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Daily thread - United States 2021 transition of power - January 14
This thread is posted daily - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
President Trump has reportedly instructed his aides to cease payments to his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani following weeks of efforts aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election
I am completely shocked. There is no possible way we could have foreseen this.
George Washington University has a page tracking all charges filed so far related to the invasion of the Capitol
Oh, damn. Thanks for that link. I have just been scouring the https://www.justice.gov/news and https://www.justice.gov/usao/pressreleases for ones related to the Capitol riots/insurrection. I had no idea they made a specific page for it. That will save me a bunch of time.
Newly-elected GOP congresswoman says she’ll file articles of impeachment against Biden on Jan. 21
What the actual fuck. This farcical bullshit from Republicans is never going to end, is it? <exasperated sigh>
Marjorie Taylor Greene is basically Internet Conspiracy Theories: The Congresswoman. I'm sure there's going to be a lot more, uh... interesting stuff coming from her for however long she stays in Congress.
As soon as they get a moment to coordinate they settle on a bald-faced lie to validate whatever they’re doing. It will always happen because our media overlords insist on legitimizing lying as just a difference of opinion or perspective.
I was kind of wondering if/when they'd be doing this .. day 1's definitely a record, eh? I wonder if they'll try filing impeachments against all possible future Democratic presidents just for safety's sake.
It's not, sadly. I don't even know the balm for this any more. Honestly, I think the cure would involve some pretty authoritarian shit as well.
Found this interesting:
Beau of the Fifth Column
Let's talk about Trump's second impeachment and McConnell....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x-lvlZiIZw
One week later, what do Americans make of the Capitol attack?
The only worry I have with that survey is, when the majority of Republicans answered that the Capitol insurrection was "bad" or "tragic", and are "disappointed, angry, or depressed"... do they think and feel those things because it was disgraceful behavior by Trump supporters (like most Dems do), or only because it failed? I really hope they are coming from the same place as Dems are about this, but given the state of things, and the fact that 70% of Rs believe Antifa was involved despite no evidence to support that, I'm sadly not very hopeful that is the case. Maybe I'm just being overly pessimistic though.
You're not being pessimistic. I actually cut out some heavily editorialized comments I had originally made in favor of posting the link on its own.
The fact that 70% of Republicans believe that antifa were involved with the Capitol attack means that misinformation is working, and it's working well. I don't know what to do with this. I don't know how you counteract it. People I know -- in real life -- believe this. People I know -- in real life -- won't hear me if I try to talk to them about it because any attempt at countering just further reinforces their belief. It's like trying to pull out a splinter but you end up just driving it further in.
I had an extensive conversation with my conservative Christian mother about the events of the past week. She is not a Trump supporter, but nearly all of her friends are. For the good of their relationships she has stopped discussing politics with them for the most part, but she said this week she asked many of them, individually, if they believe the election results were fraudulent. All of them said yes.
She described to me how isolated she feels from them, and how difficult it is for her not to judge them. Her exact words were "it is very hard for me to love them right now", and hearing that about broke my heart. Misinformation is cannibalizing her closest personal relationships with people she has known and cared about deeply for decades of her life.
When I saw the numbers in this poll, my heart sank, because it feels like at this point we're fighting the tide. Misinformation is mainstream. It is not a fringe belief. In certain populations, it is a majority belief. And it's self-innoculating against opposition. My mom's friends won't even listen to her -- a fellow Republican -- when she counters falsehoods. They're definitely not listening to me -- her gay leftist son. We wouldn't even be able to start to have the conversation in the first place.
I'm surprised that only 60% of Democrats disagree with the statement that antifa was involved and 15% agree.
I think the most notable result however is that 2/3rds of Democrats think that the Capitol rioters represent most Trump supporters. Given 7/10 Republicans think antifa was in the riots, I wonder if treating Republican voters as ideological enemies first and people second might actually take hold within large sectors of the Democratic party's electorate. (Well, at least the parts that haven't been discriminated by Republicans for a while.)
This hinges on how they interpret the word “represent” and we can’t ask them what they meant by that. Knowing the original wording of the survey question would help a little.
Fortunately they link to a (monstrous) PDF telling us that at the beginning of the article:
They also have data for a few demographics individually.
Thanks! I guess we’re not going to find out what people meant by “represent.” Maybe some other survey will ask different questions.
