Hyperbole to the Nth.
Do we really want to go down the path of judging and punishing people for what they'd have been able to accomplish if they hypothetically had unlimited resources they really wouldn't ever have access to?
Everyone would deserve a death sentence in all instances of just about anything.
Now that's hyperbole to Nth degree. That's the slippery-slope fallacy all the way down to the most extreme conclusion.
Let's instead stick to what we know:
1) Many of the rioters had an intent to de facto overthrow the government. They had guns, nooses, there were chat logs, etc. This is not conjecture.
2) Many of the rioters had the resources to do what they intended: they easily outmatched the Capitol Police forces, and backup forces were slow to respond. The physical barriers rioters encountered were not sufficient to the task.
3) What they they lacked was the knowledge of where to go to accomplish their aims. They were too slow to the chambers, and couldn't locate their targets. When they got close, those at the front lacked conviction after seeing their friend justifiably shot.
I'm think it's quite appropriate to consider January 6th a "near miss" for our country as we know it, but given comments like yours and the revisionism happening before our eyes it doesn't quite seem we're out of danger. It is very appropriate to me to punish people for their actions, and sometimes for their intended actions. "Attempted Murder" is a crime for a reason, just because they failed to complete their task doesn't de facto exonerate them of wrong doing!
The reality is we'll never know the extent of how armed (guns or otherwise) the rioters were, because almost everyone was allowed to leave unimpeded.
And "we'll never know" isn't good enough. Again especially from someone caught lying.
* Decent but not exhaustive summary of the myth you're parroting: https://www.factcheck.org/2021/03/capitol-protesters-were-ar... * Another one from NPR that gets into more specifics: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters... * Admission of rioter that he had firearms, agrees to cooperate further: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/january-6-capitol-riot-oath-kee... * Discusses Oath Keepers' chats and them clearly communicating intent, including their "quick reaction force" with an "arsenal" ready if needed: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/06/january-6-consp... * Description weapons, focusing on two individuals in particular: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-weapons-deadly-dan... * Database from NPR on those charged (CTRL+F "weapon"): https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-t...
Also watch basically any video reconstruction to see any number of people treating any number of objects like clubs. But I'm not going to rewatch the videos to find the timestamps. And now that I've jumped through your hope, I'll reinforce a key point: the vast, vast majority of rioters (both that entered and just lingered outside the capitol) were not searched.
> They had guns, nooses, there were chat logs, etc. This is not conjecture.
Stop trying to wiggle out of this. You said armed with guns. Don't try and move this over suddenly to "Clubs" because your bs has been called.
I don't disagree that some of them were posing a threat of bodily harm to the people inside the Capitol, but that's a much different claim.
> "Attempted Murder" is a crime for a reason
And it is a lesser crime than murder.
As it should be. I never intended to imply otherwise.
> The original claim was that these particular capitol rioters could have actually destroyed the republic in that moment.
I think there is a reasonable chance that they could have, had the been able to murder the "enemies" on that day. What does that mean or look like? I don't know. But what happens when the only decision-makers left for our Republic are those that tacitly and explicitly supported this action, if not immediately then more and more in hindsight.
If every member of Congress died, would the Republic cease to exist? Probably not. There's a contingency plan for that.
> What does that mean or look like? I don't know.
The claim can't be made if this can't be answered.
Those plans assume good faith leadership. This insurrection was encouraged by the lame duck president and supported by members of Congress that now refuse to investigate it. And it wouldn't have been every member of Congress dead, would it? Those supporting the Big Lie would have been around to govern. Not exactly comforting to me, and I think well within the realm of believabilty for at least the possibility of a permanent change to our Republic as we know it.
> The claim can't be made if this can't be answered.
On the contrary: the fact that the question can't be answered confidently supports my point rather than refuting it. We don't know what would have happened. It's conceivable or systems would have endured, contingencies enacted, order restored. But there's good reasons to think that may not have happened as well.
