This isn't a new phenomenon either. This has been documented [0] time and time again [1].
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem...
ref: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/08/2002562063/-1/-1/1/PLA...
Let say we have the worst case scenario where a bunch of criminals successfully enter the capital building and occupy it. Is the best response to send the army, or as many police units as needed to apprehend the criminals and put them in jail?
By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
The National Guard is not the Army, it's a dual-purpose force that is both a reserve for the Army and a reserve for civil authorities during emergencies including civil disorder.
> By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
No, even if we were talking about the Army proper, an existential threat to the government is not the criteria under the Insurrection Act for their use to disperse insurgents.
The militia, armed forces, or both may be used (among other scenarios authorized in law) against “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” which “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. 10 USC Sec 253.
History is full of examples and dead bodies where the military has been used against its own people who oppose or obstruct the execution of law. It many countries it also follows a period of regret and new laws in order to prevent something similar to ever happen again. Just because the government has a law that gives them authorization to send the military in order to secure a building, it doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Would the military trained personnel have done a better job during the capital attack than the police trained one?
The Guard is a force whose missions include support for Civil authorities during disturbances, and it's training, equipment, organizations, planning, etc. reflect that.
And, quite arguably, that are better than, and trained better than the police for, dealing with large scale civil unrest.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-elections-racial-in...
https://www.ideastream.org/news/what-national-guard-training...
The fact that you have to reach back that far, given all the more recent problems with conventional police, seems to illustrate my point.
[0]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
The GOP has been doing a large scale equivalent of swinging nunchucks around in public. The problem isn't that sometimes it swings around the wrong way and whacks someone they didn't intend to whack. Well, no, it is, of course that's a problem. But the more fundamental problem is that they're recklessly swinging an unpredictable weapon in public in an effort to be intimidating in the first place. And the problem is that people who didn't feel personally threatened by this behavior just sat there and came up with sorry excuses to try and rationalize it. This is deeply antisocial comportment that should have no place in the top echelons of civil society.
Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests, we would have had thousands of deaths.
This is not true. Here is one example of a retired St. Louis Police captain/current (at the time) police chief of Moline Acres being killed.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/retired...
There are other examples as well.
> Had every BLM protest been as violent and unhinged as the capitol protests,
Aside from the single police officer, all the deaths seem to have been protestors. At least two were killed by police - one was shot by the police, and the other was pushed off a balcony.
It is the case that between two and three dozen people were killed during the BLM protests and associated actions like the autonomous zone, with nearly all of them, judging by the articles I have found, being victims of the protestors rather than protestors themselves.
Also, not to diminish the death. But he was not a police officer. He was retired and doing security work for a friend.
In a single medium-sized event, Wednesday's riot got 5 people killed. One of them was a policeman, and at least three of them were due to violence. So in terms of fatalities per participant-day, Wednesday's event was probably at least two orders of magnitude more violent than the "BLM protests" taken as a whole.
I think that's a significant difference, and one that exposes this sort of whataboutism as false equivalency (in addition to the other issues with whataboutism).
I know this country has memory holed the negative actions of BLM, but they have a lot of law enforcement blood on their hands.
In a similar vein, I’m not blaming the people who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday for previous right-wing attacks, including on LEOs e.g. the boog boi murders earlier last year.
Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attempted to add an air of legitimacy to it.
I watched a bunch of people chant at a door on Wednesday, a couple windows were broken, a guy in viking shit flexed on a chair, an unarmed woman was shot climbing through a window, and my feed is filled with hyperbolic morons screaming sedition and traitors.
I’m over it.
> Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attended to add an air of legitimacy to it.
Engaging with any subjective representation of the protests I am talking about is outside the scope of what I'm willing to discuss—for those who've been subjected to it, I can't compete with the right-wing media's firehose of disinformation. My point about fatalities per participant-day stands as a metric of the violence during last summer's protests compared to the riot last Wednesday, and you can take it or leave it.
on my part i think my initial comment was poorly constructed as this was the main point i wanted to communicate.
Ask yourself that question, why the reaction to this event?
I'm not going to ban you right now because you posted better comments several months ago, but please don't do this. Instead, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Do you seriously actually believe this is a balanced representation of the events we're talking about? A simple yes or no, please.
