Attempted Coup in the United States: Tracking Investigations and Fallout

I feel like this might be an appropriate document with regard to most demonstrations. You don’t want the national guard to escalate conflict. They clearly didn’t account for the president of the United States instigating a riot.

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i think it’s a good point, and i don’t know enough to know whether this was standard operating procedure or not.

more troublesome than the memo is that the national guard – so far as i know – werent even deployed until well after the capitol was breached.

i dont know if there were already any on the ground, but this usa today timeline puts the deployment at 3:51pm

about 2 1/2 hours after people started attacking the police.

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As a reminder, when BLM was peacefully protesting in DC:

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yeah. except for maybe the helmets, it shows that they were kitted out in a similar way to that memo. no visible weapons, no shields, not in riot gear.

it’s that they weren’t even there which matters.

that memo then isn’t really a smoking gun. what we’re missing is who stopped them from being deployed in advance, and who delayed their deployment when dc asked for support.

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looks like some huge fraction of all viewers were viewing each video for less than 3 seconds :confused:

“The metric should have reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by the total number of people who played the video. But it didn’t,” Facebook conceded at the time. “It reflected the total time spent watching a video divided by only the number of ‘views’ of a video (that is, when the video was watched for three or more seconds).” By Facebook’s estimation, this inflated the metrics that advertisers saw by between 60 and 80 percent.

Facebook may have knowingly inflated its video metrics for over a year - The Verge

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That was for the Lincoln Memorial. There are no people in the Lincoln Memorial, much less 1/3 of the government of the United States plus the VP.

broadchurch-angry-as-me

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Well, we do have some info on that:

My bold.

There seems to have been a combination of reluctance on the Sergeant at Arms’ parts to have heavy policing and military support because it would look as if they were assuming that the President and his buddies were going to riot along with an (incorrect) assumption that if they did need backup, it could be provided quite quickly even without a formal request to be in readiness beforehand.

Also a reluctance on the part of the military to be used as a brute squad after all the (entirely justified) criticism following the policing of the BLM demonstrations.

There is then the period when the rioters were actually rioting/clearly about to which seems to be due to Trump political appointees refusing/delaying provision of support plus I suspect a pretty big issue about how the hell to go about clearing the Capitol without turning it into a complete clusterfuck.

National Guard troops are not exactly trained for sweeping through a compound of buildings which have to be left as intact as possible, clearing out hostiles with non-lethal or at least minimal force while worrying about possible “absolutely-must-not-come-to-harm” non-hostiles/hostages.

Particularly if you’re worried about the reliability of those troops in the face of the proposed tasking, which I’d be surprised if they weren’t.

You already had reports about some police officers helping the insurrectionists. It would only take a few sympathisers within a National Guard unit to turn the whole thing into a bloodbath, potentially with NG units fighting each other. Which in turn could have lead to the full-on civil war some people claim to want.

I think it’s hard to overestimate just how dangerous the events of Jan 6th were. It all didn’t go to shit but it easily could have with just a few different decisions and outcomes here and there.

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Take away their veteran’s benefits

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oh no facepalm GIF

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Seriously, though. W.T.F.?

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Yea verily the gun doth smoke…

Perhaps one of the very few “lucky” breaks we (U.S.ians) have had with Cult45.

Their funders are still funding, they are learning from previous errors, and they undoubtedly will continue to scrape together their :roll_eyes: coalition of the willing :roll_eyes: .

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I mean honestly it’s not surprising. These people don’t believe in democracy. They thought Trump deserved to be president no matter what the counts said, and I’d bet they would be happy with loftier titles that suggest he doesn’t need to go through that kind of check. They tried to decide the outcome of the election by breaking into the capitol, holding senators for ransom, and lynching the vice-president. We may respect the pick-your-favorite-name-here step as the heart of everything, but why exactly should someone like that care?

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I like to point out to people who say, “shouldn’t there at least be an investigation about election irregularities?” that 45 was calling the election fraudulent before the election. The only irregularities were him and his sycophants.

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really they just mean “shouldn’t there be more voter suppression, before and after the election”

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Um, actually there were investigations and recounts in pretty much every contested state. I think in Georgia they actually found five or so cases of voter fraud, all Republican.

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indeed, there is nothing wrong with investigations and recounts

but it doesn’t mean they get a do-over just because their guy lost

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And they are endeavoring to accomplish exactly that. At “warp speed,” if you will.

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more fucked-up fallout

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How many live in states that disenfranchise criminals?

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