What is "my way"? That I want people who clearly intended harm to be subject to the consequences of that action (within our justice system and with the burden on the state to prove their guilt)? Is that so radical to you? I'm not asking anyone be hanged ffs. Nor am I advocating for any sort of detention for every person at the capitol that day. But this isn't something we should just try to forget, downplay, minimize, revise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVZvp-Dv0gg (crush inside the building)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEGthdTzedk (mob trying to break in, and beating officers with flagpole and other objects)
Nope, don't try to whitewash this. Thirty seconds of google searches easily puts these efforts to lie.
> In the weeks before supporters of then-President Donald Trump assaulted the U.S. Capitol, TheDonald.win forum commenters debated how best to build a gallows for hanging — or simply terrifying — members of Congress deemed disloyal. What kind of lumber? What kind of rope? And how many nooses?
> “The website, TheDonald, played a far more central role in the January 6th Capitol insurrection than was previously known,” he said. “There are thousands of posts — with tens of thousands of comments — detailing plans to travel to Washington and engage in violence against the U.S. Capitol. The ultimate end goal of this violence was, on behalf of Trump, disrupt the Congress and overturn the presidential election.”
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/15/thedona...
And wallstreetbets debates how to please your wife's boyfriend. That is to say both /r/thedonald and /r/wallstreetbets (who has also harmed people via their encouragement of gambling the markets) have similar cultures of irreverence, hyperbole, trolling, and joking with the intent of setting people off. They find it funny when taken out of context and used to terrify people. For example, it's the same thing behind how 4chan jokingly made the OK sign into a white supremacist hand sign, thus causing a moral panic.
I'm not saying one way or the other as to whether the comments here are right. But you're dealing with a forum that trolls people by posting cartoon frogs, mocking the OK sign, and calling each other centipedes.
A lot of the 4chan dynamic involves people starting with something edgy as a dumb joke, and then the site's large subset of actual idiot racists taking it seriously. The OK sign was a great example of that - some people started it as a dumb joke and then actual racists enthusiastically embraced it. Hell, 4chan's racism in general started as a dumb joke and ended up with 51 people being murdered in Christchurch.
So I wouldn't use the fact that some subset of people have an edgy sense of humor as a license to hand-wave away other violent idiots who were serious as a heart attack with their planning.
Which were found on a table, not brought in to the "insurrection". Anyway, the entire narrative of the "insurrection" is a useful tool for the larger state security apparatus to justify ever increasing and intrusive technological surveillance - this time on US Citizens ("domestic war on terror" anyone? [0]). Which explains why the lie about the death of the Capital Police officer[1] was so useful that it wasn't corrected, even though it was verifiably false the entire time. I'm not aware of a single person who's been charged with "insurrection" in this alleged "insurrection" that took place. Happy to be proven wrong here. Lots of trespassing, assaulting a peace officer, and felony rioting though. The point I'm trying to make is that the technology a lot of us work on allows violent lies to spread with unprecedented ease, but there isn't a real way for them to be walked back after they're out in the open.
>Nope, don't try to whitewash this.
There's also some historical context that everyone seems to be forgetting. Puerto Rican nationalists shooting congressmen from the House balcony in the 50s (Carter pardoned them), the Kennedys, all the Weather Underground bombings in DC in the 70s, more actual assassination attempts in the 80s, various far-right and far-left terrorism here and there. This is to say that events like this are not exactly unique, and it's been really weird for me since I spent most of my early 20s studying this kind of thing (history, terrorism both here and abroad) when I was in the Army. It's like I'm watching everyone collectively want to LARP that this is the "worst thing ever" so that they can be a part of history. "Insurrection", for me at least, carries a very specific definition, and what happened on 6JAN2020, while awful, certainly doesn't fit into that category. Felony riot, absolutely. It surely isn't the worst thing ever, yes you are a part of history (however you want to define that), and the Republic is carrying on just fine.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Nation...
[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-a...
Agreed.
