DC Unrest Megathread

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It's used by the subset of the Alt-right community who post Pepe the Frog memes.

Thirded. I hate that I know what that is.

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https://twitter.com/parlertakes/status/1350993674818248708

This is what white privilege looks like. I'm surprised they weren't offered tea and sandwiches.

What do you want the cop to do here? Start a physical fight that he'd lose? Start shooting people?

[LtNOWIS]

https://twitter.com/parlertakes/status/1350993674818248708

This is what white privilege looks like. I'm surprised they weren't offered tea and sandwiches.

What do you want the cop to do here? Start a physical fight that he'd lose? Start shooting people?

If they were left-wing protesters, they would be shot dead.

If they were black or Muslim, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the Senate chamber to begin with.

Right... you might have had the optimal response to this overall scenario, which would be a prepared security force with ample amounts of manpower, barriers, and less-lethal munitions to hold the perimeter.

But in the imaginary scenario where there are several left wing guys and 1 police officer there in the Senate chamber, with serious violence and going on elsewhere,  there is no good solution. He can shoot them in cold blood, try to hold 5 guys at gunpoint and risk getting flanked, start arresting 1 guy, while the other dudes get riled up and attack him, etc. Or he can just hand out there and make sure they don't cause further trouble until they leave and are arrested later, which is what I think he did (without looking up the full video).

[LtNOWIS]

George Washington University has a nice database of all of the court records related to the January 6 siege. So far there are 112 federal cases, and roughly 30 DC local cases. A good start by the feds so far.

https://extremism.gwu.edu/Capitol-Hill-Cases

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How does a Navy Seal trained on disinformation warfare fall for this?

From Navy SEAL to Part of the Angry Mob Outside the Capitol
The presence in Washington of a longtime member of the Navy SEALs who was trained to identify misinformation reflects the partisan politics that helped lead to the assault.

A Navy SEAL falling into this rabbit hole is less surprising than a regular sailor, given their reputation for right wing idiocy and other unprofessional nonsense.

[LtNOWIS]

A lot of the blame for this stupid dispute comes from media people who couldn't wait 10 minutes for AOC to keep telling her story before sending out tweets. By the time she got to the twist ending that the guy banging on doors and yelling was a Capitol Police officer instead of a rioter, they already reported that rioters were at her door. Apparently there was even a misleading Today Show segment on it, per Haley Byrd Wilt's breakdown of the news coverage. (Article link).

So Mace is correcting a widespread misconception from the media, and then AOC thinks she's attacking her, and they have this petty slapfight on Twitter.

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No charges have been recommended for the cop who shot the lady whose name I’m not gonna say.

Good. They were trespassing and warned. He did his job.

Really amazing how Jan 6 just erased an entire summer of advocacy for Black Lives Matter views on use of force by police.

Right, because Breonna Taylor was totally trying to break into the capitol and possibly assassinate members of Congress. I forgot.

I get that being a contrarian on literally everything is your schtick, but this is tedious at best and you know it.

Do you agree that "they were trespassing and warned" is a sufficient reason for police to shoot someone?   It's pretty clear to me that liberals would only apply that standard to redneck deplorables.   Or maybe a scary homophobic muslim.
 

Congress isn't any ordinary building. And she was doing a whole lot more than simply trespassing. Hundreds of others were trespassing but only she was killed.

Yeah she was actively trying to break through an inner door they were protecting. Because it was close to members of Congeess. I think a lot of people here would be fine with police or security officers killing people in those circumstances, and they would be for the protective details for many other types of senior officials or types of federal buildings.

Imagine you go back in time to 2020 and ask someone, "So, you're against the police killing people right? But what if some crazed intruder busted through the Pentagon perimeter, and the police were too busy dealing with other stuff to stop them. They're smashing through an inner door right near some generals. Should the Pentagon Police shoot them??"

People would respond "well yeah, then they should, if they somehow haven't already shot them. But that is barely related to what we're talking about. We're talking about cops on the street or serving warrants. People doing actual law enforcement roles. We're not talking about federal security police whose main mission is to secure one building or campus, and how they would respond to an actually determined intruder."

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So, the "zip tie guy" Eric Munchel will be imprisoned until his trial. A Magistrate judge in Tennessee said that, since there was no evidence he ever tried to hurt anyone or break any property at the Capitol, he wasn't a threat to the community. But the government appealed. And a District Court judge in DC (a Reagan appointee) pointed out that, while that's true, he did threaten something more important than any property or individuals. By trying to subvert an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power, he threatened the republic itself.

It's gratifying to see a judge take that line or reasoning, and I hope the other DC District Court judges feel the same way when they preside over the actual trials.

Opinion is here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20485645/2-17-21-order-munchel-eisenhart-detention.pdf