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Trump got hit by two gag orders from two different judges. The precedent in this area of law is severely underdeveloped, both because so few defendants get gagged, and of those who do very few have the resources or energy to mount an appeal. Jacob Sullum writes a great overview of the issue:
So to avoid the common pitfalls in discussions like this, set aside Trump for a moment. Should judges have any authority to impose gag orders? If so, what limits should be in place? After working out the questions in theory, how does your position apply to Trump?
I think gag orders can be appropriate in a very limited set of circumstances. For example let's say a newspaper owner is charged with murder in a small town. He should always have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss the allegations against him and mount a defense in public. There are some areas where it starts to get cloudy for me, like for example if he hires an investigator (legal & appropriate) to dig into the history of the main witness against him (legal & appropriate) and he gets his hands on her diary (potentially legal & potentially appropriate). He then spends the lead-up to the murder trial publishing massive coverage the lurid details of all her sex kinks and fantasies, which isn't implicated in the murder charges. To me this starts to look like witness tampering/intimidation, where the defendant is humiliating a witness with the intent to discourage her from giving testimony.
So my answer is here would be yes, judges can impose gag orders but they should be extremely narrow. The operating principle should be to always allow defendants to discuss the direct charges against them, including the ability to discredit witness credibility. There's a blurry line between when someone is discrediting a witness on relevant matters, and when they're just trying to make their life hell to discourage them from testifying. An example of this blurry line is what happened to SBF, where his pretrial release was revoked in part because he leaked Caroline Ellison's diary to the NYT and because he seemed to have been coordinating testimony with FTX's general counsel.
So with that out of the way, how does it apply to Trump? Judge Chutkan's order restricts him from making statements that "target" the prosecutor, court staff, and "reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony". Practically speaking, it goes without saying that it's a terrible idea to talk shit about the court or prosecutor while your case(s) is pending. There are some obvious areas where Trump's commentary is inane and irrelevant, like posting a photo of a judge's law clerk and claiming she's "Schumer's girlfriend", or posting about the prosecutor's family members. Discrediting witnesses is harder to draw a clean line on, because again there's a gradient between discrediting and intimidating. I think Trump should have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss any of his charges and discredit any evidence and witnesses against him. While I disagree with that part of the ruling, I don't know how I would rephrase that clause, and so my reaction is that in these close cases we should default to allowing speech rather than restricting it.
Edit: @guajalote changed my mind on the propriety of Judge Engoron's order prohibiting "personal attacks on my members of my court staff". I agree that criticizing government officials should always be protected, even if the speech is targeting irrelevant or uninvolved individuals. A narrower order prohibiting incitement would've been more appropriate.
This is actually even worse than it seems. "Reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony" could include a vast number of people - what's to say Chutkan can't come down on him for even the mildest political attack ad by saying that Biden is a potential witness for the prosecution? The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign, and this is just one of the tools they're using to achieve that goal. The legal theory doesn't actually matter at all, because the point is to hurt Trump's campaign and it doesn't matter if their every decision is immediately revoked upon appeal because they will have hurt Trump in some way. It's not like there could be any reasonable restitution Trump could receive afterwards either.
I agree this includes a vast number of people, and that's one reason I don't support this part of the order. For context, it bears mentioning that Trump is absolutely being treated with kid gloves on by the system. You can ask any defense attorney what would happen to their regular joe client if they started attacking the prosecutor, the judge, the clerk, or any of their families. It's absolutely inconceivable that any random schmo pulling that would not be jailed immediately. Courts routinely and reflexively keep people behind bars ahead of their trial date for things far more petty. I remind you that there's 400k people in jail right now in the US who haven't been convicted of a crime yet, some absolutely because they're too dangerous to be let out, and some because they can't scrounge the $100 needed to bail out).
I can agree with this on the one hand, in that if some random sovereign citizen pulled these same stunts the system would come down on them like a ton of bricks - but I think a lot of these actual prosecutions are very much not "being treated with kid gloves on". I'd reserve that phrase for the treatment that Hillary Clinton got with her email "matter", or that Hunter Biden got with his crack/guns/lying on government forms/corruption/unregistered foreign agent activity/tax avoidance/driving on crack. My reading of the situation is that the DOJ wants to crush Trump by any means necessary, they're just scared of the pushback they'll get for being too nakedly corrupt which is forcing them to temper their approach.
These disputes come up regularly here and they generally get stuck in an unresolvable mire. I don't know any obvious solutions, because whatever distinction one side mentions gets dismissed as irrelevant or immaterial by the other side. Maybe one possible solution is to list out a list of objective metrics and only then figure out how to apply them to each situation. For example in the context of "mishandling classified information" we can maybe outline as metrics: number of documents, sensitivity of information, whether there was any recalcitrance, whether there was any dishonesty or fraud involved, what the motive was, whether there were any justifications, etc etc. The goal here is to avoid the all-too-common tactic of glossing over incriminating factors and highlighting only exculpatory.
