I go bush for a few days, thinking that 2021 can’t be as crazy as 2020, and a riot breaks out in the Capitol building in Washington D.C.
If you called out the Antifa/Burn Loot Murder riots that occurred in numerous American cities over their 2020 summer then I’m more than willing to listen to you condemn what happened in the Capitol building in Washington D.C a couple of days ago.
But if you kept silent about those riots or even supported them as “understandable” and “justified” by “systemic racism” and other imaginary hobgoblins then I’m not interested in listening to you.
The couple of hundred Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol Building should be arrested and tried in court for rioting and trespassing. Given the standards of modern-day sentencing in general and espicially how rioters have been treated I doubt they’ll get much punishment, but anybody who knowingly breaks the law, especially if they think it’s a civil rights issue, should be prepared to face the consequences and not run away from them.
They’ll likely have no choice, given that these were Right-Wing rioters who will be facing Left-Wing prosecutors in the D.C district and soon the Biden DOJ. I doubt their charges will be dismissed as were those for the Antifa/BLM rioters.
And then there’s Trump. He’s always been careless in what he says and how he says it. It was one of the reasons I was convinced he’d lose against Hillary in 2016, shooting himself in the foot regularly. As it turns out he was crazy like a fox, knowing that it kept the media oxygen turned on him full blast 24/7.
Even with the rallies he loves so much there was never any danger of a riot breaking out in the places he went to around America just because of what he said in speeches. As many commentators noted, they were more like big parties.
But in Washington D.C., just up the road from the Capitol building where the crucial vote was to be held, if you tell a huge crowd to march on the Capitol Building and supply a spine to weak Republicans then you should not be surprised when an element of the crowd decide to provide the spines in person. There’s also no point in making a speech like that and then following it up the next day with Tweets about being peaceful. That needed to be said up front and it wasn’t. As a result Trump has had members of his Cabinet resign and will spend the last two weeks of his Presidency doing nothing more than sitting at his desk, which is now a good thing.
Trump’s experience as a New Yorker and a tycoon has always meant that he has pushed the boundaries and in business and the law that’s acceptable. I recall someone once asking him why he respected the Japanese even as he complained about them dealing unfairly (he felt) with America: “You can respect someone even if they’re beating the hell out of you”. But in politics you’re playing with fire with such an attitude because it’s not just you in the fight and the boundaries can change fast. In endlessly claiming a stolen election and other things, Trump pushed beyond the boundary of trashing the civil institutions of the USA. That is not something you can just walk away from, win or lose.
But he’s hardly alone. I’ve been told countless times, usually by the Left, that US institutions like the cops, military, justice system and government are all corrupt, systemically racist and so forth. I’ve been hearing and seeing it increasingly for the last twenty years, from the Iraq WMD to the GFC bank bailouts to claims about Diebold voting machines in Ohio (2004) or Russian Collusion (2016) and the FBI. Keep doing that and you should not be surprised when people start to take you at your word that they’re not to be trusted.
You can also spare me any repeating of Left/Democrat talking points about the “horror” of the the day and “sedition” or an “insurrection” (it seems that former President Bush will never get over Baby Brother Jeb being rejected in favour of Trump by GOP voters) carried out by “domestic terrorists” and “insurgents”.
Do these clowns look like domestic terrorists to you?
Especially when they’re following the velvet rope lines used by guided tours. If that was Antifa/BLM they’d have swept them aside, smashed those statues in the background, sprayed graffiti everywhere and done some arson, rock throwing and lasers in the eyes of the cops.
Remember how after Bush was elected, the Left screamed that dissent was patriotic? And then when Obama was elected, dissent was suddenly racist? And when Trump won, resistance was not just patriotic, but compulsory? Well, dissent is racist again and resistance is now treason.
The media were all like “something like this has NEVER happened EVER BEFORE”, conveniently forgetting the 1954 U.S. Capitol terrorist attack by a group of Puerto Rican separatists who shot up the House of Representatives. Or, even more recently, when dozens of anti-Kavanaugh protestors “invaded” (what a great word that is) one of the Senate office buildings with nary a peep of alarm by the Democrat-media complex.
Or this in Washington D.C.just last June.
