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What do you expect those lesser offenders to be charged with? I expect they will cop charges very similar to the ones Epps got - "disorderly conduct" and suchlike.
The positions are irreconcilable because they disagree on the fundamental question of whether or not J6 was actually a bad thing. There's an incoherence to saying "the Jan 6rs did nothing wrong, and also, the feds made them do it". If they did nothing wrong, how were they "instigated" into doing it? Conversely, if the feds instigated an insurrection, that means that Jan 6 was an insurrection.
If MAGA was entrapped in a sting, it was a "sting" where they were "entrapped" into conducting what the majority of Republicans now consider a legitimate protest.
I've been with you all the way up to here, upvoting and even reporting one of your comments in this thread as a QC, but this is clearly wrong: the feds can be guilty of luring the protesters/rioters into taking risks that would make them look bad and expose them to prosecution.
Eh, fine, I'll back down a bit. Yes, it's possible to thread the needle, I guess.
But I still think that the widespread support for both the goals and actions of Jan 6 among Trump supporters offers a much more likely and harmonious explanation for why Jan 6 happened than some fed entrapment theory. If they caught Snoop Dogg with weed and he claimed they planted it, I'd be similarly sceptical.
After all, does anyone seriously think that if Trump loses to Biden again he's going to slink off sullenly into the night? No, he's going to do the exact same crap - angrily insist the democrats cheated, file lots of garbage lawsuits, pressure officials to change results, tell his supporters they need to fight or lose their country, etc, etc. And are all these people who say Jan 6 was a "legitimate protest" just going to sit back meekly and wave signs a bit and then go home? I hope so - the prosecutorial response at least provides some deterrent - but I'm not convinced it will be enough.
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No there isn't. The feds don't need to make them do something that's actually insurrection in order to make them do something that can be easily called insurrection by a partisan judge and the media.
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it was just a protest that got out of hand. a similar thing happened in Australia except it was the left protesting against a right wing government, i'm sure the right tried to make it out like it was the end of the world but i don't think anyone ended up serving 20 year prison sentences because of what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Parliament_House_riot
Yeah, say what you like about Howard but he was a savvy politician. He chose not to demonise the actual rioters or to really ascribe them agency for their own actions. Instead he made it all about the union leadership that organised the rally and blamed them for riling up their members and letting it get out of hand. He used the event to tar and discredit the unions and justify his aggressive anti-union moves - the most dramatic of which was supporting Patrick Stevedores to fire their entire union workforce.
The unions today have a fraction of the membership they did then, many of their formerly routine activities have been criminalised, and their officials have been hit with criminal convictions and massive fines. The long term damage done to the organisational left as a result was very substantial.
I do think there's a meaningful difference between the events, in that neither the union leadership nor any organised group involved in the '96 riot was trying to prevent an elected government from taking power. But it was still a disgusting event, and the actual participants should have been treated much more harshly.
Is this some form of nominative determinism? The Wire Season 3 (?) revolved around the Stevedores Union, dockside in Bawlmer.
No? Patrick Stevedores is a stevedore company, presumably named after some bloke called Patrick. "Stevedore" is just another word for a dockworker, so the connection is just that the political event and the TV season were both about dockworkers' unions.
Ah, I see now.
I was confused as hell the first time I saw the word too. I was a teen and there was a dock strike, and there was all this talk of "corralling the stevedores", so I figured they were some kind of livestock running around the docks getting into mischief. I did a great job embarrassing myself the next day bitching about how third world we must look with all these animals wreaking havoc on our docks.
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The normie Republican position is that J6 was justified because it was not an insurrection. The government's position is that J6 was an attempt to overthrow the government. The "sting" theory is that the Feds took justified protest and tried to make it look like an attempt to overthrow the government, so they could persecute it.
Who decided that Ray Epps was a "lesser offender"? The feds are charging lots of people with more for less. Ray Epps was egging people on into entering the Capitol, and the media and government are all talking about how this poor guy has been targeted by a smear!
How did the feds make J6 look like an attempt to overthrow the government without getting anyone to do anything wrong?
The Supreme Court of the United States, in 1969, when it decided in Brandenburg v Ohio that the First Amendment protected speech so strongly that it became nearly impossible to convict a person of inciting a riot. Alternatively, the framers of the First Amendment itself.
I agree that the feds are charging people with more for less, but the rules they have to play by say they probably can't convict Epps for inciting a riot. Personally I think the First Amendment should be abolished which would make it much more possible to prosecute the kind of egregious behaviour Epps engaged in. But a lot of Americans disagree with me and it's their country.
I'm going to repost the original Revolver News article here, since I posted it in another comment. Ray Epps did a lot more than exercise his First Amendment rights:
https://revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/
Epps orchestrated the breach of the capitol, announced before J6 his intention to breach the Capitol, incited protesters during J6 to join him in breaching the Capitol, and then was put on the FBI's "Capitol Violence Most Wanted List," from which he was quietly dropped as soon as investigative reporters started asking questions. And there's more.
They are not playing by any rules, a claim I have repeated several times now to which you seem not to have said anything.
You're posting on a website that was created to escape censorship. Are you trying to look silly?
This is your reminder that AshLael is literally a paid political operative in meatspace. Any conversations you have with them should be viewed through that light.
In Australia.... He has his biases, which color his responses to this issue, but we all do.
Sure, we all have biases. But I don't literally get paid to further a specific political agenda, and I have a hard time imagining a world where that doesn't drastically affect your biased far beyond normal.