I also don't think this is really resolvable either. If you can come up with a good rubric for determining the harm caused by misuse of classified information you're not even halfway there to determining the ultimate cost - was Hillary's email server the source of the leak which led to China rolling up most of the CIA's agents there? I don't know, and I don't think it's even possible for someone without access to a lot of classified information to find out. At the same time, my understanding of Trump's motives for retaining classified documents was that they contained proof of government malfeasance in Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller probe it turned into. Those documents would have been extremely sensitive and had immense consequences if they were released to the public - but the specifics of the situation are so unique that I don't think looking at these two instances and going "Well, Clinton's mistake revealed a bunch of SAPs and lead to all of the CIA's chinese sources being tortured and killed, but Trump had more pieces of paper with NOFORN on them so despite nothing happening as a result his actions were worse" is in any way conducive to gaining a clearer understanding of what happened. This just isn't the kind of question where objective measures are particularly useful or even easy to acquire.
That said, I do think that there's some kind of objective metric where you can compare the actual negative impacts of Trump's retaining of classified documents in accordance with long-standing tradition as opposed to Hillary's compromised-by-foreign-powers email server specifically designed to evade FOIA scrutiny. But as my framing of the issue gives away, my own bias is for populists and against the establishment, so I'm definitely not going to be able to come up with it.
Woah that's crazy, how do you know this?
I don't know it and can't prove it (and I also think there could be more documents unrelated to it included), but that's the only set of documents I can think of that fit the category "Trump declassified these but the government disagreed". It's likely that he also took some other stuff, like Presidents seem to do normally, but those are the documents that seem most likely to be retained. That said I don't actually know for certain - I'm sorry for being unclear with my language and giving a higher confidence level to that information than was warranted.
No worries, I really appreciate you clearing it up.
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You say that like those incarcerations don't already make a mockery of our justice system. And like any judge who behaves pettily isn't by default rendering themselves unfit for the job, unfit for any job with any responsibility, someone we should encourage children to spit on for taking the highest public calling and corrupting it for as little as personal pride.
I assume that's why Trump is being treated with kid gloves actually - everyone involved knows they ain't getting away with pettiness here. In fact they aren't getting away with anything that is not explicitly outlined in law, because they are being watched like hawks by both sides - so the way Trump is being treated is the way everyone is supposed to be treated. But I guess long ago we decided respectable behaviour was such a good measure we should make it a target and the incentives got muddled.
There's nothing you said that I disagree with, except I never meant to imply that 400k people in pretrial detention is a good thing.
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How many former US Presidents have been subjected to the same level of prosecution?
Which is irrelevant, because no other US Presidents have committed the crimes Trump is being accused of.
If the facts set out in the Jan 6th committee report are correct, then
The last time anything remotely like this happened was the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876, and the fact that nobody was prosecuted for the malarkey then (which included a 3-figure number of murders) was part of a pattern of letting white southerners get away with shit that started with the culpable failure to hang Jefferson Davis and ended up with the north cucking to Jim Crow.
"Unsuccessful coup plotters go down" (whether they get the rope or just a long jail sentence depends on national tradition) is the historical default everywhere - there isn't a directly on-point precedent in the US because nobody in US history has tried to do the kind of things Donald Trump did between the election and Jan 6th.
You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because consensus reality is incorrect and he is factually innocent. You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because he is so disconnected from reality that he is incapable of forming the mens rea to commit a crime of dishonesty - based on the publicly-available information there is reasonable doubt on this point - although I am not sure you can do so with a straight face while suggesting that he be elected President of the United States. You can argue that he should be let off for the same reason Jefferson Davis was - that prosecuting someone for serious crimes of which they are obviously guilty is nevertheless dangerously divisive if a large percentage of the population still support the perp - but the precedent is that that was a mistake (at least if you reject Jim Crow and the Gone with the Wind/Birth of a Nation school of pop-history).
What you can't do and expect to be taken seriously is to argue that prosecuting a coup plotter is a shocking escalation, or that Trump is being prosecuted (at least as regards the election-related prosecutions) for something that a Democrat or pro-establishment Republican would have skated for, because neither Democrats nor pro-establishment Republicans would allow the kind man who would think of doing what Trump did near the presidency.
Not that it matters very much given that the politics of all this is driven by Jan 6th, but the story with the other prosecutions Trump is facing are similar,
There is a lot of evidence, including from before Trump became a partisan political figure, that he is unusually dishonest by the standards of rich and powerful Americans. This means that you would expect him to have worse-than-usual post-presidency legal troubles.
