From some of the media reports this week, you would think that the country is teetering on the brink of civil war, or at least facing massive, armed unrest. The proof for all this fearsome drama are various tweets, blogs and other internet statements from QAnon, 8kun and other digital venues that carry the alt-right crap.
I always thought an insurrection occurs when a lot of people who have been repressed by their government and can’t redress the problem by lawful means take to the streets. So, here’s some examples of how and why the Capitol rioters feel they have lost their ‘freedoms’ and their ‘rights.’
There’s a County Commissioner in Otero County, NM, who actually said at a public meeting of the Commission that he was going to drive to D.C. for the inauguration, bringing both his rifle and his .357-magnum revolver to protect his ‘rights.’ He’s so dumb that he identified his handgun as a ‘Colt Vaquero,’ which happens to be a gun manufactured by Ruger, not by Colt. Anyway, this idiot was arrested last week.
Then there’s the college kid on Staten island (where else?) who was picked up because he believes, according to his Facebook page, that ‘law-abiding people are getting the short end of the stick.’ To show you how law-abiding this moron is, he posted a selfie on Facebook taken inside the Capitol and was promptly identified by fellow students and faculty members who contacted the police.
But the best one of all was a girl who stole a laptop from Nancy Pelosi’s office which she then tried to sell to the Russians because God knows what kinds of secrets would be sitting on the machine’s hard drive. It turns out that the laptop was used whenever Pelosi’s staff wanted to show some slides during a presentation, certainly a machine containing a treasure-trove of very secret stuff.
Want to get some perspective on how the Capitol riot is a threat to the American way of life? Watch the movie Burn After Reading, which has a wonderful scene in which two complete morons played perfectly by Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt try to sell what they think are some valuable government secrets to the Russians. I have to assume that the kid who swiped the laptop from Pelosi’s office hasn’t seen the flic – or maybe she has.
If you want to really understand the collective stupidity of the Capitol rioters, take a look at the video done by New Yorker Magazine reporter Luke Mogelson, in particular the segment which begins at the 8-minute mark. Here are the freedom fighters standing inside the Senate, trying to figure out whether some documents contain any important information to help their cause. Except none of them can read.
I hate to say it, but the proof of how rich and well-off most of us are, Covid-19 or no Covid-19, is that a lot of people can earn a decent living without having or using much of their brain. It’s this herd immunity to intelligence that makes them really believe they are the ones who have lost out.
The truth is these dopes haven’t lost anything except what they paid to come to D.C. to help ‘take back’ their country, plus what some of them will have to pay to bail themselves out. As of this morning, the Department of Justice has charged 78 individuals with crimes committed during Donald Trump’s most recent political rally, and the investigations are far from complete.
Yesterday, there was a report on CNN that the FBI has received more than 70,000 tips from callers or emailers who recognized someone charging up the Capitol steps. And that’s what happens when you have an insurrection in the United States. The feds have to hire more help to answer the telephones and unpack the digital mail.