Heather
Dagobah Resident
Oh, so... Trump would be excluded from the meeting? That's why I'm confused.
2020 US Election - Let The Games Begin!
- Thread starter Ruth
- Start date
Already spinning what happened today indicates Trump either unfit or unstable to continue to be President.
psychegram
The Living Force
Just got back from DC ... thought you all might like to hear a first-hand account, not that it will necessarily add much to a high-level of understanding of events. This is only what I witnessed from my very limited personal perspective.
Yesterday I found out about a charter bus going to the rally, and booked a seat on a whim. It was leaving very early, so it was an early day. I met a few Trump supporters in the parking lot, and we chatted for a bit before boarding, and then sat together. All working class; the group I was with were mainly women, a mother, her mother, and her friend. On the drive up they discussed some aspects of their private lives ... opiod addiction seemed to be a big problem in their family, and my heart really broke hearing about it. What's been done to the American people is a war crime.
Arrived around 10:30, and made my way towards the White House. Big crowd there of course. The atmosphere was carnivalesque - people were friendly, polite, everyone was angry about the steal of course but that wasn't the dominant emotional tone. Crowd was extremely diverse. There were all ages, a lot of boomers, but also a fair number of youth, and everything in between. Mostly white, as you might expect, but there were representatives of all races present, and at one point I passed a couple of black women discussing the destruction of an Abraham Lincoln statue in outraged tones. Lots of people in MAGA gear obviously, a few guys in tactical outfits, and the occasional person in some kind of outrageous costume. I saw one woman dressed as Trump carrying Pelosi in a garbage can; another woman had a curved Viking rams horn, like a battle horn ... that was pretty cool. The flags were overwhelmingly the American flag, the Trump 2020 flag, and the Blue Lives Matter flag. Occasionally there would be a Gadsden flag. I didn't actually see a Confederate battle flag (though I have seen pictures), nor did I see any 'neo-nazi' or white nationalist iconography - I mention this only because the media, obviously, is going to run with a 'Nazi white supremacist' narrative. The point here is, these were all just ordinary, patriotic Americans, fed up to their back teeth.
From where I was Trump's speech was hard to follow, due to a lot of echo. Mostly he just ran through the spiel of how the election had been stolen ... nothing anyone here doesn't already know. There was no stirring call to action, no directive to storm the capitol. In fact, the lack of a call to action seemed to be irking a lot of people in the crowd, a few of whom were yelling out that they hadn't come all the way across the country to stand on the grass and hold signs. Point being, the crowd wanted action ... they wanted to be part of the action.
Before his speech ended I started making my way to the capitol, along with many others. I remember thinking at the time that all the people filing away while he was still talking felt like a bad omen ... like he wasn't saying what they wanted to hear, and were walking away.
There was a big crowd outside the Supreme Court, loudly expressing their disapproval of Justice Roberts et al.
There were Chinese people all over the place, holding signs along the lines of 'cancel the CCP' or 'the CCP is the real virus', and soliciting signatures to condemn the CCP.
One thing I found mildly amusing was the number of predominantly black guys selling MAGA merch. Given that this is DC, and given racial and DC voting patterns, the odds are very high that the majority of them voted Biden (assuming they voted at all). Yet they're still happy to make a buck.
Along the way to the capitol I stopped at a kiosk to get a coffee, and sat on the steps of the Department of Labour watching the crowd assemble in front of the capitol. Aside from that there were a lot of people I couldn't really see much, though I did hear the occasional explosion - almost certainly tear gas. It's possible that this was the point at which the initial fence was breached, although I didn't see that happen and it may have happened before I arrived in the area.
Following the caffeination I made my way towards the capitol, on the way passing a statue - beheaded, presumably by BLM - with people sitting all over it, despite the monument being surrounded by barriers and signs stating that it was closed. Foreshadowing things to come....
Getting closer, there was a guy dressed as Uncle Sam, standing on a wall and shouting into a megaphone. There was a metalhead with an electric guitar and a portable amp, shredding some Metallica riffs while wearing a camo 'Make America Free Again' hat \m/ I also briefly chatted with a guy who said he'd gotten pepper-sprayed by the cops, and further claimed that Antifa had infiltrated the crowd by wearing MAGA gear, and were deliberately provoking law enforcement. Anyone who's ever paid attention to street protests will recognize this as a classic false flag tactic (albeit previously employed mainly by undercover cops).
