Hey!!! Thanks for making me think new thoughts!
I personally have very little emotional investment in politics, mostly because it is a poopie pageant. I did and still do have opinions about the Trumpers storming the capitol, though, but I'm also aware that it was just a dumb mob mentality event. Living in Portland, I got lots of people from out of town asking me if I was ok during the riots. I never noticed a thing other than what got hyper-focus and repeat plays in the media. Mostly some windows were broken and graffiti happened, and a bunch of angry people antagonized angry authorities who wielded some nasty crowd-disabling weaponry. But the news made it sound like my city was burning down. It wasn't. In San Diego, rioters burnt down an ENTIRE BANK BUILDING. Like, to the ground. That did not make the news the way Portland did. Political media, in many ways but not all ways, comes across to me like entertainment. Ultimately what I always see is a bunch of seriously angry people. Doesn't matter the political affiliation. People are unhappy, and destruction is an outlet.
I do want to point out, though, that there was footage of someone trying to hold back the Whitehouse Party Crashers. I think he was barricading a door. The crowd was doing something that was making him yell out in pain. So there's that little bit that makes the mass hysteria a big deal.
That's just the sort of thing that makes me get a bit on the tinfoil hat bandwagon. That is just not what building security looks like. Not in the private sector, definitely not in the federal government.
LOL! Yeah I guess wtf why was there just one guy barricading the door to the Whitehouse?
Media is an asshole. This is why I almost never watch the news. Because obviously the last time I did, they pulled one over on me.
Holy hell, you ain't kidding. Only one of two things explains how the Capitol Police were deployed: incredible hubris or outright collusion. Pretty sure the answer is 'yes'.
Watching that go down, all I could think was 'they'd have shot us for that in June.'
They burned down the courthouse in Nashville. The news coverage of the protests was so fucking absurd. I'd see coverage of things I was at and it would be so skewed and cherry picked as to bear almost no resemblance to what'd went down. To cap it off there was a night in late September when hundreds of cops surrounded about 150 of us in a Unitarian church and we had something of an armed standoff -- we wouldn't let them in and they were arresting anyone who set foot outside the church-- that went on for hours. Nary a peep out of the news on that.
Jeeeeeeeezussss. You probably didn't give them enough to work with to turn it into a profitable media story. Glad you made it out alive.