Category: The Deplorables

Capitol Riot: “No police could be seen anywhere”

A first hand witness account from J Michael Waller, Senior Analyst for Strategy, Center for Security Policy. I’ve added it to the previous post, but it deserves its own;

A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in. Among them were younger twentysomethings wearing new Trump or MAGA hats, often with the visor in the back, showing no enthusiasm and either looking at the ground, or glowering, or holding out their phones with outstretched arms to make videos of as many faces as possible in the crowd. Some appeared awkward, the way someone’s body language inadvertently shows the world that he feel like he doesn’t fit in. A few seemed to be nursing a deep, churning rage.
 
They generally covered their faces with cloth masks, as opposed to the pro-Trump people, few of whom wore masks at all. They walked, often hands in pockets, in clusters of perhaps four to six with at least one of them frequently looking behind. These outliers group looked like trouble. I presumed that these fake Trump protesters were Antifa or something similar. However, that entire afternoon I saw none of them act aggressively or cause any problems. At least, not from my vantage point.
 
A second outlier group also stood out. While many marchers wore military camouflage shirts, jackets, or pants of various patterns and states of wear and in all shapes and sizes, here and there one would see people of a different type: Wiry young men in good physical condition dressed neatly in what looked like newer camouflage uniforms with black gear, subdued patches including Punisher skulls, and helmets.
 
They showed tidiness and discipline. They strode instead of walked, moving at a more rapid pace than most of the people, sometimes breaking into a short jog, and generally keeping to the left side of Constitution Avenue in pairs of two or small groups of three. Unlike others in old military clothes who tended to be affable and talkative, these sullen men seemed not to speak to anyone at all. As we would see, they were the disciplined, uniformed column of attackers.

Read it all.

Related arrest: Mr. Mostofsky is a 34 year old registered Democrat and the son of a New York Judge. He is seen in the picture above dressed in fur, carrying a stick and wearing a bullet proof police vest he had stolen. Mostofsky is standing beside the man who carried a Confederate flag into the event. This indicates they possibly knew each other and both appear to be outsiders and leftist demons plotting to smear Trump supporters. (h/t burton)

NOTHING SEEMS TO BE WORKING

Axios;

Republicans across the U.S. are siding with President Trump over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — big time — according to a new Axios-Ipsos poll.
 
The state of play: A majority of Republicans still think Trump was right to challenge his election loss, support him, don’t blame him for the Capitol mob and want him to be the Republican nominee in 2024.

Capitol Riot: Evidence Of Preplanning

Instapundit;

Catherine Herridge, formerly of Fox News and more recently with CBS News, reports investigators think those pipebombs found at the RNC and DNC on January 6 may have been intended to divert law enforcement away from the Capitol itself at a crucial moment. That would also suggest somebody with a command and control structure for the planned riot.
 
Herridge also notes that the crucial window for understanding the timeline of January 6 events is between 12:45 and 1:15, before President Donald Trump finished his speech to the gathered protestors. If that is true, and there are abundant reasons to think it is, then it’s difficult to ascribe to Trump responsibility for inciting the riot.

Proving again the first rule of breaking events: nobody knows anything.

Update: Center for Security Policy;

The deadly riot at the US Capitol bore the markings of an organized operation planned well in advance of the January 6 joint session of Congress.
 
A small number of cadre used the cover of a huge rally to stage its attack. Before it began, I saw from my vantage point on the West Front of the Capitol, what appeared to be four separate cells or units…

Related: Our ruling class really wants us to be like China.

The Capitol Insurrection, A View from Inside

“We did it, we did it. We showed them that this is our house.”

This is essential viewing for a full understanding of what happened at the Capitol on January 6th. The interview lasts over 2 hours, and covers a number of topics. It’s helpfully timestamped by topic at the Youtube page. (Click on the description).

Jeremy Lee Quinn is an independent investigative journalist who describes himself as center-left and was in the crowd that breached the building. You can view video at Public Report, including this one.

Related: Analysis of Ashli Babbit Video Suggests Coordinated Actions

Showing Up To Riot

A venting of resentments;

Those who voted for Trump saw his electoral victory denied in 2016 by numerous loud voices calling for “resistance” as if the President elect were an invading foreign army – voices eagerly relayed and magnified by mass media, emphatically including pro-Tump media.
 
