The Lamest Coup Ever

The US Capitol building, which apparently is easier to invade than a Cleveland Taco Bell.
// photo by Martin Falbisoner

[Edit March 23, 2021] It turns out that the police officer that died did not, in fact, die from being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. This was a falsehood reported by the New York Times, despite a correct version of events published by ProPublica on the same day. The NYT was cited so many times that many of the sources I read and trust also reported it as a bludgeoning. The lamest "coup attempt" turned out to be even lamer than I had originally thought. The text has been corrected below.]

[Edit April 20, 2021] The Washington Post has reported that Officer Sicknick had actually died of natural causes, after suffering from two strokes.

It looks like 2021 is off to a great start.

A bunch of Trump-supporting violent idiots crashed the Capitol Building last Wednesday to interrupt Joe Biden's confirmation.

They were successful in breaking into the house floor and...taking selfies. Some vandalism and looting mixed in, for fun. Assaults on police officers while toting thin blue line flags. Creating a situation where some people get killed. You know, just like an extension of 2020. Same kind of idiocy, different idiots.

I'm not sure what their goal was, but they achieved turning even more people away from them as before. I didn't think that was even possible, but they did it. Because they sure as shit didn't accomplish anything remotely close to what they were wanting to do. Many of them will go to jail and there will probably be an expansion of state power that will be used against them because of these actions. Was that their goal? Well, congratulations if it was.

If any of them criticized the left's rioting and looting, which I'm certain they did, they succeeded in making themselves look like complete hypocrites. Even if they want to claim their riot was targeted while the progressives' rioting was against random businesses, point taken, but they also condemned the left when they attacked police stations, specifically chosen as a response to George Floyd's killing.

At the same time, the left's response made it look like they're also complete hypocrites. The feigned outrage over the single day of rioting, including one protestor shot by Capitol police, is particularly thick as the progressive riots raged for months with multiple murders of innocent people and self-defense killings in its wake. I somehow doubt the left will get worked up over this police shooting here, despite their hyperventilating about all cops being bastards.

Aside from the woman shot by the police, there was a police officer that eventually died the next day after being hit in the head by a fire extinguisher pepper-sprayed [correction #2: died of natural causes. sigh.]. One was later revealed to have been trampled by the mob. The last two died of a heart attack and a stroke, at best a loose correlation with the riots, even if you squint real hard. There were also reports of as many as 60 officers injured during the incursion.

I turned to CNN to see what they had to say. Not because I thought I would get good coverage by them, but I thought it would be fun to see their coverage juxtaposed against the "mostly peaceful protests" they kept hammering for half of last year, despite at least 19 dead and property damage between 1 and 2 billion dollars in the first two weeks, the vast majority of which among businesses that had nothing to do with Floyd's death. There were 130 officer injuries in Chicago alone in a little over one week.

I guess all those disastrous wars in the Middle East were also "mostly peaceful"?

CNN did not disappoint, with the headline highlighting the four dead, but not mentioning that all four that had died were Trump supporters. Information that the woman who was shot was a Trump supporter was making its rounds on social media the same day. The officer that died was later, after having been sent to the hospital, and not reported in the referenced article. It talked about an "armed standoff" with the police, despite having only six firearms being discovered at the riot. There was no evidence that any of the rioters brandished, let alone, fired any guns. More trustworthy news outlets like The Hill have only reported officers drawing guns. And honestly, to anyone that has earnestly followed police shootings, like say, Daniel Shaver's case, it would be obvious that anyone who even hinted at drawing a gun on the police would have received a barrage of bullets. Reality isn't a television show where a suspect can pull a gun on a police officer and the two stare each other down with guns pointed at each other for two minutes before slowly holstering their weapons after they bro it out. In real life, one or both of those people are not walking away from the incident, usually the second person who pulls the trigger. Leave it to CNN to be completely oblivious to this. At the same time, the summer 2020 riots included events such as the targeted murder of Aaron Danielson, rioters who intentionally trapped people inside a building as they set it on fire, and lobbing mortar rounds at the Federal Courthouse in Portland.

To be fair, CNN wasn't the only "news" outlet reporting "mostly peaceful" protests during the George Floyd Riots while cars and buildings were burning in the background or the immediately preceding paragraph talking about the numerous dead and injured. But you would be hard-pressed to find any outlet above talking about the peaceful portions of the protest that absolutely did happen at the Capitol building, in numbers of tens of thousands, compared to the hundreds that stormed the building. Granted, there were some like OAN that claimed the insurgency was an Antifa infiltration with eye-rolling "evidence", but there isn't really anyone outside the Capitol riots and 4Chan that considers OAN to be a serious news outlet. 

