This week, the political and media class emotionally marked the six-month anniversary of what they call the January 6 “insurrection.” The commemorations were reminiscent of an elementary school kid who insists on celebrating their “half birthday” — a juvenile self-indulgence, but understandable for a child. Less so for adults who are supposed to be governing the country.
Are they really trying to pretend I have short term memory loss? Almost 10 years ago protesters violently broke into the Wisconsin state capitol to block a vote. It was even praised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the time. I remember the Kavanaugh hearings, I remember Maxine Waters telling people to get in Republican’s faces, and I remember the attempted assassination of Republican senators at a baseball field. Anyone remember when Rand Paul was swarmed by people demanding he say Breonna Taylor’s name after he wrote the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act?
Remember early last year? There was a successful protest against new Virginia gun laws. The protesters were actually peaceful and picked up their trash. What was the media reaction? “Domestic terrorists who should be shot.” Lockdown protesters? “Evil death cultists!”
Fast forward to the death of George Floyd. There were massive gatherings that were somehow immune to spreading Covid 19. Large scale rioting and violence was written off. I watched many livestreams of the riots. I saw arson, assault, and even attempted murder. Many died and billions of dollars of property was destroyed. The seriousness of it was just ignored. Rioters even took over part of a city and made it their own.
The major networks and newspapers just lied about it. According to them, suburbanites clearing gun store shelves was due to “economic uncertainty related to Covid 19.” The Vox crowd was cheering the entire time. Very few of the supposedly “principled” National Review writers even cared. They just wrote jokes about CHAZ and socialism and made fun of the rioters when they tore down another abolitionist statue. The riots were still ongoing in places for weeks afterwards! Portland is still the same old story! All the people pretending to care about violence and unrest now, have never cared. It is just a show. The whole thing has just been an excuse to expand government power, expand the surveillance state, scare the populace, piss off the people who voted the wrong way, give our elected officials an excuse to be attention whores, and give a lot of taxpayer money to their friends.
A 13 minute nonviolent trespass! Can federal prosecutors and the FBI possibly do more damage to their reputations with the half of the country they're not in bed with. Oh, yeah, we can add seizing a completed Lego capitol. Serious evidence that. All this while the perjurers and frauds who peddled Russiagate get book deals and contributing slots on CNN and MSLSD.
I for one was frightened to the core by the Great Duck Dynasty Coup Attempt. How dare these unwashed deplorables come to think that they have any say about the governing of our sacred Idiocracy? Our Reps are in DC doing important work for our betters. Throw the book at these Serfs for interrupting the work of the Oligarchy's House.
Absolute insanity. Cities around the country have suffered a year of rampant crime and our representatives can't stop crying about how they were confused or scared for a few hours. Seriously when do the rest of us get that increased police protection? Or even those therapy sessions to deal with the trauma from a year of unending violence? Just imagine if they extended the same concern they show for themselves to their constituents... These people are sick.
Are there any stories of elected officials bravely standing up to the insurrectionists? You’d think one or two would have leapt at the chance of heroism with a stern demand to “Put down that laptop, miscreant shaman!” But I have seen no such story: has anybody else?
From what I have seen from the more violent episodes, the Capitol rioters were using many of the same tactics that I had seen MANY times in the riots of 2020. By January 2021, I was largely immune to watching mob violence because I had seen so much of it live streaming from all over the country in 2020.
If they were dressed in black bloc, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. They weren't as good at it but I couldn't help but think that they were under the impression that they would be able to get away with it because "everyone else" was doing it.
Later, I also saw clips of people decked out in their MAGA finest calmly walking through rope lines acting like tourists. It is somewhat difficult for me to reconcile those images with those that were more violent. I guess you could say that it was "mostly peaceful".
In the aftermath, I remember thinking that the best thing that the new administration could do would be to take the same white gloves approach with these activists as they had with the 10's of thousands of others from 2020.
Taking a principled and liberal stand that was balanced and nuanced would alleviate fear and it would demonstrate equal justice under the law. It could have united our country instead of being another mechanism to divide us.
Naturally, they decided to go with the complete opposite of that approach. If I had known that they would be arresting people for loitering in the Capitol for 13 minutes, I would have been shocked but clearly, my expectations for government agencies is still way too high.
The administration and federal agencies have pulled out all the stops to find, expose and incarcerate these "dangerous insurrectionists". I now regard many of them to be political prisoners. I honestly never thought that our government would be capable of something like this.
Over the last five years, my faith in American institutions has been challenged at every turn. Like an idiot, I keep falling back to my faith in our system of government. We know that corruption exists but the checks and balances expose and mitigate this corruption. That is the theory anyway.
