On January 6 I was happily surprised to be wrong about the Georgia election, and I was working on a post all about Qanon and related election fraud conspiracy theories, and whether we should take seriously the threat of them trying something in real life, and then I checked the news, and WHAM! All my posts got pre-empted by Current Events.
I barely got any work done in the week after Jan 6. Couldn't focus. Kept checking back in with how the world's stupidest coup d'etat attempt was going. Kept telling myself I had to close all those tabs and write some code but I just couldn't stop thinking about it.
The white supremacists attempting to violently overthrow democracy aren't done yet. There will be more attempts, before, during, or after the Jan 20 inauguration. So this post will surely be obsolete by the time you read it.
But I need to write this and get it out, just to help myself process what the fuck is going on.
- Yes, there was a serious coup attempt
- This was the least surprising thing ever
- Why was the capitol so poorly defended?
- Trump's Final Grift was telling them there was a plan
- The excruciating online-ness of it all
- Just Because They're Pathetic Doesn't Mean They're Not Dangerous
1. Yes, there was a serious coup attempt
My first reaction was "these guys are clowns who got carried away, they busted into the capitol building with their confederate flags and costumes, and then stood around taking selfies, like a dog who's caught a car and doesn't know what to do now"
Then I saw the guy with the handcuffs. He wasn't there to smear poop and take selfies. He covered his face. He had a plan. He was looking to kidnap somebody. So was this other guy with handcuffs.
And I heard about the national guard being delayed by hours due to confusion about whether they had authorization to mobilize or not
And heard about the pipe bombs placed elsewhere in the city
More evidence keeps coming out, day by day. There are accusations that some members of congress gave groups tours of the capitol building the day before (it's supposed to be closed to tours during COVID). Were they helping the insurrectionists plan their movements?
And I heard that the panic buttons had been ripped out of the congresspeoples' offices
And I heard the crowd of people chanting "HANG MIKE PENCE" after they had built a makeshift gallows outside
And I heard that, while all the members of congress were trying to hide, Q-supporting lunatic congresswoman Laura Boebert was tweeting Nancy Pelosi's location
And I saw that, while some members of the capitol police acted bravely to do their jobs and defuse the situation, others seemed to be welcoming the mob inside. It's hard to judge exactly what's going on from some of these out-of-context video clips. But it looked like some of the police were taking selfies with the mob. Opening gates for them.
Don't let the goofiness of the mob fool you: Concealed within the mob of aimless idiot vandals, using that mob for cover, there was a very serious and premeditated coup attempt.
(just because they're pathetic doesn't mean they're not dangerous)
This could easily have been so much worse. An even-slightly-more-coordinated group of terrorists would have succeeded in killing or kidnapping members of Congress, then started issuing demands that the EC votes not be counted.
2. This was the least surprising thing ever
We've been warning you since 2016 that Trump was inciting stochastic terrorism. We knew since the 2020 campaign started that he wouldn't accept losing. We've been telling you and telling you. You can draw a straight line from Trump's 2016 campaign rhetoric, through the Pizzagate / Comet Ping-Pong gunman, Charlottesville, the El Paso shooter and the pipe-bomb mailer, to Jan 6. (If you like, continue the line backwards through Gamergate, birtherism, the Fox News epistemic bubble, the 80s Satanic Panic, the Southern Strategy, ...)
The Trumpist dead-enders have been announcing, on public websites (Parler, thedonald.win, the chans, Gab, and more) for weeks, their plans to go to the capitol on Jan 6 and "stop the steal" (overturn the election results). It was common knowledge online for weeks ahead of time.
This is what they were all along. This is what they told us they were all along.
Anybody who was surprised was not paying attention.
I was only surprised it took this long. I've been predicting some kind of civil war since before the election. Why did it only start now? Was it because the critical mass of Trump cultists were still in denial about the election all through November and December? The explosion of violence didn't happen until they finally realized they lost?
I was expecting much worse. (Maybe there's still much worse to come.) I've been dreading some kind of civil war for so long that
3. Why was the capitol so poorly defended?
I kind of expected that when the mob tried something, the feds would shut it down with extreme prejudice. I was surprised to see them so unprepared and easily overwhelmed. There was barely a fraction of the police presence that was there for BLM protests in the summer, or even what's routinely deployed for smaller protests. The National Guard was intentionally kept away.
It's simply not believable that they didn't know this was coming, when it was common knowledge online for weeks.
I've heard a lot of conflicting things about xxx
But it sure seems like a strong possibility that members of congress and/or members of the Trump admin went beyond inciting the coup attempt with their lies: that they may have been deliberately keeping defenders away from the capitol building to xxx
This hasn't been proven. I don't want to turn myself into a conspiracy theorist. So I'll wait until more evidence comes out before I decide exactly what ratio of incompetence to malice I believe in.
Don't want to turn myself into a conspiracy theorist, so I'll wait until more evidence comes out before I decide exactly what ratio of incompetence to malice I believe in.
