It's a sad and pathetic moment for our country. That said, I think this will backfire massively on the Republican party. The rift between the pro-governance wing (Romney, Collins, Toomey) and the mad hyenas of Q-Anon and faction is going to get MUCH bigger. This will not help them in the suburbs. And it will have resounding effects for anyone who believes in the professionalism of government (even if they come from a right wing worldview). There is a revanchist faction that does not care for that, but I believe they will continue to be a minority. As purple district Republicans are pushed out by a mad primary system, I see them going into the wilderness for quite a few years until they elect a Charlie Baker / Larry Hogan type to lead them out.
2022 is going to be an absolute bloodbath in the suburbs. I'd be surprised if the Chamber of Commerce isn't a deep-blue organization within five to ten years.
100% agree. I have relatives that have never voted for Democrats, but they will not support this. It doesn't mean they go blue, but they will stay home more often... or go Libertarian. Either way, it erodes GOP influence.
But the Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations becoming blue would require the party to keep close to Biden's left, and nowhere near Elizabeth Warren's. That's why MY's graf about the left is so important. They have the power to destroy future Democratic majorities.
Yeah. It's going to be hard. But they have to stay the course with broadly popular ideas. Infrastructure alone, if done thoroughly, could last the entire Biden term. There are plenty of things. The most noisy parts of the left need to be patient and watch the Republicans destroy themselves. Unfortunately, if the left moves too quick, they will lose that opportunity.
Yeah, I think it will be very interesting to see what kind of natural rifts emerge as long as McConnell doesn't have control of the floor. I am sure the Democrats have a few tripwires they won't engage, but I am guessing there will be more legislation in the next few years. That is healthy. Could draw backlash, but the contrast will be stark.
We'll see. You would've thought the near depression that ensued on W. Bush's watch would have angered the country against against the GOP indefinitely. You might have thought the same thing about 911 (happened on W. Bush's watch). Let's hope Fed tightening in 2022 doesn't precipitate major market losses and a cooling economy. I'm not confident in the rationality (or memory) of the American electorate.
Yeah, if you would have asked me even a week ago I would have thought that Josh Hawley was a leading candidate to take the populist mantle from Trump and win in 2024. Not after this...in my dreams he would be punished by the Senate along with Cruz but don't see that happening. The punishment will have to come from not realizing his ambitions.
I think this may be a bit bullish on hopes for Democrats. I would say all this fades away from memory given 2 weeks (a month tops) especially with new president. I think the most likely political effect on elections from today will be approximately nothing.
Maybe - but I think it stays associated with the Trump brand for longer than that, and the Trump brand is still going to have some importance in politics for at least another cycle
I hope this will happen. In the grim game of "how will the administration end?" back in 2017 I thought the answer was: Trump would start spying on Republicans in Congress and Congress (Republicans) would finally get the guts to stand up to him. I am very glad that didn't happen (I underestimated the independence of the intelligence community) but this seems to rise to that.
Here's hoping for an impeachment, and a conviction in the Senate this time. I really, really hope the 15 or so GOP Senators required have finally gotten the message, and we can put an end to Trump 2024. That's the biggest threat to democracy going forward. (Unfortunately we may not be able to do anything about Cruz.)
If the senate has the guts to do that, they may actually save the Republican brand in the near-term (not save for us, but for the center-right types). If they don't, they are choosing the wilderness path. It will take a few elections, but the Trump-endorsed primary challengers will have base fuel, but they would lose in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. Let alone Nassau or Fairfax county.
"If they don't, they are choosing the wilderness path."
But that's assuming Trump can't win in 2024, or that Cruz can't. They are both extremely dangerous and anything can happen. Again, I really, really hope you're right ...
I'm actually very bearish on a Trump-style populist like Cruz's chances for the simple reason that Trump hates sharing the spotlight. Trump would absolutely sabotage a populist, QAnon-sympathetic Cruz before it got going
This seems basically impossible to me. Trump is still by far the most popular figure among Republicans. Saying no to a crazy, ineffectual, unpopular coup attempt is one thing, impeach is another, much less likely thing, entirely.
I hope that this event means that Josh Hawley has overplayed his hand because his weird brand of right wing populism makes me ready to more deeply consider Calexit. The victories in Georgia are such a balm and they really seem to point a way forward. I hope that a lot of the folks who are caught up in these fever dreams have some regrets about what is transpiring today and that it helps the fever to break.
I was on board for California exit going back to the Bush years and nothing that has occurred since then – including 2008 through 2016 - has changed my mind.
Please don't abandon the rest of us to be governed by the deplorables. I already face it in my state government - I don't want my national government to be irredeemable as well.
I try to be specific and literal (rather than colloquial) when using legally defined terms like “sedition” but to my non-lawyer eyes it sure seems like this fits under 18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy:
“If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.”
This is sedition. I was against the summer riots, but this is so much worse. These people should have been fired upon when they attempted to breach the Capitol.
I might be in the minority on this but I really do not think shooting them would be good, acceptable, or even efficacious. The protestors were of course horrible, but in my opinion avoiding deaths is good, even if the people in question did something bad. Not to mention some people dying could have sparked a whole new, larger group.
Fired upon, yes, but since it looks like they were naturally bottlenecked I would’ve liked to see some kind of riot foam deployed unless lethal force was absolutely necessary. Just think of the pictures and headlines if these people had been splooged into submission.
My understanding is that when the National Guard is activated in a state, the decision is made by the governor of the state. But when it is activated in DC, the decision is made by the President. It sounds like Mike Pence approved their activation after repeated requests from the DC Mayor yesterday afternoon, but all reports I saw said it was unclear why Trump hadn't been involved in the decision, if indeed he wasn't.