Then they saw his victory sullied by constantly repeated accusations of collusion with Russia from chairmen of Intelligence committees, and immediate ex-intelligence chiefs who habitually signalled that they were accusing Trump of being Putin’s agent because they had secret information, which, alas, they could not disclose. What they did do was to deplore Trump’s “subservience” to Putin on a weekly basis for four years, while refusing to entertain the possibility that in a confrontation with China it might be a good idea to overlook Putin’s sins, just as Nixon embraced Mao to counter the Soviet Union.

Edward Luttwak is author of ‘Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook’.

Discourse Engineering

James Lindsay; (Twitter thread, collated)

In no regard does “coup” apply here. Disruptive? Yes. Illegal? Yes. Bad? Yes. Violent? Yes. But they didn’t even have a coherent plan to stop what would have been their main target (certification of a vote, which could have happened again later anyway). It’s not even close.
 
The totality of evidence does not bear this out. Some of Trump’s rhetoric and some of his expressed views are favourable to those views, but he hasn’t ever actually applied any of that or gave any indication that he wanted to, even with a pandemic in his lap to justify it.
 
I spent years incorrectly arguing Trump was a tyrant. You’re not likely to convince me using arguments I’ve already worked through and seen for being wrong in myself. You’ll need real evidence, which I suppose could still arrive, but it hasn’t yet.
 
My own opinion remains that every single person in the United States who participated in riotous activity, say in the last 12-24 months (if we want limitations) should be prosecuted appropriately under the law, regardless of political affiliation or rationale.
 
If Justice isn’t blind, it isn’t Justice.
 
I said something similar today too. The form we’ll see today will look a lot more like what we presently see in China, but more advanced. Social credit will be the primary mode of social control. Wrong politik will get you bad credit, as will wrong travel and wrong association.
 
Five years ago, the media launched a campaign to define conservatives as “racists and white supremacists.”
 
Five days ago, they changed the terms to “seditionists and domestic terrorists.”
 
The first is to dehumanize the opposition; the second is to justify their repression.
 
It’s pretty important that you learn to see this “discourse engineering,” or, as Lyotard had it, “legitmation by paralogy,” when and where it occurs. The media is high enough on its own supply now that it believes it can do it more or less without limitations on its power.
 
The most dangerous part of believing they can do it without limitations on its power is that that is dangerously wrong and will therefore be “fixed” by using increasing amounts of force and coercion. This is what the slide into totalitarianism and atrocity looks like.
 
Another parallel example of exactly this is when radical Islamists (not all Muslims!) insist that Islam is “a religion of peace,” wherein what they mean is that when everyone believes THEIR NARROW THEOLOGY and submits to it, there will peace. Same, same, or very close.
 
The asymmetry is a crucial point to observe here too. They’re using Repressive Tolerance (link) as part of their paralogy. They’re going to “induce national calm NOW” by silencing their enemies and continuing to force their pseudo-reality onto everyone.

A related article here.

h/t RP

Social Disease

Daily Mail: Twitter saw its shares drop by 12 per cent Monday as the company braced for pro-Trump protesters outside its San Francisco headquarters.

It rebounded, but is still down 5+ and shaky.

More at Marketwatch;

Twitter shares are off 6.6% in Monday morning trading, while Facebook shares are down 3%. Shares of Apple Inc. AAPL, -1.92% and Alphabet Inc. GOOG, -1.52% GOOGL, -1.50%, both of which pulled right-wing social-media app Parler from their app stores citing lax moderation policies, are off 2.2% and 1.7%, respectively. Shares of Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -1.03%, which booted Parler from its AWS web-hosting platform, are down 1.4%.

“What if these weren’t fat LARP’ers, lost young men, and Q dummies?”

A portion of a Mike Cernovich thread collated, and slightly edited.

When Charlottesville happened, I begged guys not to go. They did what young men do – mock me as a weak old guy. I said they’d ruin their lives, and I’ve watched one after another get caught up. Some bad actors, and a lot just showed up not really understanding the implications.
 
