For The Record: January 6, 2021
When history books are written about now, yesterday will be in them.
When we woke up, we expected the reasons that January 6 would be important would be, firstly, that the Senate went Democratic and, secondly, that the election was certified by Congress. The first wasn’t the biggest news, though in the long run it could be, and the second actually happened today, January 7. The electoral vote was confirmed by Congress, 93-7 by the Senate, though in the House, 122 voted for further evaluation of voting. Among the 93, strongly among the 93, were Senators McConnell and Graham. This was a step too far. Today Sen. Schumer, the editorial board of the Washington Post, and the head of the American Association of Manufacturers, who is a former high-ranking Republican operative, all called for the removal of President Trump from office. The Cabinet has apparently discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, though I don’t know where they are in that decision, and White House staffers are leaving in droves.
In 2011, I was involved in a loudspeaker demonstration on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda. It’s a difficult acoustic environment and some events are held there with speeches, so intelligibility is an issue. I represented a product that addressed that. What I can tell you about that visit, which is where I took the photograph above, is that security was unbelievable. We were met at a site several blocks off site, the loudspeakers and electronics were inspected, and they brought the product to the floor. We had to be screened ahead of time to get access. While we were working on the floor, when I needed to go to the bathroom I needed a police escort. Bathrooms were an elevator ride down. You have no idea how extensive the offices under the Capitol are. It’s like another city down there.
Having gone through that security, I was doubly surprised at how easily it was breached yesterday. My mother, watching on television, and who has lived in the greater Washington, DC area for more than half a century, commented that it looked like the police didn’t want to hurt their friends.
Which brings up another point that has been talked about a great deal since the breach: If the protestors responsible for the breach had been Black, they’d all be arrested or dead.
And now I’ll say something I never expected to say in my lifetime:
How the police have treated Black protesters would have been more appropriate yesterday than how they treated those White protestors. They are terrorists and traitors.
But that treatment isn’t just about the protesters being White, it’s apparently also about them being Trump supporters. Trump has a lot of support in the Capitol Police.
Have a look yourself:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJuIzd_JY2R/?igshid=1xrhzue353fxb
So who were these Trump supporters? According to the Washington Post, the FBI is looking for help identifying them from news photos of the event. But if you want to know overall who they are, here’s a clue:
And that’s before we get to the Confederate flags they put up in the Capitol with their Trump flags, replacing American flags with both, which should tell you damned near everything.
These guys trashed the Capitol, possibly with a bit of complicity from the Capitol Police. Nancy Pelosi has asked for the Capitol Police chief’s resignation.
The FBI has said for years that we have a problem with extreme right-wingers infiltrating police forces. I think perhaps the Biden administration will be a lot more supportive of the FBI’s efforts in this direction than the Trump administration was. This may start to feel like McCarthyism to the police but they brought it on themselves. And this effort will be critical to the country.
What’s next? I’m not confident in my crystal ball on this. There are a lot of Americans who were supportive of this treasonous action and would support further action along these lines. However, that will be more difficult without a supporter in the White House. I’d be worried about how far the Trump Traitors could go, particularly with friendly police around the country, but they don’t have the support of the military, either party’s establishment, or Corporate America.
At this point I can’t expect not to be surprised.
01/08/2021 @ 10:46 am
If this had been a BLM demonstration that morphed into a riot National Guard tanks would have been rolling in the streets of Washington, DC…and there would have been so many arrests that Maryland and Virginia lockups would be filled to overflow capacity…And there likely would have been blood everywhere…
The fact is, the Capitol Police were not prepared for what took place because white folks are not presumed to be a threat to “law & order” even if it was clear to anyone paying attention that they went to Washington to fulfill their prearranged agenda of subversion and sedition…
01/08/2021 @ 12:17 pm
From my simple-minded perspective: how is it that the Capitol police seem to be so uniformly white in a city that’s as black as DC?
01/08/2021 @ 2:54 pm
Because, the Capitol Police are not a DC municipal law enforcement entity.
