I came across this video in which National Guard Bureau chief Dan Hokanson says that 65,000 soldiers and airmen of the NG [3 times the number being reported in the media] are on the ground in DC.
Tag Archives: Crowds
Trump Incitement Timeline Fully Debunked
‘From CNN via DCPatriot:
“Evidence uncovered so far, including weapons and tactics seen on surveillance video, suggests a level of planning that has led investigators to believe the attack on the US Capitol was not just a protest that spiraled out of control, a federal law enforcement official says.
Among the evidence the FBI is examining are indications that some participants at the Trump rally at the Ellipse, outside the White House, left the event early, perhaps to retrieve items to be used in the assault on the Capitol.”
This reference to the crowd at the Ellipse is interesting because it appears that it was pioneer alternative news provider Alex Jones who organized the crowd at the Ellipse.
The observation that the movement to the Capitol came from the crowd at the Ellipse is seconded in this piece at USA Today:
Many of the rioters came directly from President Donald Trump’s “Save America Rally” that began hours earlier on the Ellipse, a park near the White House. Trump spoke to them for more than an hour, insisting that the election had been stolen.
USA Today’s timeline has the rally at the Ellipse starting around 6 am with some supporters arriving the previous night. It has the Save America Rally beginning at 11 am with speeches by Eric Trump and Don Jr. and Rudy Guiliani, followed by Trump at around 11.50 am.
The speech goes on for about an hour and during the time Trump urges supporters to walk down with him to the Capitol and tell Congress to do the right thing.
USA Today claims the protestors at the rally started the walk at the end of the speech at around 1 pm.
But Raheem Kassam has debunked this “Trump incitement” time-line. The speech was not easy to hear, was mostly a laundry list of election fraud with nothing new in it, and began late, so people wandered off before it ended toward the Capitol.
Kassam points out that the first protestors arrived at around 12.40 pm at the Capitol, a half hour before Trump ended his speech at 1.11 pm and over 76 minutes before any supporter could have made the 45 minute walk from the Ellipse to the Capitol following the speech. The outer perimeter of the Capitol had been breached and police chief Sund was calling for the National Guard before the President had even finished his speech. In fact, to do what investigators found them to have done, those who breached the Capitol would have had to have left the Ellipse before Trump began speaking.
The SGT Report published an eye witness account of the Ellipse rally and the walk to the Capitol, which contradicts the mainstream reports on several points.
Apparently the rally at the Ellipse was to run from 9 to 11, followed by another gathering at the North lawn of the Capitol building at 1. This was announced at the website wildprotest.com which now brings up a 404 error sign.
Other participants have also mentioned the confusion arising from two planned events and the first one running an hour late.
The SGT Report account mentions young men with scary masks but Revolutionary symbols on the backs of their clothes boarding trains running into DC. It also mentions the unusual smell of pot at the Ellipse, but, other than that, nothing unusual about the crowd of mostly white but some Asian and a few black supporters.
He does observe that the earliest people to get to the Capitol were on average younger than the group at the Ellipse and they were the ones scaling the walls and pushing through the metal barriers. He saw smoke, smelled tear gas and heard ceremonial cannon fire but he saw no violence from the protestors and knew nothing about the entry into the Capitol until he heard it from someone else. Then he saw what he thought was an Antifa infiltrator breaking glass to enter the building. Later he heard that a woman had been killed.
As mentioned earlier, Alex Jones paid half a million to book the Ellipse and he said he was asked by Trump to lead the march. The secret service was supposed to call him out earlier to do that but he found that people had already gone on ahead.
“Jones also said he paid close to $500,000 to book the Ellipse, the park where Trump’s supporters initially gathered, and other areas near the Capitol. He said 80% of the money came from an unnamed donor.”
The second interesting point is that investigators are using a counter-terrorism strategy of picking up people who might be of concern in the future on very minimal charges. The targets mentioned in the piece are both Proud Boys leaders who were taken in on fairly innocuous infractions, such as destroying a BLM banner and making ominous online postings. Proud Boys is supposedly a far- right outfit that has picked up a reputation for standing up to BLM and Antifa, which, of course, means that in the mainstream narrative they are violent murderous fascists. I say supposedly because several savvy observers think PB are agents provocateurs themselves.
