Florida Pastor, Son and Congregant Face Federal Charges for Capitol Riot

[Bert Perry]

Well, can you and a couple dozen of your buddies make it past a few dozen Secret Service agents armed with a rope? There is a certain point where this becomes like me arguing I’m going to get past the 101st Airborne and give the commanding officer a noogie. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Your statements simply not reflect the reality of the situation on January 6, and it’s astounding to me that you are trying to minimize the danger that the vice president/Congress faced. There were firearms, bear spray, and even a crossbow in the mob. Rioters made it to within very close proximity to the vice president and members of Congress and only narrowly escaped getting caught by the mob. This information is literally all over the internet, complete with pictures and video. It’s not even debatable.

[Bert Perry]

Kevin Miller wrote:

Bert Perry wrote:

One other note; there were no pipe bombs or other weapons found at the Capitol. They were found at Republican and Democratic headquarters outside buildings away from the Capitol. So like I noted before, there was no serious threat to life posed by the rioters, as they were unarmed.

Wouldn’t the chant “hang Mike Pence” be, in and of itself, a serious threat to life? One wouldn’t even need an actual weapon to carry that out. A piece of rope would have been sufficient.

Well, can you and a couple dozen of your buddies make it past a few dozen Secret Service agents armed with a rope? There is a certain point where this becomes like me arguing I’m going to get past the 101st Airborne and give the commanding officer a noogie. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Or do you think that the rioters didn’t actually get past the capitol security and that the riot footage was all staged?

Is that the Secret Service and Capitol Security were primarily concerned with getting Congress and the VP out of danger, which they quickly achieved. For better or worse, the Capitol police largely did not engage with the rioters as they came in—if they had, of course, casualties would have been far, far worse, because the Capitol police were of course armed with weapons that were unquestionably lethal.

You guys are confusing the fact that the rioters were basically allowed in with the claim that the attack was reminiscent of the Rangers at Pointe du Hoc. It’s a different kind of thing that went on.

I completely disagree that “white supremacy” is the greater danger in our country. Why? Because it is small, contained, and, most importantly, recognized as a danger. People rightly experience revulsion when these events occur, like the car driven into the crowd in Charlottesville, the January 6th event (although I’m not sure all of the ~900 people who entered the capitol building could rightly be called “white supremacist”). But when BLM/Antifa riots happen, the reaction is either “nothing to see here,” or “Good for them!”

If you want to consider January 6th, compare the number of people involved with the thousands of people in the BLM/Antifa riots, and the ~$1.5 million in damage with the ~$500 million in riot damage during the new “summer of love,” or the number of people killed (really only the one person on January 6th if you don’t count incidental deaths, but even if you do, it’s only 5) with the numbers of people killed in the BLM/Antifa rioting. But again, the main point isn’t the numbers. It’s that people see what happened January 6th as a danger (as they should, even though plenty of the people that entered illegally were not violent — I don’t know the percentage), but the much larger riots are seen as what, a necessary consequence of social change? People are constantly on the lookout for white supremacy showing its head, but they refuse to see anything violent that comes from supposedly “the right kind of thinking” as an actual danger, even though the death and destruction (not to mention the long-term consequences to the idea of upholding law and order) is actually higher. And if barricading and setting on fire a police station is not a direct attack on the government, then nothing is.

Don’t get me wrong — people who commit crimes in the name of white supremacy should be pursued without mercy, as any crimes resulting from overt racism should. However, ignoring open racism, racial division, and threats to the rule of law from “the right people” is wrong, and not recognizing that fact makes that thinking a much greater danger than white supremacy, which, BtW, only a very small percentage of people who could be called Trump supporters actually hold, and even fewer of those have committed acts of violence for their cause.

The unseen enemy is considered by many to be a greater danger than enemies we can see and understand. But an enemy that is seen, but ignored, rather than countered, or even falsely considered to be a friend is a much greater danger than one we already recognize and fight as such.

The old joke is that if you go to a KKK meeting, two of three people there are FBI moles. I don’t know that this still holds, but the reality is that yes, white supremacists are largely contained.

To draw a picture about the seriousness of Antifa/”defund the police”, along with some elements of BLM, the number of people murdered in 2020 was about 25% higher than in 2019, for an additional 4000-5000 deaths.

Joe, no doubt that some officers suffered due to that debacle. I’m just saying that when we compare these impacts with other things, I have to wonder why on earth we’re not putting more effort into other things that are bigger on the Pareto.

Glad there were enough stern minds there to avoid a debacle as Joe describes, though I have to think that such backbones in DC seem to correlate only with MP5s to back it up these days.

Apparently the Sergeant at arms accidentally disclosed the identity of the shooter of Ashlii Babbitt. It was not a secret service agent, but rather a Capitol police officer said to have left his service pistol in the bathroom on another occasion.

Was it a clean shoot? Well, I’d have to see what the investigation revealed. Huh, they kept it secret, didn’t they? My overall take is that if a person climbing through a window was deemed to be an imminent threat, there were any number of other imminent threats that ought to have been met with lethal force. So my gut feeling is that the “investigation” was a “whitewash”. You generally don’t cover your tracks when your case is strong.