He had 88.7 million Twitter followers when banned. So, so close.
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It looks the part. Yes function is very different.
They were going to hang a small child!
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I think it’s actually a mistake to worry too much about what will or won’t discourage future right-wing terrorists or insurgents. Terrorism and insurgency are not, in and of themselves, threats to the security of a state. They can kill, they can destroy, they can assassinate, whatever, but never so much that the violence threatens the integrity of society. Rather, terrorism and insurgency are instrumental and performative. The acts of violence are intended to convince people that the state is impotent and to provoke responses that convince people that the state is illegitimate. To defeat the threat, the state needs to respond in a way that demonstrates its power and legitimacy.
From that perspective, the question is what punishments would a legitimate government hand out. I think charging this as a case of trespassing or property destruction or whatever is a very bad answer. If this was an ordinary protest, then I think those kinds of charges are the right ones. The message is that the protest itself is fine, but the rules will still be enforced. To treat this protest the same tells people that the offense was a property crime, and it very most certainly was not. To recap, the President of the United States stirred up a mob and sent it against the legitimately elected legislature to prevent that legislature from registering the results of an election. And possibly to assassinate the Vice President. And possibly with the connivance of persons unknown in the Capital Police and the DoD. And in the course of this assault the mob murdered a police officer trying to protect the legislature. None of that is hyperbole or exaggeration. That’s what happened. It’s one of the most serious political crimes we have ever seen in this country.
The defense is basically that it was ironic (the one guy wore a funny hat!) or that it was unlikely to work (do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?), but that misses the performative aspect of all of this. (Also, the murder worked out just fine!) As a society, we have words for the crimes that were committed. Sedition. Treason. Terrorism. Capital murder. If those words are not used, and the state describes these things as trespassing and destruction of property, then the message will be absolutely clear: the attack on democracy was legitimate, just like it’s legitimate to protest, it was just the incidental rule-breaking that was wrong. We will be singing from the insurgents’ hymnal. This will happen again, but it will be stronger because the waverers (people like Pence or McConnell) will see that this kind of behavior is legitimate. (Or they will believe that this kind of behavior won’t be seen as an unforgiveable transgression by everyone–same difference).
Basically prosecutors should be working as hard as they possibly can to hang political and/or capital charges on people. If there were people on the inside who were conspiring at this, they should be charged with a capital crime and executed. Podium Man and Funny Hat Guy should be charged with sedition or insurrection or whatever and sent to jail for 10 or 20 years. No one should spend a single fucking second wondering whether that nice white lady deserved to get shot in the face.
That’s not entirely to discount the concerns that are being raised ITT about how this all plays out in the real world. Maybe harsh punishments trigger a wave of right-wing terrorism and the police are so compromised that it can’t be handled, and the whole thing collapses anyways. One hopes not, but I won’t say it’s impossible. But you’re not going to win over the right-wing terrorists with leniency. Those people are implacably against you and will push until they win or are forcibly stopped. The question is what message is sent to the waverers? Perhaps they perceive the harshness as illegitimate and become more sympathetic to the insurgents, but I think that’s not true, and I think that people who travel in a milieu where cynical contempt for the United States is the standard are not well-suited to understand how normies are going to react. I think most of them are quite open to the message that the attempted coup is a crime on a different level than anything else we’ve seen in this administration, and that our society will police that line in the sand. But even if they’re not, to back away from that line out of fear is disastrously self-defeating. You undermine the legitimacy of democracy and openly announce your impotence as well. It will never work.
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Man counting is hard.
Kicking their legs off the front edge would work well enough to suffocate them I would think. #notanengineer
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Goes by the name of Pence.
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How dumb is it if there are no real consequences. I guess we’ll see if any of these arseholes actually do suffer real time but it does seem awfully just slap on the wrist for a lot of them. Maybe them all becoming somewhat unemployable is enough for some.
Marco Rubio imo
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Scroll-wheel goes backwards as well as forwards and you can also just hit the ‘k’ key.
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My own twist:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for the Senators and I did not speak out—
Even though I’m Lyndsey Graham
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I’m not hand wringing about what may happen to them, I’m reading the language some here are using and being dismayed at where all this will eventually go.
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Heritagenothate has moved from “it was antifa!!” to “the dems did the same thing during Kavanaugh”…lol he’s a couple days behind the others
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They would of hung them from the Senate rafters to the cheers of the podium and hat guy. That was just for show.
Lol, it’s like when Trump compares his Covid response to the swine flu response. Ah yes, Kavanaugh, who can forget those hearings, When leftists stormed the Capitol, and Alyssa Milano wearing a Viking helmet sat in Pence’s seat.
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It 100% would if someone pulled their legs down
Yeah he’s clearly not online enough.
https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1347983166515113987
You don’t need to wait till the guy in the auschwitz camp shirt commits genocide before calling him a nazi. Come on, ted.
(2 isn’t true, she voted for it but ya know standard cruz)