Not necessarily stupid. Emotionally manipulated. Though many may also be quite dumb.
Unfortunately, the playbook to fracture and cripple the West is now obvious.
You just gave me a sad.
I think it would be substantially productive and helpful if we stopped electing leaders so delusional and/or irresponsible that they would literally take advantage of the prestige and authority of the US Presidency to broadcast completely unsubstantiated accusations of alleged massive electoral fraud and conspiracy, and deliberately incite their followers to believe that those baseless accusations warranted demonstrations of violent unrest and even outright lawless insurrection.
That’s something productive that we could do.
Interesting how so many other western nations observing the self-inflicted fracturing and crippling now taking place in Trump’s America are shaking their heads at us for being an idiocy trainwreck, rather than imitating our example.
(The UK, I admit, seems to be joining in on the self-inflicted fracturing and crippling palooza.)
All of these are things that Trump “achieved” the moment he was born into a wealthy family. The only thing he won was the birth lottery.
Abolish the Electoral College. We wouldn’t have had Donald Trump or George W. Bush as President.
Lots of people are born wealthy. They don’t become Trump. Look, I’m not praising him. And he’s not competent like a normal person. But he didn’t just bumble his way into all this. There’s some sort of animal cunning or weird intuition or SOMETHING going on. We didn’t take him seriously as a threat in 2016 and we paid the price. We need to stop that.
Even now, I feel like people are dismissing what happened yesterday as the Deplorable Fringe. But the GOP in Texas just fired their sergeant at arms for posting pro-riot material on social media. A lawyer in my area just got fired for being there. A West Virginia lawmaker was there. The people wandering the capitol were, in many cases, educated people in places of power and influence. We cannot just assume this is a fucking idiot who somehow got lucky and created a movement.
I’m fairly new to SDMB. I I’m inclined to agree with @octopus, is there some sort of self-flagellation protocol that I’m supposed to follow ? 
I’m assuming you’re not including yourself in this group. Given all the times you defended Trump and mocked people who thought he’d promote violence, how do you explain?
Or do you believe you were emotionally manipulated by him? Because part of the emotional manipulation comes not just from him (firing up bigots) but from his enablers (soothing people like you into believing that he’s harmless).
I hope that next time we tell you Trump and his ilk are an existential threat, you’ll listen.
I’m a conservative but I tend to agree with the above thought.
I think they wanted to allow a show of protest similar to BLM but weren’t anticipating it getting so far out of hand. By the time they realized the protesters were serious they were facing an ‘open fire or let them take over’ decision.
It’s a very sad thing and The Right bears part of the responsibility for the dead.
The movement already existed. It was the Tea Party, it was “Obama’s not my President”, it was Sarah Palin fans, it was a whole bunch of resentful and low-information people who weren’t getting what they wanted from ordinary electoral politics. Trump’s “animal cunning or weird intuition” was essentially the reality-TV-honed skill of identifying an audience craving theatrical boorish aggressiveness, and the indifference to all considerations of respect for truth, rationality, principle, discretion, decency, and so forth that might have hindered him in satisfying their desires.
They chose…poorly.
Sure. But he didn’t bumble into it. I feel like we’ve decided that he’s an incompetent fool who has just been extraordinarily lucky so far, but that luck can’t last, so we can safely ignore him, he will go away soon. But over and over again in his life he’s been at the place you’d think that would happen–bankrupt, in debt. He’s been at a place where anyone would throw in the towel–but he’s come back, and bumbled his way back into power and influence.
It’s like we are playing poker with someone we KNOW is a terrible poker player, but they keep winning, somehow. But we keep playing, because they are obviously awful, so any moment now, their luck will run out and we can take all their money. But while they are a terrible poker player, they are cheating, running the table. And we keep playing, smug as fuck over their shitty understanding of a game. We go home that night, broke but still smug, because damn, we are better at poker than that asshole. But he’s got all our money.
