Lots of people, esp on HN, will say J6 was some kind of insurrection, but the BLM riots were peaceful protests. From the other perspective, what happened was a bunch of disgruntled republicans saw the riots that summer, among many other things, and rather than burn down Minneapolis, they took their grievances to the one place that actually could make a difference - the politicians in DC. Instead they were led thru the halls of the Capitol (by the police!) and the resulting footage used to frame the whole debacle as an insurrection. Certainly they were some angry protesters, but the premise that they intended to overthrow the govt by stopping the certification ceremony doesn’t even make sense, since nobody would have recognized it.
The riot wasn’t the attempt: it was the threat of violence that underscored the attempt, which was to happen in the chamber when Mike Pence chickened out (ask Chuck Grassley).
Only for once he didn’t chicken out.
Trump’s obvious, incandescent anger at Pence not doing his bidding makes it clear what that whole “protest” (along with Trump’s own plan to join it) was all about.
Any other interpretation is really a ludicrous, bad faith reframing of quite commonplace behaviour in attempted overthrows.
> Instead they were led thru the halls of the Capitol (by the police!) ... but the premise that they intended to overthrow the govt
You could have just said you didn't read the John Eastman memo and left it there. Or any of the Jack Smith findings. There was a coordinated top-down plan to violate the Electoral Count Act, its not even hidden. Just say you have no clue what you're talking about next time
> You could have just said you didn't read the John Eastman memo
Show me where exactly in the Eastman memo, the so called "coup plot", it calls for a group of protesters to go into the Capitol?
Spoiler: It doesn't. So it's actually you who hasn't read the memos. If anything, it shows Trump sought to remain president by legal means, a gray area at worst, but nothing to do with the "violent insurrection" claimed.
> Jack Smith findings
You mean the cases that were thrown out by the courts? And another that he closed himself? In other words, they had 4 years and found nothing. You are innocent until proven guilty, and ultimately he proved nothing.
Just say you have no clue what you're talking about next time.
> Show me where exactly in the Eastman memo, the so called "coup plot", it calls for a group of protesters to go into the Capitol?
Really cynical stuff. The Eastman memo was the blueprint on how to actually stop Biden's certification. That was the paperwork, the legal attack. January 6th was the kinetic attack.
Just because both actions were not detailed in the same piece of paper does not mean they weren't both part of a clearly coordinated action (of which the special counsel agreed).
> You mean the cases that were thrown out by the courts?
Wrong again. His findings were not thrown out. He ended the case himself because he knew Trump would shut him down anyway once back in office.
Look, I get it. This is a narrative that is very important to you. You can't believe that your side are the violent ones or your president is the lawless one. So much of this is a waste of time.
Just know that this is your narrative and it has no connection to reality.
The special counsel publicly said he had enough evidence to convince a jury that a premeditated, coordinated attempt to coup the U.S. government had occurred.
> partisan-appointed lawyer
There isn't an inch of proof that Biden interfered with either the DOJ or the special counsel. You assume that because Trump is doing this, Biden must have as well. This is the mentality of Trump himself, he thinks about how to commit crimes and get away with it so he assumes that's how everyone else behaves too. You can't actually imagine a world where people have principles and don't always act with self-interest.
It goes back to the first word and the first response I made to you, cynical. Not a word you're saying is accurate, but you don't care. Because you're just assuming the other side would lie the same way you do, if pressed.
> There is no evidence trump intended a violent insurrection
that's the thing about being responsible for violent events at a certain point your intention does not remove your culpability. Whether or not Trump meant to use his supporters to attack the Capitol is irrelevant. It happened. Also, when the riot turned violent, Trump had several hours to stop it. He chose to watch it all on television at the White House instead.
Guilty as sin.
> "Your side" literally shot at Trump
The shooter in question was a registered Republican.
> And at the end of the day..
So I prove you wrong, you move on like it never happened, rinse, repeat. This is a boring game. I don't feel like playing.
> Great. And as we have already established, that case went nowhere. Anybody can accuse someone of anything.
You've already admitted twice you did not read any of the evidence. You literally have no idea what the case is. You outsource your thinking and argumentation to a sitting Republican senator, as if their opinion on the matter counts for anything.
You created an account four days ago in order to post a series of justifications as to why the politically motivated violence of January 6th wasn't that bad, or was really just in response to other violence and therefore cannot be condemned, etc. etc.
If this is your hobby, I suggest you find a new one.
> If anything, it shows Trump sought to remain president by legal means, a gray area at worst, but nothing to do with the "violent insurrection" claimed.