4. Trump's Final Grift Was Telling Them There Was A Plan
In his Jan 6 speech where Trump tells his minions to march on the capitol, he says "We" a lot. He says "we" are gonna march there. He implies he'll be leading them.
Of course that didn't happen. He went home and enjoyed the show on TV while five people died for his lies.
How much farther would the coup have gotten if the president had led, supported, and backed it up? Might it have actually stopped the EC count and left the transition in doubt?
We're very lucky Trump is so fucking lazy.
Trump has never led anything. If he has one skill, it's making sure that other people are left holding the bill for his failed projects or going to jail for his crimes. Whether it's paying hush money to porn stars, getting election help from the Russian government, or just bankrupting a casino. He always gets fall guys to the dirty work, for him, and suffer the consequences, while he lines his pockets and starts the next con.
His entire career has been rolling the end of one con job into the beginning of the next con job before the consequences can catch up. Rolling a failed presidential campaign into a conspiracy theory, then rolling the conspiracy theory into a lucrative post-presidential career of professional whining and grievance-mongering, on Fox News or on some new "Trump TV" project he would start.
That would have been the logical next step. But he took it a little too far. You can't get off the tiger that easily. The people you riled up believed in the conspiracy theory, and unlike you, they acted like they believed it.
Trump's final grift was telling his followers that there was a plan. Months of echoing and validating the nutty conspiracy theories that the election could be undone: That Pence could overturn the EC count, that congress could overturn the EC count, that interrupting the EC count would somehow make Trump keep being president. That they should storm the capitol and he'd be right there with him.
Five people are dead, who should all still be alive, including the woman shot by cops, and the cop beaten to death by rioters... they would all still be alive if trump hadn't lied to stroke his own ego.
These five people died for nothing, for lies. They died because they believed the lies of their glorious leader trump and he doesn't give a single shit about them
The next day, speaking apparently under great duress, he throws his insurrectionists under the bus.
[on thedonald.win and other pro-trump forums where i go to lurk sometimes, they were furious at trump's betrayal by denouncing terrorism and sorta... not conceding exactly but vaguely admitting he lost. They stuck by him through all his crimes and corruption and racism and authoritarianism, but on Jan 7 he committed the one sin they can't pardon: apologizing]
5. The excruciating online-ness of it all
Which was the bigger blow to trump: losing the election? being impeached a second time? or losing his twitter account?
It's weird that we even have to ask that, right? Sounds like a joke. But certainly the twitter ban is a larger blow to whatever post-presidency grifting he was planning to pivot to. It'll limit his ability to keep giving orders to the Republican party from out of office, too. In a certain sense, to trump, the twitter account wasn't a means to becoming president, so much as becoming president was a means to increasing his twitter follower count.
i'm only half joking. One lens for understanding the weirdness of politics in the last several years is that the formal political process has become an extension of online fights, instead of the other way around. Tail-wags-dog.
If you're a low-profile member of a deadlocked legislative body, and your bills have zero chance of passing, WHY NOT make some inflammatory public statements on hot-button national culture war issues? This does jack shit in the game of "getting laws passed". But you're not playing that game. That game's for losers! You're playing the game of "getting more attention online".
The congressional Republicans who voted to overturn the election results weren't acting like you'd act if you really believed the election was stolen. They were acting like they had to make a symbolic protest to avoid the wrath of Trump's tweets.
Trump's candidacy all along has been driven by people who were not just brain poisoned by right-wing lies, but a specifically an "extremely online" kind of brain poisoned. The kind where you think it makes sense to bring "Pepe the frog" images to your real-life rallies. It's only gotten worse and worse over the course of 2020 as eveyone's been stuck inside spending way too much time online.
Why were they all here on Jan 6, rather than some other day? Because the Qanon "trust the plan" guys needed a new date to move the goalposts to, after "the kraken" turned out not to be real and the Electoral College had already voted. And the way that Qanon works is that all the online clout goes to the person who comes up with the best imaginary plot twist in their ongoing crowdsourced fanfic reality.
Jan 6, when congress counts the EC votes, normally a minor formality, became a flashpoint because some rando online highlighted the words "The Vice-President opens the envelopes" and spun it into a whole wishful-thinking nonsense theory that the VP can choose to reject EC slates.
It didn't matter which anon made it up: "Mike Pence secretly has the power to overturn the election on Jan 6, let's all be there that date" was more memetically fit than the other alternatives, so it won out. That's what had to be true for the deus-ex-machina to work. (Just try not to think about why, if the VP has this power, Al Gore didn't use it in 2000?)
So you had people wanting to murder Mike Pence, over not using his entirely imaginary election-stealing powers, as a direct result of the jockeying for online clout between competing conspiracy theorists.
Trump himself apparently believed in this nonsense theory too, because he's also extremely online, desperate to salvage his ego, and therefore would believe anything rather than admit he lost. Trump is not just the subject of Qanon theories, he's a consumer. Even though he could presumably have read the Constitution at any time, or had a lawyer explain it to him.
