These types of protests are common in the Capitol (and I’m pretty sure in most other US legislatures buildings). People often enter legally, protest, refuse to leave, and then are arrested. This is not what happened on January 6th.
Many protests involve civil disobedience; I think very few people here would condemn all illegal protests.
However, violence is where I (and I think many others) draw the line.
As another data point I heard: Wednesday was the first time since 9/11/2001 that the Capitol was evacuated. Clearly, this demonstration was exceptional in a way that disturbe
You can see the fear in Duckworth's eyes when she comes up with her baby strapped to her chest and waves at the crowd.
It frustrates me when the media tries to make a big distinction between protests and riots. Those words have become emotionally charged.
Rather, if we're going to have discussions about this, we should be sure to be extra clear about what we're trying to say.
I think it's fairly pointless to debate what the precise definition of a riot is. Rather, I was trying express why people see this as different from the "sit-ins" (another wishy washy word) the the poster above you talked about.
The reason that I find Wednesday's acts worse is because of the violence. And I think that there could be a much more productive conversation off of that pretense, than over what is a riot vs a sit-in.
I dislike Trump, but the claim that he has incited violence is without evidence, and we see that in Twitter's blog post announcing his ban (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...), since it offers no hard evidence and only subjective leaps of the imagination. The call to delete his account because of the current political context is unacceptable, and it is also total hypocrisy given that this logic was not applied when BLM riots caused billions of Dollars in damage in the last year. It's also hypocritical given that nearly identical incidents (riots at the capitol) have taken place several times before and not resulted in this type of coverage or censorship. Several of these incidents are in the past few years, such as the climate riot which AOC participated in (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...) or the riots concerning Brett Kavanaugh's appointment (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/04/kavanaugh-su...) or the 600-person riot protesting immigration law (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/womens-march-protesters-call...).
This isn't about riots. It isn't about violence. It isn't about a coup. It isn't about Trump even. It is only about big tech bowing down to the new incoming leaders who control their fates, and with the changing of the guard, they have become comfortable showing who they are - powerful partisans who will put the power of their monopolies to work if left unimpeded. That should scare anyone who knows where this path leads based on history. I'm genuinely worried, because as always, these changes come in response to an event that scared people and now they are naively welcoming authoritarian changes.