And the goal of the BLM demonstration was not violence, whereas that was the goal of at least some (if not many) of the MAGA folks. Quite a few folks walking around with zip ties and more than one noose as well.
Going back to July 27, 2020, Trump tweeted:
> Anarchists, Agitators or Protestors who vandalize or damage our Federal Courthouse in Portland, or any Federal Buildings in any of our Cities or States, will be prosecuted under our recently re-enacted Statues & Monuments Act. MINIMUM TEN YEARS IN PRISON. Don’t do it! @DHSgov
* https://www.cbs17.com/news/national-news/trump-tweet-threate...
* https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12878776213808373...
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-kamala-harris-l...
> "I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I'm just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks," Colbert said.
> "That's right," Harris replied. "But they're not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I'm telling you."
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/01/fac...
See also Biden on violence:
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/07/fac...
Meanwhile, the rioters at the US Capital:
> “This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
* https://archive.is/tZVFs (paywall)
* https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/capitol-trump-ins...
Maybe that wasn't the goal, as it also wasn't the goal of most of the Trump protestors. But there was nevertheless plenty of violence.
Just seven months ago, dozens of Secret Service agents were hospitalized after being attacked by BLM protestors attempting to storm the White House.
https://www.newsmax.com/us/white-house-secret-service/2020/0...
Recent events have really, really opened my eyes as to how the media covers events that it supports versus events it does not support.
People were talking about storming Congress months ago:
> “Will you and several hundred more go with me to DC and fight our way into the Congress and arrest every Democrat who has participated in the coup?” Holland posted on Friday. “We may have to shoot and kill many of the Communist BLM and ANTIFA Democrat foot soldiers to accomplish this!!!”
* https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/11/cops-n11.html
> One of Lang Holland’s posts reflected Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, and said: “Death to all Marxist Democrats.”
> Holland, who led the police department in Marshall, Arkansas, also wrote “take no prisoners” and “leave no survivors”.
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/09/local-arkans...
> In a popular thread referencing a Trump tweet promoting the debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud, one user asked, "what if Congress ignores the evidence?"
> "Storm the Capitol," was a popular reply.
> Five days later, on January 6, as pro-Trump militia proceeded to do exactly that, the mood on thedonald.win switched to jubilation and outright defiance of police, with thousands joining "watching party" message threads.
> "This is what Trump told us to do!" a top post in one of these threads read.
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-08/us-capitol-st...
verifiable voting
I think literally anyone on this site could invent a more reliable and common-sense approach to voting.
This is all just fallout from a fallible system that has little trust.
But I think you'd taking the results too far. You'd have to hack into hundreds or thousands of machines within a single state to change its votes. Worse, you have to do this in a way that looks plausible. You're talking about a major conspiracy that would have to take place. And if Russia is going to change votes why wouldn't China, Israel, or others? So they would have to all organize together so they don't undo one another's work. And that would have to happen without us (NSA, FBI, CIA) finding out. You're talking about a conspiracy that would be very difficult to pull off and require high amounts of organization.
Hacking a computer is easy. Hacking a thousand computers in a room full of people that are worried about their computers being hacked? Different story.
The problem with verifiable voting is that it has to break one the properties of American democracy, the secret ballot, or else it doesn't really work. As a voter, I want to see that a) it was recorded that I voted, and b) what my vote was. In the case of invented voter fraud, both A and B need to be possible, but making both of those possible mean it's possible to show who I voted for. Who I voted for is a secret, and is one of the central tenants to American democracy. I can talk about supporting candidate A in public and vote for candidate B in private and a lot of properties follow from that.
The challenge isn't technical, it's a social problem, and technical measures won't solve social problems.
This problem might have a technical solution though. First, each voter generates a private key and publishes the corresponding public key. Then implement a homomorphic vector addition, everybody submits their vote as an encrypted vector, and then you somehow add the vectors together homomorphically, i.e. the addition can be done without decrypting them first.
You need some kind of way to prove that each vector corresponds to a legal vote (i.e. increases the vote total of at most one candidate by at most one vote.) Then you need some way to decrypt the encrypted vector sum using some amalgamation of everybody's public keys, but without allowing to decrypt subtotals for particular subsets.