But such things were described as follows:
The key phrase was “mostly peaceful”, although I did like a description of one of these riots by an MSM source as having been peaceful until it just magically “intensified”. Kamala also got her wish: the protests did not stop after the election – except they were the wrong sort of people protesting/rioting for the wrong, non-Left-Wing-approved reason.
I guarantee you that none of the following Democrat politicians are ashamed of what they said or supported with the Antifa/BLM riots, and there is no evidence that their political careers have been or will be harmed, or that they will be banned from Facebook, Twitter and so forth – which is another way of insuring more of this, and worse, in the future.
Yes, Nancy. Maybe there will be.
Especially as the “cleansing” shit spins up to full power, aided and abetted by the Never-Trump side of the GOP no less. Rick Klein is the Political Director of ABC news: he deleted this Tweet soon after posting it, but others are not hiding their desires any more…
“Tonight while I was in Missouri, Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel,” Hawley tweeted Monday night. “They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence.”
That was because Senator Hawley was leading the way on objecting to the certification of votes in the Senate, perfectly legal if ill-advised, but Antifa decided to apply some personal pressure to his family. Incidentally a few days ago a rather prominent New Zealand Right-Winger went down a similar, if somewhat more legal path of revenge:
Have the new Attorney-General announce that the Department of Justice will commence an inquiry against Donald J Trump, 12 Republican Senators and 140 members of the US House for seditious conspiracy (section 2384 of Chapter 115 of Title 18 of the US code), namely conspiring to overthrow the Government of the United States
The same treatment given to Hawley will soon be given to other supporters of Donald Trump, including ordinary people who might have a MAGA bumper sticker on their car or a Donald Trump coffee mug at the office. How many will lose their jobs, be shunned by neighbors, or kicked out of organizations? This is not the way to protect democracy or defend the integrity of elections.
I think we are about to enter a very dark period in American history. It won’t be the “Reign of Terror.” Guillotines won’t be set up on the mall or gallows erected in Central Park. But there will be terror nonetheless. And it won’t be the Josh Hawley’s or political big shots who will be terrorized. It will be people with everything to lose who will fear being purged.
Whether that can succeed against 74 million Trump voters is yet to be seen. As one commentator noted:
And I’m usually the optimist. I’m seeing people I would consider boring vanilla normies, not gun culture people, not Trumpkins, not preppers, not even that political, now talking about violence and revolution like those are perfectly normal topics. Twenty years ago that was reserved for us internet gun nuts and taboo crazy talk for everyone else.
Yeah… we are basically fucked.
No Minister 
The crowd was seeded with four busloads of Antifa who had come “loaded for bear” complete with walky talkys so they could communicate with each other.
The invasion was timed so that coincided with Josh Hawley’s speech which was of course disrupted mid stream. Any chance of the extremely dodgy way the election was conducted getting an airing now completely derailed – mission accomplished
This is a classic “colour revolution” scenario – and coincidentally those who are highly adept in engineering colour revolutions are now finding high positions in the new Biden Administration.
Meanwhile Twitter and Facebook are deplatforming everyone who attempts to raise any questions from President Trump down, making them non persons in the new age of shutdowns and human interaction via computer rather than face to face.
And of course Government’s around the world have a shiny new toy which allows them to place whole populations under house arrest at a moments notice in the nominally name of public health.
Welcome to the 21st centuries utopian vision ruled technocrats with geriatric figureheads – the Soviet Union was a paradise compared to what is on the way
And if people don’t think something is very, very wrong another data point
Parler, a facebook alternative, has just had its apps removed from the Google and Apple Playstores
People who choose to social media platforms other than the acceptable ones are dangerous right wing nutjobs or something and must be discouraged from using anything other than the approved platforms
Now they have shut Down Donald Trump’s Email – they are isolating him
This is not the America I knew
In this time of chaos and mayhem funded by the CCP and George Soros, we can take some small solace in the knowledge that nothing ever changes, it is mostly stage managed unrest breathlessly reported by the failing MSM followed by a lot of meaningless blather from UN globalists, politicians, pundits and the same failing MSM. The specific details of the blather and the people doing the blathering is the only thing that changes over time. Amen and aQWERTY 🙂
If you can’t see the difference between the BLM demonstrations/riots and the events at the Capitol, then you have a completely skewed view as to what happened. I don’t really care whether you are interested or not in that difference, I am going to state it anyway.
