Why we were there

 

Why Protest?

 

Today marks one week since the protest at the US Capitol which is now being characterized as a seditious act of an angry mob.  Those who attended are being excoriated and “cancelled.”  I posted a blog with a fairly detached tone that was a simple description of the event and I was rewarded with a person who I don’t even know posting a review on my employer’s Facebook page calling me out by name as a cultist and a seditionist.  The person feels that I don’t deserve a job.  Fortunately, my post was reviewed and determined to be acceptable but I pulled it down anyway.

 

The one thing I did not address was why I chose to go to the protest in the first place.  I thought that would be clear to all, but I have since learned that it isn’t.  Either through innocent or willful ignorance, they really cannot figure out why so many thousands of Americans would travel to participate in such an event. 

 

There are a few points that unfortunately need to be brought up.  I thought these were self-evident, but apparently are not. 

 

1.      1.  Nobody I spoke to had any intention of breaking any laws.  That includes rioting, breaking and entering, assault or any of the things that are shown on TV.

2.      2.  Those that clearly did come to break the law were very small in number as compared to the numbers at the protest.  I don’t have actual figures because strangely, they are not available anywhere I can find.  The crowd at the Ellipse was huge and likely in the hundreds of thousands.  It was not the 2 million that rumor pegged it at but it wasn’t in the tens of thousands either.  The number actually in the Capitol was somewhere in the low hundreds. 

3.      3.  Not everybody who was there was a Trump supporter.  Yes, I know you’re reading plenty of media accounts of those arrested who were indeed Trump fans, but in watching and listening to the crowd, it was obvious that there was a small contingent of those with other views and likely, other motives.

 

Let me also get in the obligatory note that neither I nor anybody I am friends with supports the idea of sedition, treason, murder for political ends, violence for political ends, theft, vandalism, assault, or any of the things that happened inside the Capitol.  I have met a few people who are so angry that they believe it is time for violence, but those are the outliers.  They are not the Tea Party types.  They are the Q-Anon types and there are not a lot of those.  I don’t deny their existence, but they don’t represent any significant fraction of Trump supporters.

 

So what was the point and why did Americans drive and fly from all over the nation to protest this event?  Was it stupidity?  Ignorance?  Malice?  Some people really don’t understand what brought so many Americans to this point and think that is must be some cultish devotion to what they view as a the incarnation of evil.

 

In order to understand it, we need to go back a bit.  In 2016, the seeds of all of this were sown.  The Steele Dossier was a fraud from the very beginning and the FBI knew it at the time.  They ignored that fact and lied to a FISA court and to others in order to pursue a fraudulent investigation.  The Mueller report confirms that that the very least, there was zero evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.  This led to 3 years of wasted energy and time and destroyed the credibility of the FBI in the process. 

 

There was however, clear collusion between the Clinton campaign and those same Russians.  John Durham is looking into it and conservatives have been waiting… and waiting… and waiting for satisfaction for that report which will hopefully bring to justice those who really did engage in sedition.  The longer this takes, the less credibility it will have to conservatives.   

 

Then there was the bureaucratic attempted coup.  Sally Yates was one, but not the only one.  Remember all the leaks in 2017?  They were outrageous and unprecedented.  Recordings of conversations with foreign leaders have never been leaked in such a manner.  None of this has ever happened.  It was obvious that the “swamp” or “deep state” was actively coordinating to weaken the president or even run him from office.  They were called the resistance.  They damaged the credibility of the permanent bureaucracy in the process. 

 

Next was the Ukrainian phone call that turned out to be nothing.  This time, it was the national security apparatus that damaged their own credibility once the facts came out.  We watched the Democrats in congress impeach Trump for things that looked idiotic to us. 

Through all of this, the mainstream media was at least complicit if not actively involved.  They never once showed any curiosity into any of the above events except to bolster the resistance.  All it would have taken is for one New York Times reporter to question the narrative and do just a little digging.  That was never done.  The media put the final nail in their credibility coffin when they ignored the Hunter Biden story.  Even now, they admit that the laptop and the evidence of corruption exists but still refuse to mount any serious investigation of it.  

As a side note, with this level of corruption so obvious to conservatives, is it any wonder we were distrustful when more bureaucrats said we had to shut down the economy over a virus?

 

All of this just sets the stage for the election.  Some may look at the above situations and dismiss it as the wrong way to view the facts.  They really can’t dispute the facts themselves though.  In this election, 75 million Americans saw things essentially this way which is more than any candidate has in any election in history. 

 

Seventy-five million Americans saw it and voted and yet somehow President Trump lost to a candidate who didn’t campaign, had rallies where literally a few dozen people attended and had a demonstrated history of a condition resembling dementia.  It made zero sense.  Surely that can’t be true. 

Now about that election… to deny that problems didn’t exist is to deny reality.  I don’t care if court cases have been thrown out, not heard or if Republican officials in some states say things were normal.  If this is normal, then normal needs to change.  We’ve seen the video from Detroit with pizza boxes being used to block Republican observers from doing their job.  We’ve seen the video from Atlanta of cases of ballots being pulled from under a table after observers are made to leave after a “water main break” that never happened.  We’ve seen that election laws were re-written in several states by judges who had no statutory authority to do it.  That just scratches the surface but are the most obvious and don't require mysterious conspiracy theories to demonstrate.  Ballots were sent to every registered voter when the law didn't provide for that and that is in states that had resisted or been prevented from examining the voter roles for decades.  The opportunity for corruption is undeniable.

 

Is any of that enough to change the outcome?  Maybe and maybe not.  But it should be in all American’s best interest to find out.  Election integrity is critical to any functioning democratic government.  Without trust in the outcome of elections, any remaining credibility in government is gone. 

 

That is why we were there.  That is why people traveled thousands of miles to be present at the Capitol that day.  It was to remind the legislative branch that Americans demand election integrity.  We knew this was a Hail Mary and that there was likely no way to stop it at this late date, but all other avenues to attain that had been blocked.  We hoped that Senator Cruz could be successful in getting congress to actually look at the problems and delaying things just a few days more while an honest hearing could be made.  The Pence gambit was doomed but some put faith in that effort as well.  It was grasping at straws because we felt it was our duty to ensure honesty in the election. 

One more thing to consider is what we were prepared for.  We were not thinking that this would turn into a riot of Trump supporters.  The thing that concerned me and everybody I met was the fear that the same protesters that had attacked a previous rally would try to attack this one.  It is why I got a train ticket to get me out of town well before sunset.  The fear of Antifa or other violent mobs was a genuine concern of several people with whom I had conversations.  The Tea Party crowd is very respectful and will not even litter on the grounds of the Capitol.  It didn't occur to most of us that elements of the group would resort to rioting.  

Edit 1/16/2021:

Now we are seeing that the riot wasn't as pure as was first portrayed.  It is still too early to know if the real story will come out but already there is video of a BLM activist who embedded himself in the crowd and was clearly inciting as if he were a Trump supporter.  In a heated crowd, this kind of behavior would have predictable effects.  Individuals may be smart, but a mob is not and a mob is easily manipulated by those who are determined to do it.