurrectionists”, nor did they intend to overthrow anything. At most, I believe they saw themselves as practicing civil disobedience in an effort to be heard.
The videos I’ve seen from in and around Congress didn’t strike me as if the people there were intending to use violence, either. Don’t get me wrong - it was a “mob” and “mob mentality” is real and I would absolutely not have felt safe to be on the other side of those doors. What I’m trying to say is that I believe I would have judged it to be a “potentially dangerous situation”, not an “attempt to overthrow the government”.
I’d like to discuss the differing behaviors and apparent perspectives of people since that day, but I’ll wait a bit. I don’t want to write paragraphs on the topic only for the thread to be locked and it no longer be able to discussed. :)
Some unbiased sources there.
> The videos I’ve seen from in and around Congress didn’t strike me as if the people there were intending to use violence
And yet, many of them did do violence and there's plenty of video evidence of that.
I could understand not wanting to call it "insurrection", a somewhat rare and specific word. And if you don't want to use "overthrow", OK, I don't want to get hung up on semantics.
But it's hard to see this as not attempting to alter the transition of power, and in so doing subvert the most basic principle under which people who disagree can live together. And even that would not have been so important if it had just been a series of isolated nut jobs, but it's clear that they believed that they were doing so under the direction of the person who was losing power. And who had used other less-than-entirely-above-board mechanisms for that as well.
I just don't think it's feasible to present it as merely civil disobedience. The thing that they wanted to be heard about was a denial of the process by which others get their rights to be heard. Not just about this one event, but forever.
The fact is that they could not have succeeded. But they were the most vehement of an extremely large cohort of people who have been convinced that this basic rule of modern nations -- that elections are the means by which we make collective decisions -- is invalid. Even if they're wrong, it becomes true if enough of them believe it.
The threat of actual violence that day is dwarfed by that larger issue. I don't know how to respond to it. They have a self-realizing truth, one which I believe makes the country a much, much worse place to be.
While it's terrible that the GOP doesn't want this kind of investigative commission (there's possibly some GOP complicity in 1/6), I'm not sure that a bipartisan commission would've worked anyway. There's a lot the GOP doesn't want to talk about here and doesn't want aired during the 2022 election year. The House should just create a Select Committee with subpoena power to investigate 1/6 like was done for Watergate - I think this likely will happen. The DOJ could also name a special prosecutor to investigate and should do so.
What's your idea of the sequence of events where a crowd of unarmed people in the Capitol "easily" would have led to thousands of lives being lost?
We need a lot less of "it's ok when WE do it" and a lot more "This is not ok for anyone".
Are we talking about the rioters or the guy who left the pipe bombs?
This is preposterous. Donald Trump, a former POTUS, has been completely defanged and deplatformed by Silicon Valley and the broader media infrastructure. Any suggestion that the officially reported election results were not legitimate was banished and fact-checked into oblivion -- why should we believe things would go any differently in 2024?
This whole "attack on our democracy" narrative of the Jan 6 riot is being used to buttress some truly histrionic fears. For the sake of argument, let's say that the people attacking the Capitol on Jan 6 had successfully made it to the Senate chamber and torn Mike Pence limb from limb (I have to put it in these terms because they didn't bring any lethal weapons to their "insurrection"). What then? Is there a clause in the Constitution that says "if you kill the VP while the electoral vote is being tallied you get to pick the new POTUS?" No -- they would have been gassed and gunned down by the military and the vote would have proceeded with Nancy Pelosi as the new chair. Whatever the motivations of the people in the crowd, their "coup" lasted all of 4 hours and didn't even cause enough mayhem to prevent the Senate from resuming its normal business that same day. Let's chill out a bit maybe.
Maybe so, but he still holds a lot of sway over Republican voters. "The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans." I'm not sure I'd call that "defanged" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...