I already knew this, but it’s nice to be reminded: Caitlin Flanagan is a national treasure.
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Summary: It was not an insurrection. A bunch of citizens came to DC to celebrate the Trump presidency, and were surprised to be let in the Capitol so easily. They wandered around as if visiting a museum.
She is indeed.
Roger, do you defecate on the floor at museums?
Personally, I use the toilet and flush it. According to this NY Times story, one of the supposed insurrectionists “joked that he had gone to the bathroom and not flushed.” That can happen at museums.
Funny you should name-check “National Treasure”, since that movie is henceforth going to require a lot of suspension of disbelief about how hard it is to break into a federal building.
> A bunch of citizens came to DC to celebrate the Trump presidency, and were surprised to be let in the Capitol so easily.
Sure. And they broke down those windows to improve ventilation (very important in the age of covid) and they had those zip ties in case they encountered some PCs in need of better cable management while they were investigating the office of their elected representatives.
That dead cop was just a percussive massage that got a but out of hand.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/rex-huppke/ct-trump-capitol-mob-fbi-arrests-cumulus-election-biden-huppke-20210112-zmxfbai4djcxncuhbcpgjdoixi-story.html
Here’s a hilarious article illustrating the viewpoints of the various right-wing actors in the recent insurrection, from mob to GOP congressman:
>>Hello, I am a Congressional Republican who loudly repeated President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and “stolen.” I also egged on the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol.
It is tragic that large corporate donors like Hallmark, American Express and Marriott are saying they will no longer give me money and that my colleagues in the Democratic Party are attempting to have me removed from office because I committed an innocent act of sedition and may have incited people to attempt a violent disruption of government activity.
Clearly this is an attempt to silence me, and no, I do not believe it’s ironic that I’m saying that in front of a large bank of television cameras.
What we need right now in this country is unity. Clearly, the only way to achieve unity is for Democrats and all others disturbed by the domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol to immediately stop trying to blame those responsible for the attack and to not hold them accountable in any way.<<
I don’t know the whole truth about the incident, but there were at least some people who were not just wandering around as if at a museum.
As with the BLM demonstrations, very many people were peacefully protesting and some were violent. The violence can not just be dismissed because some were peaceful, nor should the peaceful be categorized as violent. I would have more sympathy with the characterization of this as a peaceful demonstration if it did not come from the same people who characterized BLM demonstrators as violent extremists.
> but there were at least some people who were not just wandering around as if at a museum.
Aside from that, the ultimate aim of this exercise – entering the Capitol and shutting down the proceedings there – was to overthrow the US republic and to install a dictator.
Let’s not lose sight of what the whole “overturn the election” thing these people are pursuing is about.
This wasn’t a display of popular discontent, or even a riot, it was an attempt to prevent the confirmation of Biden as the next elected president, and to replace him with Trump as a dictator.
BLM was bad…but they were not targeting the Capitol…there’s a different level of significance in their places where they’re rioting.
I’m wondering if the demographic changes (specifically the high level of increase in mexicans/latinos) is changing the social makeup of the country – America has always been majority “white” (loosely defined based on the era). It’s going latino. Today it’s roughly 18% but 50+% of the population growth is latino. won’t be long when latino hits 25,30,35% etc…major social changes are coming for America and a fading (visible) majority will keep grievances going.
#9, yes, that does seem to be their intention, although not as dictator in their eyes, it is just that this is what he would de facto have been had they succeeded.
Harold, Advo: The analogy to a museum was from the cited Flanagan article. She wrote: “They brought items to the lost and found; they walked between the velvet ropes. … She made it sound like this had happened to her at the Air and Space Museum.”
So, Roger, what is your opinion of the demonstration/riot/attempt to overthrow the US republic?
Advco, there was no “attempt to overthrow the US republic”. The above Flanagan article has much more info that I do, it does not say that anyone there had any such intentions.
She quotes someone saying he was there to “express my opinion as a free American, my beliefs that this election was stolen. Um—we were cheated.” That was probably the opinion of a lot of them.
#12. Clearly Flanagan was being very selective about whom she spoke in those particular passages. The whole piece does include bashing of heads to kill someone and defecating on the floors and tracking their own filth through the hallways. Someone got that riot shield away from a police officer, and it probably was not by asking nicely. Talking about the guy who found it rather than whoever took it alludes to the violence without making it centre stage.
It is quite a nuanced piece. By including the violence, but only in passing, it shows us the depths USA has descended to. These are just ordinary folk, goaded and lied to to the extent that they mount a violent and seditious attack on the very centre of democratic Government, the very thing they say they are trying to preserve. They did not know what they were doing, but they did it anyway. They just found themselves in that position because that is where the Trump rhetoric would inevitably lead them. Where else could it go? How else could it have ended? It is a much more thoughtful and clever piece than I initially gave it credit for.