a Capitol affair: glimpses from the commentariat

It's not exactly right to say "the Capitol is burning," but the US Capitol has indeed been breached, if you will, seemingly by self-proclaimed Trump supporters.  President Trump had encouraged his supporters to gather in Washington, DC, on January 6, the day the electoral votes were to be counted and certified, thereby officially affirming that Joe Biden is now president of the United States.  Were the people entering the Capitol part of the larger crowd of protestors who were there to decry election malfeasance?  That's unclear.  What is clear is that Vice President Mike Pence and others were quickly whisked away to a safe location when the siege of the Capitol began.  At least one person—an unarmed female Air Force veteran—has been shot dead, presumably by security forces inside the Capitol.  Tim Pool reported that several police officers had been injured in the violence.  President Trump himself came out and told the protestors to "go home in peace."  This seems to indicate that he recognizes the struggle is over, and he'll have no choice but to concede to Biden.

In terms of the bigger picture, commentary is all over the place.  Unsurprisingly, people on the left are accusing Trump of having incited the violence by encouraging people to assemble on Capitol Hill.  People on the right, while not praising the violence, are darkly noting that the left has gotten away with rioting for at least a year ("mostly peaceful protests," as the media called the destructive and occasionally deadly riots), and after four years of provoking the right, what did the left expect?  Here is a "core sample" of commentary lifted from Instapundit.

Two groups of people (call them A and B) both see themselves as victims and have grievances they feel aren’t being heard. Both resort to violence.

 

Dem reactions to group A:
“People will do what they do”
“Tell me where it says protests have to be peaceful”
“Don’t judge a whole group by the actions of a few”
“America is racist”

 

Dem reactions to group B:
“They are traitors”
“Violence is never acceptable”
“Arrest any people who agree with them in Congress”

 

This doesn’t go unnoticed.

 

__________

 

I think the country is close to a 'sans culottes' moment.
Gunning down an unarmed woman with what was apparently an attempt for a head shot, by the same people who stood back and watched when churches and buildings were being burned by BLM and Antifa, could be the spark that starts the conflagration.

__________

 

How much actual violence was there today? Other [than] the cop shooting a lady... nothing was burned. Most of the folks in the capital were already identified as Antifa seen in pictures at other protests... I mean if they are trying to make this as equal to riots it's sad.

__________

Time to start a new party, people. You all need to leave the GOP NOW. Fk 'em. Let's see how they run their Dem Lite Party without any actual members to fund them. I'm registered independent, have been since I turned eighteen and first registered to vote, but I'd give up that independence to join a MAGA or Patriot party. Tell me, is there any way to persuade Trump to found and lead it or is this something we're gonna have to do without him? And are there any other Republicans who might join us? I mean, of the ones in office who have shown some integrity and courage during this massive fraud.

__________

Please list the Democrats who condemned the sending of a mob to Josh Hawley's house yesterday.
Please list the Democrats who condemned the terroristic left-wing threats that dissuaded prominent law firms from representing Trump in the election recounts.
Please list the Democrats who condemned the successful efforts to keep the Pennsylvania legislature from examining the election results, due to the terroristic threats against the legislators and their families.
Please list the Democrats...

__________

 

A lot of double and nonexistent standards here.

 

Today's actions do not even come close to the property damage and loss of life associated with the typical "mostly peaceful protest" we saw last year. Joe Biden has consistently failed to condemn violence by his own supporters and specifically refused to condemn Antifa. His running mate said the "protests" "should and must continue." I would also like for someone to explain how if the use of lethal force was "justified" today, how it could be said to have been unjustified in any of the cases which led to "mostly peaceful protests" last year.

 

Particularly silly is the argument that today's events justify suppressing a full and fair investigation of this year's election irregularities. If that is the standard, there wouldn't have been any investigations of questionable police shootings last year because each and every one of them was followed by more serious violence than we saw today.

 

__________

 

Get back to me after Biden "forcefully condemns" Antifa.

 

Significant sections of several American cities burned this summer, without a word of criticism from Democratic elected officials.

 

__________

F you both. We're not having two sets of standards, one for Republicans and another for Democrats, one for whites and one for nonwhites, as we slowly slide into the muck of third-world corruption and mediocrity with a [complicit] government.

That was nothing, nothing compared to what the people in that rotunda deserved today.

__________

Look's like everyone in "right-wing media" is just terrified that the police state is going to come for them next.

 

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

 

__________

Every last Republican in Iowa is condemning the "violence." Which is no more than a few broken windows. You know what? This is the hill I choose to die on. Not a single vote for any of these fakes, ever again. 

__________

Please. Stop this childish whining.

 

The left has shown that they will not ever condemn political violence. It is a tool of the left, and they have been using it skillfully for over 120 years.

 

The number of supposedly intelligent people who are so stupid as to say "both the left and right must condemn violence" is legion. Here's the bottom line: You're gullible morons. The left will never condemn their own violence, because it is their stock in trade for effecting change when their will is denied at the ballot box or in court. So in effect, supposed 'conservatives' who make these appeals for "both sides must condemn violence' are a) stupid, b) gullible, and c) are now seen by the public as espousing unilateral disarmament.

 

The left will never reform their ways. It is who they are. The right is learning from Alinsky's playbook, and playing it better. That's what these supposed "intellectuals" are now complaining about.