FBI arrests Arkansas man facing charges in US Capitol riot accused of beating DC officer with American flag
Those are some amazingly poor excuses.
Those excuses are perfect. Some day there is going to be a history book citing this man.
A Reservation for Insurrection - Paul thought his Airbnb guests were tourists, until he heard: “We stormed the Capitol.”
The Washington Post has a long read, based on interviews with the police, giving an idea of the scale of the riot.
How battered D.C. police made a stand against the Capitol mob
[..]
I hope the events of the last week have opened more Americans eyes to the reality of how deeply ingrained racism is in police culture, and has been for a very long time. I don't know what percentage of police (and armed forces) hold white supremacist or other racist viewpoints and keep quiet about them but the answer is likely far higher than what most would expect.
I think relegating it to "police culture" is missing the big picture. I don't mean to downplay systemic racism within police departments, but this isn't a police-only thing. The police just happens to be an appealing local power structure for racists to infiltrate because it is one of the few public venues where racists can physically enact their fantasies by leveraging the power imbalance inherent to in-person police vs. citizen interactions. These same racists are not only availing themselves of the power structures of local police forces. They are availing themselves of any power structure that isn't categorically hostile to them—and to the discredit of the US, that remains a lot of power structures: local government, state government, federal government, local police, state police, federal law enforcement like ICE, etc.
Look, there are literally cops on both sides of this. Quick thinking by a cop probably prevented a shootout in the Senate, but there were off-duty-cops in the crowd, and the decisions of the leadership are suspicious.
It's a terrible, fucked-up situation, but after reading about everything that happened, summing it up as "fuck US Capitol police" is stupid, inflammatory nonsense. Have you learned nothing from this incident about why we need Capitol police? Preferably without any disloyal members, and figuring out how to make that happen is a big problem.
We should at least be grateful to those who did their job.
So most of the police at the George Floyd protests were Federal cops, and they largely wouldn’t even show insignia indicating which part of federal law enforcement they were with. Capitol Police is more like a group of very well funded security guards or mall cops. Those other federal resources were deliberately held back by the Trump administration specifically to “teach a lesson.”
I suspect, after the heat from the BLM protests, the Capitol Police wanted to do a bit of a “see how you libtards like it if we don’t clamp down” thing by deliberately understaffing. They probably didn’t expect it to go as bad as it did because, of course they didn’t.
I'm wondering what you've read about federal resources being deliberately held back? What I've read made it seem suspicious, but still a mystery.
Sure. It was clear Trump didn't order them. And there are other reports that he was glued to the TV and excited about what was happening until he noticed how "low class" his fans looked, at which point he lost his enthusiasm.
They denied support at least 6 times during, and in advance of the riots.
Yes, why they denied support is the part that still seems like a mystery. I hope that will come out in an investigation eventually.
At least they were stopped before they got to members of Congress. There are probably lots of improvements to be made, but what structure other than something that looks something like a police force (but hopefully not racist and disloyal) would be able to turn back the lynch mob?
I mean, sure, more police and a fence would help. Maybe nobody would have been killed?
Something like the military, for example. Ultimately the problem with the police is the lack of accountability -- police officers are afforded extra rights that other civilians aren't. In contrast, service members have their rights restricted, and disobedience is often met with severe consequences.
(Of course, the military is ultimately under the direction of the President, so it'd have to be something like the military except beholden to Congress. And I'm not proposing that we should use the military, just that it's an alternate structure.)
You might compare with the Secret Service, which isn't military, though agents are often ex-military.
Well, we agree on something then! I think it's very much worth discussing, for real.
Honestly I feel the opposite. The more I read the more I agree with "Fuck the Capitol Police". Like... Just that ProPublica article from the top level comment is enough to say "fuck the Capitol Police", and then there's all the rest of the details surrounding this event which just make them even worse.
Did you skip over the part of the article where there was leadership saying they were trying to root out the racists? There were apparently plenty of people who knew there was a problem, but something is lacking in attempts to fix it.
Maybe power has shifted enough now that they can actually do it.
The entire rest of the article is members of the force saying things aren't improving. Like the still-ongoing lawsuit started in 2001 and it is now 2020. That's 19 years its been a known problem. And the rest of the article quotes multiple black officers making statements that things aren't getting better. The Capitol Police don't get credit for black members making attempts to fix things and then the Police ignoring it for 19 years. The black officers held 16 demonstrations between 2013-2018.
