Coup in the USA?

[Roxanne Blue]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

One of the most frustrating things about this coup is that it was serious - deadly serious - but the participants were such a clown-car that it's difficult to look at some of them and NOT laugh.

 

[Roxanne Blue]

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

One of the most frustrating things about this coup is that it was serious - deadly serious - but the participants were such a clown-car that it's difficult to look at some of them and NOT laugh.

Some MAGA people also made the same mistake with the election results, they said Georgia had to be fraud because Biden couldn't have got the number of votes he did because Georgia only had a population of 3.9 million. It was then pointed out to them, that they had referenced the population of Georgia the country not Georgia the state. (Population over 10 million). Then it was "Georgia's not a country!"

Morons.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

This tweet thread goes on F O R E V E R but might be worth a look, if you want practically a word-by-word dissection of Trump's speech at the rally before he directed them to march on the Capitol.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

And (entirely predictably) they're now eating their own:

Wow, how they have managed to pervert the definition of patriotism! Ashli may have been a freaking MAGAt, but she did serve in the US Armed Forces, which is probably far more patriotic than anything this Kimberly chick has ever done!

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Doesn't surprise me that we're seeing so many Air Force types involved in this trumptastic attempted coup.... they've been drifting into radicalized christian extremism for years.

At least they weren't able to bring their planes with them. Could have been so much worse if the army or marines showed up in the same numbers instead.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Wow, how they have managed to pervert the definition of patriotism! Ashli may have been a freaking MAGAt, but she did serve in the US Armed Forces, which is probably far more patriotic than anything this Kimberly chick has ever done!

Those MAGA's that have never served don't seem to have much respect for the military period else they wouldn't approve of DJT at all. But then, there are service members that love him too, so who knows. Propaganda and cult attraction goes deeper than patriotism, I guess. But really, they will twist reality until it is no longer recognizable to defend DJT.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

It Was Supposed to Be So Much Worse

And the threat to the U.S. government hasn’t passed.

www.theatlantic.com

Jesus. The next few weeks are going to be so dangerous.

On the West Lawn of the Capitol Wednesday, a man in a pom-pom beanie clamored for blood. “Execute the traitors!” he shouted into a megaphone. “I wanna see executions!”

They discussed the weapons they would bring and brainstormed which lawmakers they would hang first. “I’m thinking it will be literal war on that day,” one commenter posted on TheDonald’s forum last month, according to the Daily Beast. “Where we’ll storm offices and physically remove and even kill all the D.C. traitors and reclaim the country.”

They are already reportedly plotting more rallies, including a return to Washington, D.C., before or on the inauguration, this time with more guns. For many Trump rally-goers, the events at the Capitol on Wednesday may be the “spark” that radicalizes them, Simi told me—or further radicalizes others. Among neo-Nazis on the Telegram app, “there’s been a real hailing of the predominantly MAGA crowd” that stormed the Capitol, he said. “They’re saying, ‘The lemmings are starting to see the light. Our ranks are growing.’”

 

[Free]

America was lucky to be saved by its democracy -- even if some don't realize it | CNN

Nick Paton Walsh writes that despite the horrors of Wednesday's insurrection, in the end, the quieter majority remained standing. This short moment of ugly collapse should not lead Americans to dismiss the extraordinary eloquence and value of their system.

www.cnn.com

Even in the aftermath, America might not see how fortunate it is.

Most "attempted coups" elsewhere in the world leave a hangover of giddying uncertainty - shops shuttered, presidents in hiding, the television playing a nature documentary or half the staff in the hotel you are staying in not turning up for work.

However, America's extraordinary privileges of law and functionality seemed to sustain, even in a brief moment of collapse. Wednesday was a six-hour catastrophic policing failure, one that finally served up an image of what the souring of democracy can look like, after years of appeasement and detachment by ordinary voters.