__________

The GOP, with a few exceptions, is happy to see Trump go. They can return to being the party of "free" trade with the slave-labor-Chinese-fascist dictatorship...amnesty and an open border to welfare-subsidized cheap labor for jobs [that] can't be sent out of country to please their donor class[,] which doesn't want to pay American workers American money for American work.

They wish to go back to being the controlled-opposition, volunteer-loser faction of the Uniparty.

__________ 

 

Kevin's note:  video of what people have been calling the "storming" of the Capitol can be found here.  It could be that the characterization "storming" is just more wild-eyed reporting from the mainstream media.  From what I saw, demonstrators were walking around placidly.  Other video apparently shows the police opening barricades and allowing protestors onto Capitol grounds.  I suspect that, over the coming weeks, we'll discover the truth is not what's currently being reported.  Tim Pool, however, did say there was tear gas in the Capitol Rotunda.  I'm curious to know more about the what, the how, and the why before I make judgments.

 

MY THOUGHTS

In the end, Trump will leave office.  The left keeps trying to paint him as an inciter of violence, but it can never point to a specific instance in which Trump has clearly incited violence.  (This applies to claims of Trump's racism as well.)  If anything, Trump has proved remarkably pacifistic for a supposed Republican, both domestically and internationally.  Obama was a holy terror overseas, where his sanctioned drone strikes killed tens of thousands long after the man had won his joke of a Nobel Peace Prize.  During his tenure, Trump started no new wars and ordered only two surgical strikes:  one in Syria, and one in Iran to take out General Soleimani.  And as far as any domestic incitement to violence goes, the left has repeatedly proven itself far more violent than the right. Lame attempts at a "Proud Boys" narrative—as if the Proud Boys represented the mainstream right—are laughable.

Are we close to a hot civil war?  I'd say yes.  I didn't have the space to grab all the comments I wanted to above, but one commenter darkly noted that what we're seeing is a mere preview of what to expect should the Biden government decide to, say, forcefully violate people's Second Amendment right to bear arms.  The left showed the way:  violence is now a legitimate political tactic.  This goes back to what I've been saying all along:  if it comes to actual violence, the side with all the guns will win.  The left, however, seems not to care, so it continues to poke, prod, and otherwise provoke the sleeping giant.  This will not end well for the left, I think, and right now (with apologies to Stateside friends and relatives), I'm happy to be outside of the country.  To be clear:  if the right were to violently eliminate much or most of the left in a street-level shooting war, I wouldn't feel happy or vindicated.  There would be no Schadenfreude—only horror and disgust.  But at the same time, I'd understand where the fury had come from.  Karma's a bitch, and given how things look these days, payback is coming.

Note that many Trump supporters, thoroughly disgusted with old-guard Republicans, are now in favor of starting their own party.  The term "Patriot Party" has been floated around by many Trumpistas.  Such a party would advocate continued avoidance of military meddling on the world stage (a Democrat ideal from the 90s and before), the continued prioritizing of US workers over non-American workers (a Democrat ideal from the 90s), and robust border security (a Democrat ideal espoused by both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).  A Patriot Party would have no problems with legal immigration adding to the diverse sociocultural makeup of the US, but it would probably demand that incoming immigrants be of the type who can contribute constructively and meaningfully to the US economy.  There would be no room for the shiftless, the lazy, the stupid, and the anti-integrationist.  So, yes:  assimilationism would be a huge plank of the Patriot Party platform:  accept our core values or begone.  The same would be true for election integrity; I can imagine Patriots demanding that all future voting be in-person, with a proper ID, on paper ballots to be hand-counted by staffers of several affiliations so as to keep each other honest.  Patriots would also be unabashed free-market capitalists who would reform corporate tax law and continue deregulating businesses so the economy could function more smoothly.  Their free-market ideas would be implemented in the area of health care as well, making the current US system more like the South Korean system, which is far more free-market oriented than the US system is.

I mention all of the above because Trump voters come in all shapes and sizes.  Trump is not really a Republican by the standard measures of what counts as a Republican; his political DNA remains that of a 90s-era New York liberal Democrat.  Trump spent four years fighting an establishment that hated him for not being a machine politician, for not being a Washington insider, and for not kowtowing to the swamp and the Deep State (which is part of the swamp, after all).  People on both sides of the traditional aisle hated Trump, but what Trump's presence revealed was that both sides of the traditional aisle are actually a single "Uniparty," to use the current term bandied about in the alt-media.  This Uniparty pretends to be donkey-versus-elephant in nature, but in truth, it's made up of rich, privileged elites with a globalistic agenda.  This establishment has been fighting hard to block Trump's efforts, and it manifests in many forms:  the left-leaning and corporatized mainstream media, the Democrat Party, the far left (as embodied in The Squad, etc.), Never Trump Republicans, the Deep State, etc.  It's a corrupt monster that has grown like a cancer and entrenched itself deeply in American society.  At this point, cutting out the cancer is almost tantamount to killing the patient.  Perhaps that's what a hot civil war would amount to:  killing the patient.

I'd prefer a peaceful resolution of differences through civil dialogue, but the country is pushing itself to the brink of violence, and there's little I can do aside from watch helplessly from the sidelines, here in Seoul, as my homeland prepares to eat itself.