Why would you consider January 6 protests to be the turning point specifically? It was neither particularly violent nor a first regarding violation of norms. There was no attempt at rallying armed forces in a coup d’etat.
Could just as well consider something like the Tea Party circa 2010 a turning point in separatism.
I think people also forget that before January 6th we literally had:
* Separatist movements from Antifa and the Left set up autonomous zones within US cities[1].
* Multiple calls for violence from prominent Democrats and other Leftists towards Republican politicians, judges, and a sitting US President [2]
* Billions of damage and looting by Antifa and BLM [3]
* Multiple Antifa and BLM attacks on Federal buildings, including courthouses [4]
I could go on for quite a while, but my point is that any of these events alone is comparable to January 6th. It would have been unimaginable to a 2000s American that any of these things not only take place, but were allowed and even encouraged by a major US political party.
All of these were more violent, damaging, and should carry much stronger legal consequences for the separatists, terrorists, and perpetrators; but because the Democrat-backed groups did it, it is barely even remembered.
None of these were in any way remotely existential threats to actual political stability. Minor protests. The Axios article - a fairly right-ish folk - happily points out that the insurance claims for regional natural disaster like a wildfire season are way higher cost & ongoing, where-as $1-2B estimates over 2 years across the entire nation is not excellent but honestly not bad. And an estimate from a company with a vested interest in exaggerating claims
The gentleman doeth protest too much. The Whataboutisn here is the ridiculous talking points the right wing has had to instill fear & terror in their base. Telling a people they are under attack, that their way of life is in danger, that the cities are all burning & awful: that's propaganda, fear to get folks afraid and concerned and glued to the TV. As known bad guy stated, "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Some of these protests & situations have been tense & ugly & unruly; yes. Their cost wasn't nothing. But there's just so little to fear here. These were mild inconveniences in any broad scope. More generally the false equivalence at large here doesn't sit right with me at all, seems wild. The decorum on the right has severely degraded, to where the party can't even whip itself. The presence of violent & extremist rhetoric is shockingly prevalent & ongoing, from a wide cross section of elected & nominated people. It's inconceivable to imagine a threat from the left now, to see a cycle where the left is broadly working themselves up towards a crisis point. There is no left threat. We've already experienced a major attack from the right & many seem to be campaigning on a platform of only further extremism.
It's the closest thing we've seen to the Beer Hall Putsch, an event that was also so ineptly-orchestrated as to appear comical to many, that had no immediate effect on most peoples' daily lives, and that also led to grossly inadequate punishment for the perpetrators.
Possibly. But the Beer Hall Putsch was a (relatively) highly organized attempt by a militarized organization to a achieve some very specific goals (even though the coup attempt itself was a complete failure since it only took the army a couple of hours to stop it). It wasn't even necessarily such a big deal at the time, the nazis remained an insufficient fringe party for years (until the Great Depression hit).
IMHO Jan 6th was a lot closer to something like the "13 Vendémiaire" just of course with no Napoleon, much lower scale and a lot less violent. In the sense that it was a generic insurrection than an actual coup attempt.
But the Beer Hall Putsch was a (relatively) highly organized attempt by a militarized organization to a achieve some very specific goals (even though the coup attempt itself was a complete failure since it only took the army a couple of hours to stop it). It wasn't even necessarily such a big deal at the time, the nazis remained an insufficient fringe party for years (until the Great Depression hit).
It seems like you meant to start that sentence with "And" rather than "But." January 6 was organized at the highest levels of the executive branch, which is in command of the US military. We can thank our lucky stars that the executive branch was populated by bumbling fools at the time, and that no major economic crisis was in play. But these factors won't always work in our favor as Americans.
It's hard to avoid seeing a disturbing resemblance between the Brown Shirts and groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Enrique Tarrio and Ernst Röhm would have a lot to talk about if you locked them in the same cell. They were both betrayed by the personality cults they fought for... which, after all, were chartered to eliminate people like them.
wizardrobe didn't say it wasn't a violation of norms. Said it wasn't the first violation of norms. (Mind you, I don't know what specific previous violations wizardrobe had it mind...)
It's like, in Rome, Caesar wasn't the first violation of norms. The Gracchi were. Then came Marius and Sulla. Sulla restored the norms and retired - but the precedent of violating the norms had already been set. 19 years later came the first triumvirate. 11 years after that came the civil war.
This is America. This shit happens. A mob just tried to storm the White House last month: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-771751. The Capitol just happens to have no real security (it never had—my wife used to sneak into the Congressional subway system all the time). It’s been bombed at least twice.
