This is one of those issues we can't discuss intelligently on HN because it involves bad faith. Someone will be along to deny that it happened ("Biden's president now, right?") or that there are any anti-democracy forces at work in the US at all for that matter (other than millions of illegals voting), and we'll have to treat that as a good faith argument.
I agree we can’t have this discussion in good faith:
People keep reiterating there was a planned attack on our nation, when the FBI found there was no such thing — and at least one of the 500+ arrested for Jan 6th was released because the police waved him in.
I think we can’t have that discussion in good faith because people refuse to admit they were tricked by Reichstag Fire 2.0 — or even entertain the idea they might have been.
That’s too bad:
I think the only way we prevent the rise of Nazism in the US is to admit the Jan 6th people are political prisoners and you were tricked (like the Germans).
Whether or not it was planned from the highest levels, did they not still engage in violent protest against the government? Is that not something that should be punished?
The technique is "flooding the zone with shit" per Steve Bannon. When successful, it obscures that there's objective truth at all.
HN is particularly susceptible because we're all in one silo and when we can't agree on a shared reality, we have to assume under the HN guidelines that the alternate reality is truly what our interlocutor believes.
The endgame looks like the Russian people accepting Putin's nonsense because they can't believe anything.
Trump didn't think the 6th insurgents would succeed. He had clearly been advised that the reaction to it might allow him to institute marshal law, and there was a draft executive order floating around that would have seen him use that situation to try to delay things further.
I think a lot of people fail to understand how many different ways there are to make order out of chaos, and how in extreme chaos a lot of people will accept any kind of order.