It is morally reprehensible and misleading to draw any sort of equivalence between what happened today and progressives' hesitation to condemn rare instances of violence from people who were themselves victims of far more concerning and systematic police violence over the summer.
How can you possibly say the people doing the looting this summer where themselves victims of police? You have no idea if that’s the case. You’re simply racially profiling.
The protests -- even the peaceful ones (which were the vast majority of the protests) -- were met with police in riot gear, rubber bullets, tear gas, etc.
The point is that the police response to the protests this summer was far more violent than the protests themselves, leading many people to hesitate to draw focus to the violence of the protesters and away from the violence of the police. There is no equivalent justification for failing to condemn today's violence.
Lol it's possible he has switched parties by now (for obvious reasons) but that guy was a republican when he began posting those videos, and I think the videos speak for themselves. In this case, I don't think I'm the one in a bubble...
Matt, I think you're being a little kind to the Capitol Police here. Yes, it seems like there was a failure by management to deploy them adequately, but in the face of rioters who ignored their orders, they seem to have often done nothing but fall back. From the photographs it really doesn't seem that there were that many people.
It took until they were at the door of the house chamber before anyone planted their feet and said we will shoot you if you come in here. In the senate they failed completely. When there's footage out there of cops joking around and taking selfies with people inside the house, there needs to be reckoning on their utter refusal to do their job.
After this photo was taken these guys ended up in the senate chamber. The police had sufficient resources here to put these guys in cuffs. Instead they handled them with kid gloves.
"The police had sufficient resources here to put these guys in cuffs."
From my POV, this seems wrong. The police did not seem to have enough resources to spend time arresting every single person in the capital. They let them in the Senate chamber once the Senators were evacuated, but when the House members hadn't evacuated, the police were ready to massacre the rioters...that's what it's in the top photo of this post
To my understanding these pictures are relatively early in the day. The senate door is behind this picture and there were still senators in there. These were the first guys to get that far (and I haven't seen any pictures of people in the senate chamber that aren't in this picture.)
If you follow the thread downward you can see what lead up to this - one unsupported cop keeps understandably moving back, the point where these photos are is when he finds a support and it turns into a stalemate.
Maybe they could have arrested them. Maybe they could have pushed them back with batons. But their job was to do *something* more than walk backwards while shouting.
What's the point of America's massive police force and all of its commensurate problems if you can just disrupt our democratic procedures and the cops will barely even resist?
Arrests take time and take a cop or two to actually do! It didn't seem like the type of situation where a couple cops should leave the scene to make arrests and take them to the station. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation--at least that's what it seemed like to me
Like I said, I'm not going to strongly argue that they could have gotten all of them in cuffs, I'm not a cop.
But it seems like more was called for that standing around talking to them. They have guns and batons and tasers and pepper spray. If this were a blm crowd they'd have been going hog wild with those.
I believe they were inside the capitol. My assumption without anything to back it up is that he knew where there were other police and was understandably heading in that direction.
Be curious to see if we have someone with experience here that could comment but I'm skeptical they could've done it without a high risk of escalating things to gunfire.
I am disgusted by some of the comments I’m seeing here. How the hell can you compare people protesting for criminal justice reform, even if some were excessive, with violent insurrectionists attempting to seize the US Capitol??
It became fashionable for a time this spring and summer to post about that MLK quote about riots as the voice of the unheard, but without the full context:
“And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.”
And so yes, committing violence is bad. But come on, look at the conditions that underly the two causes here. On one hand, you have minorities protesting the conditions of violence that have been inflicted on them. On the other hand, you have delusional chauvinists antithetically opposed to the democratic process.
And look at the magnitudes here!! The protests of the summer were largely peaceful, but some did result in property damage. At worst there was what, a handful of people that tried to damage a courthouse? These people today SIEZED THE US CAPITOL BUILDING. Any suggestion of equivalence is grossly misguided.
My only question from today is how to beat punish every single person who participated in today’s invasion. Personally, I want to see them hit with the maximum possible penalties possible, up to life in prison if possible. But we don’t want to make them into martyrs, so maybe just a sedition charge or something. But they MUST be punished harshly.
And of course, if our congress had any decency, Trump would be impeached by the end of tomorrow.
Nobody ever riots because they think they’re on the wrong side of history. The people breaking into the Senate think they’re justified too.
For both moral and practical purposes, protests must be peaceful. And yes, that can be very difficult! My group organized a thirty thousand person march, and we had tons of trained volunteers as “de-escalators.”
We had another huge march later, and a much smaller one in a neighboring district got all the press coverage because a couple antifa assholes punched some reporters. All the hard work of tens of thousands of people, wiped away by a couple wannabe revolutionaries.
And I totally agree with what you said! I’m sure *they think* they’re correct. But I think anyone reasonable can clearly that they very clearly are not. And we have to be able to enforce the laws that say what we deem to be acceptable!
And yes, I agree that protests should be peaceful! The work you’ve done in ensuring that your protests were peaceful is admirable. But I’m just saying that to equate the two protests, or even the types of violent outcomes we’ve seen, is simply unreasonable. Their motivations, their originators, their implications, are clearly different. A ‘both sides’ approach here is absurd.
That’s the contradiction of pluralism. We have rules about how to handle unresolvable differences. When Trump was legally elected, we peacefully protested for seventeen days. If Biden’s election were overturned, I sure hope we’d be out there, and I suspect there’d be some violence (but vigorously denounced by Biden).