Fundamentally, the rioters in Washington were trying to directly intimidate legislators, not just in the usual way, but by invading the Capitol to stop them legislators carrying out there business. Something that was blindingly obvious to Mitch McConnell.
But this post, you have basically placed yourself with the extreme right of anti democrats.
The post fully explains your thinking about covid, racism, “stolen elections”, among other things.
Not in the normal frame of conservative politics, but well to the right of normal conservatism.
“You do not know a tyranny until it is on top of you; until it has you in a trap. The tyrant is not present until he is omnipresent.” — G.K. Chesterton
You remind me of Boxer in Animal Farm Dr Mapp
Did you bloviate like this in 2018 when the debating chamber was invaded during the Kavanaugh confirmation Dr Mapp?
Did you have anything to say when Washington was burning during Trumps inaugeration?
Or do you only believe in the rule of law when it suits you?
Andrei
The one point I agree with you is the de platforming by Facebook, Twitter and Google. Those actions have pretty much guaranteed that alternative social media platforms will be established in the same way that Fox took over from CNN as the dominant cable news outlet (when cable was a thing).
There are enough people in the right with the resources to establish alternative social media platforms.
The actions pretty much guarantee that Facebook, Twitter, etc will become primarily the left wing outlets, and the new platforms will be for the right and we will see a “ratings”contest similar to Fox v CNN. There will be many millions on the right who who will migrate to the new sites.
Jesus Christ, that such blindness was once in a New Zealand National Cabinet.
The raison d’etre of Antifa is the destruction of the US government, starting with local city administrations, which they have been very successful at intimidating to get what they want, including defunding the Police.
And your months-long silence or dismissiveness in the face of all the destruction of Democrat cities by Antifa/BLM puts you in their camp in the same way that Orwell placed pacifists in WWII. Objectively you are a supporter of them.
And if the legislators in D.C. can be intimidated by a bunch of hicks, plus guys wearing such silly outfits, then I don’t hold out much hope of them having fortitude when facing some real enemies in future.
Find out who paid for the busloads of agitators who infiltrated the pro-Trump protestors and did all the damage and you’ll find out who the real enemies of a peaceful democracy are.
Tom,
Well, apparently Senators McConnell, Collins, Cotton, and Romney (among other Republican Senators) shares my blindness.
I have the utmost respect for Cotton, but I noticed that he got jumped on by the likes of you some months ago when he explcitly said that Trump should pull troops into DC to deal with those riots.
McConnell is an old and shrewd politician who knows that Trump is done but has battles to fight and win in the future and will not allow Trump’s narcissm to drag him down. Collins gets accused of being “squishy” and on some issues she is, but she matches Reagan’s description of someone that is 80% with you, which is good enough.
Pierre Delecto actually marched with a BLM group and should forever be damned for that. He should just become a Democrat, where he could at least sell managerial competence.
You’d do a lot better if you acknowledged being at least a Classical Liberal, as David Farrar does.
But who are you to lecture anybody about Conservativism? Of our NZ society what the hell have you ever “conserved” aside from the occasional little tax cut?
Some time ago you accused me of being in perhaps the 3% of the Right Wing and WRT NZ I don’t doubt that, which is why I rarely comment on NZ politics. But of course I comment on American politics, where I’m much closer to their Centre-Right than you, hence your surprise at Trump’s showing in the 2020 election, not to mention the GOP which, despite all the screams of the faux-right Never Trumpers, has come out of this election in better shape than they were in after Bush II or the Democrats were after Obama.
Some millstone Trump turned out to be for the GOP, a fact that unnerves the Democrats, especially with Trump’s gains among non-Cuban Hispanics and Blacks. The screams of racism were not as successful as in the past so they hope that event like this will be used to discredit every aspect of Trump’s policies.
Even tax cuts.
I don’t think it’ll work.
There ain’t nothing “classical” about Farrar any more. I’ve stopped visiting (banned from commenting anyway after I called him a cretin), but from what I saw from that link, he’s truly crossed over and lost his marbles. Not even AOC is talking that crazy.
Frankly, if Trump really did do what the Left are goading him to do, calling up the militia and suspending the constitution, it would be a mercy. The incoming administration are the very fascists they so loudly denounce.