So you're equating a few outliers trying to get attention, with an armed mob of thousands — summoned, dispatched, and then egged on by the sitting POTUS.
> Are you trying to say if only a few outliers bomb a building is somehow ok?
No. That's false-dichotomy thinking, along the lines of, "It HAS to be either A or B, and it's not B, so it MUST be A."
> Or because they were far left terrorist its nothing to worry about?
No. They're both bad. But:
1. The BLM rioting was mostly spontaneous and rag-tag, whereas Jan. 6 was orchestrated by the then-Commander in Chief of the U.S. armed forces, aided and abetted by his acolytes in and out of government (including outsiders such as the Proud Boys); and
2. The societal risks to democratic governance differed enormously. Unlike the BLM rioting, Jan. 6 could conceivably have played out like the October Revolution in the Russia of 1917, where an armed Leninist minority seized power and displaced the Kerensky provisional government that had itself taken control in the wake of the February Revolution. [0]
> I wonder why they [BLM rioters] are otherwise organized and have leadership and full approval of the party which is currently in power?
I don't think you can support that contention with, y'know, evidence. Keep in mind that some — not all — of the so-called BLM arson incidents were later found to have been done as false-flag operations by far-right extremist types [0] or as plain old insurance fraud. [1]
What do you mean without evidence? You are contesting BLM has leadership? They have a website, you can check it out. Regarding the democratic party support, there are a lot of videos from cnn and other networks interviews where visible member give their support to BLM.
You're painting with a broad brush: "BLM" ≠ "rioting."
EDIT: From a 2020 Trump Administration report: "President Donald Trump has blamed leftwing extremist groups for instigating nights of looting and violence in cities across the United States, but an intelligence assessment offers limited evidence that organized extremists are behind the turmoil. [¶] In part of a June 1 internal intelligence assessment of the protests seen by Reuters, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials said most of the violence appears to have been driven by opportunists." [0]
>> You're painting with a broad brush: "BLM" ≠ "rioting."
And you don't see yourself doing the same to the "other" side?
>> but an intelligence assessment offers limited evidence that organized extremists are behind the turmoil
"limited evidence"
If you have ever read a book about communist revolutions or by chance even lived in a a country which had a violent leftist takeover of power, you would have recognized the tactics and methods of those takeovers in BLM protests.
> Unlike BLM rioting or bombing of the capitol by the far left terrorist they didn't do any property damage or attack other people on the street.
Oh. I guess that makes it OK for the armed right-wing mob to try to seize control of the national government — and to go looking for the sitting VP and Speaker of the House, seemingly with lynching in mind.
(Leftist bombing? You mean by the Weather Underground in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War? That doesn't excuse it by any means, course, but it's so old as to be irrelevant to today's discussion.)
You are the one claiming leftist violence is just a fluke, just kids having fun with robbing, beating and arson. At the same time claiming a much smaller right-wing transgression is the end of the world. The are an examples of right-wing terrorist actions that are much much more despicable and truly destructable. Unlike you I have no problem condemning either side when they are wrong.
>> That doesn't excuse it by any means, course, but it's so old as to be irrelevant to today's discussion.
You must be kidding. Should we also not talk about people and ideology that brought us world war 2, since it has been even longer then the Vietnam war?
>There was no attempt at rallying armed forces in a coup d’etat.
What are you talking about? There most certainly was, and a successful one at that. The mob had firearms and pipe bombs and a wide variety of melee weapons. They smashed their way into the building. Rioters intended to hold lawmakers captive and planned to execute the vice president. Several people died.
The sitting president led a mob to levy war against the United States. The fact that it was ineffective doesn't matter.
He called for peace and then later for the mob to leave.
A generous to the other side reading of events would be it was a suggestive display of power, that he could rally even more later. Kind of like his perfect phone call being pitched as a thinly-veiled mafioso threat.
Real coups attempts involve officers rally elements to decapitate attentive movements, leaders, non-supporters.
In no honest reality was the mob action on the Capitol anything other than a nuisance. A police department from a city the size of DC could put down a majority unarmed mob with less-than-lethal and more-than-lethal assets.
And even if the mob magically overpowers the police department, the Nasty Girls would put them down and the inauguration ceremony would proceed as normal or be ignored and Biden installed as needed.
Your anonymous account and dishonest retelling (the pipe bombs were not at the Capitol) are nothing but a thinly veiled political troll. Go away.
Sure but it was a disorganized mob rather than a real coup attempt.
Of course the Pentagon's reluctance to send in the National Guard until there was an > 0% chance that the governor of Virginia would order an "invasion" (with the consent of the city mayor) was pretty concerning but incompetence rather than some conspiracy seems like more likely explanation.
