7. White Supremacy Is A Hell Of A Drug
WIP
8. The stark difference in how we treat protests
WIP
9. Serious Bugs In Democracy
It is a mistake to have a 3-month period where the loser remains in power. most countries transfer power right after the election, and for good reason! You don't want to give the loser a chance to do stuff like this. This is a symptom of our democratic system being much older than most others around the world. Which is something to be proud of, yeah, but it's also kind of like we're still running a "beta version" of democracy, which has a bunch of bugs in it and also obsolete features designed around stuff like "How long does it take people to get to Washington DC by horse?"
(speaking of "bugs": one good observation from mattygl: DC's lack of statehood = only crimes there are federal crimes. president has unlimited pardon power for federal crimes. a mob with the alliegance of the president can do whatever they want in DC and he can just pardon them all. Mob rule over DC would be completely legal. This is a huge loophole that needs closing.) XXX
If there's no punishment and no consequences for the insurrectionists (Not just the mob themselves, but the people who intentionally lied to the mob about this), they will try again (before or after trump leaves office) and the next one might get farther.
Finally, this is a whole article in itself, but the system that lets Republicans rule the country with a minority of the vote (gerrymandering plus electoral college plus filibuster etc) is a disaster. The best defense against fascism is for the majority of people in opposition to fascism to be united in opposing it. The majority always opposed Trump, but thanks to our fucked-up electoral system, the majority opposing Trump was not enough to keep him out of power.
10. The Insurrection Was Coming From Inside The House
More than half of the republican delegation in the house of representatives voted to overthrow the results of the election! They are the more dangerous insurrection.
The GOP thought they could just lie about this for political gain. Sure, a few of them are true believers, but most of the R congresspeople supporting the stolen-election narrative were doing it out of cowardice and cyncial calculation. Gotta repeat Trump's lies, knowing they're lies, or else Trump might tweet that I'm a RINO and get me primaried.
They thought that after convincing their voters that the nation had been stolen from them, that they could then use support for bogus lawsuits and symbolic protest votes as a way to get re-elected, and then just let everything go back to normal afterward.
They were wrong. Things do not go back to normal after that. Now we see that whenever a GOP politician tries to get back to reality, the base sees them as complicit in treason.
The GOP base has been fully radicalized. They live in a different reality now. They'll never stop believing the election was stolen so they'll never stop believing they're morally obligated to overthrow the government, and justified in using violence to do so. They think they're revolutionaries.
The GOP can't get off this tiger anymore.
McConnell, Mike Pence, William Barr, Lindsay Graham, Elaine Chao, and all the others are suddenly like "I would like to climb down from this tiger I've been riding and walk away without being eaten, now. I can do that, right?"
The split in the GOP is between those who want to try to get off the tiger and go back to normal -- your Mitt Romneys and Lisa Murkowskis, who are going to have to vote to impeach
-- and on the other side, the true believers, along with the cynical one who go "welp, guess i'm all-in now, got no choice but to act like a true believer". Your Ted Cruzes and Josh Hawleys, who are all angling for a chance to be the next Trump after Trump.
these fuckers so drunk on ideology and so thirsty for power that even a mob breaking into their workplace to harm them does not shock them out of it. They vote for a lie which just had them hiding under desks wearing gas masks hours before. What is mere bodily safety compared to the opportunity to show your devotion to the Trumpssiah?
The rest of us, who still live in reality, can't let these motherfuckers lead an attempt to overthrow democracy and then just go back to politics as normal afterward. We have to impose consequences on them. If they won't resign, then censure by the House and Senate, followed by expulsuion from their offices, would be a good start
I hope this split rips the GOP in half and ends them as a governing force, just like the split over slavery destroyed the Whig Party.
11. Oh, we're gonna get in trouble? Ummmm... it was ANTIFA!
WIP
12. When is the next attack coming?
Of course they'll try again. The most likely date for the next domestic terrorist attack is the Jan 20 inauguration, which many of them will see as their last chance. They're planning attacks right now on Parler and other places; I've seen it.
(This is why everybody is rushing to ban Parler; hosting it is now the equivalent of hosting Al Qaeda's terror attack planning forum. I have a lot more to say about the internet crackdown but this post is long enough already.)
About a third of the country is now radicalized to the point where they don't believe in elections anymore. That's going to be fucking up our politics for the next decade. And it could have been avoided, easily, trivially, if Trump had just met the bare minimum standard of basic decency and conceded. Not even "decency", just "acknowledging reality".
Just as trump could have saved tens of thousands of lives -- lives of his most dedicated supporters, no less! -- simply by saying "COVID is real. Wear a mask". The bare minimum of acknowledging reality. But, that's what he can never do, because acknowledging reality would bruise his fragile, precious ego. For the sake of that ego, "elections are all fraudulent" is now a required belief of Republican identity politics alsongside "COVID is a hoax". The five who died, pointlessly, senselessly, in the Jan 6 coup attempt join unknown tens or hundreds of thousands more who died in hospitals insisting COVID was a hoax.
And it's going to keep happening. Trump cultists will keep throwing their lives away for the sake of the knee-jerk ego-defensive lies of their glorious leader.
America is going to be living for years with a rebellious fascist mob inside its borders. A mob who believes in nonsense and is dedicated to overthrowing the government. All because trump's ego couldn't handle losing.
(Here's a silver lining: the attack was severe enough that everybody has to wake up and pay attention to it, but not severe enough to kill more than 5 people, or to harm any members of congress. It's horrible that 5 people died, but it could easily have been 50, or 500.)
