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Notes -
It's YouGov (derogatory), but :
Thanks, that'll be a useful bit of info in the future. Saved.
Still, there was nothing even remotely close to J6 on the Democratic side. The likely counter would be the Mueller investigation, but it was very different from J6. It's not an ongoing idea that all elections are fake. Harris isn't implying "wait until I win or lose to see if the election is legitimate" like Trump is.
Saying J6 was unique ignores the important reason it was: Incompetence by the security forces. Giving a political speech to a large crowd in the capitol city of the polity is basically the MOST LEGITIMATE thing a politician can do. That the security forces were unprepared was also an intentional choice made primarily by the mayor of DC and the speaker of the House. Both were opponents of the speech-giver, and politically benefited from their own incompetence.
That is actually the most terrifying take away from J6: That Democrats can weaponize their own incompetence to humongous political benefit.
I agree and this is one of the more under-reported issues.
The GAO report on the Capitol Police is pretty damning
TLDR: Capitol Police:
The Capitol routinely offers tours to members of the public with very little scrutiny on their identification. We all go through far more at the airport to fly than you would going on a tour at the Capitol. I believe the limiting factor is that tickets for these tours are hard to come by and may require some sort of connection in a Congressional office. The Capitol is, in effect, about as well guarded as a mall (not The mall as in The National Mall, but a shopping mall).
You can fight over the degree to which J6 was a coordinated coup attempt, a mob action, a protest, or whatever. That's beside the point that if Capitol Police had been basically competent it wouldn't have happened. It's interesting the parallels to the thread on U.S. Secret Service -- When people tell the story of Omar Gonzales getting inside the White House the central theme is always "Holy fuck, how can the Secret Service be this bad?" That's the right response! And I think that should be a lot more central to the J6 story instead of "iT wAs aN AsSauLT on DEMocracY!"
This Johns Hopkins report looks at the demographics of the J6'ers who went to court after the fact. They have a high propensity for financial hardship and some level of criminal background. To be blunt about it - we weren't dealing with the top brass. For all of the press's laughable over-reporting on "Ranger Stacks" (not even the right term) and the omnipresent tactical gear, most of these people were LARPers who went to D.C. to because they didn't have much in the way of missing back home. They then overwhelmed a tiny, mostly absentee, and totally incompetent Capitol Police force.
"buT iT wAs aN AsSauLT on DEMocracY!"
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You are demonstrably mistaken.
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There was literally a riot to prevent Trump's inauguration called "DisruptJ20." Even wikipedia has an article about it.
The feds dropped all charges, including of the black-clad leftist terrorist arsonists. Just like they did in 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/government-drops-charges-against-all-inauguration-protesters-n889531
You should ask yourself why you forgot these events happened just because the TV stopped talking about them.
Maybe you should also read the Wikipedia article?
The reason the DOJ dropped the charges is because they lost every one they brought to trial.
Jury trials based out of DC?
I don't wonder why.
Yes, as a general matter people have to be tried in the jurisdiction where the alleged crime they committed occurred. What should the DOJ have done? Wasted a bunch of money prosecuting another 200 cases it wasn't going to win?
Yes. Unironically, unabashedly, yes. There would be far less perception of a bureaucratic-driven double standard if the Jan 6 treatment had been done to equivalent rioters years before. That would be worth far more than the money saved.
The question of the thread is how to get an opposition party to buy into the legitimacy of the government of the victorious party. The value of a federal prosecution for state legitimacy in this context doesn't come from securing a conviction, it comes from showing the commitment of the government to seek to bring people to court on the basis of what they did, rather than on the basis of who they protested against. Appearing to turn a blind eye to one's own partisan faction and what they do against their political opponents is about the worst thing you can do for the legitimacy of a legal institution.
If the Justice Department sits on and does nothing with 200 cases against the opposition party, the opposition narrative has 200 examples of the other team- the winning team, in this case- not being prosecuted on the basis of acts conducted. When prosecution isn't being pursued for acts not in dispute, 'we wouldn't secure a conviction' is a poor shield to charges that the real reason is 'we didn't want to.' Especially when there would be plenty of people publicly acknowledging partisan sympathies from within the government, and especially if the opposition would be charged for equivalent acts later.
On the other hand, if the Justice Department brings up the evidence and prosecutes 200 cases and the DC jury fails to convict a single one, the opposition who lost will still be citing 200 cases of the Justice Department being on their side and insisting on the propriety of the Justice Department. This insistence will not only negate years of hostile accusations as to why the government didn't even attempt the case, but has all the usual psychological effects of challenging and/or undermining people who would later go from lauding the Justice Department's willingness to challenge bad actors to (when those were the other side) to accusing the Justice Department of uneven handling (when it was the oppsition side).
That DC juries would jury nullify is a separate issue, and a far better problem to have from the perspective of government legitimacy. If DC juries intend to consistently demonstrated partisan animosity, there are ways the government (Federal or the Congress under the majority party) can respond to that, much as how jury reforms were imposed on the civil rights south to ensure fairness. What is more important is that if DC juries are the problem, opposition party ire will be focused on them, and not the federal government itself.
