America's Political Prisoners

My position on the afternoon of January 6th has been consistent since the early evening of January 6th...

I was in a bad mood because so many pundits of the American right had signed on to the "citadel of democracy" twaddle. As you may recall, I called it a "citadel of crap": I felt a bit bad when American newspapers picked up on my coinage, because it didn't seem entirely becoming for an immigrant to have to point it out. But, on the other hand, it is a citadel of crap.

Likewise, the Capitol Police is not really a police force. It's a personal security guard for the Emirs of Incumbistan. That's why they're exempted from the freedom-of-information laws that apply to real constabularies: If Ashli Babbitt had been shot dead by an officer of the Dead Moose Junction Municipal Police Department, you'd know his name; but she was shot instead by a member of the Congressional Praetorian Guard, and thus you have no right in law to know his name. This is yet another example of the political class opting out of the legal regime they impose on everybody else.

The biggest lie of January 6th was that the "rioters" were somehow responsible for multiple deaths that day. Very belatedly, the DC coroner confirmed that, aside from Ashli Babbitt, everybody dead had died of natural causes - including Officer Sicknick, whom most Americans still believe was murdered by Trump supporters bludgeoning him with a non-existent fire extinguisher. The Capitol Police, in both their formal statements and their leaks to media chums, helped advance that lie.

This national disgrace — Political Persecution — has been going on for way too long.

>> The biggest lie of January 6th was that the “rioters” were somehow responsible for multiple deaths that day.

Yup, one of the biggest lies — the other was the staged “siege” with the fake door glass, cross-eyed cops, and fake rounds.

Those threads keep getting pulled because there's no basis for them. Ie, they're unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.

What happened is that a few months ago some website with a very dodgy reputation clipped from the video a few images of the right wrist of the covid-masked shooter, and you could see what looked vaguely like some alternating black and white pattern, or maybe alternating "lighter vs darker" places - consisting of at least 1 or 2 segments of each. Whether it was a decorative wristband or another type of wristband (for work?) is unknown. But anyway, this conspiracy group took an enormous leap of logic from there using guilt-by-association, to show a photo of a known person (I believe it was the guy who took down Scalise's assailant?) and who also had a wristband with dark and light alternating segments. And they circled both men's wrists in the respective images and declared "Voila! Q.E.D! We have ID-ed Ashli's killer! An exclusive scoop for our website! You heard it here first!"

So far they haven't proven that they have discovered anything more consequential than click-bait ... effective click-bait apparently.

The guy who stopped the Scalise shooting was black, BTW. While the masked guy who murdered Ashli looked pretty white to me ... and this was before I ever heard of the Scalise defender claim. But back in Jan/Feb I went several rounds with Freepers who were certain that the shooter *MUST* be black ... obviously because the entire conspiracy theory dies otherwise ... and they wouldn't even back off to halfway to say, "ok, I'll admit he could be either white or black; this low-rez video of a masked person makes it difficult to figure out which".

Hey, there was at least one Freeper who claimed that the stance and the way the gun was being held proved that it was a *woman* behind that mask. Oh puh-leeze. I know where that's going .... the next leap from there will be to claim Pelosi itself was the shooter.

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