I was napping when they broke into the Capitol. My wife, Martha, woke me to tell me the news. At that point, the riot (or “insurrection,” if you prefer, although I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms at the time) was a couple hours old; it appeared that Congress was safe, our representatives tweeting and cuddling each other in their undisclosed safety bunkers. Ok, I don’t remember any reports of “cuddling,” but I like to think of Susan Collins and Chuck Schumer holding each other tight.
Martha said she thought we were watching an important moment in American history. I said I didn’t think so; there’d already been so much insanity during Trump’s four years in office that the scene struck me as just another example–though a particularly dramatic one–of MAGA’s criminal exuberance. It was, I thought, Trump’s political death knell.
Five years after the fact, with our criminal president reinstated for a second term, I understand that day—and especially its aftermath—differently. January 6, 2021 was the day America broke.
Archive: http://archive.today/L3hAL
Thank Merrick Garland.
I called it our beer hall putsch at the time and was unfortunately correct
that’s… surprisingly accurate.
Thanks I’d already followed the fascist vs antifascist street fighting of the years prior and made a point to educate myself on the rise of the nazis. There lied a major decision point for America: crack down hard on the fascists or they will use whatever was done as part of a persecution narrative.
Btw this makes Mitch McConnell Paul von Hindenburg… the senile kingmaker (or Fuhrermaker in this case)
At some point the US needs to just accept that it’s always been broken. Every time something happens media comes out acting like everything was perfectly fine until this very recent thing happened.
That shithole country is a never-ending slog of pain and suffering.
everything was perfectly fine until this very recent thing happened.
And it is all perfectly fine again as soon as it doesn’t generate enough engagement for them any more.
Nobody ‘broke America’. It’s working perfectly as designed. This shit goes back 250 years, but a lot of people are just now waking up to the reality.
I understand that it may be a hard pill to swallow for Americans, but the truth is simple. The USA was founded as an empire and functioned as a terror state for pretty much all of its history.
If you didn’t know it, then it’s probably because it poured billions of dollars into mass propaganda, kidnapping and jailing journalists, as well as utterly destroying any country that dared to oppose it.
None of this started with Trump. Not a single thing. It has been the standard policy long before Trump was born. He just stopped pretending otherwise. In its entire history, the USA has had maybe 2 or 3 presidents that were not serious war criminals.
The core issue is not Trump, or the republican party, or the oligarchs, or even capitalism. The core issue is the United States’ existence. The only solution is to either radically transform the country, ideally dividing all states into independent countries, or to get rid of it entirely.
As long as the USA continues, world peace is physically impossible to achieve. There will not be peace, order, or justice in the world until the empire collapses.
It’s because after the Vietnam protest the wealthy parasites were like “woah, we are over-educating these peasants and their economic conditions are too accommodating and they are getting rebellious as a result”, so they’ve been on a 50 year mission to dissolve public education. Yes there’s also a propaganda component as they have turned all corporate media into state propaganda (what was it Mussolini said about merging corporations and the state?), but propaganda can’t be as effective if people are educated.
Republicans broke America. It’s been the plan since Reagan.
The extremely out of touch and radically right wing - in other words, everyday Republicans - started lying about this the very fucking day of the terrorist attack on our country. What some call rightfully call at least an insurrection, what some pussy news outlets call a “riot”, and what these assholes call a “day of peace” was really a terrorist attack coupled with a coup attempt.
i wasn’t sure whether the us would die immediately that day, as i watched the capitol under siege, or whether it would die slowly over the next 20 years. if stopped being a question, when started being a more legitimate one.
Sri Lankan writer and Indi Samarajiva’s essay is insightful
"The minority party threw chili powder at everyone in Parliament and took over by farce. Math, however, requires a majority and the courts kicked them out. They gave in. We’d been protesting for weeks and yay, we won. No. I didn’t know it at the time, but we had already lost. No one knew — but oh my God, what we lost. The legitimate government came back but it was divided and weak. We were divided and weak. We were vulnerable.
The coup was a farce at the time but how soon it turned to tragedy. They called it a constitutional crisis, but how soon it became a real one. Right now, the same thing is happening to you. I’m trying to warn you America. It seems stupid now, but the consequences are not."
Here’s an archive of his Medium post. http://stupidcoup.byethost10.com/?i=1
Republicans, all Republicans, broke America. This isn’t just on Trump and his Jan 6 seditionists.
And conservatives. And yes, even the “true conservatives”.
It broke WAY before January 6th.
We truly are the bad guys.
👨🏻🚀🔫👨🏻🚀
They just removed all pretense of what America is
This was just another step on the path. Maybe a little leap. I was watching with a coworker when I said, “they’re going to win the next election. Prison or not, this was his Beer Hall Putsch.”