To be clear, I am not condoning the actions of the rioters. As I've opened with, those people are violent idiots. I'm pointing out the utter hypocrisy of those reporting on these events, that has been going on for much longer than just the past week. There's just not much more I can add to the tweetstorms out there about these people. Even the normally fun-tempered Matt Welch on The Fifth Column went on a profanity-laced tirade against them with a vehemence I've never seen from him before. 

While I think they have plenty of reasons to be pissed, among them the wildly biased reporting, committing this level of violence because of supposed election fraud to which they have very thin evidence for (even if it is nonzero), is just counterproductive and really, a stupendously dumb hill to die on. I even sympathize with their disgust with the government, but my sympathy quickly ends as they obviously just want a different boot on Americans' necks whereas I want freedom for all.

At the same time, the left kind of, sort of, has a point that the police resistance has been uneven, even though the video that seemed like the police opened the barricades was not accurate; it was more of a retreat due to overwhelming numbers than them opening the gates. However, some police officers were taking selfies with pro-Trump rioters while back in June, a different kind of friendliness was extended to BLM protesters, in the form of smoke grenades. The number of police seemed wholly insufficient for the crowd sizes expected. Also, while the rioters' incursion against the Portland Federal Courthouse last summer was met with roughly similar police resistance, law enforcement eventually used unmarked vehicles to kidnap suspected rioters, taken to an undisclosed location, a tactic that should never be used in any society that wishes to claim itself to be free. The lack of police officers at the Capitol to keep the peace is, at least in hindsight, a head-scratcher. Still, there are instances that also point to extremely lax policing of Antifa violence, again in Portland. The general normalization of violence within the political and law enforcement system in Portland and in the media across the country still at least points somewhat of a double standard by the left here. The charges by the left of racism, yet again, are off base as they seem to not be able to see anything outside skin color. It was claimed, by prominent people, that if the rioters were black, there would be dead bodies strewn all across the Capitol lawn. This is blatantly false, as we've had these exact situations come up just a few months prior with no such massacres. Not even close. To claim this is as irresponsible and delusional as Donald Trump's haranguing and incitement about the "stolen" election if done with the same fervor. The obvious reason for the discrepancy appears to be that the BLM and Antifa protests were specifically geared against the police, whereas the pro-Trump groups are generally supportive of police, until last Wednesday. When you have groups engaging in violence, shouting "All cops are bastards," rightly or wrongly, it's probably not going to endear you to police officers and keep them at ease.

We're supposed to call this a coup when one of
the insurgents is cosplaying as a Viking, taking
selfies with others for his Instagram page? Also,
nice chin diaper, officer.

Talks about this being a coup are also kind of dumb, though not as dumb as the rioters themselves. A coup is when an armed militia or segment of the military mounts a specific and organized attack on the leaders of a country with the express intent to murder or otherwise forcibly remove them from power. It's a bit more involved than trying to stop an electoral vote certification by means of a bum-rush. While there were some crazies that had this idea, no one conducts a coup with six guns, none of which were drawn. No coup attempt ends in only one person on the defensive side dying the next day, after a trip to the hospital, due to a blow to the head with a fire extinguisher (by the way, I hope the fucking perpetrator who murdered him goes to jail for a long time and finds a new boyfriend there named Bubba) due to being pepper-sprayed [correction #2: died of natural causes]. Granted, there were explosives found in the vicinity, but none went off (unlike the mortar rounds shot at the federal building in Portland last summer) and the tie of these explosives to any organized incursion (if there even was any) is unclear. We know what coups look like. One happened just four years ago in Turkey, which resulted in 265 dead. If this was a coup attempt, this was the lamest coup in human history, without a single gun even brandished by the insurgency. It may also be the first "coup" in human history where one of the insurgents dressed up as a Viking as if he was running in Bay to Breakers.

This is what an actual coup looks like. I didn't see any LARPers posing for selfies in the video.

Some try to label it as a "self-coup" where a head of state extends his or her power beyond the legal limits. These people apparently think Trump is far smarter and cunning than I do. What Trump had blatantly proven in the past four years is that he is a personality with no filter, with an ego that cannot be topped. Trump's words over the past two months about a stolen election is just what one might expect from everything we've learned about him in the past four years. Have these people not been paying attention? Trump doesn't have the foresight or intelligence to organize any real coup. He was just riffing like he always does, with little regard to any semblance of reality outside his own head. Even if it was a so-called self-coup, given that he didn't have the military behind him on it, which is kind of a needed component, it was still the lamest coup in human history, as his nonexistent plan didn't even come close to any kind of semblance of having any real force, or even any tone of seriousness, to forcibly overturn the election results.

It's nice to see, though, that politicians suddenly get serious when the violence is brought to their doorstep in the second deadliest riot in the past year.