Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration ceremony generated the largest crowds ever. Donald Trump’s 2016 ceremony generated a week of bizarre lying about the numbers at his much smaller event. And now there will be no public inauguration at all, with the National Mall, stretching from Congress to the Washington monument, to be closed to the public.
It would be hard to overstate the symbolic significance of such a move. Washington, the city, was laid out in such a way as to emphasise the new federal/imperial republic arising from the motley collection of colony-states that had made a revolution.
Its design is explicitly occult; long avenues making sacred secular sites visible from each to each. The monument itself is startling, at once pharaonic, but also more modern than the steadily more kitsch monuments that followed.
John Adams, second president, nearly abandoned the new capital when he found that the White House was being built with slave labour. A few years later, Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana purchase, which changed the country and the presidency, defining the latter’s executive powers — by buying half a continent — as anything not explicitly ruled out of doing.
The empire — the projection of expansion as the unfolding of enlightenment in the world, rolling out from its marble capital — had begun. That empire is far from over, but something within it is, if the new government so fears a section of its people that the general public has been replaced by 26,000 soldiers in camo, camping out in those polished white halls.
The logic is hard to refute: the event would be such a target rich environment, and the usual ratio of actually violent crazies to the merely angry and disgruntled — usually in the tens of millions to one — has been so upended in the Trump era, that a political event like a mass inauguration is now unpoliceable.
Or maybe it isn’t, who knows?
But it would be a daring new administration willing to find out. This is an extraordinary wrecking operation, led by one man and his sycophantic enablers. A country founded in principle, on a set of principles, evolving out of instituted state racism, a place with extremely open settings of free speech, a court system that for decades enforced a secular liberalism beyond the beliefs of much of its population — all this has held together.
Its great recent upheavals — the civil rights/black power movement, and the Vietnam/new left movement — cut with the grain of its spirit, holding it to account on its own terms. Somehow, a general collapse of mutual consent — such as had occurred in 1860 — was avoided.
In four short years, Donald Trump and his enablers have taken that to the edge of destruction. It is an extraordinary anti-achievement. Trump’s willingness to mobilise refusal of consent, based on phantasms of electoral fraud, so greatly assures him of the worst president ever status, that no one else comes close.
The usual contenders — Lincoln’s predecessors, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, from the 1850s — usually get the wooden spoon because, as pro-slavers, they meddled and connived in negotiations around a dying system, emboldened the South, and made the Civil War inevitable. But that was a clean break, which led to emancipation — sabotaged by another wooden spooner, Andrew Johnson, a virulent racist, who’d been Lincoln’s VP for political reasons.
Trump’s genius has been to lend state power, the voice of sovereignty, to the process by which the culture and history was atomising the minimal consensus on which it relied. Yes, worse than the civil war crew. Other contenders — Warren Harding, Zachary Taylor — no longer come close.
In Crawford, Texas, Dubya must be yelping with relief. He gave away US hegemony and crashed the economy. But that now counts as mere incompetence, compared to a president who widened the fissure running through US society itself. The question is, how far and how irrevocably?
The next few days will give some answer. It is yet another sign of the great shift that what has in the past been a ceremony of legitimating celebration is now a moment of unique apprehension in which the US finds out what it now is.
Between 1968 and the end of the ’70s the country was subject to several thousand political bombings. Several thousand. It was potentially not as close to a fracturing event then, as it is now. Such a possibility may prove, in the years to come, pure chimera.
Politics may return to the realms of elite technocracy, the condition of large sections of the public to the state of permanent dissatisfaction and steady material decline for the bottom quarter, that appears to be the long-term condition in much of the West.
Trump may prove to have been the ultimate diversion, Joker a political movie as expressive of its era as The Battle of Algiers.
Or… that may be the throat-clearing. We are seeing the Trump carnival parade as the end of a certain type of right-wing redemptionism which was born in the mystique of Reaganism, and could only maintain such mystic force by going deep into the gnostic extravaganza of the Q conspiracy.
But mystical movements can precede a re-rationalised politics. What if, out of Trump’s spectacular rise and fall, a fully rational, cell-structured but well-organised national movement of right-wing violence emerges? That would be a self-selecting movement. As the crazies and fantasists go back to carbs and sitcoms, the more committed find a new resolve that arises from the fiascos they were fooled by.