We’ve also had anti-vaxxer protests in California, which I **vehemently** disagree with, and I think what they are advocating for is dangerous. But they still have a right to protest (they threw menstrual blood on people, which they did not have a right to do).
Yeah, I think we’re agreeing? I’m drawing a distinction between the people who were just there protesting in general, and the smaller subset who broke into the Capitol. The former should not suffer any legal repercussions; it’s a clear execution of their 1A rights, even if I certainly find their position dumb, distasteful, and anti democratic.
However, the ones who seized the Capitol absolutely deserve the most effective punishment we can. Idk, I’m not usually a fan of ‘punitive punishment as deterrence’ for everyday crimes, and I hope we can avoid turning them into MAGA Martyrs, but *something* must be done to show how unacceptable it is to do this. They went well beyond any reasonable exercise of the first amendment.
"When you adjust for the totally normal and acceptable fact that cops harass black people more than white people, they use an unjustified level of force on both ethnic groups equally."
I want to agree with you, but I've been convinced by those who say that the national media grossly underplayed the level of death and destruction that occurred alongside the protests this summer, and I think it's actually you who has got the magnitudes reversed. See this, for example: https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html
Frankly, I think all that "voice of the unheard" shit is giving away too much moral ground. What does looting a Target have to do with racial justice? Leftists should have been united in vehemently denouncing rioters, just as we often saw happening on the ground. How many videos did we see this summer depicting black activists begging anarchists not to destroy shit? If anyone was in need of cancellation this summer it was the "In Defense of Looting" author.
I sympathize with the valence of your response, but I think it's counterproductive. Whataboutism is pointless. Bad things are bad, even when placed next to worse things.
***How the hell can you compare people protesting for criminal justice reform, even if some were excessive, with violent insurrectionists attempting to seize the US Capitol??***
Because they (those protestors who went beyond mere peaceful marches in favor of looting/destruction/arson etc) have something in common with Trump's thugs (violence).
I'm skeptical of "throw the book at them." I think you get diminishing deterrence benefit, and if people like me (on the left) call for strong penalties when our general political view is that the US is over-incarcerated, it communicates that this is about pay-back and retribution, not justice. I think something more measured would be consensus for a much wider group of Americans - particularly because rioting isn't going to sit well with some people on the right.
Not entirely sure what others are saying but in my opinion the comparisons aren't between the Capitol riots and BLM Protestors. They should be specific to BLM-associated people or groups who engaged in acts of violence, looting and vandalism. It's completely wrong to break into congress and it probably is a more serious crime like sedition. But it's also wrong (and not helpful to BLM's cause) to burn down a Wendy's because a police office shot someone in their parking lot the night before. Some kind of comparison can be made there
I'm skeptical of "throw the book at them." I think you get diminishing deterrence benefit, and if people like me (on the left) call for strong penalties when our general political view is that the US is over-incarcerated, it communicates that this is about pay-back and retribution, not justice. I think something more measured would be consensus for a much wider group of Americans - particularly because rioting isn't going to sit well with some people on the right.
"And I hope that progressives will recognize the overwhelming importance of securing those wins, and be willing to make whatever concessions to the moderates are necessary to make them comfortable with taking those steps. It’s progressives more than anyone else who’ve recognized the danger of the moment we’re in today and hav been in for years. But part of recognizing the danger is prioritizing victory. Some issues just aren’t winners, especially given the slanted nature of America’s political geography. And to win — fair and square and without mob violence — is critically important right now. More so than making edgy or self-indulgent statements."
This is extremely important. The Republic is riding on it. We may not be able to get Manchin and others to change (though there's hope after today) but we can make sure that progressives aren't a millstone around the Democrats' necks by changing messaging and emphasis and agreeing that compromise is a fundamental part of democracy.
By not being dumb liberals who call themselves socialists - the worst possible branding in US politics - only because they don't know what socialism is.
By emphasizing what can get passed in Congress (whether by raw votes or persuasion to get the raw votes) rather than shibboleths and posing.
By not demonizing their own allies and describing any compromise - a basic element of any democracy - as treason or corruption or whatever.
Clearly the mob today is justified at stopping the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, damaging the capitol building, etc because Antifa/BLM riots bad.
They should reread Matt’s post because he does not draw that kind of equivalence and, although not hyperbolic like most of the media right now, is pretty clear that he sees the treatment of today’s “protesters” as quite different from the treatment of left wing protesters.
He calls it a putsch and an insurrection. He notes that the national guard was deployed in force in June and even includes a helpful picture. I think we need to take the following point more seriously and quit lumping (or pretending) Matt in with the false equivalency crowd.
“If this goes down in the books as a fun day at the zoo for the people involved, we will see more of it. Especially because given what we know of the partisan makeup of American police forces, the odds will always be that mobs of this sort tend to get kinder treatment than leftwing mobs.”
When people were talking today about law enforcement against the rioters, I was thinking about George Washington and the whiskey rebellion. Deterrence can be important but if it goes too far it can slow down the process of healing and moving on.
More damaging that the riot rhetoric is the "corporate Democrats are like Republicans" and whatnot. No one on the left should blur the line between what the GOP has fomented and any Democrat.
I’m guessing some of the comments this thread make the case for your distaste for comment sections. Some appear to be arguing forfascism with a friendly face. In Singapore, it is a crime to chew gumorwear your hair long.
I don't see it as trolling. Raises some good points that aren't necessarily being refuted. FWIW I think a lot of good points are being raised by everyone, and it's a productive conversation. It's easy enough to disengage if you're over it.