They literally say that the Capitol Police didn't take black officer's complaints seriously. So yes. Fuck them. They don't get credit for black officer's work when the black officers work was against them.
But the black police officers making these complaints are also police. There are police on both sides. I think the black police officers should get credit for their own work, and we shouldn't pretend they aren't part of the organization too.
I think the difference is that there are clear sides in a union-management dispute. (I think that's one of the more unfortunate things about it, but the lines are clear.)
It seems less clear with racism since it's more like internal corruption. Like, which side is management really on? I doubt most managers want the workers to be doing racist stuff, and I doubt that racists act that way with management support. Well, maybe it depends on the manager.
It’s sounding like the management in that case was racist itself. That kind of endemic racism doesn’t persist if management isn’t okay with it.
I don't know, not having studied or having any connections to police work. It seems plausible that it might be driven underground, but hard to root out?
Other possibilities to consider:
There are lots of scenarios. We are outsiders. Every organization has internal politics, and we don't know how it works or how screwed up it is.
I agree with you that we need police and that it’s important that we highlight and support those who choose to uphold their duties and the law, particularly when they do so in the face of death or potential harm. That is not something I take lightly at all. I’ve also spoken out against inflammatory language here on Tildes on multiple occasions, so it feels a little weird for me to be okay with this, but I think it’s important to note that “fuck the police” has a long-standing history as its own specific protest phrase against racism and brutality in law enforcement. It’s not what I would choose to say here, but I do think it’s different from other examples of inflammatory discourse because it has a well-established cultural context. I take it less at face value and more as shorthand for placing the events at the Capitol within a history of racist abuses enacted by law enforcement (though this event was noteworthy not for continuing the pattern but for confirming the inverse).
I guess, but I'm thinking of that sanewashing post I shared a while back about whether "defund the police" really means "defund the police." I don't think having inflammatory slogans stand for more reasonable positions makes sense? At best, it's begging to be misinterpreted.
That’s definitely a valid point, and I have the exact same complaint about “defund the police”. The difference to me between “fuck” and “defund” is that there is a much bigger cultural precedent to the former that there isn’t for the latter. I’ve heard many iterations of “fuck the police” over the years — almost always as a response to egregious injustices — but “defund” was new to me this year and was almost immediately dizzying for my inability to pin down its actual meaning. Presumably it does take time for things like that to gain their cultural foothold and settle into shared meaning, but much of the “defund” discussion I saw felt almost like it was in bad faith. “Fuck” has a much more clear and consistent meaning to me.
That said, I’m really only mentioning this to shine a contextual light rather than as a full-throated defense. Not only do I not subscribe to “fuck the police” as a philosophy, but the original NWA song also has a homophobic line about whether or not police are “fags”, so this isn’t exactly something I’d be thrilled to throw my weight behind even if I did agree with its message. For me it’s mostly about not standing in its way rather than giving it an endorsement. It’s usually used by people of color as a way of expressing anger at the unfair treatment they receive and the disproportionate harms levied on them by the police. Even if I don’t endorse the specific form of messaging, I still think it’s important that their message be heard.
(Emphasis added.) I guess I agree with that part, because I'm not sure what it would mean to make for it. There's no scoreboard where we give them points when they do something good and take away points when they do something bad; sometimes we talk like that but it's a metaphor. A lot of the capitol police earned their paycheck that day and then some, but this doesn't mean the problems don't need to be fixed. If anything they're more urgent.
This is too binary. There were definitely failures, but mostly they didn't give up, they kept fighting. That's important. Lots of times things go wrong and the rank-and-file still has to deal with the consequences. In theory, there shouldn't be any need for heroics if the leadership did its job, but there are a lot of things that should never have happened.
This is again, rounding things off to a single binary value, success or failure. To get slightly more in-depth about it, they succeeded at protecting the lawmakers. Barely. Not how it should have happened, but still.
If you make me pick between "success" and "failure" overall, I'm not going to choose "success." But I don't think it's all that enlightening. There's more to writing a postmortem than that.
Like, every plane crash is a failure, but it doesn't solve the mystery of why it happened.
A lot of Trump supporters deny the idea of systematic racism in America. The fact that police officers can be openly racist at work for years without repercussions pretty much proves it’s existence, iMO.
$5 says Trump comments on how small Biden's inauguration crowd size is. Oh wait, no Twitter....