01/14/2021 @ 9:52 am
Or:
https://www.propublica.org/article/no-one-took-us-seriously-black-cops-warned-about-racist-capitol-police-officers-for-years?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social#1042091
01/14/2021 @ 5:02 pm
That could be it all right
01/14/2021 @ 5:50 pm
It is pretty common for people to think of cops being all of one mind. I have been saying for years that police departments are made up of people from the general public. The issues and prejudices that exist outside also exist inside. My experience with the LAPD was of a divided locker room which consisted of 3 basic parts. There were white cop groups, Latino cops groups, and Black cops. Those who did not come from one of the three largest groups fit in where they could. I always had the feeling that people never accepted this description of cops, which would require understanding that cops are very much like themselves. This story about Black cops not being listened to about the white racists on their departments is very familiar to me. I don’t think you can go anywhere in our society and not find divisions like these.
01/14/2021 @ 6:19 pm
We could see this in the events of Jan. 6. On one hand, there were cops who colluded with the rioters and took selfies with them. On the other, a Black cop, Eugene Goodman, led them on a chase away from an open Senate chamber door and might have single-handedly saved the US Government.
01/08/2021 @ 3:01 pm
The United States Capitol Police (USCP) is a federal law enforcement agency in the United States charged with protecting the United States Congress within the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its territories. It answers to Congress, not the President of the United States, and is the only full-service federal law enforcement agency responsible to the legislative branch of the Federal Government of the United States.
—–Wikipedia
01/13/2021 @ 8:46 am
The Capitol Police turns out to be a way more complex story than it looked. There are members who may have been complicit and there are members who were heroes, one of whom is dead and another, Eugene Goodman, who may have saved the country by leading his pursuers away from the Senate chamber. The amount of trouble they had getting help when they asked for it was insane.
01/13/2021 @ 2:01 pm
~~sadistic throng is a catalytic google search~~
K have you noticed lack of crowd estimates? One of my BOXF best old X buddies, Tet to Tet gentleman farmer, private airstrip and all of the above beyond all that, profile in courage persona, texted me suggesting that I ‘headphone’ Lady Gaga breathe well and focus on my flax cracker baking AFTER I’d described how I lapsed into an Our Father (…as we forgive them…) which inhibited my ninja jugular vein – 0 – beer bottle reflex when attacked by a thick blimp of a white crayola who’d puss on splattered in my face screaming pizzagate propaganda barking about his concealed carry permit…warm wrought weather family joint…soin bitch defines RUMP-FACE LO;}
Mostly I’m silent.
K – – you have inspired me to sauna-fast today in humble memorial to home of the brave
ALERT alert alert ALERT
NEVER AGAIN
01/13/2021 @ 8:09 pm
I grew up with a girl who, while very bright, had a way of disappearing into a false reality. She went on to study French literature at University of Chicago, so when I say she was very bright, she really was. But, that tendency of hers used to alarm me. I had never seen anything like it at that stage of my life. I said to her, one day, a hole is going to open up in the ground, and you’re just going to disappear into your other reality. I didn’t know how to describe it, even to myself, but I always believed that entertaining a false reality too much could cause broader problems than you might imagine.
The thing that is happening in our national politics today feels just like that felt at that time. 5 people are dead because so many entertained a fantasy about a stolen election, and numerous other myths uncorked by Qanon. Supposedly, there were officers flashing badges to get in to this siege, and assisting the insurrectionists. This disaster isn’t based on a single tax cut, or how many guns a citizen gets to carry at one time…or whatever. This is a deadly conflict between a real election, and an imagined result to it. How do you fix that?
01/13/2021 @ 8:42 pm
JP,
The crowd estimates have been fairly varied, up to 30,000.
Bitey,
The first thing you do is slow down the spread of the imagined result as reality. That’s been happening, courtesy of some of the biggest online platforms that are finally getting religion. This also means reducing certain kinds of news coverage which it looks like may also happen.
The second thing you do is hunt the guys down who did this and prosecute. That’s happening.
The third thing you do is cut off their money. The corporate world is moving in this direction surprisingly quickly, almost as fast as they got rid of Confederate flags. There are several major corporations that have said they will not contribute to the campaigns of anyone in Congress who voted against Electoral College vote certification. By the way, Forbes has said that if anyone hires Trump’s press people who lied to everyone for four years, the companies that do will face extreme public scrutiny from Forbes on anything they announce.