The difference between January 6 and previous incidents is there's a very well-reasoned argument to be made by people who are experts in this area that the events of January 6 were the culmination of a self-coup attempt we typically only see in developing nations[1]. Fortunately the execution was inept and the institutions were able to withstand the assaults against them, but there were serious efforts to accomplish it nonetheless. The actual assault on Congress was just one facet of the attempt.
I've watched the footage of the rallies in the days before January 6. The people who assaulted the capitol were fed a firehose of lies for days and weeks (and actually going back to 2016) about the election which dovetails nicely with your point:
> The point I'm trying to make is that the technology a lot of us work on allows violent lies to spread with unprecedented ease, but there isn't a real way for them to be walked back after they're out in the open.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/11/capitol-ri...
Honestly, this is an amazing essay thanks for sharing. From an anthropological perspective this is exactly what I'm talking about, people wanting to feel like they're at some apex of history. Her arguments amount to "this was a coup attempt because I've redefined what a coup attempt means to fit this specific instance". The entire piece is an exercise in redefining what have long been well understood to be the hallmarks of a Coup actually are. Exaggerated language is throughout the essay, but there's a couple sentences that stand out to me:
>>During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Trump drew Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper out of a White House meeting to follow him for a provocative photo-op in front of a historic church. Paramilitary forces under the president’s command cleared a passage for his group across Lafayette Square.
Summarily debunked[1], but it's one of those enduring memes from this that strikes onlookers as so foul that that any attempt to correct the record is met with discordance and invective. "Paramilitary" forces? The Park Police are now a ... paramilitary force? Let me get my cousin in Montana on the phone, I'm sure he'd love to know this.
>>As in the case of other coup attempts, the president’s actions have put us on the brink of civil war.
Yes, a very "expert" opinion here. "On the brink of civil war", we are.
We're in a situation where we're watching the same film, and seeing two different movies. I don't have anything to blame here but the technology we all help build which allows the narrative to be manipulated like this in real time, with no meaningful way to update.
[1]https://greenwald.substack.com/p/yet-another-media-tale-trum...
No, its a classic autocoup (self-coup) attempt. Executive leader directs loyalists against another government power center for the purpose of either extending term beyond what has been secured through the regular process or seizing additional unauthorized powers in the existing term. It wasn't even covert, they were literally overtly directed to go to Congress for that end.
Now, was it a poorly planned, uncoordinated, sloppily executed, and ultimately failure of an autocoup attempt? Sure, but that doesn't make it not a coup attempt.
Dozens of people have been charged, and a founding lifetime member of the Oath Keepers has plead guilty, to relevant crimes, to wit, unlawfully entering the Capitol with the intent to influece, obstruct, and/or interfere with the electoral vote count, and/or conspiring to do so.
Its not like “attempt or conspiracy to effect an autocoup” is a separate offense under the US Code.
The idea that "trespassing" into the Capital is something you can charge against the citizens of a democratic country, and not an Imperial Empire, is probably a separate question.
> The new IG report is being used by some Trump supporters and anti-anti-Trumpers to revisit coverage of that sort and argue that it unfairly assigned blame to Trump. While some mainstream outlets have misleadingly suggested the new IG report proves Trump didn’t order protesters to be cleared out, Trump supporters have gone even further and have used it to try to discredit the media in general.
> ...However, the operation to clear Lafayette Square involved numerous other law enforcement agencies, including Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). And the report makes clear that the various agencies involved in the chaos that unfolded outside the White House that day were not always in radio communication with one another — and overall were certainly not on the same page.
> Notably, as lawyer Luppe Luppen highlighted on Twitter, the IG report indicates that Secret Service officers on the scene — who were aware of USPP’s operational plan — escalated the situation by using pepper spray against protesters, and by doing so before USPP officers had a chance to give demonstrators any warnings to disperse. The report says a Secret Service official later apologized to USPP officials for the incident, but didn’t explain why it happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
[2] https://www.vox.com/2021/6/11/22527796/ig-report-trump-bible...
Nah, I'm aware of them, believe me. This just wasn't that. I think we're going to talk past each other at this point.