Violent Extremists Took Over The US Capitol
Long Before January 6
By Caitlin Johnstone
No longer content with absurd claims that the
January 6 Capitol riot was as bad as the 9/11
attacks, Democratic Party-aligned pundits are now
insisting that it was in fact worse.
On a recent appearance
with MSNBC’s ReidOut with Joy Reid, former
Bush strategist Matthew Dowd said he felt the
Capitol riot was “much worse” than 9/11 and that
this is the “most perilous point in time” since the
beginning of the American Civil War.
“To me, though there was less loss of life on
January 6, January 6 was worse than 9/11, because
it’s continued to rip our country apart and get
permission for people to pursue autocratic means,
and so I think we’re in a much worse place than
we’ve been,” Dowd said. “I think we’re in the most
perilous point in time since 1861 in the advent of
the Civil War.”
“I do too,” Reid said.
This is absolutely BONKERS and offensive to the thousands murdered on 9/11.
Appearing alongside MSNBC's Joy Reid, Matt Dowd says "January 6th was worse than 9/11 because it's continued to rip our country apart and give permission for people to pursue autocratic means" pic.twitter.com/UnJfAID5SN
Not to be outdone, Lincoln Project co-founder
Steve Smith cited Dowd’s hysterical claim but adding
that not only was January 6 worse than 9/11, but it
was actually going to kill more Americans
somehow, even counting all those killed in
the US wars which ensued from the 9/11 attacks.
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“He couldn’t be more right,” Schmidt
said at a town hall for the Lincoln Project.
“The 1/6 attack for the future of the country was a
profoundly more dangerous event than the 9/11
attacks. And in the end, the 1/6 attacks are likely
to kill a lot more Americans than were killed in the
9/11 attacks, which will include the casualties of
the wars that lasted 20 years following.”
A total of 2,996 Americans were killed in the
9/11 attacks, and a further
seven thousand US troops have been killed in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Exactly one person was killed
in the January 6 riot, and it was a rioter shot by
police inside the Capitol Building. Early reports
that rioters had beaten a police officer to death
with a fire extinguisher
turned out to have been false.
These bizarre alternate-reality takes are awful
for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that
this so-called “insurrection” everyone is still
shrieking about never at any point in its planning
or enactment had a higher than zero percent chance
of overthrowing the most powerful government in the
world, and the fact that they are manufacturing
consent for
new authoritarian measures just like 9/11 did.
But perhaps the most annoying thing about all the
melodramatic garment-rending over how close the US
Capitol came to being taken over by violent
extremists is that the US Capitol has been under the
control of violent extremists for a very long time
already.
For all the fretting everyone has been doing
about fascists and white supremacist groups, those
are not the violent extremists posing the greatest
threat and amassing the highest body count today.
Neither are the communists. Neither are the
anarchists. Neither are the radicalized Muslims, nor
the fundamentalist Christians, nor the
environmentalists, nor the incels. No, the most
dangerous and deadly group of violent extremists in
our day are adherents of the mainstream status quo
politics of the US-centralized power alliance.
And it’s not even close. Certainly many of the
groups listed above are dangerous and undesirable,
but they’re not the ones raining explosives upon
families around the world for power and profit.
They’re not the ones brandishing nuclear weapons
with steadily increasing recklessness as they ramp
up a
new cold war against Russia and China. They’re
not the ones poisoning the air and the water and
rapidly destroying the environment we all depend on
for survival. They’re not the ones enslaving
humanity to a brutal, oppressive and exploitative
global capitalist system which leaves far too many
toiling for far too little when there’s plenty for
everyone.
That would be the so-called “moderates” of the
western empire, who in reality are anything but.
BREAKING: Sources report violent right-wing extremists have seized the US Capitol, established a globe-spanning empire, and murdered millions of people.
It is violent to wage nonstop campaigns of
military mass murder and impose civilian-killing
economic sanctions on nations which disobey your
dictates. It is extremist to brutalize, brainwash
and enslave humanity while continuously shoving the
world in the direction of extinction and armageddon
in the name of profit and unipolar hegemony. Because
US officials sit
almost entirely on the right side of the global
political spectrum, we can accurately say that
everyone is fretting about violent right-wing
extremists storming a Capitol building that had
already long been occupied by violent right-wing
extremists.
And yet when Facebook started
sending Americans warnings that they may have
viewed “extremist content” scrolling through their
feeds, posts supporting this most dangerous group of
extremists were not the content they were being
warned about, but any kind of
content which opposes the status quo those
extremists have created. They’re killing the
ecosystem and murdering people every single day
while imperiling us all with the risk of nuclear
war, my social media feeds are full of Americans
literally trying to crowdfund their own survival
while the world’s worst
add trillions to their wealth, but it’s the
people who want to change this abusive
system who are the dangerous extremists.
Some analysts focus primarily on criticizing the
really obvious monsters who spout racist and bigoted
rhetoric to advance their toxic agendas. Others
focus more on criticizing the monsters that are
harder to see through the fog of feigned politeness
and propaganda distortion, the ones you see in
government buildings and on Fortune Magazine covers
and on TV news shows telling you what to think about
the world. Those who spend their time criticizing
the latter more than the former are often attacked
and ridiculed as fascist sympathizers and Kremlin
assets, but only by those who don’t actually see the
monsters that they are pointing to.
Hollywood trained us to fear psychopathic killers
prowling around in the dark so we won’t notice the
psychopathic killers who rule our world in broad
daylight. We’ve been trained to fear the serial
killer covered in blood and wielding a chainsaw so
we won’t notice the serial killer wearing a suit and
wielding a pen.
Our collective maturity cannot begin until we
learn to see the violent extremist monsters where
they actually exist, and not just where we’ve been
trained to look for them.
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