Such a movement would only need to have 1000 or so “resolved” soldiers out of the millions of fringe crazies, Dunkin’ Donuts militias, and out of the 320 million Americans, to sow havoc.
They would be paralleled by a political movement in certain states that would be neo-secessionist, as a serious movement — seeing in president Biden’s centrist administration, the great horned beast of permanent progressivism. Why, in Texas or Idaho, stick with a United States that offers only that? Secessionism with mass support now seems at least plausible, and that is another product of Trump’s reign.
Either he just disappears, as he said COVID would, or he turns out to be history on a golf cart, in slacks both shit-stained, and white as imperial marble.
Trump, I think better than most politicians, was able to tap into the malaise affecting Western democracies – that active disenfranchisement of large parts of the population, where inequality is rising, many kinds of labour are no suitably rewarded, and politics is becoming more self-serving.
While Trump was a terrible president completely out of his depth and with a habit to somehow say the wrong thing, the problems in American democracy have little to do with his influence. His rise is the culmination of a justified sense that Western Democracies are failing a good proportion of their citizens, so I can’t see how his departure from the Oval Office will do much of anything to heal politics in America. The system isn’t working for a lot of people, and many of the reasons for that are still actively part of the sociopolitical fabric of society.
The only positive I can take from all this is that his removal from Office might mean that he’s not the headline nearly every day.
There’s an awful lot of ‘chat’ on the Dark Web, and the last week has seen a very large increase in new patrons.
Not a patron, myself, but the jungle drums are beating….
Let’s not forget who are the deliberately disenfranchised in the US. In many states of the US electoral district boundaries are distorted into strange shapes to ensure domination of the state assembly and federal representation by one party regardless of whether it wins the popular vote or not. Then in many states ‘purging’ of electoral rolls, theoretically to remove dead voters or voters who have moved away but in practice removing voters likely to favour one particular party. The Democrat candidate for Governor in Georgia recently lost the election by about 80,000 votes days after her opponent ‘purged’ several hundred thousand likely Democrat voters from the electoral rolls. Then consider what choice those who seek to vote still have. Their choice is between two right-wing parties both thoroughly dominated by the corporate money that finances their hugely expensive but largely meaningless electoral campaigns. It’s educational to watch a few interviews with candidates and see how uniformly they judge the effectiveness of their campaigns by the amount of funding they’ve collected, mostly from corporate donors. Who of course don’t just give out of the kindness of their hearts. They will be expecting to call in favours from successful candidates. Then consider what corporate ownership of government has given the mass of the people: A rush of wealth to the billionaire few, a hollowed out, impoverished and indebted middle class and below them the employed poor who cannot survive on the pay from just one full-time job should they be lucky enough to have one. And now the collapse in employment caused by the COVID crisis with little government support for the unemployed. What could go wrong? In Australia we at least have better voting facilities and a slightly wider choice, with the Coalition on the far to mid-right, Labor on the centre-right to centrist and Greens on the centre-left, all of them with some chance of controlling or at least influencing government and not all fully dominated by corporate interests.
The real problem is they have an outdated constitution written by the wealthy of the 1780s. they also lack a proper voting process–ie compulsory voting is the fairest way to a democracy for everyone.
“The real problem is they have an outdated constitution written by the wealthy of the 1780s.”
I’m curious about this. What remnants of the founding fathers are causing problems today? After all, there’s been several enfranchisement moments extending voting rights and participation to be more democratic.
And what of issues like gerrymandering, Super PACs, lobbying, and weakening of conflict of interest provisions. All these are cited by political experts as negatively impacting democratic rights, yet none of them are anything to do with the original authors of the Constitution. Are they not real problems?
“they also lack a proper voting process–ie compulsory voting is the fairest way to a democracy for everyone.”
We have compulsory voting here, yet for the most part, the American political process has far more voter engagement than we do. What would you expect to see as the consequences of introducing compulsory voting there?
As Judith Brett commented, if you have compulsory voting, you have to make voting as convenient as possible. If only the US system worked to include instead of exclude voters, things might be very different.
I get that a lot of effort had gone into trying to disenfranchise particular communities. What I’m not sure about, however, is whether compulsory voting would fix that. There’s a very high engagement with politics by the populace there compared to Australia where we have compulsory voting.