It is increasingly clear that our national security state has become one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Republican and Democratic voters are equally responsible for this atrocity. Willingly giving them even more power to operate domestically is the dumbest fucking thing that anyone could do.
Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE underestimated the reality that was laid bare by Snowden and Assange. I know that I did. I said many of the things that I hear Democrats saying now. "They are just doing their job. These people are terrorists." Honestly, I don't know how I could have been such an idiot.
It is now quite clear that politicians, intelligence agencies, the media and large corporations are all reading from the same playbook. If there is any chance that a representative government can ever be elected, I will demand that they dismantle and rebuild every intelligence agency in our country. They need to be disrupted.
On any given day, I go back and forth between who I hate more. Is it the media or the intelligence agencies? Well, many times, they are the same thing. And either way, you really can't go wrong. They are all worthy of increasingly more hatred and distrust.
I am learning to embrace my place as an American dissident. If that is what they were going for, they have succeeded far beyond anything that I could have imagined. Turning law abiding citizens into dissidents is probably the dumbest thing they could do but here we are.
It's all to take the focus off the real reason why the people were milling about the Capitol: the stolen election.
Oh, hey Michael? If El Presidente Biden was SO POPULAR and he got more votes than Obama did, why didn't he have any coattails downballot? TRUMP most certainly had coattails in 2020, Republicans almost took back the House. So, how can a Presidential candidate have 80 million people voting for him, but not the other members of his Party?
And how is it that whenever the most popular President in our lifetimes gives a speech, he can't crack 5,000 views and his dislike ratio dwarves his likes (this is why the WH is trying to pressure YouTube to disable seeing the likes to dislike ratio)?
Much of the "citizenry" is buying this nonsense, and in "academia", they re writing books about it. I'm an adjunct at a major university, and our 'staff development' in Feb was about how only Qanon believers / Tucker watching / conspiracy theorists / Covid deniers are the ones who DON'T believe these things.
Many on the zoom call were actively pumped and jazzed about this woman's presentation. They called it 'important' and they were 'showing it to their children'.
The presenter even had written a book. She's the junior varsity version of Robin D'Angelo, but just as determined and emotional at making sure your "angry uncle" who forwards you links to FOX news is put in his place, and doesn't take over the country.
It's hard not to be cynical, but when the USA breaks up, these people can howl to themselves all they want, while the rest of us will ignore it.
Are they really trying to pretend I have short term memory loss? Almost 10 years ago protesters violently broke into the Wisconsin state capitol to block a vote. It was even praised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the time. I remember the Kavanaugh hearings, I remember Maxine Waters telling people to get in Republican’s faces, and I remember the attempted assassination of Republican senators at a baseball field. Anyone remember when Rand Paul was swarmed by people demanding he say Breonna Taylor’s name after he wrote the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act?
Remember early last year? There was a successful protest against new Virginia gun laws. The protesters were actually peaceful and picked up their trash. What was the media reaction? “Domestic terrorists who should be shot.” Lockdown protesters? “Evil death cultists!”
Fast forward to the death of George Floyd. There were massive gatherings that were somehow immune to spreading Covid 19. Large scale rioting and violence was written off. I watched many livestreams of the riots. I saw arson, assault, and even attempted murder. Many died and billions of dollars of property was destroyed. The seriousness of it was just ignored. Rioters even took over part of a city and made it their own.
The major networks and newspapers just lied about it. According to them, suburbanites clearing gun store shelves was due to “economic uncertainty related to Covid 19.” The Vox crowd was cheering the entire time. Very few of the supposedly “principled” National Review writers even cared. They just wrote jokes about CHAZ and socialism and made fun of the rioters when they tore down another abolitionist statue. The riots were still ongoing in places for weeks afterwards! Portland is still the same old story! All the people pretending to care about violence and unrest now, have never cared. It is just a show. The whole thing has just been an excuse to expand government power, expand the surveillance state, scare the populace, piss off the people who voted the wrong way, give our elected officials an excuse to be attention whores, and give a lot of taxpayer money to their friends.
A 13 minute nonviolent trespass! Can federal prosecutors and the FBI possibly do more damage to their reputations with the half of the country they're not in bed with. Oh, yeah, we can add seizing a completed Lego capitol. Serious evidence that. All this while the perjurers and frauds who peddled Russiagate get book deals and contributing slots on CNN and MSLSD.
I for one was frightened to the core by the Great Duck Dynasty Coup Attempt. How dare these unwashed deplorables come to think that they have any say about the governing of our sacred Idiocracy? Our Reps are in DC doing important work for our betters. Throw the book at these Serfs for interrupting the work of the Oligarchy's House.
