Reviewing the stand

After all that went down Wednesday afternoon, I needed a few days to clear my head from the information overload. (The odds and ends post that came up Thursday was actually written last weekend.)

What blew me away initially was the number of people attending – some accounts stated there were a million people there. Could be true, might not. Let’s say for the sake of my next few paragraphs there were a half-million.

I also want to preface those paragraphs by referencing a memory. Back in November 2009 I went to a Capitol Hill rally dubbed the “Emergency House Call” and as part of that I (and hundreds of others) traipsed through the various House office buildings – many of them visiting my representative at the time, the “blue dog” Democrat Frank Kratovil. But we didn’t visit inside the Capitol. (I’ve actually been in that building once, but as one of those “smelly tourists” Harry Reid used to complain about. It was back in the summer of 2009, as it turned out – that was a big year in my political activism.)

That “Emergency House Call” was probably the closest I’ve come to something like what some of the people did on Wednesday (minus the property damage, of course.) Yet let’s say 5,000 people ransacked the Capitol building – first of all, there were over 50 arrests (and counting, that I’m aware of) so even that subset of 1% of all protestors had its own violent subset of less than 2 percent.

(As an aside, I can’t deny that Richard Barrett, the grandfatherly protestor photographed sitting with his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, reminds me of a old-aged Calvin. Maybe Hobbes was somewhere off camera.)

I certainly don’t want to say that these 0.2% of protestors were in the right, and certainly it seems that the most hardcore Trump backers have learned their lessons from the black bloc protestors that ran wild this summer. (Then again, the Capitol is still standing.) And while there are people who swear that Antifa was all over the violent part, the bios of those arrested seem to indicate otherwise. They represented the white supremacist side of incidents like the one we had in Charlottesville a few years ago.

I’m all for letting the long arm of the law deal with them; unfortunately it’s going to cost many of those people who were arrested their careers, even if they weren’t in the white supremacist category. (In particular, the legislator from West Virginia that resigned after livestreaming himself there.) It also cost Ashli Babbitt and Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick their lives. (I don’t know if the other three who died in the overall protest died inside the Capitol or not.)

And it turned out to be for naught – in fact, any traction the cause may have received was reversed by the riot.

In the aftermath, it would seem that the era of Trump is going to be remembered for this and the pandemic as opposed to the strong economy and significant efforts at world peace it achieved with the Abraham Accords, and that’s a shame. Then again, that’s what a somewhat volatile New York personality and 90-plus percent negative coverage by the media will get you, I suppose.

Yet what worries me even more is the overreaction by Democrats and Big Tech. Impeachment with less than two weeks left in his term? Yeah, I get that impeachment and conviction would preclude Trump from running in 2024 but the Democrats have already figured out ways to rig the election so why worry? After all, the reason we got Trump in the first place was because the media could use him to gather eyeballs and he was going to be the candidate that would take the entire GOP down with him when Hillary was crowned empress in 2016. The media and Democrats (but I repeat myself) were happy to promote Donald Trump then because they thought he was the weakest GOP link. Guess again.

On the other hand, I have to admit the social media giants have the perfect right to yank whoever they want from their platform. It doesn’t mean they should on some trumped-up charge of encouraging an insurrection – people, if there really was an insurrection you would have had hot and cold bleeding politicians. Let’s just say their standard of enforcing terms of service seem a little arbitrary and capricious and leave it at that.

Finally, the wars and rumors of wars are getting intense. Has the Insurrection Act been implemented? How about that Executive Order? Anything out of the mainstream is now being micro-analyzed as evidence the Deep State is either beginning its takeover or being dismantled by the heroic Donald Trump, depending on who you talk to.

We still have 10 days until Donald Trump’s term comes to an end. Why do I believe it’s going to be a bumpy ride? Aside from that, I’m still not quite sure what to think about the events of the last two-plus months (yes, it has been that long since the election.) I guess I will just prepare as best I can for the worst and pray for the best.