So far the best thing about this comment section, as opposed to place like the NYTs or left-wing twitter, is that it's less of an echo chamber. It's ok to disagree and even to think someone is so wrong that you don't respect their arguments. But I think there's a lot of value in actually having these debates play out, saying your piece, and then disengaging if it's not working for you.
Obviously there are trolls (I think the name was Galleta or something?) and you have to draw the line somewhere, but this is far from that place.
One thing I find very frustrating in discussing the events of last summer is that I have nothing like a quantitative scale of what happened - how many people were involved, how many injuries were caused by participants, how many injuries were caused by police, how many buildings were damaged; and most importantly, I have even *less* information about any other potentially comparable events, like the 2017 women's march, various marches and/or riots in 1965 or 1968, events in other countries. Everything I've seen in any news outlet seems woefully incomplete and/or anecdotal, so all I can see is people reporting what they want to report about whether any events last summer were actually destructive.
I see someone's been going through this thread posting a link to a quantification of the insured property losses due to events of May 26-June 8 in the low ten figure range (https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html) which is definitely a helpful start. But it's really hard for me to tell how to compare that to even Rodney King in 1992, because I don't know whether more or fewer businesses carry the relevant kind of insurance, so I can't tell if this is a large or small figure.
The underdiscussed consequence of liberal participation in the erosion of norms that promote lawlessness is that given the partisan makeup of police forces, it'll make it increasingly less likely that they'll actively intervene to protect Democratic lawmakers.
I'm fearful that an erosion of norms of civility that lead to a woman in pussyhat yelling at a Republican official at lunch or small groups of anti-police brutality demonstrators standing outside the Mayor's house, being viewed as acceptable, will lead to armed neckbearded men yelling at Democrats in restaurants and camping outside their homes.
I think it might be worth acknowledging that the majority of protests this past spring were peaceful (and often met with violence by law enforcement) and were made in the name of democracy and of equal justice under the law. no comparison in any way to what is happening today.
I think that's a tough sell when you have videos of people lighting buildings on fire.
To clarify, I agree that what's happening today is much worse, but "mostly peaceful" just sounds like a way to sidestep condemning the actual violence that occurred.
We have negativity bias. One burning police car negates 5,000 peaceful marchers. And the ongoing siege of the Portland police station was not conducted by people who want a stronger democracy. They were assholes who enjoy breaking stuff.
One thing to note, BLM/antifa wouldn’t be caught dead wearing Biden/Harris merch, while Proud Boys, etc, all wear MAGA hats. We can and should speak out against our own violent fringe.
I really don't understand why the Capitol Police didn't draw a line in the sand at the threshold of the building. They were armed. Lethal force should be allowed. We shouldn't have to mobilize 10,000 troops for every protest in DC.
I would have preferred they stay outside. I don't think they should have been allowed inside the U.S. Capitol Building, the White House or the Supreme Court...especially so when the entire Senate, House, and VP are inside. WTF? It was a breach of national security.
This is what friends in the military and formerly in the military who have kept their contacts have been worrying about, particularly after the Traitor made his minions into Asst Secretaries of Defense. They have been looking into the lower levels of top military leadership since their arrival, to find those officers who would be good with such a thing happening, so they could reach down to them (the way Nixon finally worked his way down to Bork in the Saturday Night Massacre) as they fire those who refuse the orders.
Trump has been planning this. He said as much in that looney phone call on Saturday to Raffensperger "I've got something else I can do. I don't want to do it, but it's ready."
And his speech he's giving right now - still calling things stolen, telling the seditionists to go home and wait - he is still dangerous.
Trump needs immediate impeachment. They don't have to hold hearings, all they have to do is play the recording of the speech where he incited this. Remove him permanently from American life. And then go after every Proud Boy, every militiaman, every advocate. They have the laws on the books to do it - they put them there 50 years ago when they thought we were "the threat." Each of these people can be charged with conspiracy to travel interstate to foment a riot. Law's been on the books since 1968 (they used it against the Chicago Seven). Every single one of them is a conspirator in treason - which is defined in the Constitution as "making war on the United States." That's what they did today.
It's a sad and pathetic moment for our country. That said, I think this will backfire massively on the Republican party. The rift between the pro-governance wing (Romney, Collins, Toomey) and the mad hyenas of Q-Anon and faction is going to get MUCH bigger. This will not help them in the suburbs. And it will have resounding effects for anyone who believes in the professionalism of government (even if they come from a right wing worldview). There is a revanchist faction that does not care for that, but I believe they will continue to be a minority. As purple district Republicans are pushed out by a mad primary system, I see them going into the wilderness for quite a few years until they elect a Charlie Baker / Larry Hogan type to lead them out.
2022 is going to be an absolute bloodbath in the suburbs. I'd be surprised if the Chamber of Commerce isn't a deep-blue organization within five to ten years.
100% agree. I have relatives that have never voted for Democrats, but they will not support this. It doesn't mean they go blue, but they will stay home more often... or go Libertarian. Either way, it erodes GOP influence.
The National Association of Manufacturers called the insurrectionists "Armed Thugs" in a statement today:
https://twitter.com/carlquintanilla/status/1346921397193494530
But the Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations becoming blue would require the party to keep close to Biden's left, and nowhere near Elizabeth Warren's. That's why MY's graf about the left is so important. They have the power to destroy future Democratic majorities.
Yeah. It's going to be hard. But they have to stay the course with broadly popular ideas. Infrastructure alone, if done thoroughly, could last the entire Biden term. There are plenty of things. The most noisy parts of the left need to be patient and watch the Republicans destroy themselves. Unfortunately, if the left moves too quick, they will lose that opportunity.