You can publish all the encrypted votes received and the decrypting amalgamation, so anyone with the capability to download and process a large data set. Anyone can check that every vote was cryptographically approved by a distinct pre-registered voter and the votes were totaled honestly.
If we assume an upper bound of 1 billion voters, each 1 kb of encrypted vector size adds 1 TB to the raw vote data. Based on existing "clever" cryptosystems that do similar things (e.g. ZK-snarks), it's reasonable to guess we won't need more than 100 kb per encrypted vector. So an entire 1-billion-voter election could be processed by a small storage cluster with 100 TB, you can't verify it on your laptop, but the technically inclined could verify the vote themselves for probably somewhere around $1,000 - $20,000 of hardware and sysadmin time.
I don't know if there's existing crypto math to do this, but I'm pretty sure it at least hasn't been proven impossible.
The kind of crypto primitives needed for this kind of system might be found someday.
If you are a member of a violent gang or are too racist to police justly you are too dangerous to employ as a cop. Not looking for and removing these people is intentionally turning a blind eye to the extreme danger they present to people in their communities.
Is this a joke?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain#Fall_of_the_Iron_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
[0]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
When I looked back through your account history trying to find examples of using the site as intended, rather than political flamewar, I ran across https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25626137 instead. That's not a political flamewar comment, but it still breaks the site guidelines badly. I've banned this account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended. If you do, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us some reason to believe it.
I have had plenty of interesting debates on here; when it comes to politics however, HN has a certain bias and an ideological blind spot. The narrative that the left is censoring everybody while you have Republican legislators passing this[1] is laughable, yet the narrative persists because it's not being challenged.
I do try to see the other side[2] when I think it makes sense. Playing victim of the left while a right-wing mob just stormed the Capitol is not one of these times, sorry.
The cynic in me thinks this is what YC wants; it promotes the sort of thinking on which VC thrives. I have little reason to believe otherwise. There's few people on HN challenging these narratives and now there's even fewer.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...
I didn't consider your ideological preference when banning you. It would be the same if you were arguing for the opposite side, so no, I don't see any irony—the logic seems boringly straightforward. Sometimes I don't even know what ideological preference an account has—it turns out if you do something often enough, you can train yourself to mask out those bits.
Claims of "bias and ideological blind spot" about HN are legion, but they're wildly contradictory. The people you disagree with make just as impassioned claims about how overrun HN is with bias in favor of your side. I could give you so, so many links...
I totally get how a cynic would trace this back to YC's business interests, and there actually is a chain that connects HN moderation to that, but it's different than the one you imagine. Here's how we actually think about this: the way to maximize HN's value to YC is to maximize how interesting it is to the community [1]. I know it might be hard to believe, but it's that simple. It's a rare treat to get to work on a problem where you literally only need to optimize for one thing and you know what it is [2].
The neat thing is that you can imagine this motivation to be as sinister and greedy and evil as you like, and it's still awesome. If YC owns the leading place on the internet for good hackers to gratify their intellectual curiosity...that is crazy valuable [3]. Why would we manipulate HN for any other purpose? That would be stupid—it would lose us the good will of the community, which is the entire thing. Whichever way you slice this problem, YC's interests are aligned with keeping this community happy. It's a fortunate historical accident that we ended up in this position, and personally I feel grateful for that (because it allows me to do this job without much conflict of interest) and am pretty fierce about protecting it.
The things we ban accounts for—like snark, flamewar, attacking other users, ideological and political battle—are what causes a forum like HN to get less intellectually interesting. That's why we don't want flamewars. It's not a moral or an ethical point. It's just that flamewars are boring. They feel like they aren't boring, for a while, but that's an illusion—it confuses high-activation with curiosity, and in reality those two are mutually exclusive. Once the anger and trauma have vented themselves, there's nothing left, and people are left feeling bitter and disconnected from each other—hardly a condition in which to playfully explore the world.
