"More than 250 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement who were trying to protect the Capitol, including more than 85 accused of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Others have been accused of assaulting members of the media, including one Associated Press photographer, or destroying media equipment."
A trivial google search turns up this newsweek article, which lists half a dozen people indicted for firearms, including one who also had more guns than he could wield himself as well as molotov cocktails stashed in his van. https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-were-there-armed-protest...
Also interesting that a handful of bad people carrying guns make everybody else a criminal. Is that the world you want to live in?
Every movement or protest has people who resort to violence. Whether actual protesters, or whether infiltrated by someone looking to discredit the movement.
Law enforcement is famous for it, and there are quite a few vidoes of them trying to 'start shit' so they can escalate.
I don't know whether guns were used at Capitol Hill, I don't really care. It was an attempted violent coup. By the protesters, not infiltrators.
I think the world has lost its marbles.
Anyway, I stand by my initial position that it is disingenuous to act so innocently amazed that people might regard an angry violent mob storming the capitol with a gallows chanting to hang the vice president as an insurrection.
But as it is, it's unclear who won the election without fraud.
No it isn't.
Other states have similar problems.
The left had a nationwide movement named "Occupy" and the Democrats and most media approved.
The right did it once and the same people all lost their minds.
Occupy Wall Street was 2011.
The crucial difference between January 6 and Occupy Wall Street is that the members of Congress and the Vice President were inside the Capitol Building on January 6, whereas no elected officials were in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. If the break-in of the Capitol had occurred while it was empty, that would have been a different matter, still serious, but not giving the appearance of a coup attempt.
The best example is perhaps the occupation of the Wisconsin state capital:
> Thousands of protesters rushed to the … Capitol Wednesday night, forcing their way through doors, crawling through windows and jamming corridors...thousands of pro-union activists — many bused in from out of state — rampaged through the historic building in an effort to stop a vote on collective bargaining reform legislation.
...
> during the course of the occupation, Walker received a steady stream of death threats against him and his wife, including one that promised to “gut her like a deer” and one threatening to kill his sons. Police found dozens of .22-caliber bullets scattered across the Capitol grounds. The occupiers drew chalk outlines of fake dead bodies etched with Walker’s name on the floor, and carried signs that read “Death to tyrants,” “The only good Republican is a dead Republican” and one with picture of him in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, Reload.”
...
> House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised the occupiers for an “impressive show of democracy in action” and tweeted as they assaulted the Capitol that she continued “to stand in solidarity” with the union activists. In other words, Democrats were for occupying capitols before they were against it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/14/democrats...
I'm not sure why you keep mentioning 2016? The Wisconsin protests were also in 2011.
Anyway, in Wisconsin they were protesting a proposed bill. It wasn't a coup attempt.
I'm actually a Wisconsinite, so I'm very familiar with this.
If you read the linked Wisconsin State Journal article, you'll see that the protests were peaceful. "Police and protesters continued to get along, with no incidents reported and no arrests." It wasn't actually a "break-in". What happened was that there were already some protesters who had been inside the Capitol for some time, and then a much larger crowd showed up that night and wanted to get in, because there was a vote on the bill scheduled soon. The police were initially reluctant to allow the larger crowd to enter but decided to allow them. There was no violence.
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article...
Again, the issue isn't really protesting legislation in Capitol buildings. In general, that's a legitimate democratic activity. The issue is the safety of the members of Congress and the VP from a crowd on January 6 who wanted to overturn the results of the election that was about to be legally certified.
And that bias is probably why it fails to mention the death threats, violent rhetoric, chalk outlines, forcing lawmakers to flee, etc.
All that in order to stop, not merely protest, passage of the bill.
If we're to believe that lawmakers in Washington were in danger on January 6th, despite the complete absence of any violence against lawmakers, we should also believe the lawmakers in Madison were in danger. Death threats should be taken seriously regardless of partisanship.