Absolute insanity. Cities around the country have suffered a year of rampant crime and our representatives can't stop crying about how they were confused or scared for a few hours. Seriously when do the rest of us get that increased police protection? Or even those therapy sessions to deal with the trauma from a year of unending violence? Just imagine if they extended the same concern they show for themselves to their constituents... These people are sick.
Are there any stories of elected officials bravely standing up to the insurrectionists? You’d think one or two would have leapt at the chance of heroism with a stern demand to “Put down that laptop, miscreant shaman!” But I have seen no such story: has anybody else?
Reichstag Fire, except as farce.
From what I have seen from the more violent episodes, the Capitol rioters were using many of the same tactics that I had seen MANY times in the riots of 2020. By January 2021, I was largely immune to watching mob violence because I had seen so much of it live streaming from all over the country in 2020.
If they were dressed in black bloc, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. They weren't as good at it but I couldn't help but think that they were under the impression that they would be able to get away with it because "everyone else" was doing it.
Later, I also saw clips of people decked out in their MAGA finest calmly walking through rope lines acting like tourists. It is somewhat difficult for me to reconcile those images with those that were more violent. I guess you could say that it was "mostly peaceful".
In the aftermath, I remember thinking that the best thing that the new administration could do would be to take the same white gloves approach with these activists as they had with the 10's of thousands of others from 2020.
Taking a principled and liberal stand that was balanced and nuanced would alleviate fear and it would demonstrate equal justice under the law. It could have united our country instead of being another mechanism to divide us.
Naturally, they decided to go with the complete opposite of that approach. If I had known that they would be arresting people for loitering in the Capitol for 13 minutes, I would have been shocked but clearly, my expectations for government agencies is still way too high.
The administration and federal agencies have pulled out all the stops to find, expose and incarcerate these "dangerous insurrectionists". I now regard many of them to be political prisoners. I honestly never thought that our government would be capable of something like this.
Over the last five years, my faith in American institutions has been challenged at every turn. Like an idiot, I keep falling back to my faith in our system of government. We know that corruption exists but the checks and balances expose and mitigate this corruption. That is the theory anyway.
It is increasingly clear that our national security state has become one of the most powerful institutions in the world. Republican and Democratic voters are equally responsible for this atrocity. Willingly giving them even more power to operate domestically is the dumbest fucking thing that anyone could do.
Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE underestimated the reality that was laid bare by Snowden and Assange. I know that I did. I said many of the things that I hear Democrats saying now. "They are just doing their job. These people are terrorists." Honestly, I don't know how I could have been such an idiot.
It is now quite clear that politicians, intelligence agencies, the media and large corporations are all reading from the same playbook. If there is any chance that a representative government can ever be elected, I will demand that they dismantle and rebuild every intelligence agency in our country. They need to be disrupted.
On any given day, I go back and forth between who I hate more. Is it the media or the intelligence agencies? Well, many times, they are the same thing. And either way, you really can't go wrong. They are all worthy of increasingly more hatred and distrust.
I am learning to embrace my place as an American dissident. If that is what they were going for, they have succeeded far beyond anything that I could have imagined. Turning law abiding citizens into dissidents is probably the dumbest thing they could do but here we are.
It's all to take the focus off the real reason why the people were milling about the Capitol: the stolen election.
Oh, hey Michael? If El Presidente Biden was SO POPULAR and he got more votes than Obama did, why didn't he have any coattails downballot? TRUMP most certainly had coattails in 2020, Republicans almost took back the House. So, how can a Presidential candidate have 80 million people voting for him, but not the other members of his Party?
And how is it that whenever the most popular President in our lifetimes gives a speech, he can't crack 5,000 views and his dislike ratio dwarves his likes (this is why the WH is trying to pressure YouTube to disable seeing the likes to dislike ratio)?
Much of the "citizenry" is buying this nonsense, and in "academia", they re writing books about it. I'm an adjunct at a major university, and our 'staff development' in Feb was about how only Qanon believers / Tucker watching / conspiracy theorists / Covid deniers are the ones who DON'T believe these things.
Many on the zoom call were actively pumped and jazzed about this woman's presentation. They called it 'important' and they were 'showing it to their children'.
The presenter even had written a book. She's the junior varsity version of Robin D'Angelo, but just as determined and emotional at making sure your "angry uncle" who forwards you links to FOX news is put in his place, and doesn't take over the country.
It's hard not to be cynical, but when the USA breaks up, these people can howl to themselves all they want, while the rest of us will ignore it.
I’m curious, is the average Democrat buying this, or rolling eyes?
Michael, did you watch this from Tucker regarding Georgia audit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcWMi3wHnlE
Has Fox News become the voice of reason?