You do realize John Eastman himself literally says he would lose 9-0 [1] when heard in the supreme court, admitting he is illegally violating the ECA with no sound legal argument. And he was literally disbarred for this behavior. [2]
How do you reconcile with this cognitive dissonance?
> In other words, they had 4 years and found nothing.
So you just admit you have never heard the Jack Smith report. Just say that next time, why lie?
> J6 was some kind of insurrection, but the BLM riots were peaceful protests
I'm not a fan of shameless whataboutisms, but this one is particularly bad. The attempted insurrection on January 6th had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter riots (Funny, you can never say those words. It's always an abbreviation).
It was a premeditated attack on the Capitol at the exact time and place the new president was being certified.
It is the most cut and dry example of an attempted coup this country has seen in decades, and it was organized and executed by the sitting, and current President.
There's no reason for you to try to remake history. Your guy got back into power and made all of his legal problems disappear.
He has not avoided prison because he was somehow not guilty. He avoided prison by overcoming the legal system.
On second thought, isn't a core tenet of the US justice system "innocent until proven guilty"? Under that tenet, along with the fact that he was never found guilty, wouldn't US values require considering him innocent? Or have US values changed since that tenet was adopted?
He had already been convicted of multiple unrelated felonies.
He was in the process of being tried in multiple cases in multiple jurisdictions regarding his attempts to compromise an American election, each time with overwhelming, nearly comical evidence against him.
Saying he's innocent until proven guilty not only ignores the reality that the cases against him, even based on what is publicly available evidence, were airtight, but also the fact that these cases only went away because he won re-election and made them go away.
It's his narrative. It's how he's making sense of it. But most importantly, it's his justification.
"The violence on my side is only in response to the violence on your side." This is how such an unambiguous act of political violence makes sense in his head, in the context of it being a defensive action.
Of course it's absurd. But in order to stay aligned with your pre-existing worldview, you sometimes have to say and believe absurdities.
We are just watching him work through it in public.
> Black Lives Matter riots (Funny, you can never say those words. It's always an abbreviation).
> the BLM comparison
Hey look, you did it again.
> provide context for what the country was going thru at the time
No, it's a shameless whataboutism trying to justify your side's riot with a clear political goal with the other side's riots that were more a spontaneous reaction to a horrific crime.
Both were riots but the circumstances and purpose of each could not be further apart.
> and J6 was partly a counter protest.
I know. You need that to be true. But it's not.
> he won many of those cases on appeal
No, he didn't. He lost every single major court case (E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case, civil fraud case, Georgia Election Interference Case, Falsified Business Records), except for one appeal that kept him on the ballot in Maine despite his coup attempt.
Bear in mind these people are very much pro-gun and believe the 2A is there to protect against the govt. If they had intended to violently overthrow the govt, it would have been very apparent. Yet not a single bullet was fired from the protestors. As you pointed out, the only ones doing the shooting was from the police towards the pro-trump people. That lady was unarmed, and was shot while climbing thru a window. (Considering this [1] was the standard for 'peaceful protests' at the time.) Hardly qualifies as self defense, and had this been any other situation the policeman would be stripped of his badge and jailed. But of course, Biden's DOJ declined to prosecute.
Let me tell you about Belgium in 1830. It got attached to the Netherlands, and their king would not listen to the locals. Things got completely out of hand until we got huge protests. All the while, the idea at the Belgian side was things would calm down once their king would stop being so bloody minded and make some concessions. Well, the Dutch king didn't, the revolution succeeded, and we more or less accidentally liberated ourselves. France couldn't invade yet, and there was a general air of: whoops,we created a country, now what? Belgium is a country to this day, for no real reason.
You can start an armed revolt, but you have no idea what's going to happen afterwards.
Arguing that it was a poor insurrection attempt does not negate what it was. Arguing that it could have been worse doesn't change the fact that five people died. The unarmed lady was shot climbing through a window you didn't say what window it was the window dividing a violent mob from congress people sheltering in place.
And making excuses for political violence guarantees that there will be more in the future. It should never be tolerated.
There aren’t some kind of magic levers inside of the building. To perform an insurrection you need military support. Do you think all of the people involved were just so dumb that they thought they could take over by simply being inside the building? The reality candidate where they intended to delay the proceedings by protesting on site makes massively more sense. Certainly one can disagree with the method there and say it wasn’t appropriate, but there is a lot of hysteria over it and I don’t really get why people are sucked in by it.
The plan was, according to the special counsel who had researched it, to buy time for the Eastman memo's plan of sending fake electors to create a constitutional crisis, whereas then the House needs to vote on who is president.
The attack on the Capitol wasn't meant to overthrow the government itself. It was meant to stop the certification, which it did, so that the rest of the plan could take place.