The final point made in the piece is that investigators are looking for evidence of any kind of command and control behind the protestors, which suggests that they don’t think that the more violent aspects of the rally were set off spontaneously by what Trump said in his speech, which is the mainstream narrative. They think there was a coordinated plan in motion, well before Trump even got to the protest.
Stirring Footage From Inside Jan 6 Capitol Protest
Watch this footage taken by New Yorker reporter Luke Mogelson and ask yourself if, given the circumstances, there’s anything at all to be ashamed about in the overall behavior of this crowd of anywhere from half a million to over a million.
I couldn’t have felt prouder watching this honest, courageous, self-restrained ground-swell of patriotic feeling and righteous indignation.
If this be insurrection, make the most of it. And count me right in as an insurrectionist.
The protestors for the most part are dressed in ordinary street wear, some wearing masks of the US flag, others carrying US or Trump flags. Inside the halls of Congress they chant, Protect your liberty, Protect the constitution and tell the guards they are there because Trump, the guards’ boss, wants them there. They thank the guards for letting them in. They chant “Whose house? Our house,” “It’s the people’s house, let the people in,” and similar stuff.
“Defend the constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic,” shouts another. They talk about it being a war.
They march through the halls, look around and ask where everyone is because there’s no one but police. The brave Congress critters are skulking under desks in safe spaces, instead of meeting their constituents.
When someone sits in the vice president’s chair, one of the leaders tells him he cannot and it is disrespectful. The fellow in the chair then asks, with splendid logic, why THEY can steal an election, but HE cannot sit in a chair. But he does get up.
The officers who let them in are thanked repeatedly and told that they are only doing their job and it’s appreciated. A leader calls out that this is hallowed ground, sacred, and deserves respect. Another protestor says, Now that we’re here, we might as well form a government.
One guy’s looking for anything in the papers left behind that can be used against these “scumbags,” a sentiment probably shared by around 100 million people, including this blogger.
Someone tells the rest to watch what they do, because it’s a PR war…there’s talk of an information operation.
The guy with the horns on his head, Qanon Shaman, bellows in the background high above the paper hunters at the desks. Someone says they’ve found papers showing that Cruz was going to object to Arizona’s objection…he was going to sell us out anyway..Then he seems to retract. Another person says, Cruz and Hawley would have wanted us to do this. Someone says, There are 4 million people coming, some have just not got there. Another refers to a million people.
Several men get up and invoke Jesus Christ’s name, asking for light and protection from heaven, thanking Him for giving them the opportunity to be heard in this place and for being able to take back the country from communists, globalists, and traitors.
Before leaving, one of the leaders wants a picture taken and asks permission from the guards to do it.
Then they leave through one entrance while Mogelson leaves through another, where he takes more footage, this showing a more boisterous side of things. People are scaling the walls, tearing off fabric high up, but are largely nonviolent, with lots of chanting: USA, USA, and I think, We want Trump.
The police start tasering and throwing smoke bombs and people shout, Is that all you’ve got? We’re coming for you…
Someone builds a gallows and starts shouting, We’re going to hunt each and everyone of you down. There are calls to fight at home, to protest in the state capitols and to organize. Better to die a free man, shouts one man, than on your knees. Someone uses a flagpole to smash what looks like suitcases or boxes and shouts about how the media wouldn’t be able to record that. Another man says CNN is hiding behind Union Station.
People shout Treason, treason, treason.
Alex Jones Paid For Part Of Capitol Rally
I found this piece at the NY Post really interesting and possibly significant.
Alternative news pioneer, Alex Jones, of Info Wars fame, paid $500,000 of his own money to book either the Ellipse or another venue [it isn’t clear from the article] at the January 6 Capitol protest.
The idea was for Jones to lead the walk to the Capitol, but people were already on their way in the hundreds of thousands before he got there.
One of the things that participants noted was the disorganization of the event, from the poor quality of the audio that meant that Trump’s speech wasn’t easy to hear to the division of the crowd into two venues organized by different groups.
It looks from this piece as if Jones was one of the organizers.
