“Storm the Capitol!” someone shouted.
Dave Weigel of the Washington Post regularly covers political activist events. He attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and other conservative conclaves. He reports on Netroots Nation conferences and live-tweets DNC platform meetings (god help him). But Wednesday’s storming of the U.S. Capitol complex caught him off guard. Weigel expected more bold talk from one-eyed fat men, the kind he has heard for years.
This time was different. This time instead of internet comments there were enough true believers in person to make a mob. The conspiracy-theorist-in-chief egged them on. When the Proud Boys marched past, the leader shouted through a bullhorn, “They can’t stop us!” and “I say we storm the Capitol!”
Weigel shakes his head:
It took 90 more minutes for me to grasp the significance of that. A career covering politics, much of it spent on the conservative movement, had conditioned me to revolutionary rhetoric that nobody acts on. Yet here they were, acting out the plan they’d screamed into reality, walking right past me.
Weigel found little time for live-tweeting once the attack got rolling. Things were moving too fast and there was too much ground to cover. Rioters were attempting to overthrow the government, Weigel writes, because that is what they thought they were doing,
“Chris” told him, “If they don’t start [expletive] arresting people and hanging people real soon, they’re going to be burning and hanging off these [expletive] trees out here.”
A woman accosted a BBC reporter. Weigel attempted to come to his aid. She screamed at them both.
“He has a right to be here, as do you,” I said.
“No,” she said. “You’re communists. You’re bought by China. Get out.”
When things went sideways, it happened fast.
Everything I heard, from the threats to murder members of the government to the snarls meant to scare reporters away, was familiar from the rhetoric I’d seen online. I’d been conditioned to see it all as hyperbole, intentionally provocative trolling.
But when these rioters said “storm the Capitol,” they meant that they would storm the Capitol. When they said “Hillary for prison,” they meant that they wanted to jail the president’s 2016 opponent. When they said “Biden’s a pedophile,” they meant that they thought the president-elect was either a member of an international ring of child rapists, or a freelancer with the same predilections. When they said “1776,” they meant that the incoming government was illegitimate and tyrannical, and should be overthrown by force.
These were desperate acts by people who had marinated their brains in lies for years. No conspiracy theory was too outlandish to believe. If Trump left office, if the Democrats and the Deep State stole the election, as Trump told them repeeatedly they had, their world would end.
Weigel finishes:
They’d been told that Democratic victories meant not just gun control, but a national registry and door-to-door confiscation. They’d seen ads warning that a Democratic sweep of Congress would lead to the defunding of police departments, putting their lives at the mercy of Antifa. Some of their news sources, in sync with the president, told them that there was a way to prevent Biden from taking office.
Naturally, they believed it. And, Weigel observes, “they believed the justice system would protect them, and they would get away with it.”
They were true patriots. They were the Real Americans™. All others are lessers, sheeple, Communists, or worse. “Nothing will stop us….they can try and try and try but the storm is here …” Faced with living in a world run by Satan-worshipping pedophiles, no act of violence is unjustified.
Five died, including a 35-year-old woman shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer, and a U.S. Capitol Police officer, the suspected victim of a homicide. D.C. Metropolitan Police already have 16 pages of suspects wanted for everything from curfew violation to assault, property destruction, possession of weapons, explosive devices and Molotov cocktails, and felony riot.