Not that all of this will work but it will help. One thing I expect is as the FBI not only takes this seriously but is supported by the White House in taking it seriously, a lot of police departments are going to be under close examination in terms of what kind of nut jobs and supremacists they have working for them.
My suspicion is that a few Congressmen will be taken down by all of this. Some of them may have helped up front.
01/13/2021 @ 10:39 pm
Yes, it appears several congressmen helped insurrectionists recon the Capitol. That is deeply disturbing.
01/13/2021 @ 10:53 pm
Very deeply. That’s sedition at the very least. More direct participation than Trump’s. I hope they’re arrested.
01/14/2021 @ 8:59 am
Meredith March Against Fear, June 1966
Perhaps it dawns on all 340,000,000 of us that it’s not about DJ TRUMP. 10 years ago GOOGLE data press-released that new aggregate data exceeds all historical data every 96 hours. I opened this brief comment/essay with the Meredith March caption as a hallowed retrospection of an enduring struggle perhaps as humble homage to the profound perseverance of our predecessors which incorporates the valid compunction of that perfect Sam Cook ballad, ‘Change is Gonna Come’. If I may belabor my passion, all hours found me upon an essay reread: ‘Are Americans Psychopaths?’ — Umair Haque, Medium, 18 DEC 20, as found within Myriad’s, Bindlesnitch, 10 JAN 21….one of those astute scolding reflections! And Haque’s comprehensive demonstration is disconcerting as a splash of ice water to one’s face while Northwoods windblown winter camping. Simply said: what GOOD are…we? Blessed Americans as well as all born free people? Read read read please, out on this limb; Lady Liberty, our harbored misty moonlit nostalgic ‘lost in the night’ icon of hope and promise. I’d initially purveyed Mary Gravitt’s eruditional multifarious website and again read aloud of James Meredith’s March Against Fear, June 1966. Which prompted another image of : Senator John McCain (29 AUG 1936 – – 25 AUG 2019) :
“We are Americans first, Americans last, Americans always.”
“We’ll get through this,” Senator McCain said,” we’re Americans.”
Hey man ‘o man! Lady Gaga as well as Jennifer Lopez to dream the impossible dream at our hard fought righteous [:::] President Biden – – Vice President Harris Inauguration?!
WHY NOT!?
01/14/2021 @ 11:16 am
JP
What good are we? Individually or collectively? Right now the problem is that if we attempt to be good collectively, smaller populations are interfering with that attempt, sometimes successfully.
Sen. McCain’s death was enormously consequential to this country. If he’d been in the Senate at the time, the first impeachment probably would have worked. He was enough of a patriot to exercise his checks and balances. McConnell’s baseline was just too much lower. He had opportunities to curb most of Trump’s excesses and refused to, probably because he was too anxious to get those Supreme Court justices, which he got.
There are other problems, of course. Democrats and Republicans are not symmetrical. They aren’t opposite sides of the same coin. They think very differently. Republicans tend to be better coordinated because they delegate more to leadership. However, this also means they question less, so the lack of logic in a stand becomes much less likely to be confronted, either in terms of the conclusions drawn from information or, more often, in terms of the feasibility of the information itself. Faulty information believed leads to resentment, which in turn leads to supporting Trump because he’s the king of resentment support – it is this way more than anything else which accounts for his support. Republicans assume Democrats think this way. I used to get mailings from Republicans and they were very, very heavy on discrediting leaders because to them that’s the key, though not to us to the same extent. That’s their thought failure: the lack of thought other than tactical thought, which they’re good at.
Our thought failure is that we pay no attention to our effect on them. We tend to dismiss them rather than figuring out how to reach them and we don’t disown our excesses, which enables them to use our excesses to represent us to their people, and our excesses drive them nuts. I’ll give you a trivial but illustrative example:
I understand that a prayer service in the Capitol recently ended with “amen and awoman.” They view this as excessive, ridiculous, and verbally tyrannical as they get accused of all sorts of things if they don’t accept this. They are right on all counts. It was also a completely stupid move on our part because amen has nothing linguistically to do with men at all – it’s a transliteration of the Hebrew “amein” which has nothing to do with men at all. Man in Hebrew is – and you might find this one interesting given how Genesis is translated – Adam (accent on the second syllable).