It was like beating my head up against the wall. Warning people that events often sweep people away. “Caught up in the game” is a term you hear in law. Wrong place, wrong time. You’re maybe just curious, but you end up getting swept up in events. And then it’s over for you.
 
But from the young guy’s perspective, what’s the answer? There’s no escape value. It’s all, “Oh you’re broken because you’re a man. You have toxic masculinity.” The only socially offered fix is for men to become less like men and more like women.
 
Otherwise, they’re diseased.
 
I saw political violence coming because I understand men. ANTIFA is largely white men. That’s been proven over and over again. You’re a man, you want to live out Fight Club, and ANTIFA is a way to do this and basically get a free pass.
 
The counter to that is the Capitol.
 
Extremist researchers from Muslim world know that you have to offer a moderate solution, an off road. That when you call men terrorists, you drive them into radicalized groups. That research is being tossed out now in the West. Every man who has alternative view is a terrorist.
 
The incentives are to create more problems, that drives funding into “extremism research.” To raise money, you need more extremists! And yet that’s how you summon more of what you’re supposed to be militating against. The researchers know this, and they don’t care. It’s money.
 
I’ve said this consistently since at last 2015 – terrorism will become a way of life in the U.S. It’ll be like parts of Middle East. Because everything we learned about Islamic terrorism, that you don’t attack *all* Muslims, that you build up moderates, is being thrown away now.
 
The biggest mistake a society can make is to confirm the righteousness of zealots. That started with “Punch a Nazi,” where Nazi predictably grew to mean every Trump voter. Capitol rioters watched attacks and riots celebrated by media, and now they feel righteous, too.
 
The U.S. is poised for a post-911 crackdown on civil liberties – which was a disaster then and will be a bigger disaster now. You cannot enforce authoritarianism against 40% of the country. To do so is to incite a “civil war,” which won’t be what people think.
 
Capitol LARP’ers watched too much Bravehart and 1776 stuff. They are in an old model of war.
 
A current model of war will be 4GW, which is the worst possible way of having a war, because it never ends. You end up not with Balkanization, but the cartelization of society.
 
We are in unbelievably perilous times. Just as people who didn’t see Trump’s rise and dismissed it, because they know it all, think they can just put the boots down the necks of 40% of the country.
 
I just can’t believe what I am watching, and what will *obviously* happen. It’s not the Q people or fat LARP’ers I worry about. It’s that the oppression becomes so severe that you get what happened in Mexico. A Special Forces Group says, “F*ck this.”
 
Then what?
 
There is 0 reason to believe It Can’t Happen Here. We are not special. I won’t go into tactics, not only for reason to not educate bad people, but for others.
 
If you watched the Capitol storm you no doubt asked, “What if these weren’t fat LARP’ers, lost young men, and Q dummies?” What if this had been *real* guys?
 
If the attack on the Capitol had been real guys instead of fat middle aged men and Q boomers and aimless young men, it would have been *hundreds* of dead Congress members. That’s how vulnerable an open society is. That’s how fast civil society can disappear.
 
The Scalise attack, the Capitol attack, all of this shows that – thank God – it’s simply the case that real guys don’t want to do violence and domestic terrorism.
 
Anyone anything about solutions must start from there. As of now, real guys don’t do that. How do we preserve it?
 
I don’t have a lot of answers on how to preserve civil society, but I do know one fact. You *do not* preserve society by turning the state against 40% of the country.
 
This isn’t Soviet Union, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Mao’s China.

You should read the whole thing, while you still can.

Round Two

66% GOP wants Trump to run in 2024, 79% say election ‘stolen’.

The belief among President Trump’s supporters that the election victory was “stolen” through fraud has surged anew, driving 66% to urge the Republican to run in 2024 if Joe Biden is certified the winner.
 
A new survey for the communications and messaging firm Seven Letter found that 79% of Trump supporters believe that Democrats stole the election from Trump, even more than a similar Rasmussen Reports survey last week that put the number at 75%.
 
And as a result, 66% of supporters want the president to run again in 2024, which he has privately vowed to do. In the survey, he outdistanced Vice President Mike Pence and his son Donald Trump Jr.

And there’s plenty to motivate them. Biden’s welcome back of Obama era swamp creatures combined with the Republicans new foothold on redistricting lays the groundwork for major gains in 2022.