Trump seems to have publicly praised Jones and invited him to organize. So one thing I’d like to follow up on is why Jones did not coordinate with the other organizers.
The second question I have is about the size of the crowd.
I got the impression when I watched the rally on videos on pro-Trump sites like The Gateway Pundit, The Donald, Conservative Treehouse, and Centipede Nation, that it was over half a million and maybe even a million, but public accounts of it are much more modest, usually saying something like 200 to 300,000. But that’s still vastly more than the official estimates before the event, which anticipated a maximum number of 80,000.
On India Today, an American Indian Republican official of some kind mentioned a figure in excess of a million, but I have not been able to find a printed transcript of the interview.
This is the first printed estimate I have seen which is close to my own observation.
Not knockout “games,” but organized gangs
I found one site, which seems to have the same sense I have, that this black-on-white crime is not the work of random “flash-mobs,” or random thugs, or “knock-out games.”
This looks like organized, pre-planned violence.
The incidents below occurred in 2011, in the run-up to the 2012 election, which I blogged previously, deliberately employed race-incitement as a strategy.
Chicago Illinois
In Chicago attacks by black mobs are becoming routine. So much so that the police is now mobilizing detectives and additional officers to form gang units in a desperate effort to try to get a handle of this.
So far they are failing.
June 9th 2011,”police here are girding for another weekend of ‘flash mob’ attacks after arresting 29 people in connection with a recent rash of assaults and robberies in and around the city’s tony shopping and dining district. Twelve crimes involving large groups of young men were reported last weekend in addition to others earlier this spring. The incidents are some of the first major problems confronting newly appointed Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy”.
The attacks are typical of what this man, Krzysztof Wilkowski, experience after shopping on Michigan Avenue. He was sitting on his scooter a couple of blocks away checking his phone for a restaurant when he got whacked in the face with a baseball. After he was dazed by the blow , “a few of the attackers dragged him off his scooter and pulled him onto Chicago Avenue where they punched him, hit him with his helmet and tried to grab his phone”.
Another victim was “Jesse Andersen, the 35-year-old brother of Smashing Pumpkins front-man Billy Corgan” who was accosted and attacked by a black mob while waiting for the train.
Don’t think that these attacks occur in some devastated ghetto. On the contrary. The black mobs are praying on victims in Chicago’s affluent North Side, including the very popular tourist attraction, The Magnificent Mile.
A few days ago another balck mob invaded and took over a Walgreens store right on the “Magnificent Mile”.
Read full article here
Peoria Illinois ” kill all the white people”
A mob of African-American male youths terrorized White residents of Peoria, Illinois as they shouted “kill all the White people” while rioting in the downtown area late Saturday night.
Eyewitness Paul Wilkinson, president of the Altamont Park Neighborhood Association, wrote the following account in the Peoria Chroncile:
Tonight, around 11 p.m., a group of at least 60-70 African American youth marched down one of the side streets (W. Thrush) to the 4 lane main drag (Sheridan). They were yelling threats to white residents. Things such as “we need to kill all the white people around here”. They were physically intimidating anyone calling for help from the police.
This is the fifth large mob action in about a month while smaller groups of 10-12 are out threatening children and adults a few evenings a week or later into the night.
SourceNo. Virginia.
Three people were beaten by mobs in Northern Virginia in two separate incidents that occurred within five minutes of each other on Saturday night, authorities said.
To think that this is random stretches the furthest bounds of credulity and requires a suspension of disbelief bordering on comatose. The spark of these attacks is planned and some of them were actually organized on social media sites. Do you remember which president got elected using social media sites?
The insanity of public debate in America
Consider the following,:
1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.
These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.
2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.
Leading “libertarian” activists say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public. This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.
No one thinks of simply ignoring and not linking the Sterling material. Instead, they all follow the media’s cue automatically, as though pulled by invisible strings. Then they call themselves “fiercely independent” and talk about “freedom,:” “free speech,” “free choice,” “self-ownership” and other flattering mythologies with a straight face.
Meanwhile, so-called “evil statists” are the only ones arguing that the the recordings are on their face illegal and should not be distributed in the public realm.