I don't know. I don't believe for a minute they would have been allowed to succeed, but if they'd been a bit less incompetent in their coup attempt, or Trump was a bit more clever in his efforts, we could have had a horribly bloody mess on our hands right now.

 

[Fionalein]

I just begin to wonder... If the rioters had succeeded in hanging Pence... wouldn't that indeed made them somehow AntiFa?

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I just begin to wonder... If the rioters had succeeded in hanging Pence... wouldn't that indeed made them somehow AntiFa?

Pence gets a lot of justified hate, but I'm seriously very grateful to him for doing the right thing when it mattered most.... he had the audacity to tell Trump that no, he'd not install him as a dictator.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

OK, but it happened in VENEZUELA, not the effing USA. Democrats have never advocated Venezuelan or Cuban style "socialism" because that's not democratic socialism. This bullshit from the right-wing has been going on since FDR, and it's way past goddamned time it stops. Taxation levels of 1960 and lifting the earning cap from Social Security and Medicare taxes would resolve most of this, but the GOP has people like Rose's Hispanic friend convinced Pelosi is Fidel Castro in drag. ENOUGH! The GOP needs to die as a party.

That's a bit different, though. That's an immigrant community bringing applying their understanding of the political situation in the old country to their new home. When I was younger, I knew a lot of members of the various communities of emigres from the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, or their children, and I understand that sort of fiercely conservative anti-communism, based on first-hand experience of one form of socialism.

But that was back when the USSR was still a threat. That was more than 30 years ago.

Seems to me that, while there are specific groups of people who, for historical reasons, have unexpected party affiliations that people maintain even though they don't particularly agree with the party in question, that doesn't explain why anti-communism is still such a big thing in parts of the US -- I've been reading Anne Applebaum's recent book Twilight of Democracy -- she makes this very point, that she used to be a Republican, as were many of her friends in central and eastern Europe, because they were the party most opposed to the USSR.

However, the USSR ceased to exist 30 years ago, and the world has completely changed since then, with the result that many of her former anti-Communist friends in Poland, Hungary, the UK and the US, who used broadly to agree with her about the importance liberal democracy and the rule of law, are now her bitter political opponents with whom she no longer speaks, because they've thrown in with fascists and authoritarian populists.

That's the bit I don't get -- why are people in the American midwest, for example, so scared of socialists when they've probably never met one in their lives, and they tend to agree with socialist policies anyway, if they hear the policy described without being told whose it is?

Back when people could say, "You want to make the USA like the Soviet Union or East Germany" that threat was scary -- I'd rather have lived in the US than in the USSR if I had to, or Hungary or Bulgaria -- but "You want to make the USA more like Germany today, or The Netherlands, or Norway"?

What's wrong with that? Pretty ironic that the US Republicans are now the ones who want their country to be more like Russia.

 

[Free]

Shorter Fuckwad: Don't do anything to stop the criminally-insane Trump or things are going to get worse for you.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

These Black Capitol Police Officers Describe Fighting Off "Racist-Ass Terrorists"

Two Black officers told BuzzFeed News that their chief and other upper management left them totally unprepared and were nowhere to be found on the day.

www.buzzfeednews.com

 

[Free]

‘This is the image I can’t forget’: Warren aide shares the impact on Black Hill staff of seeing the Confederate flag carried in Capitol

Josh Delaney watched in horror on Wednesday as the Capitol was stormed by a mob of Trump supporters, who breached the government building in a day of violence that left five people dead.Like many across the country, Delaney, who is the deputy legislative director for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth...

www.boston.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I think the point of the article, though, isn't so much, "these are crazy people, so feel sorry for them" as "these are crazy people who are convinced they have real grievances, so feel scared."

 

[Free]

I think the point of the article, though, isn't so much, "these are crazy people, so feel sorry for them" as "these are crazy people who are convinced they have real grievances, so feel scared."

And Kev's reaction seems to be more about Anne Applebaum's summary of the piece rather than the article's conclusions (if there are any).