unz | I think for most of us who were watching, we simply had an overwhelming feeling of Schadenfreude — seeing the political elite that’s been selling us down the river and making our lives hell for decades for once the ones cowering in fear. This was most especially true of the Democrats, who got a taste of their own medicine after endlessly excusing and justifying BLM and Antifa violence over the past four years. Only a few weeks before, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted an ill-timed message justifying protests, writing, “The thing that critics of activists don’t get is that they tried playing the ‘polite language’ policy game and all it did was make them easier to ignore . . . The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable. Activists take that discomfort with the status quo and advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small and grows. To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable . . . that’s the point.” On this, we can agree with her.
What if activists aren’t PR firms for politicians & their demands are bc police budgets are exploding, community resources are shrinking to bankroll it, & ppl brought this up for ages but it wasn’t until they said “defund” that comfortable people started paying attn to brutality
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 2, 2020
But for me, I was no less happy to see the Republicans on the run. After all, it is they who have been stoking the anger and resentment of populist Americans, secure in their belief that they had conjured a monster they completely controlled and that they could endlessly exploit for their own purposes no matter what they did. Well, that monster turned around and bit them on their fleeing asses on Wednesday. The “people,” whom they love to claim they represent, went from being an ideological abstraction to an angry mob after they felt cheated and decided to take matters into their own hands. It’s important to remember that, according to reports, what first inspired the protesters to descend on the Capitol was when word reached them that Pence had refused to challenge the certification of the Electoral College result. They weren’t just angry at the Democrats; they were angry at the whole lot of them.
Just as among conservatives, there are those on the Dissident Right who see this event as a tragedy, primarily because they believe that this protest has discredited the populist movement. To such people, I can only respond: What were you getting out of being well-behaved? It was already clear before the Capitol occupation that no real attempt was being made to win justice regarding the election results. Those Republicans who have backed Trump in his efforts to challenge Biden’s alleged victory have, for the most part, only done so because they want to be able to tell their Trump-loving supporters that they did their best, but that, in the end, the Democrats cheated them. I’m quite sure that they’ve known for weeks that they had already done all they could do through legal procedures; what they’ve been doing in the meantime was merely theater for their constituents. None of them really wanted to challenge the establishment; they are the establishment. So, from our point of view, what is there to be gained by backing a lost cause? A lost cause that, moreover, didn’t offer much to us to begin with, given that every Dissident Rightist has been deeply disappointed in the Trump administration? Sure, a Trump win was preferable to a Biden win from our perspective, but it’s hardly worth quietly and passively going down with the ship for him.
Of course, even before the Capitol had been cleared, I started seeing the conspiracy theorists coming out of the woodwork to claim that this was yet another “false flag” event, just like every other historical event to have occurred over the past 70 years. The main support for this claim that I’ve seen is that it has been asserted that known Antifa members have been identified in the crowd that occupied the Capitol. Even if this is true, I don’t see what difference this makes. People in Antifa are known to be attracted to violence and chaos, so it’s hardly surprising that a few of them may have shown up to take part.
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