I agree that the efforts the US puts into trying to disenfranchise particular voting groups is awful, and anti-democratic. What I’m unsure about is whether making voting compulsory would improve things there when there’s already a high engagement with politics despite the efforts. (Perhaps there are active efforts to try to disenfranchise because of the high engagement). What evidence would there be that Americans would be even more engaged if they were made to vote?
As far as I can tell, the fixes to the American system that would make a difference would be things like the elimination of gerrymandering, limits on campaign contributions, changing from a first-past-the-post system to one of preferential voting. All these directly address issues in how the electoral system is rigged. What changes in behaviour would come from forcing people to vote?
(I should add I believe that voting would be compulsory. What I am questioning is what making voting compulsory would do to the American political landscape. I don’t know that it would fix anything – after all there’s compulsory voting here and our politics still has many of the same problems that America is currently facing).
I think Brett’s point was that the government felt obliged to make voting easy – as the US should.
I completely agree with that.
The argument is, I believe, that compulsory voting would put more pressure on the states to make sure people have equal access to polling booths and other means of voting. Studies keep showing that wait times are much longer in poorer areas on election days, early voting stations are fewer, and so on. People just give up. Also they might have to do something about scheduling elections away from working days, e.g. have a national holiday.
I agree with that. Given how smoothly elections run here, I was shocked when I learnt about how they run in the US. It seems strange that they don’t do everything in their power to get people to vote.
My concern is that I don’t see how those measures would translate into better politics. At best, I can see all the effort put into making voting difficult would cease, but I don’t see how that would affect who is elected and what the elected do with their power. Getting rid of gerrymandering, on the other hand…
“What remnants of the founding fathers are causing problems today?”
Quite a lot, both in what was included and what was left out.
Woopwoop has already mentioned voter exclusion. This has been made much worse by courts stretching the constitution as far as they dare in support of syatematic exclusion, suppression and gerrymandering measures, but the lack of any right to vote (never mind complulsory voting) goes to the heart of the problem.
That said, voting is run under State law, not federal, so the various State constitutions, governments and courts also play a large role.
Another massive problem is the prejudice against representative democracy written into the federal constitution and given form by the imposition of the Electoral College. This exists to provide a means of frustrating the popular will, and it has done that several times recently, not least in 2016, putting Trump in power when he lost the popular vote by some 3 million votes.
The Senate is also far from democratic. It was originally not based on a popular vote at all. There are two huge problems with the Senate. Two senators each were appointed by the state legislatures, regardless of population. This was done to protect slave-holding states from being over-ruled by the majority in other states. It still works to give a Senate majority to small part of the US population who live far from the big states and cities.
The Senate was supposed to be a body that stood above retail politics and free of political parties. That is why it has final say on such matters as impeachment and political or judicial appointments That did not work so well, so an amendment was passed to make each senator elected, which is where we are now. This just made it worse, as we see with the disgusting farce of the last impeachment trial where partisan senators refused to even hear any evidence.
I could go on…
… after all, I have not even mentioned the Supreme Court and its successful constitutional coup in 1803, when it gave itself the right of judicial review to force the other branches of government into compliance with whatever interpretation it chooses to put on the constitution. This is why appointing Supreme Court Justices is just about the most significant thing any president can do domestically.
Al Gore would agree.
The deplorables rhetoric is really alarming, not least that it’s overly applied and relies heavily on adopting a WEIRD moral worldview (as defined by Jonathan Hairy), but that most people see themselves as good people holding good values and standing up for a right and just world.
Clinton’s comment about those most vocal for their support for Trump was fine in context, but utterly boneheaded when those sentiments are translated into the everyday politics where there is a strong section of left-wing activists that do demonise conservatives as such, and a conservative media that’s repeatedly pushing a victimhood line.
The ‘context’ in which Killary made her remarks to Goldman Sachs & Co were far more instructive on where she and her ilk see themselves ‘positioned’.
After the Munich Putsch, In 1923, the Germans fancied they had dealt with the ‘little corporal’ and his messy brand of politics and behaviour. Oh, how wrong they and everyone else were. To surpass (for that is what must be done) evil takes more than just a quick trial and a sentence. You must regain the trust and confidence of the middle ground and help them understand the truth and how to make life better without resort to violence. They must determine that evil intent is not their path and they must push it to the sidelines of politics where it belongs. This applies as much to America as it does to Australia with the likes of Hansen, Kelly, Bernardi, Christensen et al.