Didn't a bunch of states create mail-in-ballot rules that undermine ballot secrecy just for that election in particular before some of them got taken out by courts due to their irregularity?
Wasn't the whole Covid psy-ops leading to these rule changes in the first place?
"We can't have ballot secrecy because there is a horrible disease with a 1% mortality rate for 80 years olds, oh we can still have massive protests against police brutality, but not ballot secrecy, no no"
If there was evidence of a massive conspiracy showing all level of governments and media building up the Covid scare with the ultimate goal to undermine the integrity of the elections, wouldn't that be some kind of coup, or at least conspiracy to commit a coup?
Thanks to the Twitter files we already know that federal employees were pressuring social media companies to erase opinions going against the media consensus on Covid. From the same agency that back in 2015 was building up an investigation against Trump to prevent him from getting elected.
Well yes, of course the average rich and powerful American is a honest guy. Not the kind of guy to end up on Epstein's flight logs. Oh wait, I still can't see them, so I'm gonna have to believe that he is a honest guy and it's pure coincidence that Trump is getting prosecuted and not Epstein's buddies. The judges are just doing their work, nothing to worry about.
Before 2020, nobody thought that mail-in ballots were per se fraudulent. In 2016, three states including one swing state had all-postal elections (Washington, Oregon and Colorado), and most other states had no-excuse postal voting for anyone who applied. 23.7% of all votes were cast by post (see pp 9/10 here). And nobody on either side of the aisle thought that this was a problem that would justify overturning a close election.
Trump made specific allegations of fraud which were not true. He could have made the purely legal argument that slightly easier postal voting introduced in an irregular way was grounds for tossing the election on a technicality (as of 2016, it was a colourable legal argument based on the independent state legislature theory, which wouldn't be rejected by SCOTUS until Moore vs Harper in 2022) and allowing Republican State legislatures to choose electors, but that wasn't the argument he made. He said that he won by a landslide, that there was "massive fraud", that Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines meant that the in person votes were invalid, and that rogue election officials had added large numbers of fake ballots to Biden's tally.
You mean the pandemic with an impact visible at the macro-demographic level? Or are you telling me that governments outside the US faked 6 million deaths (by official count) or 25 million deaths (based on demographic statistics) in order to allow slightly easier postal voting in a US election?
Yes, which is why it is good that there is no such evidence. The pre-2020 conventional wisdom was that easier postal voting helps Republicans (because of the military vote), so if there had been a large-scale conspiracy to steal the election for Democrats, the main goal of the conspiracy would not have been slightly easier postal voting.
I didn't say that. I said that by the (low) standards of rich and powerful Americans, Trump is unusually dishonest. Heck, even by the (even lower) standards of greater-NYC real estate operators, Trump was unusually dishonest, this was common knowledge on Wall Street, and was in fact sufficiently common knowledge that a joke about it got into Sex and the City.
Epstein's buddies like one Donald Trump, who allowed Ghislaine Maxwell to recruit girls at Mar-a-Lago, who was a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express, and who promoted the corrupt prosecutor who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal the first time he got caught? Even by the (very, very low) ethical standards of Epstein's social circle, Donald Trump went above and beyond.
Because they don't have to be. Ballots can still be considered relatively secret with the exception of a few %age. When a large share of ballots get mailed in, then the mechanism by which these ballots get collected, who handles them and whether or not people influenced how they are filled becomes a bigger issue.
No, one side thought the Russians fixed the elections through Facebook ads or some such nonsense.
Maybe he got it wrong, doesn't mean that there was no plot to fix the elections.
Governments that are essentially vassals to the US, perhaps. Other governments could also independently find their own reasons to dabble in medical authoritarianism, and join in on the fun using the same existing justifications made-up by the most effective media in the world. "Look I'm not forcing you to stay home to cover up ongoing political issues, see Hollywood has the same problem"
And of course media control made it easy to dismiss outliers like Sweden which did not have any lockdown and was basically fine.
People all-over the world die all the time. I could see a strong incentive from less-developed countries to claim X number of citizens died 'from Covid' if that means they can get or simply maintain existing humanitarian aid from the West
There are only so many military votes you can get even if you made postal voting easier. On the other hand 'democracy'-supporting organizations used to hold ballot secrecy as important prior to 2020, so idk why.
How would they go about it? I'm not in charge of election-fixing for Democrats, so I wouldn't know but it seems you have some experience in their manner of thinking.
