Washington Post reporter Kate Newsome and photographer Joy Sharon Yi went inside the riot, inside the mob, inside the Capitol. Newsome was shouted at and vilified by protestors when they asked her where she worked. She told them. “F— you! Fake News!” She maintained her calm.
That our country could ever have come to this.
For any who have not watched it may strongly commend
Frontline: The United States of Conspiracy,’ It can b e
viewed on line.
INCREDIBLE.
The videos demonstrate how courage is now essential to being a journalist who covers politics. One of comments noted the Post’s sub-masthead, “Democracy Dies In Darkness.” I think we can all agree that democracy can easily die in the sunlight for everyone to see. Let’s hope the same light will let us see how it can be reborn. I’m not sure, if I were a betting man, what odds I would take.
Trump needs to GO AWAY forever. He’s EVIL and a traitorous liar.
He has committed heinous crimes against so many.
I keep thinking what it must like to live with or be around this crazy person who has no morals whatsoever and throws tantrums. Unbelievable that he’s potus.
Ever notice that his mouth looks like an anus? PERFECT symbol for who he is.
The power of propaganda. It is hard to fathom that people actually believe the far right rhetoric. The people who enabled and endorsed this narrative deserve to be prosecuted.
Trump unleashed a monster in the underbelly of America. A large number of Americans were easily misled by an authoritarian demagogue. A steady diet of right wing hate, scapegoating and conspiracies erodes faith in the democratic process. The sad part is that these people are nothing like Trump. He’s a billionaire con artist that is using them to serve his own pursuit of power and money. Trump “loves the uneducated” because they are easy to manipulate. Pitiful, but dangerous.
Vice News posted a series of videos from the rioters’ phones. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vq9k/youre-scared-now-watch-parler-videos-posted-by-rioters-inside-the-capitol
In Cahoots
You Capitol police
Who bravely stood, thanks be.
Some few of you in cahoots
With the absurd but dangerous Proud Boys,
Not unwillingly enabling the milling
Wall-scaling throng, the boisterous crowd noise
Turning battering ram,
Bashing ahead with fire extinguisher killing,
You who cooperated with the berserker-
Fur-clad bare-chested Viking,
With the pipe-bombing-bearing, officer-striking
Mob, a lasting disgrace.
Whether you played the misleader or the shirker,
The emblem of the whites-only racist face,
The Stars and Bars, flaps in your blood
And in the blood that is your hands’ defiler,
Some of that blood still staining President Taylor.
The insurgency was mostly akin to flood,
Thank god, not fire,
What with all that Molotov-bottled-up ire.
The brave among you police fought; some capitulated,
Letting the screamers or oddly touristy trespassers
Stay gawking or vent their obscene release.
Rome’s Capitoline geese
Who squawked in time to save their Capitol
Were of more use. What could be crasser?
You who were in cahoots:
Peru’s indigenous desperate fighters,
Clamoring their defiant Inca hoots
While battling vicious conquistadors, Pizarros,
Were of much tougher moral fiber
Than you who posed for selfies with the Bizarros.
Capitol Offense
The whitest building, the whites-only dome,
Rising above D.C. like wavetop foam,
The noblest product known of all our piles,
Exists by unfree labor that defiles.
Reclaimed by Lincoln for a Union free
(For some this freedom remains a mystery),
Re-reclaimed by a Presidential huckster,
Retains its bigoted, spit-shined, lackluster,
Sepulchral sanctity that lives by bribes,
Pork-barrel vittles argued for by tribes
Of lobbyists, tacked onto bills by riders,
Negating all good intent like true backsliders.
In such an atmosphere, will the sprayed mace
In rioters’ eyes fume worse than the disgrace?
The Senate majority leader cares for none
Of the vandals dressed like Viking or like Hun
Or Goth whose black attire and eyeblack, flags
Drape—not ours but Police-Lives-Matter rags,
Good-ol’-boys’ Stars and Bars that scent their place
In this still largely segregated space.
Outnumbered, still the Capitol Police
Fought a brave losing battle where Release
Of crassest Prejudice, privileged Arrogance,
Made marble walls and halls a blood-floored manse
Where zip-ties would take hostage the lawmakers
And execution-style deaths be thirst-slakers,
Expressed most bloodlust in the rioters’ picnic
That littered the scene and killed good Brian Sicknick.
Some of the police who fought you sympathized
With whatever grievances you had devised,
Yet fought you till mauled with flagstaffs and sticks
And riot shields, withstood such as who sicks
Vicious pit bulls in “most admired disorder”
Till total breakdown of the restraining border.
We trust them as we do hostile witnesses
Sworn to tell truth that counters their own interests;
Likely their hearts felt what the marauders felt,
Yet they sank down defending. Cut and welt
And blow to the head they took, defending principle
And practice Time at best finds half-defensible,
The standing contradictions whose old home
Embraces all beneath the White Man’s Dome.