Around this time a rumour also started to circulate through the crowd that Pence had declined his constitutional duty; the crowd's mood changed dramatically at this betrayal. It was at this point that chants of 'Hang Mike Pence' started to be heard. Making my way closer, I passed more people who said they'd been tear gassed, and indeed the occasional explosion could be seen. One guy said they were firing rubber bullets, and showed me one he'd picked up as proof, which he let me photograph. The crowd started chanting 'This Is Our House' and 'USA'. I could see protesters ahead pushing up the stairs against the cops and climbing the scaffolding, occasionally ripping down the paper covering the scaffolding in order to wave a flag. Each time the latter happened the crowd would erupt in cheers and chants.
Rumours began to circulate that patriots had taken the capitol, and a lot of people began surging forward, announcing their intent to join the fun. Around this time I had to make my exit, as it was getting close to the departure time for the charter bus and I didn't want to get stranded. I really had to tear myself away though - the energy in that crowd was intense, intoxicating, and it was clear something historic was happening.
All of the shops were shut down in the bus terminal, so no hope for food or coffee - because of course. Shortly after arriving there, all of our phones went off with an emergency announcement from Mayor Bowser telling us there was a 6 pm to 6 am curfew in effect. To be honest, I was glad to be making my exit before then, as it was clear the real action would start at that point.
The mood on the bus was very upbeat - everyone was energized from the events of the day, feeling invigorated by the unexpected, and successful, storming of the capitol. Things changed a bit when the video of Trump telling everyone to stand down came out. Couldn't help but think of the C's wondering if Trump had the boldness to do what needs to be done ... telling everyone to go home really seemed like he lacked the cojones for it, and that obviously deflated the mood.
Another thing that really stuck out to me was the news that Nancy Pelosi's hard drive had been taken. Quite some time ago I was reading one of Clif High's ALTA/webbot reports, and one of the forecast events was 'secrets revealed', specifically in the context of an angry crowd storming government facilities and coming across sensitive data that blew things wide open. Obviously too early to tell whether anything will come of this but it certainly struck me as eerie.
While I don't have any first-hand evidence to contribute one way or another, it's worth mentioning a subject that became an almost instant topic of debate as soon as these events manifested: was this a spontaneous uprising, or a false flag/trap? I'm pretty sure this wasn't a false flag - the mood in the crowd was really ugly once the Mike Pence news spread, so I don't think the storming was instigated in order to 'make MAGA look bad' (also ... the media have already been screaming that MAGA = Nazis for 5 years....) Whether or not it was a trap is a trickier issue and one I'm still not sure about. On the one hand, the capitol wasn't very well defended, and the storming of it did seem suspiciously easy. On the other hand, given that MAGA rallies are historically well-behaved, civil, and peaceful, it's very possible that the elite miscalculated and assumed that the most that would happen would be a bit of grumbling. Certainly the behaviour of the congress-critters did not seem like the behaviour of people who were gleefully leading grassroots Americans into a trap. So, my personal feeling about this is that the storming probably was entirely spontaneous, enabled by the moral weakness and blind wishful thinking of the elites. But, time will tell.
Building on the trap narrative, a lot of people have been drawing parallels to Charlottesville, which in retrospect very obviously was a trap, a highly successful one which destroyed the Alt-Right as a viable countercultural movement. On the one hand, there is absolutely no doubt that the media is going to run with a narrative of vile neo-nazi terrorists threatening Our Democracy(TM) on behalf of Cheeto Hitler, and that if Biden is successfully installed as president this will be used as an additional excuse for a totalitarian crackdown. On the other hand, essentially all the Alt-Right accomplished in Charlottesville was to get beaten up ... not only was their ideology unsettling, but they looked weak. The storming of the capitol is something very different: it is the elite who look weak, the people who look strong ... and all of the several hundred thousand people who were there will take that sense of victory back to their hometowns, where 'storming government offices and driving out the parasites' is now an option on the table. The Alt-Right was also a fringe ideology with little popular support, whereas this was an expression of grassroots frustration shared, conservatively, by 100x the number of people who were actually present. Adding to that the fact that conservatives essentially ignore mainstream media, and it's really not clear that the propaganda offensive that is already ensuing will be successful to the necessary degree.