This is the latest example of how Trump often weirdly acted more like a spectator of politics than a president -- he would make a lot of angry tweets about the government, even though presumably he could have actually been doing something about it instead. Other than audience size, his tweets were no different than the ones any other angry old white man binge-watching Fox News would make.
It makes perfect sense if you presume the real game he was playing was for social media virality, to position himself not so much as leader of the government but as leader of online-angry-white-people-who-hate-the-government.
And what did the mob do when they got inside the Capitol? Not the smaller group with serious coup plans, but the larger mass of aimless idiots with their confederate flags and shit, who were like "Now what?"
They mostly filmed themselves breaking laws! Showing their faces, using their real names, in one case showing their ID badge from work. Posting selfies and videos of their petty theft and vandalism. Making content for their social media accounts. Like they couldn't even concieve of maybe not publicizing the selfies that the FBI is currently using to arrest them all.
These goons could have worn masks! Everybody who's not a Trump maniac is wearing masks! Even if they don't believe in COVID, it gave them a perfect excuse to cover their faces! But being anti-mask COVID denialists has become such a core part of their identity that they refused to wear masks even when committing crimes on camera!
"Can't let myself be seen in a mask, it would ruin my brand if my twitter followers saw me being a virus-cuck! Wait, why am I being arrested??"
It's been said about the original wave of fascism, in the 30s, that it was a politics driven by spectacle and aesthetic, empty of policy substance or even of coherent ideology. Also, it was the first political movement driven by a mass medium (radio). This feels like it ties in somehow to the attention-seeking performativity of the Extremely Online right in our current moment. What does fascism look like when everybody's brain has been fried by social media?
Nobody knows yet. We're finding out in real time.
6. Just Because They're Pathetic Doesn't Mean They're Not Dangerous
I don't like to listen to politicians talk. Even politicians I like. I didn't listen to Obama speeches. If they were important I got the text and skimmed it. I just prefer to consume information in the form of text and not listen to some blowhard stroke his ego.
So I got through most of the trump era knowing what he was saying, but without knowing quite how he said it.
I'm listening to Trump's Jan 6 speech and it's unbelievable what a weak, whiny, self-pitying old man he sounds like. This is the dude who inspires such loyalty? Whose fans photoshop his face onto Rambo's body and swoon about how alpha-male he is? The guy Ben Garrison draws as a muscular colossus striding over his enemies' heads? Really?
I guess i've avoided listening to him talk for 4 years so i'm always surprised to hear what his actual voice sounds like. I dunno if i expected him to sound like a supervillain or like Foghorn Leghorn or what I expected but he just sounds like "waaaah, the media is mean to me, waaaaah twitter flags my posts, waaaaaah republicans don't thank me enough, waaaaah Pence needs to do a coup for me or i'll cry"
He whines about the election being "stolen" from him in exactly the same tone of voice he whines about Oprah Winfrey not having him on her show any more. Nothing he says has any meaning except defending his ego against unflattering facts.
You dipshits wanna overthrow democracy in order to give absolute power to this loser? This simpering, self-pitying, toddler, this spoiled brat? Really?
I'm aware there's a flaw in the human brain that makes a lot of people susceptible to submitting their will to an authoritarian demagogue, and trump worshipers fit that pattern perfectly, but never in a million years would I have guessed a demagogue could activate that flaw by whining so much.
Is this why so many people under-estimated the threat he posed for so long?
We've tricked ourselves, with movies and stuff, into thinking that fascists are supposed to look cool. Thinking that somebody who looks like a clown can't also be a fascist. We expect fascists to look like Darth Vader when in reality they're more like Anakin Skywalker whining about sand. Or maybe like Daleks: they look unbelievably silly but while you're laughing at their goofy plunger-arms, they murder you and your family.
(Something people forget about the real-life Nazis is that they were total fuck-ups. When we portray them as efficient, organized, lock-step marching machine in cool uniforms, we are replicating their propganda. We're portraying them how they portrayed themselves in propaganda like "Triumph of the Will", a film that was incredibly influential in defining film grammar and visual language; whenever you see Saruman addressing an army of orcs or the First Order addressing an army of stormtroopers, you're seeing Triumph of the Will. The actual Nazis were not good at governing. They made terrible decisions, like everybody drugged up on ideology makes terrible decisions.)
So the Capitol insurrectionists, with their furs and shields and facepaint and mall-ninja body armor and Punisher skulls, were losers in cosplay. So what? The KKK is losers in cosplay too, and they're a terrorist organization that's killed thousands of americans. ISIS were losers cosplaying the glory days of the Caliphate. White supremacist and other reactionary terror are both comically pathetic, and a deadly danger, at the same time.
Ultimately the only difference between "idiots play-acting fascists" and "actual fascists" is how far along they've gotten in seizing power.