And it is not too early to herald what might best be described, if not as a wave, as the Trump Undertow of 2020.
 
Because, like an unseen riptide, this year’s results just handed the GOP an advantage many never thought possible. And it carried far away from shore Democratic hopes and dreams.
 
“Wait,” you say, “Trump lost the presidency.”
 
Yes, he did. But Trump, even as he lost, engineered a huge win for the GOP this month, and one that will echo through American politics as our once-a-decade reapportionment fights begin.
 
“On the eve of reapportionment, Republicans are now in a better position than they were after 2010,” Noah Rothman noted in Commentary. “Following those elections, Republicans controlled 54 of 99 state legislative chambers.” (Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral.)
 
That number is now 61.
 
If anything, Rothman understates the impact of the GOP domination of state legislatures. After the 2010 election, congressional redistricting lived in the shadow of a Supreme Court suspicious of gerrymandering. In one 2015 case, the court upheld the redistricting maps of Arizona’s absurdly partisan “citizens’ commission” by a 5-to-4 margin. Today, two of the five justices in the majority on that case have left the court. State legislatures now may do their redistricting work free of fear of new “tests” invented by the court to strike at their maps. Indeed, commissions of the sort that design districts in California, Ohio and Virginia may not be long for the books — a never-very-popular, post-Watergate-era reform whose era is now long over.
 
The new Supreme Court may be revisiting its 2015 decision very soon.
 
In nearly two dozen states, the congressional district mapping is safely in the hands of the GOP. That’s because Trump generated huge turnout in red states as well as blue, and Republicans did well down a lot of ballots.
 
It is ironic that Trump’s narrow losses in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin kept him from a second consecutive term. It wasn’t a conspiracy that cost Trump the White House but a terrible combination of bad timing — the vaccines he promised were announced a fortnight too late for them to impact voting — and bad polling. Polling directs resources, locates rallies, energizes or depresses turnout. If polling tells you Wisconsin is lost, Pennsylvania is competitive and other states are safe, when none of that is accurate, the consequences are disastrous.
 
The party Trump leads is reluctant to tilt at legal windmills, but it is eager for answers about why no one expected so many states to finish closely or projected House Republicans to pick up seats. The headline that read “Biden leads Trump by 17 points in Wisconsin” is what I’ll never forget, nor should the pollsters, the media or the experts.
 
Elected Republican leaders will rightly balk at asking state legislatures to overturn popular votes — as radical a “constitutional” innovation as packing the Supreme Court, and just as repugnant to rule-of-law conservatives. But the GOP nomination in 2024 will be very much Trump’s for the taking should his health and energy remain as they are now.
 
Whether he runs again, Trump has reset the stage for the decennial remaking of the maps on which lawmaking at every level of government depends. It’s a proper capstone for a first term — or a last.

More: “He is not going anywhere.”

The Tolerant Left

You will be made to pay;

For Leitch, the transition to private life did not go smoothly.
 
As parents and their children entered her clinics, she found herself dragged into discussions about her political views. In the interview, she at first said the interactions were positive, but when pressed acknowledged it was not always the case.
 
For parents to be concerned she had an “agenda” was not in the best interests of the children she wanted to help, Leitch said.
 
“It was beyond disruptive,” she said.
 
“For me personally, it was very uncomfortable. And I can’t imagine what it was like for the child.”
 
So, after encouragement from Canadian colleagues and after canvassing available jobs elsewhere, she settled on accepting a position as chief of pediatric orthopedic surgery at the children’s hospital of Mississippi and moved there last spring.

Via

New Rules

I shouldn’t admit to enjoying this, but I do.

https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1299909804173918208

 

Post developing with more from the Portland caravan as I find it, including a shooting in downtown that appears to have left one man (white) dead. Andy Ngo is the best starting point, as usual. . (just getting up to speed on this, I was busy with non-blogging stuff today).

The shooting was captured on livestream here. (18:02 mark)

The victim is being identified as a member of Patriot Prayer.

Update: The identity of the shooter (shown at a different time) is being tracked down by 4chan and others. [edited to remove false hit on the ID] Update — a different individual has been identified that seems to match the description.

Related — vehicles from Oregon keep showing up across the country, including Washington.

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