I don't mean to imply that the things you care about and are fighting for don't matter. They do matter, and that's true of the others as well. But this is an optimization problem. Our job is to keep HN interesting. Scorched earth is not interesting [4]. Therefore we have to ban accounts that take this place in that direction.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] I'm not saying HN is good at it—I wish it were better. The point is that the niche is so valuable that anything else YC might do to try to squeeze value out of it would be dumb. Also, it's all relative: if the rest of the internet descends into flames and HN can manage to remain interesting, its value grows. We're basically in an outrun-the-bear joke.
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Appeal to white supremacists to attempt to build a winning coalition has been a core GOP strategy for more than a half century; that part of the right-wing that isn't itself white supremacist relies on support from white supremacists to advance their agenda. (To be fair, that was true of the Democratic Party instead of the GOP from the founding until the 1960s, but for a couple of breaches between the extreme racists and the rest of the party that were usually healed in short order. White supremacy has always been a powerful enough force in America that it's always been a significant influence on at least one major party.)
Why on earth would we not try to detect and remove these people from law enforcement agencies?
As for law enforcement involvement in the terrorist attack on the capitol, there are plenty of videos. Law enforcement agencies around the country have also disclosed that some of their officers were involved, which seems like an odd thing to fabricate.
So yes. We know that.
There's a pretty big gulf between a relatively abstract set of political and economic opinions, and an ideology that views some groups of people as sub-human and inherently criminal, and specifically seeks to disenfranchise them. One can quite reasonably make the case that individuals who hold opinions along those lines are temperamentally incapable of protecting and serving their community. Their whole community.
The Chicago Public Library had a gallery documenting victims of torture by the Chicago Police Department. Plenty of photographs, making it quite clear that it was almost exclusively a thing that White cops did to Black and Latinx citizens. It's hard to see how we as a society can hope to eliminate state-committed atrocities like that if we're not even willing to weed the ideology that produces them out of the paramilitary wings of our local governments.
Speaking on a more macro scale, the movement that produced that protest and this insurrection is so transparently rooted in racism, with roots going back at least as far as the Southern Strategy, that we're now to the point that trying to apologize for them is, at the absolute best, an act of petty denialism.
They killed hundreds of millions of people. You could be raped of tortured at any time.
It is not white supremacist. It is anyone with power.
Right now in the US, the antifa movement is as violent or more violent than anyone else. Certainly the Guardian is not an unbiased source.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/dc-riots-c...
Which doesn't mention anything about Mayor Bowser refusing offers of assistance - only the Capitol Police. Indeed, it cites her asking for assistance on December 31st in preparation.
Except that... then what? That isn't how a coup works. You can't just take hostages and then make demands about who gets to be the President. It has no effect. Official actions taken under duress are invalid. As soon as you leave the building nobody is going to honor anything you demanded.
It's easy to take a building. Just show up with greater numbers than there are cops in the area. But a building is not the government. Physical possession of the Senate floor isn't what grants the power to do anything. It's purely symbolic.
The fact is that law enforcement operates primarily through deterrence. You can install some bulletproof glass and things like that, but the main thing preventing murders and such is that if you do it then you go to jail for a long time after.
This type of performative hyperbole coming from the left is going to make this whole situation worse. What those yahoo's did was bad enough, there's zero reason to throw gasoline on the fire.
> But if you play out the actual implications then you can use hyperbole and call it a coup. That's valuable language and you don't want to let a crisis go to waste.
The GGP labeled this with an both the correct term and an incorrect term.
1/6 was an insurrection, not a coup. An insurrection is a rebellion against civil authority, which this clearly was, even if it was incompetently executed. I think a coup is typically used for when power is illegally taken by military or police authorities, which this was not.
Trump calls it "getting revenge" and we call it a coup attempt because that's what it was, a coup attempt.
And different measures could make a marginal difference one way or the other, but if you have a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress, that's pretty hard to stop.
...was that the people they were fairly explicitly targeting escaped the mob, in some cases with very little margin, because of successful use of barricades, delaying tactics, and in one case deadly force.
But the amount of "it could have been worse" attributable entirely to what the mob didn't do, is large. And I don't think I'm wrong to attribute a lot of that to the ordinary deterrents being in effect.
One of the important ones is the line between planning to do something and actually doing it. It's one thing to stand in a crowd chanting something stupid, quite another if the moment comes and you have to choose.