The parameters of debate in the much-vaunted “free press” are set by media barons who profit from cheap gossip and extortion (which lowers the cost of running a paper, since the public does the reporting for free or for small sums), pornographers, and paid operatives of the government posing as private actors.
No one considers this a gross conflict of interest. The media barons are presumed not to have political agendas and presumed not to manipulate in collusion.
Nor is this manipulation termed what it is – an extension of the state into the private sphere. It is all deemed “free market” unproblematically.
3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.
I actually agree with that argument, but those who deny a Donald Sterling his privacy can surely have no justification for giving a Belle Knox hers.
With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide) is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).
4. The same people who attack Donald Sterling’s private speech and hold it to an arbitrarily decided public standard also denounce theocracy (with its logically entailed blasphemy laws) as an insupportable and “medieval” intrusion into free speech and thought. And they declare themselves the embodiment of “reason” against the “irrationality” of the religious.
5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate. They even object to any constraint placed on their right to disseminate for commercial profit the vilest images, even where they would be accessible by minors.
They defend their right to view violent child pornography, even though that right supplies the demand that drives a global market of child abuse and murder and though the act of viewing itself has been deemed criminal.
But while the act of viewing child-porn is criminal, the act of dismembering a child is deemed “private” and protected.
The left also defends without any nuance or moderation the right to publish “art” that inflames the public, even where major violence could result as in the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which, as it turns out, were a deliberate provocation from a neo-con flack.
Study suggests whites don’t see non-whites as “people”?
From April Kemick at the University of Toronto (Scarborough) website:
“The human brain fires differently when dealing with people outside of one’s own race, according to new research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough.
This research, conducted by social neuroscientists at U of T Scarborough, explored the sensitivity of the “mirror-neuron-system” to race and ethnicity. The researchers had study participants view a series of videos while hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines. The participants – all white – watched simple videos in which men of different races picked up a glass and took a sip of water. They watched white, black, South Asian and East Asian men perform the task.
Typically, when people observe others perform a simple task, their motor cortex region fires similarly to when they are performing the task themselves. However, the UofT research team, led by PhD student Jennifer Gutsell and Assistant Professor Dr. Michael Inzlicht, found that participants’ motor cortex was significantly less likely to fire when they watched the visible minority men perform the simple task. In some cases when participants watched the non-white men performing the task, their brains actually registered as little activity as when they watched a blank screen.
“Previous research shows people are less likely to feel connected to people outside their own ethnic groups, and we wanted to know why,” says Gutsell. “What we found is that there is a basic difference in the way peoples’ brains react to those from other ethnic backgrounds. Observing someone of a different race produced significantly less motor-cortex activity than observing a person of one’s own race. In other words, people were less likely to mentally simulate the actions of other-race than same-race people”
The trend was even more pronounced for participants who scored high on a test measuring subtle racism, says Gutsell.”
Comment:
Actually, what the researchers found was not that “people’s brains” react differently when they watch people of other races than their own.
What they found was that white people’ brains reacted differently when they watched non-whites, as opposed to other whites. A bit of a difference.
Now, if the researchers had also done tests with brown people as the study group and then blacks and other groups, then it would be valid for them to generalize from their research to conclusions about people as a whole.
But they can’t generalize about “people” from one subset of people without being guilty of the very thing they’re supposed to be studying, racism.
Of course, the perceptions of the whites in the study might not have had so much to do with color as such, although it manifested that way, but as with the status evoked by white skin. Since white or light-skin tends to signify higher status in contemporary society, it follows that when white people – in this study – showed less awareness of or empathy toward dark-skinned people, they might have been doing that not so much because of the different skin-colors of the people they were observing, but because of what those colors signify today, which is lower status.
This inference is strengthened by a similar study of race and perception conducted by Sophie Trawalter et al. in 2012.
Quoting from the abstract of the Trawalter study:
Archival data from the National Football League injury reports reveal that, relative to injured White players, injured Black players are deemed more likely to play in a subsequent game, possibly because people assume they feel less pain. Experiments 1–4 show that White and Black Americans–including registered nurses and nursing students–assume that Black people feel less pain than do White people. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 provide evidence that this bias is rooted in perceptions of status, not race per se.