Yes the ‘little corporal’ did reemerge with a vengeance. However he and the NSDAP never managed to win a majority by themselves in even semi-rigged elections.
They only became a significant party in the 1930 election.
In July 1932 in a reasonably free election NSDAP became the largest party, but without a majority. H lost the presidential election in 1932. There was another federal election November 1932 after which the NSDAP was still largest party, but lost support and seats. H was nominated as Chancellor in a coalition government with conservatives, but NSDAP proceeded to seize power.
An election was held in 1933 with violent suppression of communists and social democrats and massive state propaganda. The NSDAP still only managed to win 43.9% of the vote and did not have a majority. H then passed the Enabling Act with the support of conservative parties that made him dictator..
H came to power because of his conservative enablers who thought they could use him to push the left back but could still control him. That went well – which is a lesson for enablers of extremism everywhere.
He also had mutually beneficial relationships with a number of individuals and organisations from the other side of the Atlantic, such as Ford, GM, GE and Prescott Bush.
Bernie did the same with a positive message. However, he was a bigger threat to capital then Trump was – both in 2016 and 2020. Bernie would have won in 2016.
I agree. Bernie would have won. I think a lot of Democrat voters stayed home on voting day because they didn’t like their candidate, who failed to campaign in several of the so-called ‘battleground states’ and lost them narrowly.
How do you explain the middle class nature of most participants?
Like Hanson’s One Nation, too many blame and/or deflect by focusing on a supposedly or imaginary white uneducated working class (Brexit too) when in fact many are simply middle class white Christian conservative nationalists, with many axes to grind…… after years of propaganda from Fox, talk radion etc., with the encouragement of Trump to be enraged and let it all out…..
Similar to those middle class oppposing immigration on behalf of workers and the environment…. to mask their own antipathy towards immigrants and non Europeans.
“How do you explain the middle class nature of most participants?”
That’s a good question, and I think you answered it in your next paragraph. I agree that the blame thrown around to the uneducated working class is at best overstated and at worst missing key factors of many voters.
Yes, I agree that there’s that cultural conservatism that Trump tapped into, with that also serving as forms of disenfranchisement. (As a side note, Make America Great Again is a fantastic slogan because it allows people to substitute in whatever they feel is their gripe about the changing culture as the problem Trump would fix.) The shift of a society away from God, the sexual liberation movement, the rise of non-Christian immigrants, an immoral media – especially Hollywood, gay marriage, etc. It’s a long list (as you say) axes to grind with how the culture is changing.
It was a surprise for me in 2016 how strongly Evangelicals supported Trump despite him embodying pretty much everything they preach against, but it makes sense that they see him as someone who will do their bidding, as we saw with his appointments in areas like education and the courts.
How do you know that the deplorable are so despised by the progressives? How do you separate the despise of the progressives from the same despise of the rich conservatives?
Haven’t you just bought the stick-on narrative that was fed to you? Don’t the Wall St bankers pretty much despise everyone who isn’t another Wall St banker/gangster? Isn’t it time to let go of that narrative that progressives just run around despising everybody, when there is pretty clear evidence that much of the despising and anger is coming from those who are not part of this progressive Illuminati.
An important point missing here is Covid-19. Biden and his party have studiously avoided major public gatherings as the virus runs rampant in the US. The fact the public are not invited to the inauguration has as much to do with that public health stance as it does with the potential for more mob violence. Let’s not forget, we’re still engaged in a global pandemic, and America is ground-zero.
I was thinking along the same lines regarding Covid-19…Even the ‘ridiculous’ thought that the inauguration could’ve been ‘zoomed’ in the interests of public body politic health n safety..
I wondered, during the ”campaign”, whether Biden’s ‘basement bunker’ was the product of some supa-smart political ops. whose reasoning combined Schadenfreude with the obviously Darwinian result of large MAGA gatherings of spit & heavy exhalations.
Cheating, as alleged, was unnecessary if sufficient deplorables attended and spread the good news to those who couldn’t make the venue but would have voted Trump in those very few, relatively minor districts which swung the Electoral College in 2016 .