Frankly if the Pro-Governance GOP wing can dump the Grover Norquist orthodoxy, quite a bit can get done.
Yeah, I think it will be very interesting to see what kind of natural rifts emerge as long as McConnell doesn't have control of the floor. I am sure the Democrats have a few tripwires they won't engage, but I am guessing there will be more legislation in the next few years. That is healthy. Could draw backlash, but the contrast will be stark.
We'll see. You would've thought the near depression that ensued on W. Bush's watch would have angered the country against against the GOP indefinitely. You might have thought the same thing about 911 (happened on W. Bush's watch). Let's hope Fed tightening in 2022 doesn't precipitate major market losses and a cooling economy. I'm not confident in the rationality (or memory) of the American electorate.
Yeah, if you would have asked me even a week ago I would have thought that Josh Hawley was a leading candidate to take the populist mantle from Trump and win in 2024. Not after this...in my dreams he would be punished by the Senate along with Cruz but don't see that happening. The punishment will have to come from not realizing his ambitions.
I think this may be a bit bullish on hopes for Democrats. I would say all this fades away from memory given 2 weeks (a month tops) especially with new president. I think the most likely political effect on elections from today will be approximately nothing.
Maybe - but I think it stays associated with the Trump brand for longer than that, and the Trump brand is still going to have some importance in politics for at least another cycle
I hope this will happen. In the grim game of "how will the administration end?" back in 2017 I thought the answer was: Trump would start spying on Republicans in Congress and Congress (Republicans) would finally get the guts to stand up to him. I am very glad that didn't happen (I underestimated the independence of the intelligence community) but this seems to rise to that.
Here's hoping for an impeachment, and a conviction in the Senate this time. I really, really hope the 15 or so GOP Senators required have finally gotten the message, and we can put an end to Trump 2024. That's the biggest threat to democracy going forward. (Unfortunately we may not be able to do anything about Cruz.)
If the senate has the guts to do that, they may actually save the Republican brand in the near-term (not save for us, but for the center-right types). If they don't, they are choosing the wilderness path. It will take a few elections, but the Trump-endorsed primary challengers will have base fuel, but they would lose in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. Let alone Nassau or Fairfax county.
"If they don't, they are choosing the wilderness path."
But that's assuming Trump can't win in 2024, or that Cruz can't. They are both extremely dangerous and anything can happen. Again, I really, really hope you're right ...
I'm actually very bearish on a Trump-style populist like Cruz's chances for the simple reason that Trump hates sharing the spotlight. Trump would absolutely sabotage a populist, QAnon-sympathetic Cruz before it got going
This seems basically impossible to me. Trump is still by far the most popular figure among Republicans. Saying no to a crazy, ineffectual, unpopular coup attempt is one thing, impeach is another, much less likely thing, entirely.
I hope that this event means that Josh Hawley has overplayed his hand because his weird brand of right wing populism makes me ready to more deeply consider Calexit. The victories in Georgia are such a balm and they really seem to point a way forward. I hope that a lot of the folks who are caught up in these fever dreams have some regrets about what is transpiring today and that it helps the fever to break.
I was on board for California exit going back to the Bush years and nothing that has occurred since then – including 2008 through 2016 - has changed my mind.
Please don't abandon the rest of us to be governed by the deplorables. I already face it in my state government - I don't want my national government to be irredeemable as well.
I try to be specific and literal (rather than colloquial) when using legally defined terms like “sedition” but to my non-lawyer eyes it sure seems like this fits under 18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy:
“If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384
This is sedition. I was against the summer riots, but this is so much worse. These people should have been fired upon when they attempted to breach the Capitol.
The National Guard should have already been deployed - then it would never have come close to this. The Capitol Police deserve a formal apology.
I might be in the minority on this but I really do not think shooting them would be good, acceptable, or even efficacious. The protestors were of course horrible, but in my opinion avoiding deaths is good, even if the people in question did something bad. Not to mention some people dying could have sparked a whole new, larger group.
Yep. In an ideal world they're all in prison by the inauguration, but shooting is too far for all the reasons you stated
Fired upon, yes, but since it looks like they were naturally bottlenecked I would’ve liked to see some kind of riot foam deployed unless lethal force was absolutely necessary. Just think of the pictures and headlines if these people had been splooged into submission.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_foam
Possess any property of the US contrary to the authority thereof...it doesn't get any clearer than that.
Do we have it confirmed that the National Guard wasn't deployed because Trump didn't want them deployed?
I would also like confirmation about this story. Still early days, but that's insidious if it's true. And hard to be surprised at.
My understanding is that when the National Guard is activated in a state, the decision is made by the governor of the state. But when it is activated in DC, the decision is made by the President. It sounds like Mike Pence approved their activation after repeated requests from the DC Mayor yesterday afternoon, but all reports I saw said it was unclear why Trump hadn't been involved in the decision, if indeed he wasn't.
It is morally reprehensible and misleading to draw any sort of equivalence between what happened today and progressives' hesitation to condemn rare instances of violence from people who were themselves victims of far more concerning and systematic police violence over the summer.
How can you possibly say the people doing the looting this summer where themselves victims of police? You have no idea if that’s the case. You’re simply racially profiling.
The protests -- even the peaceful ones (which were the vast majority of the protests) -- were met with police in riot gear, rubber bullets, tear gas, etc.
Source?
The point is that the police response to the protests this summer was far more violent than the protests themselves, leading many people to hesitate to draw focus to the violence of the protesters and away from the violence of the police. There is no equivalent justification for failing to condemn today's violence.