Here’s an earlier but more substantive example: Flag burning. Most Democrats don’t approve of it. We all grew up pledging allegiance to it and we care about what it represents. But we didn’t think it mattered all that much. It raised millions for Republicans because it mattered a great deal to their constituents, and the Republicans could paint us as supporting it because we didn’t disown it.
If you’re trying to win Republican voters or even work with Republicans, it’s best to be conscious of what stupid crap will set them off and avoid it if it’s easy to avoid. Our Left doesn’t think this way at all. The kind of crap – by which I mainly mean language – that drives the Right crazy is what the Left uses for Virtue Signaling. What’s important here is that the Left could push the exact same concepts in different language and score points. Feminism gets referred to as feminaziism. Equal pay for equal work is just fairness. Inadequate access to promotion without any attention to merit is just unfairness. Freedom from sexual assault is just justice. Maternity leave makes a great deal of sense if, to put it bluntly, Republicans want more White babies. Affordable and available day care leads to poor women working instead of being on Welfare which has all sorts of consequences that Republicans value, like modeling of working to children and more prosperity leading to less crime.
01/14/2021 @ 5:53 pm
D.C. really needs statehood. The current arrangement left them at a huge disadvantage with regard to protecting itself from a tyrannical President. If D.C. had rights that other states had, and a governor, and Senators, things would have been different.
01/14/2021 @ 6:22 pm
DC has needed statehood for years. When I lived there, my father and I had an office in the Maryland suburbs in a little house that just served as an office, and I kept my legal address there because I wanted to vote. DC license plates say, as they should, Taxation Without Representation. Best license plate in the country.
01/16/2021 @ 5:38 pm
“[A] lot of police departments are going to be under close examination in terms of what kind of nut jobs and supremacists they have working for them.”
The Capitol Police Department answers to Congress, not the President of the United States, and is the only full-service federal law enforcement agency responsible to the legislative branch of the Federal Government of the United States.
It seems to me that any ‘close examination’ of the Capitol Police Department should begin with the Congressional oversight entities, the people who are responsible for establishing and enforcing the policies, procedures, and protocols that govern that law enforcement agency…
Such scrutiny would include all practices and procedures regarding personnel; hiring, firing, career advancement, and discipline.
01/16/2021 @ 7:04 pm
Ron, if last week showed anything, it was that the public has a bunch of nut jobs and supremacists in it. While the departments tasked with protecting the Capitol had a few sprinkled and turned, there were also officers who ricked their lives trying to protect everyone. Your statement is one of your typical type, “in terms of what kind of nut jobs they have working for them…”. If pressed about it, you would claim that it is limited to a small group, and determined by a comma, a missed comma, or some misinterpreted word. It’s bullshit, Ron. Your typical bullshit.
On the other hand, the problem that society faces is real. There is an indeterminate number of supremacists out there willing to wreak havoc. In that effort, they have likely penetrated the ranks of a variety of organizations. There was a fireman charged with throwing a fire extinguisher also. Your style of statement is not helpful, Ron. Incidentally, Ron, there were more than several Air Force veterans involved in the insurrection. Put yourself in the barrel of “nut jobs and supremacists.”
01/16/2021 @ 7:31 pm
@Bitey;
I’m not in disagreement with anything you’ve said on the matter except to add that, “…any ‘close examination’ of the Capitol Police Department should begin with the Congressional oversight entities,…”
I would like to think that you wouldn’t have a problem with that…
01/16/2021 @ 7:40 pm
I don’t disagree with that at all.
The problem that we face has deep factors. Congress has been unwilling to do simpler things. I don’t think the will exists as the legislature is currently assembled to resolve the issues that caused this problem. I suspect that we are in a period either resembling the period just after the Civil War, or right before. I fear that this problem is about a nation that wants to tear itself apart, and is finding stalking horses. One of those real issues is whether or not non-white people should be allowed full citizenship in the US. I am on one side of that issue. Donald Trump, and many others are on the other. I don’t think an investigation of oversight will succeed because no one will give voice to what the actual issue is…or until they do.
01/17/2021 @ 11:40 am
Bitey, I think all indications are that Biden will give voice to that issue. He already has, repeatedly and typically unprompted.