Had they lived.
What it means is these criminals are back in power. The Top 100 Most Damaging WikiLeaks – The Millennium Report
Excellent, Tony – hadn’t seen that, so many thanks.
Notable mention, prior to getting to O’Bomber at No 1;
2. Can we believe WikiLeaks?
In short, yes. In its 10 year history, not one single leak has ever proven to be false, something WikiLeaks prides itself on. If the leaks were false, everyone implicated in them would have immediately and aggressively denied their claims rather than simply change the subject in speculating if Russia did it….”
You may like this. The quantum leap forward: On birthing the world’s fastest, most advanced internet network, China claims supremacy over the US — RT Op-ed
EXCEPT that ‘quantum events’, pertaining particuarly to size (e.g. Plank size) ARE NOT MEASURABLE because the act of observation alters the condition of what is being measured.
A quantum leap has no ‘real-world’ meaning or, at best, is immeasurably small.
May I respectfully doubt that anyone has built a genuine quantum computer yet. UNSW were world leaders in quantum computing in 2020 and they were years away from getting a functioning quantum computer. Some fundamental hurdles exist which nobody has yet theoretically solved let alone actually engineered. I’m certain that google hasn’t built one. America is way behind in quantum computing research.
The remark, DB, accrues from the characteristics of basic quantum theory or quantum mechanics (both searchable)! The remark does not require an appeal to a Quantum computer.
Hawking had a crack at describing Heisenberg and Plank characteristics in his book (for the layman) “The Grand Design”. Feynman Paths (p. 100) come to that.
Is it a fake article?
Yeah – Hillary’s taking time off from her pedo pizza shop and is out the back of her local Chinese takaway with a bunch of illegal Mexicans busy changing Republican votes to Democrat.
TonyP and David, why not post your thoughts on QAnon? They’d go down well there.
Problem with QAnon is they don’t like facts, they would get hold of that and juice it up until it has no relationship with reality.
TonyP, that Millennium Report link of yours goes to a loony far-right conspiracy-addled site which doesn’t like facts and seems to have no relationship with reality. The first paragraph of an article dated 15 December starts:
There’s a very good reason (actually very BAD reason) why THE GREAT SCAMDEMIC, THE GREAT RESET and THE GREAT STEALECTION were all carried out by the New World Order globalist cabal in 2020. It’s the very same reason why 2019 saw the military deployment of 5G in key power centers around the globe.
Their view of the ‘Storming of the Capitol’ was so crazed the needles of my satire and irony detectors started moving, momentarily:
The Democrats were desperate to shut down the congressional objections to the Electoral College votes… So, they staged a dramatic swarming of The Capitol Building (TCB) in order to DISTRACT everyone’s attention. This black operation was led by AntiFa anarchists disguised as Trump supporters. That’s why the security at TCB was so lax—to permit the storming of the building so that Trumpsters would look bad. It’s true that there were many MAGA protesters among those who entered TCB, but they were there to STOP THE STEAL. Given the “soft coup by stolen ballot” that was being rubber-stamped by the U.S. Congress, the MAGA protesters have every right to shut down the unlawful, treasonous process.
Very entertaining, but I won’t be ordering a Pedo Pizza soon.
I’m not a fan of the new world order thing while Putin and Xi are giving them the finger. Remember those with the most nukes are the rulers of the the universe. I’m not sure if Americans have the brains to organise a complicated riot like you mention.
Capt’n, I’m surprised you managed to post so much italics without the ModBot intruding.
It was a fun read, in brief, so thanks for posting.
I can’t imagine the fevered morass from which that came so I hope that you have had time to recover your equanimity.
And, Wikileaks, Cap’n? Any ‘errors’ in what they brought to light? Any ‘conspiracy theories’? Any pizza menus?
And, do you have any view on why so many keep missing the freakin’ point, when it comes to Assange and Wikileaks?
Just today, the most signed petition in its history was submitted to the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, calling for an ICC investigation into what Nils Melzer, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Torture (and other human rights abuses) defines as the ‘Joint Political Persecution’ of Julian Assange.
Melzer is a Professor of International Law, and he describes the persecution of Assange as the worst case of political persecution of an individual he has ever come across.