As an epilogue, the ladies I mentioned before very nicely offered to drive me home from the local bus terminal. The American working class really are the salt of the Earth.
Yesterday I found out about a charter bus going to the rally, and booked a seat on a whim. It was leaving very early, so it was an early day. I met a few Trump supporters in the parking lot, and we chatted for a bit before boarding, and then sat together. All working class; the group I was with were mainly women, a mother, her mother, and her friend. On the drive up they discussed some aspects of their private lives ... opiod addiction seemed to be a big problem in their family, and my heart really broke hearing about it. What's been done to the American people is a war crime.
Arrived around 10:30, and made my way towards the White House. Big crowd there of course. The atmosphere was carnivalesque - people were friendly, polite, everyone was angry about the steal of course but that wasn't the dominant emotional tone. Crowd was extremely diverse. There were all ages, a lot of boomers, but also a fair number of youth, and everything in between. Mostly white, as you might expect, but there were representatives of all races present, and at one point I passed a couple of black women discussing the destruction of an Abraham Lincoln statue in outraged tones. Lots of people in MAGA gear obviously, a few guys in tactical outfits, and the occasional person in some kind of outrageous costume. I saw one woman dressed as Trump carrying Pelosi in a garbage can; another woman had a curved Viking rams horn, like a battle horn ... that was pretty cool. The flags were overwhelmingly the American flag, the Trump 2020 flag, and the Blue Lives Matter flag. Occasionally there would be a Gadsden flag. I didn't actually see a Confederate battle flag (though I have seen pictures), nor did I see any 'neo-nazi' or white nationalist iconography - I mention this only because the media, obviously, is going to run with a 'Nazi white supremacist' narrative. The point here is, these were all just ordinary, patriotic Americans, fed up to their back teeth.
From where I was Trump's speech was hard to follow, due to a lot of echo. Mostly he just ran through the spiel of how the election had been stolen ... nothing anyone here doesn't already know. There was no stirring call to action, no directive to storm the capitol. In fact, the lack of a call to action seemed to be irking a lot of people in the crowd, a few of whom were yelling out that they hadn't come all the way across the country to stand on the grass and hold signs. Point being, the crowd wanted action ... they wanted to be part of the action.
Before his speech ended I started making my way to the capitol, along with many others. I remember thinking at the time that all the people filing away while he was still talking felt like a bad omen ... like he wasn't saying what they wanted to hear, and were walking away.
There was a big crowd outside the Supreme Court, loudly expressing their disapproval of Justice Roberts et al.
There were Chinese people all over the place, holding signs along the lines of 'cancel the CCP' or 'the CCP is the real virus', and soliciting signatures to condemn the CCP.
One thing I found mildly amusing was the number of predominantly black guys selling MAGA merch. Given that this is DC, and given racial and DC voting patterns, the odds are very high that the majority of them voted Biden (assuming they voted at all). Yet they're still happy to make a buck.
Along the way to the capitol I stopped at a kiosk to get a coffee, and sat on the steps of the Department of Labour watching the crowd assemble in front of the capitol. Aside from that there were a lot of people I couldn't really see much, though I did hear the occasional explosion - almost certainly tear gas. It's possible that this was the point at which the initial fence was breached, although I didn't see that happen and it may have happened before I arrived in the area.
Following the caffeination I made my way towards the capitol, on the way passing a statue - beheaded, presumably by BLM - with people sitting all over it, despite the monument being surrounded by barriers and signs stating that it was closed. Foreshadowing things to come....