Under no circumstances take my word for it all of this is freely available.
Okay, that isn’t an insurrection or an attack though. It’s some attempt at a legal loophole via targeted protest, right? Insurrectionists typically don’t rely on legal mechanisms to achieve their goals.
This sounds like moving the goalposts. Sorry, I don’t intend to move the goalposts.
What I mean is - yes, the document you linked seems quite plausible, I hadn’t read about that before. But, based on the reaction I see to January 6th from the public, I have trouble believing that the public reaction is driven by an understanding of the alleged plot and not from media driven hysteria. Are we saying that the media is drumming up hysteria based on the actual plot, but since the common man doesn’t actually understand such things typically that the media doing so is justified?
Like to me an authentic negative reaction to reading about the plot would be something like disappointment that the type of legal strategizing that happens in courtrooms has made its way into politics. And I think even you personally are using the language “insurrection” and “attack”, which doesn’t really line up with the alleged plot at all, does it? This is what I’m confused about.
That is a strawman argument, or perhaps you misunderstand the comparison. Nowhere did I say it was a poor insurrection attempt. I said it was not an insurrection at all. They were set up and led into the capitol for the cameras, in a ploy to frame it as an insurrection. And ultimately, that's what happened.
To this claim that "5 people died" - how many were shot by the "violent insurrectionists"?
The answer: none.
1 policeman had a stroke and 4 committed suicide. You cannot blame the J6ers for the policemen's pre-existing conditions or suicidal tendencies. None of the suicides were coerced. The only person who was killed was the aforementioned pro trump woman.
In crowd control, if your line is broken, you fall back. That's why rioters were allowed to walk through the Capitol. The police had no ability to stop them once their forward line was broken.
"The police were giving them a tour." I'm sorry, what did you expect them to do? Go home? Not try to keep an eye on what was happening?
> You do know they were subsequently pardoned?
Accepting a pardon is a formal admission of guilt. You literally cannot pardon an innocent person. That's the whole point.
And again, justifying or excusing political violence guarantees that more will come, which is why I'm particularly angered by what you're doing.
>Accepting a pardon is a formal admission of guilt. You literally cannot pardon an innocent person. That's the whole point.
Wrong. Pleading guilty is an admission of guilt. Being convicted is not the same as admitting guilt. That is why there are things called appeals. Pardons can be a tool to overcome miscarriage of justice. And that's exactly what happened there. A partisan conviction by the regime they were protesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon
>And again, justifying or excusing political violence guarantees that more will come, which is why I'm particularly angered by what you're doing.
Strawman after strawman with you. Nowhere at all am I justifying political violence, because what happened was a mostly peaceful protest. I'm particularly angered by YOUR rhetoric, and it is amusing there isn't a shred of self awareness with that statement. If you haven't noticed, YOUR narrative has led to multiple high profile assassination attempts by leftists convinced Trump is a fascist or something. It hasn't merely guaranteed political violence, it has already happened. Multiple times.
> Wrong. Pleading guilty is an admission of guilt. Being convicted is not the same as admitting guilt.
You either pardon a person declared guilty by a judge and jury or a person who pled guilty themselves.
> Pardons can be a tool to overcome miscarriage of justice. And that's exactly what happened there.
I don't like this game and I'm not going to play it. Political violence spirals, and anyone who seeks to excuse it because it's their side, and their side can't be the violent ones, is childish at best and malevolent at worst.
> Nowhere at all am I justifying political violence
no you're just saying there was a bunch of grandmas and they were let in by the police and yes people die but it wasn't their fault and the guy organized the whole thing couldn't have possibly foreseen it becoming violent and then when it did he was in the white house so it's not like he could have pulled out his phone at any time and tweeted for them to go home to stop the whole thing.
I get that you need this to make sense in your head, but just understand not a single person is convinced by your babbling.
Who gives a shit? You're trying to say that because they were pardoned, they didn't do anything wrong. They were convicted of crimes in a court of law.
> You sought to pin political violence from 'your side' onto the opposition.
I don't even know what you're attempting to reference here. Your repeated attempts to excuse real political violence on January 6th is disgusting and dangerous.
So you can carry on trying to change the subject and confuse the matter. It won't accomplish anything.
> 77 million people would like to have a word with you.
Yes as i said in the beginning of this conversation Americans made a grave mistake returning a man to power who has no intention of ever leaving peacefully. as you pointed out January 6th could have been a lot worse, I pray the Republic survives whatever attempt is coming in 2028.
Although I'm sure you're preparing all of your excuses for why whatever happens won't be that bad.
