Originally published at: FBI releases spectacular footage of Capitol riot | Boing Boing
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Boils the blood to see Nazis/Facist/KKK/GQP/Magat scumbags running amok. tRump fanned those flames, members of Congress/Senate aided them, the hunt needs to continue from the bottom feeders to the top enablers.
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These are audition videos for the new TV show “Hawley’s Heroes”
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While “riot” is an accurate shorthand for what happened on 6 Jan., let’s not let it obscure what it really was: an organised and armed insurrection against the legitimate federal government of the U.S.
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As much as I deplore the attack on the capitol by Trump’s Terrorists I don’t believe that is bear mace. It looks like a conventional fire extinguisher
Further evidence; when you watch the reactions of the officers being sprayed they look pretty calm, not the reactions of people in a cloud of chemical irritant.
Obviously, since I was not there I can’t know for sure. But that is my analysis.
Cheers.
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That is possible, but I bet they consider a chemical fire extinguisher still a type of assault.
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There is a weird vibe to this video for me. The officers are moving sort of randomly, not like a force under attack, and the insurrectionists are harassing them but not in any sort of intentional way. I don’t mean the bear spray was unintentional but that there seems to be no point to it, other than making the LEOs unhappy. It has a cosplay/LARP sort of feel to it. I know 5 people died but only one shot was fired.
It’s really a very serious thing but I don’t see much of a response in the moment (thanks to the skulduggery between the WH and the DoD) or in the time since. They let people go after detaining them because there was no way to transport them on the day? Yet in so many other cities we saw riot shields and Bearcats and all the rest that a militarized police presence can offer.
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Cops in the DC area are fairly used to pepper sprays and the variants, and several of them are wearing eye protection and gas masks. I imagine is still sucks to get sprayed, but reacting to it likely would cause them to lose face among peers.
that’s a weird way of looking at violence.
you had officers with crushing injuries, eyes gouged, spines crushed, impaled by flag poles, beat by batons and baseball bats.
and the officers weren’t even the targets!
there were two pipe bombs, defused. people chanting to hang pence. gallows. zip ties. people hunting down people serving in congress ostensibly to hurt them, or put them on “trial” like people planned to do in michigan to whitmer.
leo was injured because they stood in the way of what those trump supporters wanted to achieve. that they got so close was down to a failure of imagination - sorry, deliberately ignoring - that white conservatives would want violence.
do people now want to downplay that violence and the goals of that violence? of course. racism is alive and well. but, trump and his supporters can’t be allowed to get off that easily or it will happen again, and be even worse the next time.
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I didn’t read @paulbeard’s post as excusing the violence in any way, rather that it was a comment about the kind of surreal vibe of how it played out, especially as a televised event.
Yes, there was an organized element to the insurrection. Yes, its very intent was to overthrow the legitimate government and stop the democratic process from occurring. Totes.
But there were also a lot of, well, kind of dazed cultists that seem to almost have lost track of what is real, what is a bunch of bullshit on the internet or in the radical right wing media. The whole thing has a bit of a made-for-tv vibe to it. It all almost seems like the kind of event a master of manipulating the media might come up with…
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It is. But it seems that without a death toll, these events fade quickly. The LEOs who were injured weren’t considered worthy of commendation by some of the people they defended. There has been a lot of news about violence against Asian-Americans but it took a murder spree to put that above the fold on the front page. “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” as the quote runs. The USA is/has a violent culture. I don’t think violence is downplayed: it’s just constant, like a pulse.
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totally. there were definitely some, driven by the president to the capitol who didn’t quite know what the heck was going on. some who probably were looking for him to show up like he promised.
others confused that law enforcement wasn’t helping them along. and more than a few who were wondering where the kegs were because there were always kegs the other times they rioted.
still there sure didn’t seem to be many people trying to defuse the situation. my impression is they were all there to participate - in whatever way they could - trump’s overthrow of democracy.
( and you don’t see the level of violence that happened at the capitol even in the trump designated anarchist cities of portland, seattle, and chicago - where cities were “literally burning to the ground” )
all that said, as i wrote my reps at the time - after acknowledging the trauma they lived through - im less concerned with giving long jail sentences to people who were there on the ground, and more concerned about trump and his friends who helped make this happen.
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agreed. they are buried quickly, even with a death toll, because to deal with them requires dealing with white supremacy. and who wants to do that?
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As crazed as these numbskulls were, from their perspective, they were doing the right thing. They were clearly in the right. They were being directed by the President himself – and that much is true (and so many of his family/cronies).
Which is why it’s so so dangerous that GQP keeps fanning these flames and supporting The Big Lie. More programming…
here’s where i disagree.
violence as a tactic ( and i should probably be clear that i mean violence against people ) is not acceptable, and you cannot be “in the right” ( except, i guess politically ) if you believe that using violence to get your way is okay
other people have asked: well what if trump had won the election, wouldn’t the other side do the same thing?
the answer is clearly no.
we saw what resistance against trump looked like. again and again. we’ve even see what resistance against police violence and white supremacy looks like, and even there violence was not directed at law makers or leo
yes, windows were broken. yes, some businesses got looted. i would even say that yes, this sometimes seemed like a deliberate tactic so that ( @paulbeard’s point ) things weren’t quickly ignored - but people weren’t out seeking blood.
violence has not been the point of protests on the left, yet that was explicitly the point of the capitol rioters and the many many instances of white supremacist violence we see time and again here in the us
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I said they believed they were in the right, not that they actually were.
The Nazis thought they were in the right. From my own study of history, most sick shit people have done has been self-justified. How people can be led to believe this is worthy of greater study, IMHO.
This book was very informative for me when I read it in high school. The scariest part is that totally average people can be turned into murderers.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0062303023/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_1C3K1Y1V7VGFXFBNJAZW
I’ve mentioned it before, but this quote from Talented Mr. Ripley stuck with me:
Well, whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? In your head. You never meet anybody that thinks they’re a bad person.
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in my view, it’s one thing to believe in conspiracy theories and another to act with violence. they are mutually independent qualities.
i started with pushing back a certain train of thought that paulbeard was expressing, “there seems to be no point to it, other than making the LEOs unhappy. It has a cosplay/LARP sort of feel to it. I know 5 people died but only one shot was fired.”
and your comment on “dazed cultists that seem to almost have lost track of what is real”
yeah, a lot of them didn’t know exactly what to do. and yes, a lot of them expected a different kind of response – but they weren’t just playing a game, or doing some sort of weird virtue signaling.
they were all actively supporting a violent insurrection with the explicit goal of overthrowing the government, harming law makers, and installing trump as god emperor
if the ( deliberately under supported ) capitol police hadn’t stopped the trump supporters from getting at lawmakers and their staff – it would have been a much bloodier day, and the larpers and dazed cultists would have been helping it along.
they are dazed and ambling because it wasn’t working out.
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And it’s not like the Democrats never had a reason to be upset by the outcome of a Presidential election. No Republican has entered that office with a majority of the popular vote since the 1980s.
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