But that's my point: he's being paid to further a specific political agenda in Australia. Feel free to hold his job against him on literally any other issue, from COVID to gun rights, but J6 is too specific to the US. I could grant something like "if he publicly took the wrong side of this issue, he'd lose his job" like Jiro argued, I could even grant that even though we're anon-posting over here the unconscious fear of ruining his career might bias the opinions he's posting here, but he's not literally getting paid to persuade people J6ers are insurrectionists.
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I'm pretty sure that if he went on public record as saying that the January 6 protestors did nothing wrong, he'd lose his job as a political operative, even though it is in Australia.
It is logically possible to hold opinions favoring the Republicans in the US while still holding leftist opinions with respect to Australian political issues. Unfortunately, politics doesn't run on logical possibility.
But he's not going on record while posting here. In any case, I'm not saying he's not biased (since, again, we all are), but bringing up his job makes it sound like he has direct interest in persuading the public J6 was an insurrection. This would make sense if he was and American political operative, but not an Australian one.
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Which crime do you think he could be convicted of, what are the elements of that crime, and what evidence exists to prove all elements beyond a reasonable doubt?
I think the best way to contest that claim is to talk in detail about the actual rules that are observably being applied, which I am doing.
I have a longstanding view that the US bill of rights was a big mistake, which I have articulated multiple times. It has put judges in the position of having to effectively make policy decisions about what constitutes due process or equal protection or free speech that are always going to be somewhat arbitrary and politically controversial, and that in turn has made it very important to staff the judiciary with judges that interpret these very vague provisions the way your side wants, which has created a highly politicised judiciary.
I think a much better system is to allow democratically elected governments much more latitude in making the laws they want, for policy choices to be explicitly legislated, and for judges to have a much more restrained and uncontroversial role in applying the law. Sometimes governments will pass bad laws, but there is a much more direct and workable system for the public to rectify those cases than when judges make bad constitutional rulings.
If the same standard was being applied to everyone (which is different question from what I think he should be convicted of), I see no reason to not at least try to pin "seditious conspiracy" on him, like the guy that got 20 years without ever being present in Washington.
This is not a valid criterion to prove or disprove the point being debated here. The attempt to prove something beyond reasonable doubt happens after the charges are made, in court, not before. Rittenhouse was charged with murder despite exonerating evidence being public before the charges were made, for example.
It's not accurate to suggest that the existence of evidence is irrelevant to the charges that get laid. Yes, sometimes bad charges get laid despite the evidence not supporting a conviction. Rittenhouse was a dramatic example (and rightfully acquitted). But it's not the norm.
The normal process is investigate, then charge. It doesn't always happen that way, but it's the normal process. And particularly for US federal prosecutors (who tend to be both good lawyers and fiercely protective of their reputations as good lawyers), they will very much want to win the cases they bring.
Epps spent a long time without being charged. I don't know why, but it's at least possible that was because there was a lot of time being spent investigating him to see if they could find evidence to make harsher charges stick, and they couldn't. While it's certainly possible that mining a person's history and communications will turn up evidence of lawbreaking, it's also possible that it doesn't.
But it is accurate to suggest people get charged before the charges are proved beyond reasonable doubt, because that's a thing that happens in court, rather than during the investigation. Therefore putting it forward as one of the criteria in this discussion is unreasonable.
Maybe, but we don't actually have a way to determine whether this portrayal of how the system works is accurate. Taking Rittenhouse as an example again - his prosecutor is on record saying that if it was one of the rioters that killed him, rather than the other way around, he would not have prosecuted. If we lived in that world, how could a member of the public even begin to argue that the BLM rioters are handled with kid gloves? We'd have no access to the internal communications that could shed light on the decision making process, and no evidence to dispute the claim "trust me bro, there just wasn't enough evidence to push for a conviction".
Also, people who believe Epps is a fed are explicitly arguing that this is not a normal case.
Sure, it's possible. If you have enough trust in the system to believe the rules are applied fairly, it's natural to dismiss any discrepancies in how he was treated as "I guess they were investigating him, but didn't find any evidence". My issue with the discourse around Epps, is that the idea that he's a fed is being treated as unreasonable, when there's more than enough circumstantial evidence to raise eyebrows. While there's no smoking gun that he's a fed, there's no grounds to criticize people for coming to the conclusion that he is.
Huh? I asked "What evidence exists to prove all elements beyond a reasonable doubt?" I'm not asking for a court determination that has already been made, I'm asking for evidence that can be brought into court to prove the charge. If you don't have it, how can you say that the charge should have been laid?
Of course we do. The system is staffed by people. Normal people who openly talk and complain about their jobs. Lots and lots of them. Some of them post on this forum. It's not a mystery.
When you actually talk to people who work in the criminal justice system, they will often have many complaints about how the whole thing operates, but those complaints bear little resemblance to the conspiracy theories. I work in politics, and have many complaints about how the political system operates, but they are completely different complaints to those of my father-in-law who thinks that all the world's governments are run by the Pope who is the Antichrist.
Yeah this is fair. I don't think it's an unreasonable thing to suspect - law enforcement obviously uses undercover cops and other similar techniques on a normal basis, and it wouldn't be weird at all if some of the groups involved in Jan 6 had feds embedded in them. I don't even think this is a bad thing.
I just don't think that the light prosecution of Epps increases the likelihood that he was one such agent. People react to his case because the things he says on video sure sound like they ought to be crimes, and they don't do the homework to figure out that actually they probably aren't.
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