Getting closer, there was a guy dressed as Uncle Sam, standing on a wall and shouting into a megaphone. There was a metalhead with an electric guitar and a portable amp, shredding some Metallica riffs while wearing a camo 'Make America Free Again' hat \m/ I also briefly chatted with a guy who said he'd gotten pepper-sprayed by the cops, and further claimed that Antifa had infiltrated the crowd by wearing MAGA gear, and were deliberately provoking law enforcement. Anyone who's ever paid attention to street protests will recognize this as a classic false flag tactic (albeit previously employed mainly by undercover cops).
Around this time a rumour also started to circulate through the crowd that Pence had declined his constitutional duty; the crowd's mood changed dramatically at this betrayal. It was at this point that chants of 'Hang Mike Pence' started to be heard. Making my way closer, I passed more people who said they'd been tear gassed, and indeed the occasional explosion could be seen. One guy said they were firing rubber bullets, and showed me one he'd picked up as proof, which he let me photograph. The crowd started chanting 'This Is Our House' and 'USA'. I could see protesters ahead pushing up the stairs against the cops and climbing the scaffolding, occasionally ripping down the paper covering the scaffolding in order to wave a flag. Each time the latter happened the crowd would erupt in cheers and chants.
Rumours began to circulate that patriots had taken the capitol, and a lot of people began surging forward, announcing their intent to join the fun. Around this time I had to make my exit, as it was getting close to the departure time for the charter bus and I didn't want to get stranded. I really had to tear myself away though - the energy in that crowd was intense, intoxicating, and it was clear something historic was happening.
All of the shops were shut down in the bus terminal, so no hope for food or coffee - because of course. Shortly after arriving there, all of our phones went off with an emergency announcement from Mayor Bowser telling us there was a 6 pm to 6 am curfew in effect. To be honest, I was glad to be making my exit before then, as it was clear the real action would start at that point.
The mood on the bus was very upbeat - everyone was energized from the events of the day, feeling invigorated by the unexpected, and successful, storming of the capitol. Things changed a bit when the video of Trump telling everyone to stand down came out. Couldn't help but think of the C's wondering if Trump had the boldness to do what needs to be done ... telling everyone to go home really seemed like he lacked the cojones for it, and that obviously deflated the mood.
Another thing that really stuck out to me was the news that Nancy Pelosi's hard drive had been taken. Quite some time ago I was reading one of Clif High's ALTA/webbot reports, and one of the forecast events was 'secrets revealed', specifically in the context of an angry crowd storming government facilities and coming across sensitive data that blew things wide open. Obviously too early to tell whether anything will come of this but it certainly struck me as eerie.
While I don't have any first-hand evidence to contribute one way or another, it's worth mentioning a subject that became an almost instant topic of debate as soon as these events manifested: was this a spontaneous uprising, or a false flag/trap? I'm pretty sure this wasn't a false flag - the mood in the crowd was really ugly once the Mike Pence news spread, so I don't think the storming was instigated in order to 'make MAGA look bad' (also ... the media have already been screaming that MAGA = Nazis for 5 years....) Whether or not it was a trap is a trickier issue and one I'm still not sure about. On the one hand, the capitol wasn't very well defended, and the storming of it did seem suspiciously easy. On the other hand, given that MAGA rallies are historically well-behaved, civil, and peaceful, it's very possible that the elite miscalculated and assumed that the most that would happen would be a bit of grumbling. Certainly the behaviour of the congress-critters did not seem like the behaviour of people who were gleefully leading grassroots Americans into a trap. So, my personal feeling about this is that the storming probably was entirely spontaneous, enabled by the moral weakness and blind wishful thinking of the elites. But, time will tell.
Building on the trap narrative, a lot of people have been drawing parallels to Charlottesville, which in retrospect very obviously was a trap, a highly successful one which destroyed the Alt-Right as a viable countercultural movement. On the one hand, there is absolutely no doubt that the media is going to run with a narrative of vile neo-nazi terrorists threatening Our Democracy(TM) on behalf of Cheeto Hitler, and that if Biden is successfully installed as president this will be used as an additional excuse for a totalitarian crackdown. On the other hand, essentially all the Alt-Right accomplished in Charlottesville was to get beaten up ... not only was their ideology unsettling, but they looked weak. The storming of the capitol is something very different: it is the elite who look weak, the people who look strong ... and all of the several hundred thousand people who were there will take that sense of victory back to their hometowns, where 'storming government offices and driving out the parasites' is now an option on the table. The Alt-Right was also a fringe ideology with little popular support, whereas this was an expression of grassroots frustration shared, conservatively, by 100x the number of people who were actually present. Adding to that the fact that conservatives essentially ignore mainstream media, and it's really not clear that the propaganda offensive that is already ensuing will be successful to the necessary degree.