> And that bias is probably why it fails to mention the death threats, violent rhetoric, chalk outlines
Heh. It was an article published Thursday morning about the events that happened Wednesday evening. Of course it doesn't mention everything in the grand context. Do you not understand how news works?
I would also note that this is the article linked from the Washington Post article that you linked.
> forcing lawmakers to flee
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Democratic lawmakers voluntarily, intentionally left Wisconsin for Illinois in order to prevent a quorum.
> All that in order to stop, not merely protest, passage of the bill.
Heh, this is just a bizarre statement. Why would you protest a bill if you weren't trying to stop its passage? Of course they were trying to stop its passage. Aren't there bills that you don't want passed?
> If we're to believe that lawmakers in Washington were in danger on January 6th, despite the complete absence of any violence against lawmakers
Another bizarre statement. There was no violence against lawmakers because the lawmakers were evacuated from the building while the Capitol police were trying to hold back the crowd.
> we should also believe the lawmakers in Madison were in danger for the same reason
No, because protesters were actually in the Wisconsin Capitol when the bill was passed. There was booing, but no violence.
> Death threats should be taken seriously regardless of partisanship.
Agreed, and the police do investigate them. But a lot of politicians of both parties get death threats, and most of them are just rhetoric. There were no assassination attempts on Scott Walker, and he personally wasn't even in the Capitol, as he was the Governor and not a legislator.
> There were no assassination attempts on Scott Walker
Nor were there any assassination attempts on January 6th.
> the lawmakers were evacuated from the building while the Capitol police were trying to hold back the crowd.
It took me a moment to realize you were talking about Washington, because the same thing happened in Madison: The senators hid under a stairwell, out of view, while the police ordered a city bus to pull up in front of the building. Officers then formed a human wall on the sidewalk, parting the sea of protesters and creating a pathway for the senators to reach the bus. Once the senators were on board, “the mob on the street began punching the windows and shaking the vehicle. … The police told the senators and staff inside to keep their heads down in case a window shattered.”
That, by the way, is what I was talking about when I wrote "forcing lawmakers to flee".
Honestly, it's like the WaPo article and the madison.com article are describing different events, except they aren't, just two perspectives on the same event.
The Washington Post article is literally labeled an "Opinion" by the Washington Post, and it was written by Marc Thiessen, who coincidentally co-wrote a book with Scott Walker: https://www.amazon.com/Unintimidated-Governors-Story-Nations...
Talk about obvious and undeniable bias!
Both are undoubtedly guilty of selective reporting.
But let's be clear, are you accusing the WaPo piece of lying, not merely choosing what to cover?
Act 10 had been covered extensively by the Wisconsin State Journal for the previous month. You wouldn't expect every new story to say every single thing. It was already a familiar issue to us all.
> But let's be clear, are you accusing the WaPo piece of lying, not merely choosing what to cover?
I would say exaggerating. Take it from Republican Representative Glenn Grothman, who was there for both events. "It never reached that pitch (during Act 10)."
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2021/01/08/wisconsin-act...
During the Wisconsin Capitol protests, Grothman was personally surrounded by protesters, who chanted "Shame!" at him but didn't harm him physically. There's even video of this.
"Grothman downplayed the situation and told the paper he didn't think he was ever in any real danger."
I do think we've strayed very far off topic, which is supposed to be Reddit...
Violent? The only violence on January 6th was between police and protestors. There was plenty of similar violence at Occupy protests, but the Occupy protests also had other kinds of violence, like Sexual Assaults Reported in 'Occupy' Camps[1]
Insurrectionist? "The FBI at this point believes the violence [on January 6th] was not centrally coordinated...there was no grand scheme...to storm the Capitol and take hostages."[2]
Sympathizers within the government? Like Obama?[3]
An attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of government? Yes, both were. That's actually a common protest tactic - protesters generally argue that a protest has to be disruptive to be effective.
1: https://abcnews.go.com/us/sexual-assaults-occupy-wall-street...
2: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-e...
3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-risky-embrace...
The establishment media (millionaire mouthpieces for billionaires) is not going to assist any movement that actually threatens the establishment.