> What they didn't do is mostly because it didn't work, not because there was no attempt.
What I'm referring to is methods, not goals.
Nobody wants to imagine the level of violence that people are capable of when unrestrained. I don't intend to describe it here, but the world has seen it in other times and other places.
Sure, a huge mob of people trying to get into a building not explicitly designed to be a fortress isn't easy to stop, and with the limited resources available evacuation was probably the right move, but what we actually saw on video in front of the Capitol was a line of about six police and a movable fence, and open doors. I've seen more convincing looking security at music festivals. You can try to deter people by what might happen if they try rather than what happens if they succeed, especially if they're crazy people who think what will actually happen if they succeed is President Trump giving them a medal.
They did not just stand around [1]. This was extremely violent, and they intended to murder people. Deterrence meant nothing to them. They were only stopped because the Capitol Police and Secret Service shot one of them. Different measures would absolutely have made a difference and saved lives.
What I still can't understand is why the police wasn't prepared for it. Isn't the FBI supposed to infiltrate dangerous groups? Or was the "march on capitol" completely unplanned before Trump suggested it? Finally, has nobody considered that something like this might have happened? (It was obvious to me, as well as at least one thinktank.)
The losing side, given this unorthodox election, wanted some validation of results, as well as to legally challenge the way they were done (PA's changes).
The response was one of derision and essentially shutting out the right from discourse. No effort was made a conciliation. This had the predictable effect of galvanizing people that there was indeed fraud.
If you think that these people had no reason to be angry, you aren't paying attention. If you can understand the frustrations and lead up to the BLM movement, but don't even want to pay lip service to this, you are either a horrible person or stupid. Take your pick: evil, ignorant, or both?
> Their affidavits raise a series of observations where the effect is not clear. For instance, one Republican poll challenger, Articia Bomer, said she saw 27 ballots inserted into a counting machine “at least five times.” An affidavit by a poll watcher named Brett Kinney said he witnessed a worker reach into an envelope marked “invalid ballots” and “process them with valid ballots.”
Why would this happen? Can we have an explanation that explains why this is standard operating procedure? Assuming good faith on the part of everyone, an explanation like “each ballot has a unique bar code and a misread would require re-reading, on a misread this red light on the scanner would light up and the ballot should be re-scanned until the green light lights, but even if the ballot is scanned successfully multiple times it would not be counted more than once” - maybe there is an explanation like this out there but I haven’t found it, only repeated insistence from every mainstream media outlet that there is no evidence of voter fraud.
Furthermore, there are credible examples of observers being disenfranchised - again, many not so credible (for example, building at capacity when there are already plenty of bipartisan observers, or “feeling intimidated” or whatever). But in Fulton County, observers insist that they were told by election officials that counting is over for the night, and that’s backed up by news reports from election night (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pipe-bursts-atlanta-arena-ca...) and then they continue counting - but now the election officials insist that nobody was told that counting was over for the night even though ABC reported that a specific responsible person, Regina Waller, had said so. Who is wrong? There are also many reports from several states where observers were kept 6 to 25 feet away or only able to watch the counts through a video monitor, which doesn’t seem like it would allow them to really observe anything. Many of the court cases were thrown out due to lack of evidence that the election outcome was altered - because affidavits aren’t investigations, they of course can’t show evidence of that. I have heard plenty of rebuttals for some of the more far fetched fraud theories, but it still seems to me that observer rights need to be bolstered, including a more thorough explanation of procedures, a way to document and address/explain exceptions in the public view. However, there does need to be a way to filter out the specious complaints, because any system where exceptions require handling can be DDoSed.
So while there is a lot of easily debunked, meaningless, agitating noise, there are also still some valid, unexplained concerns. I think you are right that a lot of people just won’t believe it no matter what, but I also think a lot of reasonable people are still feeling pretty uneasy about this election, and the fact that a couple dozen radicals shut down the last chance for transparency for 75 million voters ought to concern everyone.
Which federal law do you think they violated?
There have been plenty of much more questionable elections in the past. 2000 is a big one. In 2004 there were a lot of hints that Diebold voting machines favoured Republican candidates. Still, those elections stood, because the votes had already been cast. If rules are unfair, change them, but don't demand the election gets blindly thrown your way for no good reason.