Yes, I do think that. Here is a thread of ~1000 instances of police doing that: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266751520055459847?s=20
I probably wouldn't include left-wing twitter as outside of the NYT/Vox bubble
Lol it's possible he has switched parties by now (for obvious reasons) but that guy was a republican when he began posting those videos, and I think the videos speak for themselves. In this case, I don't think I'm the one in a bubble...
Matt, I think you're being a little kind to the Capitol Police here. Yes, it seems like there was a failure by management to deploy them adequately, but in the face of rioters who ignored their orders, they seem to have often done nothing but fall back. From the photographs it really doesn't seem that there were that many people.
It took until they were at the door of the house chamber before anyone planted their feet and said we will shoot you if you come in here. In the senate they failed completely. When there's footage out there of cops joking around and taking selfies with people inside the house, there needs to be reckoning on their utter refusal to do their job.
Things are still muddy. I've also seen video/photos of them trying to do something but being massively overwhelmed.
At first look it seems clear the main problem was they were drastically understaffed.
Specifically I'm thinking about events like this: https://twitter.com/igorbobic/status/1346899437520621568
After this photo was taken these guys ended up in the senate chamber. The police had sufficient resources here to put these guys in cuffs. Instead they handled them with kid gloves.
"The police had sufficient resources here to put these guys in cuffs."
From my POV, this seems wrong. The police did not seem to have enough resources to spend time arresting every single person in the capital. They let them in the Senate chamber once the Senators were evacuated, but when the House members hadn't evacuated, the police were ready to massacre the rioters...that's what it's in the top photo of this post
To my understanding these pictures are relatively early in the day. The senate door is behind this picture and there were still senators in there. These were the first guys to get that far (and I haven't seen any pictures of people in the senate chamber that aren't in this picture.)
If you follow the thread downward you can see what lead up to this - one unsupported cop keeps understandably moving back, the point where these photos are is when he finds a support and it turns into a stalemate.
Maybe they could have arrested them. Maybe they could have pushed them back with batons. But their job was to do *something* more than walk backwards while shouting.
What's the point of America's massive police force and all of its commensurate problems if you can just disrupt our democratic procedures and the cops will barely even resist?
Arrests take time and take a cop or two to actually do! It didn't seem like the type of situation where a couple cops should leave the scene to make arrests and take them to the station. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation--at least that's what it seemed like to me
Like I said, I'm not going to strongly argue that they could have gotten all of them in cuffs, I'm not a cop.
But it seems like more was called for that standing around talking to them. They have guns and batons and tasers and pepper spray. If this were a blm crowd they'd have been going hog wild with those.
It was a surreal video, to watch this poor man running from all those people. Did he actually end up leading them into the capital?
It was incredibly chilling seeing that.
I believe they were inside the capitol. My assumption without anything to back it up is that he knew where there were other police and was understandably heading in that direction.
They should have shot these scum.
Be curious to see if we have someone with experience here that could comment but I'm skeptical they could've done it without a high risk of escalating things to gunfire.
>Instead they handled them with kid gloves.
Can anyone speculate on why this is? I mean I think I know the answer but I want someone smarter than me to say it
The National Guard should have already been deployed, like they were for BLM protests, as MY notes.
I am disgusted by some of the comments I’m seeing here. How the hell can you compare people protesting for criminal justice reform, even if some were excessive, with violent insurrectionists attempting to seize the US Capitol??
It became fashionable for a time this spring and summer to post about that MLK quote about riots as the voice of the unheard, but without the full context:
“And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.”
And so yes, committing violence is bad. But come on, look at the conditions that underly the two causes here. On one hand, you have minorities protesting the conditions of violence that have been inflicted on them. On the other hand, you have delusional chauvinists antithetically opposed to the democratic process.
And look at the magnitudes here!! The protests of the summer were largely peaceful, but some did result in property damage. At worst there was what, a handful of people that tried to damage a courthouse? These people today SIEZED THE US CAPITOL BUILDING. Any suggestion of equivalence is grossly misguided.
My only question from today is how to beat punish every single person who participated in today’s invasion. Personally, I want to see them hit with the maximum possible penalties possible, up to life in prison if possible. But we don’t want to make them into martyrs, so maybe just a sedition charge or something. But they MUST be punished harshly.
And of course, if our congress had any decency, Trump would be impeached by the end of tomorrow.
Nobody ever riots because they think they’re on the wrong side of history. The people breaking into the Senate think they’re justified too.
For both moral and practical purposes, protests must be peaceful. And yes, that can be very difficult! My group organized a thirty thousand person march, and we had tons of trained volunteers as “de-escalators.”
We had another huge march later, and a much smaller one in a neighboring district got all the press coverage because a couple antifa assholes punched some reporters. All the hard work of tens of thousands of people, wiped away by a couple wannabe revolutionaries.
And I totally agree with what you said! I’m sure *they think* they’re correct. But I think anyone reasonable can clearly that they very clearly are not. And we have to be able to enforce the laws that say what we deem to be acceptable!
And yes, I agree that protests should be peaceful! The work you’ve done in ensuring that your protests were peaceful is admirable. But I’m just saying that to equate the two protests, or even the types of violent outcomes we’ve seen, is simply unreasonable. Their motivations, their originators, their implications, are clearly different. A ‘both sides’ approach here is absurd.
That’s the contradiction of pluralism. We have rules about how to handle unresolvable differences. When Trump was legally elected, we peacefully protested for seventeen days. If Biden’s election were overturned, I sure hope we’d be out there, and I suspect there’d be some violence (but vigorously denounced by Biden).