I was honestly at first reading what you said thinking "oh really, I didn't know that. I need to look into this, sounds like it was way worse than portrayed" until you said that. Somebody having a stroke is not the same thing as someone being beaten to death or shot. Even saying "several people died" demonstrates a disingenuous disposition, you have to deliberately avoid going into detail to make your point. The only person that died as a result of the actions there was a woman named Ashley Babbit who was shot by US capitol police.
Given that, I ask you, with all these firearms and pipe bombs and a real attempt at insurrection, how come nobody fired or detonated them?
One Union boy died, unfortunately, but we gave better than we got!
The people who were shot were killed to defend the capitol and were given ample warning. Ashley Babbitt, for instance, was trying to break down a door.
I love how when I ask that same question, people like asdfgionio [1] obviously do a quick search and find (contrary to what they were told immediately afterwards) that no Capitol police was, in fact, killed during the riot. They either shut up or try to double down. I then point to Officer Sicknick's autopsy results and that usually gets them to shut up.
[1] Who I can only describe, based on his comment, as a Union Army LARPer; "We", indeed. (Actual war reenactors go to great lengths to get the uniforms, gear, and battles right; I doubt asdfgionio has ever seen a battlefield not published by EA.) I've seen several other such instances, of Redditors and such bravely proclaiming how "they" will lead another Sherman's march through states that commit the unpardonable sin of voting for the wrong candidate.
Oh that's what that was, a reference to the civil war? I was wondering what he was talking about, "union guy". Man, these guys really live in a different world than the rest of us.
I was curious about it too because as far as I knew nobody else died from it besides the woman who was shot by capitol police. Every time I think I'm about to learn something new about J6 I don't.
> I was curious about it too because as far as I knew nobody else died from it besides the woman who was shot by capitol police. Every time I think I'm about to learn something new about J6 I don't.
Sicknick's death by stroke the day after the riot was widely attributed to some injury from the incident, despite his having told his family that he had not been injured in the first place. That's why he received the equivalent of a state funeral. That's also why the coroner specifically looked for evidence of trauma causing the stroke, either from a head injury or exposure to tear gas, and specifically ruled out both possibilities in his report. But this still doesn't prevent the gullible from prattling on about how "many" policemen were killed, or that the ravenous mob of rioters were armed with everything but a tactical nuke.
(I think this is also why we haven't yet seen a breathless best-selling account of "The Day Trump Tried to Overthrow the Government", or a Netflix docudrama. Any such work with a pretense of accuracy would have to depict, well, not much beyond 150 idiots invading a public space, refusing to obey Capitol Police's orders, and causing some mayhem until one unarmed rioter is finally shot after an inexplicable delay. No grenades/pipe bombs being detonated, no politicians being lynched, no policemen being fatally beaten by a mob.)
As I wrote elsewhere:
> Had Capitol Police as a whole done their job and used their training and weapons to stop the invaders in the first place, a great deal of trouble would have been avoided while more rioters would have been shot (which I have no problem with). Why they did not do their job is something that I trust will be answered one day.
OK, now we see just how rational your justification for your position is. Terrorists? It's like when MAGA people call Democrats child molester demon worshippers. Are you even interested in genuine discourse at all?
OK, ya got me: You managed to find one case from 2017 involving one Dem state senator (who was promptly yanked from all her committee assignments after her comment and "chose" not to run for reelection). Oh, and you found a bunch of rants from comedians, actors, and other powerless publicity-seeking hotheads — who can be found in all walks of life and of all political persuasions. Did you find anything in, say, the past couple of years?
Wow. I know perhaps this makes sense from a non-American perspective, but as an American, January 6 was incredibly violent. I think some people forget that this isn't normal.
I am an American and I don’t think it was particularly violet. There were 4 deaths. Not 400 or 40 (not like I wanted there to be more). But pearl clutching over some people protesting where they shouldn’t have when Congress wasn’t in session is just silly.
>I am an American and I don’t think it was particularly violet. There were 4 deaths.
There was one death. One. An unarmed rioter named Ashly Babbit who was shot by Capitol Police well after the riot's start.
One Capitol Police member, Officer Sicknick, died of a stroke the day afterwards, but the coroner specifically looked for signs of his either being hit on the head, or exposed to tear gas, as causes, and concluded that neither was true.
Had Capitol Police as a whole done their job and used their training and weapons to stop the invaders in the first place, a great deal of trouble would have been avoided while more rioters would have been shot (which I have no problem with). Why they did not do their job is something that I trust will be answered one day.
Could just as well consider something like the Tea Party circa 2010 a turning point in separatism.
For the modern era, at least.