The Proud Boys, Boogaloos, and whatever this or that grouplet on the right calls itself, they're being no more innovative than they were in their earlier incarnations. Throwing QAnon into this reflects the tendency to amalgamate and exaggerate threats from that quarter, and to see the Capitol riot as the expression of some kind of new unitary fascist current. It was not.
I repeat the very self-evident facts: (1) Very few of the Trump voters showed up on January 6 in Washington. Crowd estimates I've seen range in the 50,000 to 100,000 and thee seem to be exaggerated for effect. (Btw, if this represents what a president can call to Washington for something like this, opponents of Trump should be celebrating. Imagine, btw, how many the Democrats in Congress could have called out in response to the Supreme Court nominations or the Great Tax Cheat or Caged Babies.) Of the self-selecting jackasses who did show up, only a fraction assaulted the Capitol. The numbers I've seen are vague--some say "hundreds" an others "thousands." Of these, the preponderant majority were clueless yahoos--not the working class Trumpies of legend but mostly threatened and self-entitiled elites of small town and rural America. Only a fraction of them seemed to have had any kind of strategic purpose. And I don't mean the bully-boy chants about hanging Pence or the media hype about "insurrection." (Any self-respecting cabal of housecats could have organized as close to an "insurrection" as those clowns did.) I meant the lieutenant colonel and the military types involved, but they didn't seem to have any coherent idea of what they wanted to gain out of this. Some of them may have had a crude idea of how to conduct a coup, but there were few indications that they were making any coordinated effort to replace the government. There were the pipe bombs, which were not detonated and seemed to have no purpose other than intimidation. But none of that indicates any new coherent leadership or strategy. This is not to minimize the threat to "democracy." Quite the contrary. The Capitol Rioters have no meaning or even an existence as such were it not for the tug of war at the top of the very traditional American power structure. To not understand this and to determine our "next steps" based on not understanding this is to play into the hands of that power structure. Mark L. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5469): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5469 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79488065/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