As an epilogue, the ladies I mentioned before very nicely offered to drive me home from the local bus terminal. The American working class really are the salt of the Earth.
axj
The Living Force
I disagree. All those who support Trump needed this boost of confidence. It is not just words now and they have seen that things can go very quickly if they need to, especially if Trump or another leadership figure gives the go ahead.
And those who oppose Trump already have a bad opinion about his supporters. Nothing will change on either side if the media uses this to make Trump supporters look bad, especially considering that only around a third of Americans still trust the mass media at all.
psychegram
The Living Force
A detail I forgot to include.
Chatted with a guy who helped storm the Capitol, who got shot up by the cops. Pic related.
He's a senior and a vet. There is no way in God's green Earth that this guy was Antifa.
Sen Portman currently speaking so switched to PBS but instead of being able to hear him, some black woman that I don't recognize is spewing how Trump's own people are saying the Pres has lost it and will do anything to hold onto power and so, the 25th amendment.
psychegram
The Living Force
Take from. Twitter's Bronze Age Pervert and follower.
Nević Nenad
The Living Force
The feeling: "all you politicians are the same traitors, and all of you are just against the common people" with subsequent bashing is already starting on Trump's facebook page.
All I can say is that if Trump has a card to play he better play it now. The walls are closing in and he quite frankly looks like a bumbling fool. It has been painfully evident since mid December that there is no rule of law in the US. The only law now is kill or be killed. The psychopaths control everything and can do anything they want with impunity. There is no punishment for them and the only thing they fear is a bigger bully or perhaps losing their heads. They live in an anti-universe with where there is no common ground, diplomacy and negotiations only work with people who have some degree of respect for ideals and principles. Try mixing matter and antimatter in the same space and see how well they coexist. Bush II was right, the Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper. Trump, either start shooting or go f- yourself. We need more violence, not less. Rein these people in and make them fear you.
Although, at last count the Cassiopaeans had 23% of the US population classified as psychopaths, so that's a lot of people to kill. Perhaps it was, is, and always will be a hopeless cause.
Although, at last count the Cassiopaeans had 23% of the US population classified as psychopaths, so that's a lot of people to kill. Perhaps it was, is, and always will be a hopeless cause.
Heather
Dagobah Resident
I don't think anyone's saying it wasn't as combination of Trump supporters and infiltrators. It would be good to have a clearer picture of how that breaks down, of course. What might be even more significant is that the police were part of the operation in allowing, even inviting it to happen.
Perhaps this false flag implicates Pence, as well -- the understanding beforehand what he would do, and how that would affect the crowd.
taratai
Jedi
At this point, an "ordinary patriotic American" being a Nazi is a given to them, just like the Sun being up there in the sky. No need for narratives anymore, just show the truth and some random smiling white guy holding an American flag. Their followers will immediately know how they are supposed to react.
Ronan
The Force is Strong With This One
I think that it was very honourable for Donald Trump to ask his supporters to go home peacefully. What I realised tonight (here in England), with the video being pulled, was at this pivotal point the truth of the old statement "History is written by the the victors"! Please understand I am not saying Biden is across the line yet.
Interesting thought just came to mind on finishing the sentance. I will probably get flack from the UK "Bidenites", and a potential response could be. Two of these three are true. a) You don't know, b) You don't want to know, c) You are a liar.
Interesting thought just came to mind on finishing the sentance. I will probably get flack from the UK "Bidenites", and a potential response could be. Two of these three are true. a) You don't know, b) You don't want to know, c) You are a liar.
psychegram
The Living Force
This young man was present when the martyed woman was shot. His words are not the words of someone who will accept defeat (sorry for the telegram link, for some reason it won't let me upload the video file directly ... but do watch this!)