The petition put before the ICC outlines the specific clauses of international law breached by the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador and Australia, in pursuit of Assange. There is a team of highly qualified legal and political experts who have advised those behind Assange on the framing of the petition, and Nils Melzer has supported the pursuit by those behind the petition.
Simply put, I don’t give a rat’s freckle about what happens in or to Amerika. I do give a rat’s freckle about what happens to Julian Assange, because a) the man has been set up by a rotten system that cares only for its own maintenance, and b) he ‘disappears’, and there will be very, very few remaining with the guts to take the personal risks necessary to expose ‘radical truth’ to the ordinary sods with enough interest in their own rights and welfare to take note.
And, imbeciles who prefer to ‘theorise’ about conspiracy theorists, like Qanon, instead of facing the bald basic facts about Assange’s plight can go f*** themselves, for they are for evermore, pig ignorant rubes.
I am sure that I had occasion, recently, to point out that ‘fact’ for Oldie is what his favourite political actor says is the case; be it Sanders or whomever.
Oldie does not permit himself to be distracted by such inanity as judgements from ICC decisions or authorities on International Relations; quite the reverse (indeed) should such ‘uninformed’ persons possess the temerity to contradict the ethos of a right-thinking person.
I have been intending to inquire of Oldie as to what what work he deem authoritative that does occupy his bookshelves but, alas, I have been too preoccupied pursuing fact.
In fairness to Olide, he has many more friends on this site than do I!
As to Assange, damned pity that the guy is a wet-blanket; a bit of a Rudd personality when in the office (I have met some who have worked with him – if ‘worked’ is the word; ‘endured’ might fit better). He ought to have faced the Swedish stuff head-on and would (now) be in a much stronger position.
Nevertheless, uncle Sam (as with Manning or Snowden) does not care for knit-pickers or whistle blowers (neither does Oz – a fair few careers destroyed there) and are thus considered less than equal. That is what the issue is about.
For his sake, I hope the prison library has an introductory Russian text on its shelves.
This ‘Millenium Report is bogus, promoting conspiracy theories, supposedly based upon Wikileaks materials:
‘STORMING OF THE CAPITOL BUILDING: False Flag Operation Executed by Deep State to Crush the Patriot Movement‘
‘Pizzagate is so big it will eventually take down the U.S. Federal Government, just as Pedogate will collapse the World Shadow Government’
‘5G Roll-out Greatly Endangers Every Person in the USA“It must be stopped before it’s too late!”’
Not helpful.
The Millennium Report might be bogus, champ, but Wikileaks revelations never, ever have been.
That’s why there are such determined to efforts to kill the founder in Belmarsh prison.
Or, do you hold with the ‘rape allegations’, and the rest of the trumped up crap non-facts about Assange?
Can you read (what I wrote) about ‘The Millenium Report’ versus claiming otherwise and deflecting?
Generally, any source should satisfy the CRAAP test: currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose.
Are the wiki emails right or wrong?
Always have been (see Chalmers Johnson’s ” Sorrows of Empire”).
Holy cow Tony, does this mean that Hillary was a crooked politician? Read up to point 25 and then gave up. She was 1. A Clinton and 2. A politician.
Of course she played dirty politics and played fast and loose with the law. They all do. Seemed like such a lot of work to go to to build an evidence brief for something that is blithely accepted as normal political bastardry.
No different to our current government here really.
I agree, the loons may have posted that list but the content was factual.
sorry, cannot accept “mere incompetence” as a suitable epithet for Dubya’s mass murder
The next few days… things are so fluid. On the 6th I thought the peak had passed, the right had done its worst. But 20 minutes before today’s Crikeyarrived, a detailed Washington Post account of the riot landed in my inbox. I can’t get over this:
“Looking over the chaotic scene in front of him from the Capitol steps, Glover grew concerned as the battle raged. There were people caught up in the moment, he said, doing things they would not ordinarily do. But many appeared to be on a mission, and they launched what he and the police chief described as a coordinated assault.
“Everything they did was in a military fashion,” Glover said, saying he witnessed rioters apparently using hand signs and waving flags to signal positions, and using what he described as “military formations.” They took high positions and talked over wireless communications.”
That’s what twenty years of war fighting will give you.