We’ve also had anti-vaxxer protests in California, which I **vehemently** disagree with, and I think what they are advocating for is dangerous. But they still have a right to protest (they threw menstrual blood on people, which they did not have a right to do).
Yeah, I think we’re agreeing? I’m drawing a distinction between the people who were just there protesting in general, and the smaller subset who broke into the Capitol. The former should not suffer any legal repercussions; it’s a clear execution of their 1A rights, even if I certainly find their position dumb, distasteful, and anti democratic.
However, the ones who seized the Capitol absolutely deserve the most effective punishment we can. Idk, I’m not usually a fan of ‘punitive punishment as deterrence’ for everyday crimes, and I hope we can avoid turning them into MAGA Martyrs, but *something* must be done to show how unacceptable it is to do this. They went well beyond any reasonable exercise of the first amendment.
Yeah hard agree here. I am not a fan of harsh punishment, but if ever there's a time to make examples of people, it is now.
"When you adjust for the totally normal and acceptable fact that cops harass black people more than white people, they use an unjustified level of force on both ethnic groups equally."
"Police encounters" is a vague term that does not necessarily mean an encounter between the police and a violent criminal.
Ok, source? Here's one that says the opposite, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793. And the way you phrased that makes it sound like you're talking about the Fryer 2016 paper, to which there is this response https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0110-z.
I want to agree with you, but I've been convinced by those who say that the national media grossly underplayed the level of death and destruction that occurred alongside the protests this summer, and I think it's actually you who has got the magnitudes reversed. See this, for example: https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html
Frankly, I think all that "voice of the unheard" shit is giving away too much moral ground. What does looting a Target have to do with racial justice? Leftists should have been united in vehemently denouncing rioters, just as we often saw happening on the ground. How many videos did we see this summer depicting black activists begging anarchists not to destroy shit? If anyone was in need of cancellation this summer it was the "In Defense of Looting" author.
I sympathize with the valence of your response, but I think it's counterproductive. Whataboutism is pointless. Bad things are bad, even when placed next to worse things.
***How the hell can you compare people protesting for criminal justice reform, even if some were excessive, with violent insurrectionists attempting to seize the US Capitol??***
Because they (those protestors who went beyond mere peaceful marches in favor of looting/destruction/arson etc) have something in common with Trump's thugs (violence).
I'm skeptical of "throw the book at them." I think you get diminishing deterrence benefit, and if people like me (on the left) call for strong penalties when our general political view is that the US is over-incarcerated, it communicates that this is about pay-back and retribution, not justice. I think something more measured would be consensus for a much wider group of Americans - particularly because rioting isn't going to sit well with some people on the right.
Not entirely sure what others are saying but in my opinion the comparisons aren't between the Capitol riots and BLM Protestors. They should be specific to BLM-associated people or groups who engaged in acts of violence, looting and vandalism. It's completely wrong to break into congress and it probably is a more serious crime like sedition. But it's also wrong (and not helpful to BLM's cause) to burn down a Wendy's because a police office shot someone in their parking lot the night before. Some kind of comparison can be made there
I'm skeptical of "throw the book at them." I think you get diminishing deterrence benefit, and if people like me (on the left) call for strong penalties when our general political view is that the US is over-incarcerated, it communicates that this is about pay-back and retribution, not justice. I think something more measured would be consensus for a much wider group of Americans - particularly because rioting isn't going to sit well with some people on the right.
"And I hope that progressives will recognize the overwhelming importance of securing those wins, and be willing to make whatever concessions to the moderates are necessary to make them comfortable with taking those steps. It’s progressives more than anyone else who’ve recognized the danger of the moment we’re in today and hav been in for years. But part of recognizing the danger is prioritizing victory. Some issues just aren’t winners, especially given the slanted nature of America’s political geography. And to win — fair and square and without mob violence — is critically important right now. More so than making edgy or self-indulgent statements."
This is extremely important. The Republic is riding on it. We may not be able to get Manchin and others to change (though there's hope after today) but we can make sure that progressives aren't a millstone around the Democrats' necks by changing messaging and emphasis and agreeing that compromise is a fundamental part of democracy.
“...by changing messaging and emphasis...”
What, lying is the solution? Huh.
By not being dumb liberals who call themselves socialists - the worst possible branding in US politics - only because they don't know what socialism is.
By emphasizing what can get passed in Congress (whether by raw votes or persuasion to get the raw votes) rather than shibboleths and posing.
By not demonizing their own allies and describing any compromise - a basic element of any democracy - as treason or corruption or whatever.
That's not lying. That's being a grown-up.
“By not being dumb liberals who call themselves socialists...”
You support dumb liberals? I can’t get behind supporting dumb people.
tl;dr of way too many of the comments here:
Clearly the mob today is justified at stopping the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, damaging the capitol building, etc because Antifa/BLM riots bad.
They should reread Matt’s post because he does not draw that kind of equivalence and, although not hyperbolic like most of the media right now, is pretty clear that he sees the treatment of today’s “protesters” as quite different from the treatment of left wing protesters.
He calls it a putsch and an insurrection. He notes that the national guard was deployed in force in June and even includes a helpful picture. I think we need to take the following point more seriously and quit lumping (or pretending) Matt in with the false equivalency crowd.
“If this goes down in the books as a fun day at the zoo for the people involved, we will see more of it. Especially because given what we know of the partisan makeup of American police forces, the odds will always be that mobs of this sort tend to get kinder treatment than leftwing mobs.”
When people were talking today about law enforcement against the rioters, I was thinking about George Washington and the whiskey rebellion. Deterrence can be important but if it goes too far it can slow down the process of healing and moving on.