The legitimacy of the government is considerably better off if a lack of justice is seen as the fault of the jury pool that voted 90% Democratic than if the government simply accepted it. One is a scandal for the Democratic Party, and one is a scandal for the state.
So, I guess you'll be voting for Harris then? That's the only reasonable conclusion I can draw based on the timeline here. The protests happened in 2017, and the decision to drop the charges came in 2018. That's well into the Trump presidency and well into Jessie Lieu's tenure as US Attorney for Washington DC. If Trump had a problem with these non-prosecutions it was well within his power to put pressure on the US Attorney's office or fire Lieu if she didn't comply, but there's no indication he did either. Instead, he tried to get Lieu promoted! You can say the same thing about January 6. Sure, Trump wants to pardon them now, but he could have done a great deal to prevent the prosecutions if he'd actually acted before he left office. While he was warned of the unclear legal ground a blanket pardon would stand on, it would have made prosecutions a hell of a lot more difficult. And 30 of the perpetrators had been arrested by the time his term expired, including most of the prominent ones. Seeing all those guys walking free and the rest having defenses that would take a Supreme Court decision to resolve would have at least delayed proceedings long enough to dampen the Biden Administration's enthusiasm for pursuing the charges. But, of course, he didn't, and here we are.
If that's the limit of your reason, that's the limit of your reason.
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If there was anything close to Civil Rights-era issues, there'd be evidence from J6 people that there were actually innocent people prosecuted and convicted of crimes they didn't commit. The usual issues people have is harsh sentences and that the criminal justice system was unfair to them.
In which case I say, welcome to America. Enjoy your stay.
The problem was all the J6 people committed crimes. Want to not go to jail? Don't commit crimes on video with your face easily visible so much so that random people on Twitter can figure out who you are and report you to the police.
So, the issue isn't the juries. The problem is let's say, a third of the population think what people did on J6 wasn't a crime, regardless of the very clear law on the books. OTOH, the reason the Disrupt protest arrests didn't work out is most of what they were charge is far more vague than basically, "don't do anything the government like on direct government property."
Thank you for demonstrating the point on differing political interest on pursuing crimes.
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No, they only storm and disrupt political buildings between elections
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I agree. It wasn’t even close. Because the democrat effort was longer, more impactful, and more insidious.
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I agree! Democrats caused way more property damage and loss of life, and terrorized a much broader swath of the population. Their political protest were nowhere near as orderly, civil, and pointed at exactly the people who were the problem as J6.
I also didn't like the BLM protests, but their major aim wasn't to undo a presidential election. They were a separate issue entirely.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/11/11/anti-trump-protesters-pepper-sprayed-demonstrations-erupt-across-us/93633154/
Imagine if J6 had been J6-J9!
And Republicans protested in 2012 when Obama won re-election. But in that case and the one you cited, neither were trying to undo the results of the election other than expressing general disapproval that their side lost. Neither went to the federal capital, and neither were egged on by a sitting president.
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IMO the most amusing comparable incident was (VP candidate) Tim Kaine's son getting arrested for trespassing in the Minnesota Capitol with smoke bombs and fireworks.
But the sheer scale of lawfare against the Trump administration was also pretty darn disruptive even if "legal" -- in quotes because SCOTUS on a few occasions had to step in to resolve mutually-incompatible injunctions. Or how we had IIRC an agency head that refused to leave the position when replaced until a court ruled they had to leave. Not that all of it was misplaced, but it definitely reflected a desire to subvert the lawful powers of the executive purely on the basis of the character wielding them.
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First impeachment, #NotMyPresident, #Resistance, inauguration riots, post-election riots.
None of these seriously challenged the idea that Trump won in 2016.
Sure they did, you just don't accept 'seriously.'
At the time, however, and for several years after, these were routinely associated with the Democratic party conspiracy theory- colloquially remembered as Russiagate- that Trump had conspired to corruptly win the 2016 election.
#Resistance and its associated elements routinely propagated conspiracy theories to that effect, to the point that even after the Mueller Investigation found no substantiating evidence of Russian collusion most Democrats believed it anyway.
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The first impeachment is the equivalent, no?
No, it didn't challenge the idea that Trump won in 2016.
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because they are different groups so radicalism looks different between the groups? Repubs are populists, their reaction to disbelief with elections was to riot and generally distrust institutions even further.
Dems are statist bureaucrats and their response involved having all of the government machinery they control rebel against Trump, endless lawfare in the lower courts and district courts they control, government agencies continually leaking things to state aligned media. Laundering fake intelligence through "foreign" (really just parts of the state beyond Trumps jurisdiction) intelligence agencies back to the US so they could endlessly keep the Trump admin under surveillance. etc. Selectively enforcing laws and managing media coverage to encourage and legitimize their npc's riots while cracking down harshly on any opponent's riots (blm riots vs covid protests). Cracking down on access to positions in state institutions, things like diversity and inclusion statements being required in college's. Honestly the republican response to 2020 was pretty mild compared to the state's response to Trump in 2016.
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