No, they do. Trump’s actually done very poorly as a billionaire. He’s been repeatedly given large sums of money and lost it all. If he had taken all of the money that’s been handed to him and simply put it into a basic index fund, he’d been far richer than he is now.
The same is true about Trump’s political career. Trump didn’t get himself elected President. Trump’s a moron. He hijacked a political system that was set up by the Republicans years before he jumped on board. Any bozo with a R next to his name could have gotten elected in 2016. And most bozos would have been able to ride into a second term with no problems.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Trump’s the problem. Because Trump will be gone next month and the real problem will still be here.
It’s like how we all breathed a sigh of relief in 2009 when George W. Bush left office and we said “Thank God that’s over.” (Just like we did in 1960 and 1974 and 1992.) If we do it again in 2021, the Republicans will just start making plans to appoint the next guy in line.
You are ignoring a whole raft of actions that fall between those extremes.
The cops were not lifting a finger because that was the plan. The coup was foiled by people calling in the National Guard. Not by Capitol police. They (or their leadership) were all in on the coup.
…2020 was such a long year that its hard to fathom that the Christchurch Mosque Shootings happened in 2019. But we saw the very same institutional failures of intelligence then that was saw during the events yesterday.
To paint the picture this is Asher Wilson-Goldman’s account of talking to the police about anti-Jewish activities and presenting the police specific, actionable intelligence.
In the wake of the Christchurch Mosque shootings the Royal Commission noted the very same things.
So I’m with asahi here. This was both a massive failure of intelligence, institutional blindness, a focus on “Antifa” that meant that the authorities simply didn’t see this coming. They couldn’t see it coming even though the President of the United States was calling for it, even when the instigators were opening planning this on Facebook, Twitter and Parlor, they couldn’t see it even they were wearing T-Shirts declaring civil war.
This was probably the first incursion through the lines.
Once they broke the lines here it was all over. There weren’t enough police on the lines, not enough reserves, they didn’t have any of the riot gear that we’ve seen being deployed over the last six months. The police strategy relied on compliance. They didn’t expect to get overrun because why would they? This wasn’t “Antifa.” No batons, no helmets, no shields. The only option they had was either start shooting or a series of strategic retreats until they could get the numbers to get control again. They chose to do the latter. And the latter was the correct choice IMHO. That doesn’t excuse the racism, the institutional failings that lead to this moment.
I’m having a bit of a “Who are you and what have you done with asahi!?” moment here.
Usually you err in the direction of alarmism when it comes to the danger of violent extremism from the right. While I may not have thought it was likely that the protestors would attempt to storm the capitol to disrupt the vote, I certainly thought it was not improbable (maybe a 1 in 6 chance). The capitol police should have been prepared for such a possibility with additional security staff and riot gear available should the need arise, and with a plan in hand.
I wasn’t all that surprised that they tried to enter, just surprised that they succeeded.
I think a big aspect of Trump’s legacy is that our institutions are not nearly as powerful as we were all led to believe and Trump had a lot of success because he had the appropriate amount of belief that they could restrain him.
Trump is legitimately extremely good at cultivating a larger-than-life media persona and attracting a cult following, but his political successes seem to have more to do with the fact that everyone but him knew you can’t just do “that” and everyone but him was apparently wrong than with how much of a shrewd manipulator he was.
I thought it was unlikely precisely because I assumed that the Capitol Police and the National Guard would be there in sufficient numbers to make it impossible short of the insurrectionists showing up in tanks!
They not only weren’t there to prevent it, they weren’t even on standby in the immediate area with authorization already set up; it took hours to get enough of them out there to clear the place.
Suppose that mob had actually caught Pelosi and Harris?
If it works, it works.
I blame the Capital police superiors. I fail to see how they could not have predicted that a large confined group of people could become a rampant mob!
I expected them to open the doors, otherwise we would be report a story where dozens, if not a couple of hundred were injured. Remember the Rollimg Stones concert at Altamont and the Hillsbourough Soccer Match in which uncontrolled mobs stampeded and crushed people who were trapped in confined places like the bolted doorways and chained gates.