Tom … thank you for your post. I can accept much of what you say. But overshadowing any debate is the fact, pure and simple, that Trump crossed the line and he and ‘his’ will now pay the price … just as those who crossed the line in the BLM and ANTIFA inspired riots should also be held accountable. The fact that’s not happening is an indictment of the largely Democrat controlled cities where those riots took place.
Sorry fredonas … your line that the ‘peaceful’ Trump inspired mob were infiltrated by ANTIFA who did all the damage is so pathetic as to beggar belief … but you’ll certainly have a friend and supporter in Andrei.
I didn’t claim they were antifa, just paid agitators. The fact that the failing MSM is trying to discredit these claims does nothing to quell my suspicions that this was a staged setup by leftist elements. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/07/no-theres-no-substantive-evidence-that-capitol-riot-was-spurred-by-antifa/
Veteran are you sure that your antipathy to Donald Trump isn’t clouding your abillty to look at what is going on rationally.
Donald Trump held a rally, maybe 200,000 people attended that rally maybe more. Rallies espousing political causes are not unusual in Washington DC.
He gave a speech, at no time in the course of that speech did he advocate for violence
After the speech the Capitol building was invaded, this is not the first time this has happened. Not all those who invaded the Capitol building were Donald Trump supporters, indeed one of those near where the woman was shot is a notorious BLM agitator. The guy in the buffalo horns and the guy with the tattoo on his hand have been photographed at Antfa and BLM rallies – Rudy Guillani put out a video with their names and history but Youtube has deep sixed it 😦
The USA is transforming into a police state without freedom of speech before our very eyes
@Andrei
I don’t accept that there were four busloads of Antifa. The overwhelming majority of those who broke in were Trump supporters – including the idiot with the horned helmet, who has been interviewed at various Trump events as a supporter.
But you are correct about this guy, John Sullivan.
Yeah, here’s an article on him
He now claims he was just “blending in” to record stuff but since one of Antifa’s aims is to start a revolution it would hardly be a surprise if he helped. This is the dream scenario for the Far Left.
Tom there is a video of them arriving in four mini buses – Mayor Guiliiani had it on his deep sixed video. Most didn’t go inside but they mingled with the crowd outside and smashed the windows – in the video showed a woman is screaming “Antifa antifa..” as they smash windows and while another guy, a genuine supporter pulls them away. It provides the images for the TV
Another video shows the door being opened to admit the people who went inside – they didn’t break in but were invited in, most of them were normal people – which is why you have your picture of them behaving in an orderly manner because they were primarily orderly people being set up as patsys for what was to follow
The average punter thinks the people inside came through the windows they saw being smashed in the edited video shown on TV, two seperate and distinct events have been conflated
Then the agitators mingled in with the people inside start to act out and some of the formerly orderly people become disorderly, herd dynamics , some but not all, probably not even most but enough – and this is the trick utilize crowd dynamics and then misrepresent it
It was all of course timed exactly to coincide with Josh Hawley presenting his case so that he was disrupted and undermined and any chance of delaying certification until the results could be properly audited, which was what he was proposing, withered on the vine and the general population distracted from the issue at hand with all the hand wringing
Victoria Nuland who will be back at the top table now,, orchistrated similar but more violent things in Ukraine, Bulgaria and Macedonia (were it didn’t work because most Macedonians caught on to what was being done to them and didn’t play ball)
It was also done in Syria where it ignited the civil war and many other places besides – its how that crook Saakashvilli came to power in Georgia.
Its a playbook that has been used over and over again
The Democrat elite are masters of a conjuring trick when there is something they don’t want explored. They deflect the topic toward their opponants – its sleight of hand you only catch if you are paying close attention
So the DNC Email server gets hacked and hugely embarrassing Emails expose their malfeasance but the topic quickly becomes the Russians are hacking our election – it wasn’t the Russians it was an inside job by a Bernie Sanders supporter playing outside his league but there you go, it worked and the American people for the most part looked away from where the DNC didn’t want them to look
The Biden’s get wind of the fact that Rudy Guliani was talking to the Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor about Joe Biden getting his predecessor fired and the next thing you know Trump is being impeached for allegedly doing what Joe Biden actually did and boasted about. The sheer chutzpah of it. But it only works because of a sychophantic media
There will be multiple layers of obfustication to that fredonas.