The authors suggest that the findings of their study do not necessarily mean that whites are being racist in not caring when non-white people feel pain. The findings could also mean that white people show less empathy because, for one reason or other, they think black people can tolerate greater pain.
Of course, none of these conclusions means much until studies of black or brown perceptions of white people are also done.
One might guess that in those studies it will be found that browns and blacks are actually more sensitive to the pains of whites than those of their own. One might guess that, because in recent studies it’s been shown that both whites and blacks rated white faces as more intelligent, honest, and attractive than they did black/dark-skinned faces….
I’ll pull up the link in a minute… (incomplete)
Preet Bharara – Overhyped and Toothless
“Yet nowhere in Gabriel Sherman’s well-researched piece in New York is there even one mention of Preet Bharara.
There’s a simple reason for that: Preet Bharara is not busting Wall Street. He’s not collaring the masters of the meltdown. He’s done nothing to even slightly discomfit Wall Street’s still-ferocious money machine, or has yet to bring to justice the architects, enablers and continuers of the 2008 financial crisis — the bankers who got us into that mess, and the ones who are continuing to extract pain from foreclosed homeowners, in the New York area and beyond.
As a matter of fact, his over-hyped insider-trading prosecutions, the main focus of the Time piece, are doing the Street a favor, by targeting people who actually ripped off Wall Street — individuals like hedge fund managers Raj Rajaratnam and Danielle Chiesi, who functioned a bit like the goons who used to dope race horses in the old days.
Bharara’s insider trading targets rigged the game for their own profit by illegally misappropriating information, in effect stealing from their employers and other investors, just as the horse-dopers cheated racetracks and other betters. Another analogy, also from the racetracks of old, would be to the scam artists who used to “past-post”: bet on races after they knew the outcome.
That’s how insider trading works. It’s a form of theft and cheating. It’s bad. Bharara was right to prosecute them, just as he has aggressively pursued drug gangs in the outer boroughs. But let’s be clear on something: The big players, the Goldman Sachses, Merrill Lynches, Banks of America and so on, don’t like insider trading any more than Preet Bharara does.
And none of his criminal prosecutions to date — including his recent bust of three high-ranking former Credit Suisse execs, accused of rigging the value of mortgage bonds they held in 2008 — had any connection to the pain being felt by Americans today, which can be directly traced to the misconduct of mortgage bankers and derivatives traders in the run-up to the financial crisis.
The real perps of the financial crisis haven’t been in Bharara’s — or the Justice Department’s — cross hairs for a single moment since Barack Obama took office three years ago. It’s one of the most troublesome failings of his administration.”
OWS Unites Against Corporate Personhood
Occupy Wall Street unites around abolition of corporate personhood (via Tikkun Daily):
“There is only one way to reclaim democracy and make our government one of, by and for the People. We must make support of a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood a campaign issue in 2012 and beyond. Candidates around the country are taking a pledge to amend. As they challenge incumbents and better-known challengers in the upcoming primaries, the issue will gain prominence in other races. Eventually it will become generally recognized that when faced with a choice between candidates willing to prove that they are seeking office in order to serve the interests of their constituents and not those of their corporate patrons and themselves, the choice will be obvious. As voters in more and more elections respond by electing candidates who have taken the pledge to amend it will become clear that the amendment will pass.”
Civil Unrest In Guadalupe, February 2009
Researching trouble spots that could predict how civil unrest might unfold in the future, I came across this report from February 2009 ,about insurrection in the French Caribbean. It is described, literally, in black and white terms, as a class war that breaks out along racial lines. The source being The Daily Mail, this might be sensationalistic. But there’s no denying it’s plausible:
“Britons are among thousands of tourists fleeing Guadeloupe after full scale urban warfare erupted on the French Caribbean island.
Trouble broke out on the island earlier last month after protesters began rioting over high prices and low wages.
But the situation escalated this week after protesters began turning on rich white families as they demanded an end to colonial control of the economy.
The troubles come at the height of the holiday season, with thousands of mainly British, French and American tourists on the paradise tropical island.”