This is quite possibly the most one-sided, emphatic, and fact-free editorial that I have ever seen on the HN front page.
Coupled with threats of violence: "Businesses that want to avoid chaos between now and 2022 and prevent system breakdown in 2024 would be well advised not to donate to politicians who repeat the big lie and suppress the vote."
I concur, and I’m definitely not on the “side” of the author.
_However_, just because I don’t agree with something doesn’t mean I can’t learn from it or use it as a basis for analyzing my own beliefs.
The thing that most struck reading this article is something that has repeatedly struck me while interacting with the “other side”: there is a complete disconnect between how Republicans and Democrats see the events of Jan 6.
Note that the following is my perception of each side’s position. I am not asserting this is what anyone in particular believes, only that this is what they seem to believe, when filtered through my own biases.
Democrats are using the words “insurrection” and “domestic insurgency” to describe it. They seem to be assuming that the people in DC on Jan 6 intended to overthrow a legitimate, elected government through force. Meanwhile, I see Republicans most often use the word “protest”. The strongest word I’ve seen used on that side is “riot”.
Having spoken with a couple of people who were at the Capitol rally, I’m confident that the vast majority of those present there did not see themselves as “insurrectionists”, nor did they intend to overthrow anything. At most, I believe they saw themselves as practicing civil disobedience in an effort to be heard.
The videos I’ve seen from in and around Congress didn’t strike me as if the people there were intending to use violence, either. Don’t get me wrong - it was a “mob” and “mob mentality” is real and I would absolutely not have felt safe to be on the other side of those doors. What I’m trying to say is that I believe I would have judged it to be a “potentially dangerous situation”, not an “attempt to overthrow the government”.
I’d like to discuss the differing behaviors and apparent perspectives of people since that day, but I’ll wait a bit. I don’t want to write paragraphs on the topic only for the thread to be locked and it no longer be able to discussed. :)
I have a hard time figuring out how to bridge the gap when even "riot" is used without appending "... in the US Capitol, at a time when the transition of power was being formalized".
I could understand not wanting to call it "insurrection", a somewhat rare and specific word. And if you don't want to use "overthrow", OK, I don't want to get hung up on semantics.
But it's hard to see this as not attempting to alter the transition of power, and in so doing subvert the most basic principle under which people who disagree can live together. And even that would not have been so important if it had just been a series of isolated nut jobs, but it's clear that they believed that they were doing so under the direction of the person who was losing power. And who had used other less-than-entirely-above-board mechanisms for that as well.
I just don't think it's feasible to present it as merely civil disobedience. The thing that they wanted to be heard about was a denial of the process by which others get their rights to be heard. Not just about this one event, but forever.
The fact is that they could not have succeeded. But they were the most vehement of an extremely large cohort of people who have been convinced that this basic rule of modern nations -- that elections are the means by which we make collective decisions -- is invalid. Even if they're wrong, it becomes true if enough of them believe it.
The threat of actual violence that day is dwarfed by that larger issue. I don't know how to respond to it. They have a self-realizing truth, one which I believe makes the country a much, much worse place to be.
I think that, as more people look into the events of January 6th, they will find that the opportunity for violence was very small. Not a single protestor had a firearm. Most protestors did not enter the capitol, most of them didn't even walk from the Trump rally all the way to the capitol. The Proud Boys and other groups ducked out before the event began. Alex Jones of all people was the voice of reason during the event.
> The obvious trigger of this dream was the Senate vote preventing an investigation of the domestic insurgency of 1/6. The proposal was modelled after the 9/11 commission
While it's terrible that the GOP doesn't want this kind of investigative commission (there's possibly some GOP complicity in 1/6), I'm not sure that a bipartisan commission would've worked anyway. There's a lot the GOP doesn't want to talk about here and doesn't want aired during the 2022 election year. The House should just create a Select Committee with subpoena power to investigate 1/6 like was done for Watergate - I think this likely will happen. The DOJ could also name a special prosecutor to investigate and should do so.
Five lives were lost on 1/6. There could easily have been thousands of lives lost on 1/6 - we got very lucky, it wouldn't have taken much for it to have gone to a very bad place.
Three rioters died from medical emergencies, one was shot by police, and the Capitol Police officer's death was never conclusively linked to the events of the riot.
What's your idea of the sequence of events where a crowd of unarmed people in the Capitol "easily" would have led to thousands of lives being lost?
Not in the least. But when someone (rightly) condemns 1/6 then throws out a veiled threat of violence to businesses who don't agree with him politically, the argument goes way out the window.
We need a lot less of "it's ok when WE do it" and a lot more "This is not ok for anyone".
> The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression. The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states. State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote. The House and Senate accept that altered count. The losing candidate becomes the president. We no longer have "democratically elected government." And people are angry.
This is preposterous. Donald Trump, a former POTUS, has been completely defanged and deplatformed by Silicon Valley and the broader media infrastructure. Any suggestion that the officially reported election results were not legitimate was banished and fact-checked into oblivion -- why should we believe things would go any differently in 2024?
This whole "attack on our democracy" narrative of the Jan 6 riot is being used to buttress some truly histrionic fears. For the sake of argument, let's say that the people attacking the Capitol on Jan 6 had successfully made it to the Senate chamber and torn Mike Pence limb from limb (I have to put it in these terms because they didn't bring any lethal weapons to their "insurrection"). What then? Is there a clause in the Constitution that says "if you kill the VP while the electoral vote is being tallied you get to pick the new POTUS?" No -- they would have been gassed and gunned down by the military and the vote would have proceeded with Nancy Pelosi as the new chair. Whatever the motivations of the people in the crowd, their "coup" lasted all of 4 hours and didn't even cause enough mayhem to prevent the Senate from resuming its normal business that same day. Let's chill out a bit maybe.
> Donald Trump, a former POTUS, has been completely defanged and deplatformed
Maybe so, but he still holds a lot of sway over Republican voters. "The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans." I'm not sure I'd call that "defanged" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...
Coupled with threats of violence: "Businesses that want to avoid chaos between now and 2022 and prevent system breakdown in 2024 would be well advised not to donate to politicians who repeat the big lie and suppress the vote."