More damaging that the riot rhetoric is the "corporate Democrats are like Republicans" and whatnot. No one on the left should blur the line between what the GOP has fomented and any Democrat.
I’m guessing some of the comments this thread make the case for your distaste for comment sections. Some appear to be arguing forfascism with a friendly face. In Singapore, it is a crime to chew gumorwear your hair long.
That's just scf0101.
Perhaps Mattie needs to do something about trolls on this Substack. So uncongenial.
I don't see it as trolling. Raises some good points that aren't necessarily being refuted. FWIW I think a lot of good points are being raised by everyone, and it's a productive conversation. It's easy enough to disengage if you're over it.
So far the best thing about this comment section, as opposed to place like the NYTs or left-wing twitter, is that it's less of an echo chamber. It's ok to disagree and even to think someone is so wrong that you don't respect their arguments. But I think there's a lot of value in actually having these debates play out, saying your piece, and then disengaging if it's not working for you.
Obviously there are trolls (I think the name was Galleta or something?) and you have to draw the line somewhere, but this is far from that place.
scf doesn’t seem to be trolling, just more conservative than everyone else
Yep I agree. Just the only one talking up Singapore.
One thing I find very frustrating in discussing the events of last summer is that I have nothing like a quantitative scale of what happened - how many people were involved, how many injuries were caused by participants, how many injuries were caused by police, how many buildings were damaged; and most importantly, I have even *less* information about any other potentially comparable events, like the 2017 women's march, various marches and/or riots in 1965 or 1968, events in other countries. Everything I've seen in any news outlet seems woefully incomplete and/or anecdotal, so all I can see is people reporting what they want to report about whether any events last summer were actually destructive.
I see someone's been going through this thread posting a link to a quantification of the insured property losses due to events of May 26-June 8 in the low ten figure range (https://www.axios.com/riots-cost-property-damage-276c9bcc-a455-4067-b06a-66f9db4cea9c.html) which is definitely a helpful start. But it's really hard for me to tell how to compare that to even Rodney King in 1992, because I don't know whether more or fewer businesses carry the relevant kind of insurance, so I can't tell if this is a large or small figure.
The underdiscussed consequence of liberal participation in the erosion of norms that promote lawlessness is that given the partisan makeup of police forces, it'll make it increasingly less likely that they'll actively intervene to protect Democratic lawmakers.
I'm fearful that an erosion of norms of civility that lead to a woman in pussyhat yelling at a Republican official at lunch or small groups of anti-police brutality demonstrators standing outside the Mayor's house, being viewed as acceptable, will lead to armed neckbearded men yelling at Democrats in restaurants and camping outside their homes.
I think it might be worth acknowledging that the majority of protests this past spring were peaceful (and often met with violence by law enforcement) and were made in the name of democracy and of equal justice under the law. no comparison in any way to what is happening today.
The majority were peaceful, but that seems like it should make it even easier to condemn the non-peaceful ones
I think that's a tough sell when you have videos of people lighting buildings on fire.
To clarify, I agree that what's happening today is much worse, but "mostly peaceful" just sounds like a way to sidestep condemning the actual violence that occurred.
We have negativity bias. One burning police car negates 5,000 peaceful marchers. And the ongoing siege of the Portland police station was not conducted by people who want a stronger democracy. They were assholes who enjoy breaking stuff.
One thing to note, BLM/antifa wouldn’t be caught dead wearing Biden/Harris merch, while Proud Boys, etc, all wear MAGA hats. We can and should speak out against our own violent fringe.
Agreed but negative bias also applies to police violence. The actual statistics are so, so different from what I heard this summer.
I really don't understand why the Capitol Police didn't draw a line in the sand at the threshold of the building. They were armed. Lethal force should be allowed. We shouldn't have to mobilize 10,000 troops for every protest in DC.
You would've preferred the police to kill tens (maybe hundreds) of people rather than evacuating everybody?
I would have preferred they stay outside. I don't think they should have been allowed inside the U.S. Capitol Building, the White House or the Supreme Court...especially so when the entire Senate, House, and VP are inside. WTF? It was a breach of national security.
The police might have been outgunned. No one knows how many weapons were out there.
The fact that they might have been outgunned is why they needed to stand their ground at the threshold.
I just saw the video where police shot the women climbing through an inner window of the building. So, at some point, they agreed with me.
This is what friends in the military and formerly in the military who have kept their contacts have been worrying about, particularly after the Traitor made his minions into Asst Secretaries of Defense. They have been looking into the lower levels of top military leadership since their arrival, to find those officers who would be good with such a thing happening, so they could reach down to them (the way Nixon finally worked his way down to Bork in the Saturday Night Massacre) as they fire those who refuse the orders.
Trump has been planning this. He said as much in that looney phone call on Saturday to Raffensperger "I've got something else I can do. I don't want to do it, but it's ready."
And his speech he's giving right now - still calling things stolen, telling the seditionists to go home and wait - he is still dangerous.
Trump needs immediate impeachment. They don't have to hold hearings, all they have to do is play the recording of the speech where he incited this. Remove him permanently from American life. And then go after every Proud Boy, every militiaman, every advocate. They have the laws on the books to do it - they put them there 50 years ago when they thought we were "the threat." Each of these people can be charged with conspiracy to travel interstate to foment a riot. Law's been on the books since 1968 (they used it against the Chicago Seven). Every single one of them is a conspirator in treason - which is defined in the Constitution as "making war on the United States." That's what they did today.
I’d love to see that, but I don’t see how it can happen.