SO, THAT HAPPENED (USA EDITION)

Regular readers know that I generally try to brush past American politics as much as possible for two reasons: firstly, a lot of it doesn't matter that much on a day-to-day basis (broader trends are a different story), and secondly, you can read about American politics anywhere and I try to give time to other areas as much as possible because there are a lot fewer places where you can read about the exciting news in, say, Rwanda.

But this is not the week to ignore American current events because, as I am sure you will echo, "what the fucking fuck?" Given that the storming of the Capitol is all of us witnessing actual history in the making, it probably deserves some discussion, because despite what you may think or have heard, this is much closer to the beginning of a longer period than it is a singular event. What that longer period may be is still up for debate, because that's how history works.

The first thing that has to be said is that while this event might have been shocking, it cannot reasonably be said to be surprising. Partially this is because conservative rhetoric in the United States has been ramping up past sheer reality-defiant insanity for a while now, and partially this is because many of the people who stormed the Capitol literally said on social media days or weeks beforehand "we are going to storm the Capitol on January 6th to overturn the election" which in retrospect probably should have been a tell, but a combination of media and societal mores have conditioned many, many decision-makers to believe that conservative activists don't really mean it when they make violent threats about doing something they actually can't legally do.

Did Donald Trump and other Republicans encourage these idiots to violently storm the Capitol? The answer here is an unqualified "yes" (as numerous criminal defense attorneys have pointed out, Trump's actions would absolutely earn criminal charges in other contexts), but the problem is that it seems unlikely that simply encouraging the mob was the extent of the Trump administration's involvement. At a minimum, Trump refused to mobilize the DC National Guard in response to the crisis (it was Mike Pence who actually did so, which one would note he is not empowered to do as Veep), and Maryland's Governor, Larry Hogan, initially told Democrats at the time that he was prevented from mobilizing his state's National Guard in response for reasons which have not yet been explained but which almost certainly stem from the White House. Tack on that certain reporters have been diligently following up on the riot and have started stating publicly in advance of their final stories that there was absolutely communication between the rioters and the White House and the picture gets uglier and uglier.

Initial reports that Capitol police allowed rioters to simply flood in seem to be mostly untrue. There are a couple of incidents of police-rioter cooperation that have been cited my multiple left-wing sources - because, and I say this as a leftist myself, we don't trust cops and we particularly don't trust them to police right-wing nutjobs appropriately - but the greater release of interior Capitol video in the days following the attack make it fairly obvious that rioters and Capitol police were mostly in antagonistic positions to one another and that the rioters were mostly attacking the police viciously with relatively little retaliation from the police considering what was happening. (I mean: one police officer was literally beaten to death and fifty others suffered injuries.) Other than the sad case of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by police while attempting to break down an interior door, the other three rioter deaths can be categorized as death-by-misadventure, including the one dude who hilariously died of a heart attack after accidentally tasing himself in the balls when his Taser misfired in his pocket, which is an absolutely true thing that happened and you should repeat that every chance you get.

The other element that really needs to be stressed about the attack is that there were, essentially, two distinct groups of rioters attacking the Capitol. The first and larger group were just stupid assholes: these are the people who marched in and then sat at desks or broke things or stole shit or took selfies. This is not to suggest that they were blameless - they have plenty of blame to shoulder - but they were the less dangerous group overall. The more dangerous and much smaller group were the men (almost entirely men) who were dressed in tactical gear and clearly wielding flexible zipcuffs and who, in the videos, move swiftly and with purpose, and it is entirely reasonable to suspect that they were planning violent action against their perceived enemies because why else would you fucking need flexible zipcuffs?

The reaction to the attack has been both expected and unexpected. A fair number of longtime Republicans have completely disassociated themselves from the party - most notably Colin Powell - or publicly lectured their fellow party members about how this isn't how to do democracy. However, as many or more are complaining now that it wasn't as big a deal and some are even fundraising off it, and many of these people are absolutely incensed that Twitter and Facebook have since banned Donald Trump (who - and this is true - spent most of Friday night trying to circumvent the ban like a raging teen trying to evade the mods on his favorite forum by tweeting from half a dozen other accounts, including a couple of staffers' accounts, all of which got swiftly nuked) and that the right-wing social network Parler has been dropped like a rock by the big tech companies, because far too many Republicans have either decided they need to get in bed with the crazies to win elections or are simply crazies themselves.

As for the Democrats, they are slow-walking their own response to an extent that seems utterly ridiculous. Nancy Pelosi had the House take the weekend off before commencing impeachment proceedings - and impeachment is absolutely justified considering Donald Trump tried to instigate a violent insurrection against the American government - and Democratic leadership generally just seems to be more interested in having Mike Pence and what remains of Trump's Cabinet exercise the 25th Amendment and depower Trump instead of impeaching. To be fair, Mitch McConnell has hinted that the Republicans wouldn't allow the Senate to reconvene to discuss impeachment anyway (since to reconvene the Senate you need a universal assent from its members), but so what? Let them own it.

All of that said: there is still so much we do not know about this event, because we have been told so little by authorities. (As one journalist pointed out: it has now been five days and there has not been a single press conference by any government official to discuss what is already one of the most important events in American history. That is insane.) Partially this is because a lot of the authorities who would tell people things are controlled by the White House still, and Donald Trump obviously doesn't want anybody being told anything because most of it is probably very, very bad for him.

But, just as likely, there is the strong possibility that we aren't being told anything because investigating authorities are now down a rabbit hole of malfeasance: as they arrest rioters they start getting access to electronic records they did not previously have, which might include communications about planned future attacks - like the ones the right wing have been openly planning for the 19th and 20th (Inauguration Day) - or which might reveal complicity in other branches of government (such as municipal police forces - we're learning about more and more cops who travelled to Washington expressly to riot). At the same time, Parler's inept managers have somehow managed to allow hackers to pull literally all of their data files from January 6th - meaning that there is a publicly accessible record of every single Parler post and direct message from that day, including all of the uploaded videos (80 terabytes' worth of them) so there's going to be a ton more evidence against a great many people.

This is the first reason I say we're closer to this having been a beginning rather than an end: the American lunatic right has not been smacked down hard enough by their failure. Rather, they have been emboldened, in part because their leaders are still encouraging them and in part because everybody is now realizing that we came very close to potential executions on the floor of Congress, including the lunatics who now no doubt find reason to try again. And they are already trying again: they are protesting, fully armed, outside multiple state Capitols across the country and indeed invaded a couple at the same time as the Washington riot occurred, because this is a movement, and movements don't stop easily.

The other reason I say this is more a beginning than an end is simply that the next six months are so are going to define America's future going forward. The idea of America is at this point hanging by a thread, because the willingness of the right to assert that the centre - much less the left - simply does not have the authority to govern has reached critical mass. Either the Democrats deal with this - and Joe Biden's unity/healing schtick, as nice and well-intended as it may be, isn't even close to how you deal with it - or you're looking at small-d democratic America's end.

(The exciting news in Rwanda currently, by the way, is that the country is denying that it had troops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mostly because they're cooperating with the DRC to wipe out the Allied Democratic Front, an Islamic militia trying to overthrow the DRC government and generally just killing a lot of people and they don't want the ADF using their participation for propaganda purposes. Now you know.)

See you next week.