Trump got in his own way and lacked the awareness to see coming what some of us knew was in the rafters waiting. They understood his ego was an exploitable weakness

All of the people that got caught up in the actions of violence were predicable pieces on a chessboard, I’m more interested in the player(s)

Unless you have some proof it just sounds like another conspiracy.

Personally, I don’t use Facebook or Twitter. I don’t care what they do on their private platforms.

I would also note that, given the high emotions around the notion of a stolen election, it was quite impressive how little the unrest spread. There were hundreds of thousands at Trump’s rally, but the unrest was confined and short-lived. Honest commentators would commend the good sense of the vast majority.

I would also note that the timing was weird. Here was the first occasion when MSM could not ignore the presentation of a case to answer re poor election integrity. But the “storming” both cut the presentation short and distracted from it. There was absolutely nothing to trigger the event. Why at that moment, except that it suted parties other than Trump partisans.

The narrative might be more credible if the “storming” had happened AFTER the challeges had run their course and the election of Biden had been certified. But while the debates were still ongoing, and hope for a miracle remained?

I would go so far as to say that if you are easily persuaded that it was a spontaneous act by Trump partisan hotheads, perhaps I could interest you in some prime oceanfront property in Arizona. I’ll give you at bargain price! My bitcoin account is ….

Conservatives by definition cannot be radicalized. Conservatives are merely trying to preserve a United States that was, for most of its history, a prosperous place with a credible government.
It is pure idiocy to suggest that preservation of a working system with honest elections is somehow “radical.”.

The opponent army is not made of soldiers in uniforms, it is made of people, your own friends or family, discussing and arguying on social platforms all the time and wearing each other down, isolating eachother apart.

Lay low, don’t paint yourself into a target (guess itz too late for you now 😉 and most of all… “stay safe”.
Cheers

“Do you want to have every aspect of your life scrutinized by somebody else’s measure of moral and ideological purity before you can say anything online? How about before you can book a hotel room? Fill up your car with gas? Go shopping? Get on a plane?

After all, we have big data and AI now, so this is all doable. ”

Well, in fact, that is EXACTLY what some have published and are seriously considering, profiling customers using your online activities to determine your level of access to services, etc… this may be here sooner than you think.

(My wife just say an article to that very effect… I’ll try to track it down.)

That said, it was certainly inappropriate and disappointing. But it was not on the scale of a national tragedy.

The problem has been percolating for some time and it is the result of a process we know in the aviation safety field as a “normalization of deviancy”. When one deviates from established procedures and nothing bad happens, they are likely to repeat the deviations until there is an injurious or deadly outcome. When the Clintons were allowed to deviate from lawful and moral standards without consequence, others assumed they could as well. Obama began his political career by cheating his opponent through leaking sealed documents from his opponent’s divorce proceedings. As POTUS, Obama continued to deviate from lawful and moral governance culminating in the promulgation of false accusations against an incoming President. All without consequences. Now Biden has benefited from what appears to be wide scale election fraud, another deviation from honesty and integrity.

But this time, the normalization of deviancy has generated opposition protests, anger, distrust of the courts, and loss of faith in the electoral process. Why would anyone be surprised that a small sampling of 74 million Trump voters would decide to act out. The real surprise should be why it hasn’t happened all over the country.