I mean, while we're making stuff up, lets say it's a violation of the constitution to allow for a Democratic government. Article IV, Section 4 requires Republican party rule. /s
Validation of the result? Beyond all the official counts and recounts? I’m confused.
Also your last paragraph was completely uncalled for.
What did occur was a lot of little things and disparate things that had a huge dampening effect on the mobilization of discussion and questioning of details. And this has been happening for way before the election results were even out, it's been going on for years with a steady escalation.
There was also the constant repetitive narrative pushing, specific language and tone by reporters, activists and politicians that essentially gave "official" and "quotable" legitimacy to potentially-questionable election results, and gave plausible excuses/cover to de-legitimize and conspiracy-blame any criticisms of the election results. This stuff is downright scary, and a good chunk of the people not seeing it are the ones that are (for now) in the "good books" of whoever is overall in charge of driving the narrative and controlling public discourse. Right now, the left/Democratic party is in said good books.
Look how the discussion is so widely and suddenly revolving around conflating this protest with insurrection even though it was essentially a fart in the grand scheme of things, and implying that there is a huge overlap between right/republican/conservative individuals and "racists/white-supremacists". It's laying the ground-work to make it legitimate and acceptable to assume/claim that republicans are racists among other things. Next up we'll have dehumanization, firings and overall de-platforming because said protestors were "terrorists" due to their participation. The event will be labelled as a "coup attempt" and the storming of the building was a "terrorist attack". And if you question any of these accepted facts (because hey all news reports labelled it as such) you too will be de-platformed, ostracized and called a terrorist-sympathizer or a "something-denier" (hint look at the anti covid-lockdown protests for an example).
The process you talk about in your first paragraphs: that some people get subtly shut out of the political process, does happen, but it happens mostly to poor people, black people, and university students. Various forms of voting suppression are aimed at preventing them from voting. Several voter ID laws require forms of ID that conservatives are more likely to have. For example, a gun license would be valid, while a student ID card wouldn't.
Also note the difference in DC police response against the BLM protests in the summer versus this more protest.
Then the losing side didn't accept the results from the courts, and that's where it became a ridiculous circus. Also, the demands were ridiculously out of proportion. In the end, because they couldn't get their way, they tried to overthrow the legal result of the election and threatened members of Congress with serious harm.
> "No effort was made a conciliation."
They never tried. They demanded a total surrender of democracy to their demands. That is completely unacceptable. You can't compromise with something like that.
The reason these people were angry is simple: they were lied to and manipulated by media and politicians manipulating them to do their dirty work. The lived in an ecosystem of lies that kept telling them they should be angry, so they were. The lies they believed have been refuted time and time again, but they did not tolerate reason.
> "evil, ignorant, or both?"
Considering how eager they were to hurt people, they definitely check the evil box. It's hard to believe they honestly believed the lies, but it appears that some of them definitely did. But they must have been unbelievably gullible to take it this far.
I really, really hope they will finally learn that their leaders and media have constantly fed them lies; lies that they keep repeating to each other, and I hope they stop listening to them.
But there is no way to compromise with their attitude. You can't say: alright, let's have some lies and some truth. Let's have some freedom and some oppression. Some democracy and some autocracy. A movement that is so eager to hurt people our of sheer hatred should not set the political direction of a country.
This was the Beer Hall Putsch. It's good it failed, but it needs to have consequences. The US can't allow this to happen again.
In case you needed some reminding, since you're defending the term and its use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck
I've also paid attention to the doxxing that's been going on in r/SanDiego and most (if not all) of these people live in the city and are business owners. They are hardly definitional rednecks.
We saw this with the word thug. Everyone know what you're doing if you call black people from the suburbs thugs.
They are also presently discussing their next day-out for rednecks in the form of another insurrection and coup attempt on the 17th of January. Let's hope that this time some people will take notice because while everybody seems to be happy that this effort failed from the perspective of the perps it looks like a major victory: they took the bloody capitol with such ease that 10 minutes more planning would have had them hold house or senate members or even the VP or the speaker hostage. Or worse.
This isn't over yet.