01/17/2021 @ 1:29 pm
Kosher, you’re right. Biden has, and my statement was unclear. What I meant was, there has not been an open discussion on both sides about what the issue is. The issue is not acknowledged by both sides, and that makes it more difficult to resolve.
01/17/2021 @ 5:15 pm
It depends on where people get their information. There is another issue past that but the big one is that the two sides don’t agree on facts. Why they disagree on facts is twofold: because it is easier and more comfortable for the other side to believe inaccurate things that would weaken the moral case for addressing the problem – Blacks get a disproportionate share of government resources, the law protects Blacks, the police are fair, Blacks are using liberalism to take Whites for a ride, inner city Blacks don’t work because Welfare is preferable – and because the other side isn’t getting information from sources that actually know anything. The best witnesses are witnesses and the other side does not seek real witnesses out, That lack of curiosity is how you know you’re not looking at good faith.
Information is more complicated than how things are. To be complete it has to include some about how they became that way. As one becomes aware of how things became the way they are, the costs of inaction become more obvious. An open discussion means teaching because one side is way short of information.
There’s another aspect to the discussion that isn’t there but should be, and that is the consequences to Whites of attacking racism and the resulting Black poverty. And here there are two things the other side doesn’t get, one of which is obvious to one side and one of which is obvious to neither side. There are apparently a whole lot of White people who are terrified about the day White people no longer constitute an absolute majority of the American population. They believe there is going to be an enormous pent-up backlash. This is like their Y2K and, like Y2K, nothing at all will happen. Believe it or not they need to be told this. They should be able to figure it out. I can certainly explain why, though I know from experience that that doesn’t make it obvious. The second thing, the one that doesn’t appear to be obvious to liberals, is that attacking racism will have enormous economic benefits to the country as a whole. This is nothing like a zero sum game. A permanent underclass is expensive, both in terms of opportunity costs and actual costs. It is expensive to governments and it is expensive to the private sector. This kind of investment has a serious financial return. I guarantee you that the vast majority of conservatives view this kind of expenditure – expenditures to reverse some costs to the targets of racism – as a dollar spent means a dollar lost, it’s us or them, when in actuality it’s us And them. Unfortunately, a lot of liberals if not most think the same thing. The result is that they support the expenditures solely on the basis of it being the right thing to do. Conservatives who don’t like Big Government don’t generally think that’s the right thing to do, but there’s another case for it that everyone ignores.
01/17/2021 @ 5:17 pm
There’s nothing wrong with doing something solely because it’s the right thing to do, but there is something wrong with failing to show other benefits when the other side doesn’t agree that it’s the right thing to do.
01/16/2021 @ 10:58 pm
I don’t think the nut jobs and supremacists quote is from this post or thread, at least I can’t find it, but I think I originally said it rather than Ron. He’s quoting it. The issue isn’t that they’re more common in law enforcement than anywhere else. The issue is that they’re more dangerous in law enforcement. Because of the sensitive nature of the work and because of what just happened, I suspect we’re going to see more careful screening of right-wing ideologues and I suspect that if too many current cops are actively involved in fringe movements the FBI may be notifying their bosses.
We aren’t necessarily about to see a massive reduction in bigotry. What we are more likely to see is that public bigotry is less socially acceptable than it’s been during the Trump administration. That doesn’t solve the problem but it does make some people more safe. We’re still going to be plagued by people who object to race-based policies while they don’t object to the treatment that necessitates race-based policies.
01/16/2021 @ 7:00 pm
BTW:
Jonna’s question was:
“[H]ow is it that the Capitol police seem to be so uniformly white in a city that’s as black as DC?”
The following is quoted from the article she linked:
“The Capitol Police force is only 29% Black in a city that’s 46% Black. By contrast, as of 2018, 52% of Washington Metropolitan police officers were Black. The Capitol Police are comparable to the Metropolitan force in spending, employing more than 2,300 people and boasting an annual budget of about a half-billion dollars.”
Neither the piece nor this thread directly addresses the issue she raised or the issue of the reasons for, or causes of, this glaring disparity…
01/16/2021 @ 6:42 pm
I expect the Capitol police department will go through some changes but I don’t just mean them by a long shot. All the departments who have employees arrested for participation in the Putsch attempt will wonder who else they have like that and think they’re trouble, particularly if the FBI gets involved in checking their people out.