The thing is these type of events are novel to most Westerners but they are in fact the ways of a classic Colour Revolution
If people of good will on both sides wanted to avoid all this agitation all that was required was an open and transparent audit of the election in the disputed States but all that demands for this have been met with is contempt, obstruction and outright lies.
Before the election the GOP in Pennsyvania went to court over the legality mail out of absentee ballots and the court ruled no harm had been done yet so they couldn’t file. After the election when the harm had been done the court ruled it was too late to file because of some legal term “laches” . And that of course is read as a big “Fuck you!” by the man in the street – we are in charge and we can do what we like
I told the tale of my mate in Phoenix on anoither thread, one of the Vets – he sneered and more or less implied I was making it up by putting “friend” in scare quotes
But its true never the less, he is I guy I worked with at Anadarko years ago on pipeline design who retired to Arizona as people do. Someone submited an absentee ballot in his name and when he turned up to vote he was told he had already voted. He went through the rigmarole of having the absentee ballot cancelled and casting a special ballot which took about two hours . Who knows which ballot was actually counted but not his real one would be my pick. And this is not an uncommon story except in most cases the people who detect it don’t usually go through the drama of casting a special vote – and many, those who don’t actually vote get to know someone has cast a vote in their name
The whole expansion of absentee ballots was an open invitation to fraud which is why the sewer cities in the swing states pushed for it and also blocked cleaning up the electoral rolls, verifying that the names and addresses on them were accurate (which they weren’t)
The creepy Mark Zuckerberg put 100s of millions of dollars into these key cities nominally for “get out the vote campaigns” but actually for Ballot harvesting and the so called “drop boxes” where harvested ballots can be laundered. And any attempt prior to and after the election to call these acitvities out was met with the claim that people are trying to suppress the “minority vote™ “
But what it actually means is people like my friend Roland, law abiding citizens who make the effort to vote according to the rules are disenfranchized.
And the they get pissed off – and now creepy Mark Zuckerberg and his powerful mates in Big Tech are shutting down any possibility of examination and discussion of these matters and have been doing so since election night
And I’ll tell you something no good is going to come of it
Andrei … bullshit your assertion I sneered. What I called you out on was your assertion your mates vote wasn’t counted. You don’t know that, you can’t know that … at best it was speculation designed to prove your point that the election was rigged. You may wish to align yourself with a narcissistic draft dodger as reflecting your values and ideals … your privilege. But clearly we are poles apart in our understanding of and commitment to the democratic process.
For the record I think the shutting down of Trump’s twitter account was daft as giving the conspiracy theorists oxygen. He should be allowed to parade his ignorance, stupidity and innate ability to contradict himself in arguing black is white and vice versa..
Vet I’m not a fan of Trump – of all the people who threw their hat in the ring for this election cycle my pick would have been Tulsi Gabbard, a democrat but she is far too honest and decent to be a politician
I don’t detest Trump the way you do and what I do like about him is he doesn’t start wars – on ther diplomatic front he has been successful, successful that is if you don’t like wars. Remeber how he calmed down the North Korean situation or got peace deals in the ME?
And he has been good for the American worker who he has put first…
We are not poles apart when it comes to the democratic process – we both hold to the one man, one vote principle.
And we both surely agree that the process should be open, auditable and transparent and where we differ is that you believe that the 2020 American election met those criteria and I don’t,
in fact in certain locales it was a total shambles, an utter disgrace, which produced results in those particular locales that look like they came from a tin pot African dictatorship not the bastion of demcracy
“If people of good will on both sides wanted to avoid all this agitation all that was required was an open and transparent audit of the election in the disputed States but all that demands for this have been met with is contempt, obstruction and outright lies.”…
Instead we have the current version of the Reichstag Fire. No culprits will be acceptable unless they’re of the right wing terrorist variety; All media commentary not coloured yellow is deemed to be ‘beyond the pale’; All GOP influence must be purged, their leader must be silenced. We will be ein woke volk under Nancy (until Joe finds the right stairway to the dias).
All veteran academics and editors! In this hour of crisis, as thoroughly pissed-off Trumpist hordes darken Potomac’s far banks, the fatherland is grateful for your vigilance.