One of the first, recorded, great blowbacks was the return of Wellington’s victorious troops, having deferated Napolean and aved Britain, heading home to hovels after having seen the gay lights of Bruxelles, in not gay Paree.
The Established Order was terrified, to put it mildly.
Luckily there was a growing empire requiring battle hardened troops but it was still “..a close run thing” as the Iron Duke said of another, minor matter.
This is a most compelling report, though on a quite different level to Guy’s very insightful analysis. That such a level of apparent organisation has become evident–even before a full analysis of all the pictorial evidence of Jan 6 has been done–is a cause of very deep concern. If we connect this with the reports that there would be demonstrations/riots in all the state capitals over the next few days, then what we are witnessing is a well organised campaign, not necessarily centralised, but still effective if decentralised.
Social media could allow the necessary coordinated communications to be made, but to undertake riots at specific points across the entire country implies serious organisational capacity and prior experience at carrying through such a campaign.
If such a campaign does come to fruition and is widely reported–as the rioters will want–it will be most interesting–and hopefully not alarming–to observe the reactions of the police and the various National Guards.
“though on a quite different level to Guy’s very insightful analysis”
True, but I was responding to GR’s “The question is, how far and how irrevocably?The next few days will give some answer.”
It can appear, if not every 1st person, then every 2nd person in the USA, is connected to the military.
WaPo didn’t happen to mention the 100 odd strong group, led by a serving Captain from ‘Army Psyops’, that made their way from up from her base at Fort Bragg, did they?
No, but a Wash Times report today does mention ex-Capt Emily Rainey in passing. It implies that there is no evidence to dispute her story that she led a mainly civilian group and wasn’t involved in the violence. The article provides much more info than the Wa Po abot those involved, which is based mainly on interviews with officers who defended the Capitol. It has a Jan 6 visual of a military-style formation “stacking up” used when entering houses.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/15/capitol-rioters-included-highly-trained-ex-militar/
She just resigned her commission.
Violent or non-violent participation isn’t the most relevant point.
I find it more relevant to compare the ‘defence’ of the Capitol, when BLM and Co were approaching their protest day last year, with the ‘defence’ assembled last week.
Seen the pics of the comparison? Why was that, would you think?
And, golly gee, the very next day, last week, the next chapter in the ‘Patriot Act’ (sub-headed ‘Domestic Terrorism’) was already being rolled out (Shiff had it drafted and parked last year), and it was a continuation of what Biden promoted in the ’90’s, which was used for the Patriot Act by Bush, Cheney etc after 9/11.
Lack of prep, deliberate or otherwise, is relevant. Comparison with BLM is relevant. Military tactics by elements in the crowd are relevant. Violence and preparation for violence by those elements is particularly relevant.
You are entitled to your inference about Biden and Shiff, though I think it is about as likely a conspiracy as Trump teeing things up directly with the Proud Boys – i.e. not very, and contrary to Occam’s razor.
As for Rainey (yes I know she resigned after), she is pretty much irrelevant. I don’t understand why you deflected in her direction, when there is now very specific and clear evidence that military elements (long feared, as Oldie points out) are now centre-stage.
A histogram of occupations overplayed with political allegiance is required to determine what is ‘centre stage’
Military-style preparation and behavior is the most relevant category, not political allegiance. “Centre-stage” is still the Washington DC event, but this will probably change over the weekend with right-wing armed protests predicted at the 50 state capitols. Lets hope they fizzle. The worst case would be that each right-wing armed protest is confronted by a left-wing armed group, though this appears to be on no-one’s radar. Rather than construct histograms of past events, I think I’ll keep up with the news.
Some military-style preparation certainly but also “rent-a-crowd”.
Apparently, buses had been charted from the airport some days in advance. I’m unsure if that initiative qualifies as ‘military’ or otherwise.
I doubt if something like 48% support is going to “fizzle” – but we shall see.
As R. pointed out the brigade is not from a single disaffected sector. There are shared similaities AND contradictions.
I’m trying to find that in today’s WashPo could you post a link for that account or is it only in a mail out?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/01/14/dc-police-capitol-riot/
Keith1, it’s true that things look more disturbing as more details come out. On the other hand, many of us have been aware of the existence of these underground white terrorists for a while. This event has brought them to the surface and flushed them out so they can no longer be ignored. Let’s see what happens from now on.