Oh man then if Sex and the City said it, it must be true. Out of all the real-estate scammers in the US, Trump is unusually dishonest. He was buying every judge to the point that it took him reaching the Presidency and suggesting defending the Southern border for somebody to finally decide, "that's enough, now we gotta get this unusually dishonest guy!" "Let me find the dirtiest dirt I have on this guy... Yes... This is perfect, the Russian President had some prostitutes pee on him!"
You have Epstein's flight logs? Why aren't you releasing them then?
Oh he promoted him but didn't hire him and was not in charge when the actual ruling happened. But he was in charge at the time Epstein almost saw consequences for his crimes.
If Trump was such a good buddy with Epstein, why are we investigating Trump over some paperwork issues or election quiproquo instead of Epstein? Why not investigate his role in the Covid masquerade?
Show us the flight logs, show us the Pfizer receipts, show us the meeting notes from the FDA, now that would be an interesting investigation.
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I'm not going to contest this point much, but I think there's ample reason to for people believe his misconduct is being handled with a particularly harsh hand for actions that, if committed by someone who has the favor of the elites, get away with minimal punishment.
If calling an election fraudulent and seeking to undermine or overturn the results is bad enough to warrant prosecution, Stacey Abrams should probably have been hit for this too. To her credit, she's quieted down considerably since she lost the rematch in a clear blowout. Not clear that Trump would do the same, granted.
If mishandling classified documents ranks up there, then we of course have Hillary, but yeah, we also have Biden storing them in his garage.
Sexual misconduct? Well Andy Cuomo resigned over that. Would they have brought these charges to trial and sought actual sentencing if he hadn't?
And we really have to remember that Hunter Biden very nearly walked away with a sweetheart plea deal except the deal was so good that it didn't pass the Judge's sniff test. So there's other reasons to wonder what kind of double standards might be at play that makes Trump such a target. REALLY seems like there's somebody's thumb on the scale in both Hunter's and Trump's cases.
Indeed, the fact that Hunter is being prosecuted at all is the main reason I'm willing to believe that there's any modicum of justice left in the Federal Justice system.
So I think your argument ultimately has to coalesce down to "No other person in high political office has committed every single one of these egregious/criminal acts over the course of their career so as to warrant a particularly hard smackdown."
And I'll let my own position on it be more clear:
I think the reason Trump is getting prosecuted is mostly because his political opponents control some of the legal systems which have jurisdiction over him, a weakness which most politicians would studiously avoid.
For example, even if Ron Desantis, in his capacity as Governor, wanted to strike back against those who have thrown political attacks at him, he'd be hamstrung by the fact that most of them don't have sufficient connections with the state of Florida to even be subject to the State's jurisdiction. He currently has the simultaneous advantage of being ensconced in a politically friendly state so if he confines any misdeeds to Florida he has a much better chance of avoiding an eventual prosecution.
Trump, with his lengthy career in NYC and his businesses being based out of New York effectively had his ass flapping in the breeze for politically motivated prosecutions coming out of a state where his 'allies' have no sway.
Similar with Fulton County, Georgia, although We'll see if Kemp steps up to assist on that one.
That's not why the judge rejected it. Plea deals are treated like contracts, and those require a "meeting of the minds" to ensure that both parties know what they're agreeing to. Hunter's plea deal was a confusing and ambiguously written mess. During the hearing, the judge very quickly realized that Hunter's defense attorneys interpreted it one way (expansively, covering Hunter from potential foreign agent charges), and the prosecutors interpreted it another way. This was very sloppy work by the standards of federal court, and it made sense for the judge to give the parties another chance to hash it out (they didn't).
Let's assume that Trump "did everything right" as he likes to say, and committed 0 crimes. How much would you estimate his overall prosecutions to change?
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US Presidents are charged with two crimes on average.
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You know the answer and it's none.
I don't know if people realize how much they're aping Ibram X. Kendi with this kind of argument. Kendi's core thesis is that racial differences of any kind are ipso facto evidence of racism. Why are there more black people in prison? Obviously the only explanation is racism. Hopefully you have the awareness to see the fallacy when it's presented in this manner, as the obvious retort to this explanation is to examine whether there's more black people in prison because they commit more crimes. Similarly, the fact that Trump is the first and only former US President to face any prosecution doesn't tell us the full story. We also have to examine whether he's facing more prosecutions because he happens to commit more crimes. You can't examine the world with selective blindfolds and expect to arrive at the truth.
Out of all the people committing crimes, the US legal system chooses to expend so much effort on Trump. The one President that has not started any war and has actually tried to downsize the war effort.
The one President whose foreign policy actually seems like it was made by an America-minded person. Not somebody working for the military industrial complex, foreign lobbies...
One thing I would not mind Trump being investigated for would be his involvement in the Covid masquerade.
Go ahead, investigate the Trump admin's role in the Pfizer vaccine development, advertisement and distribution. As long as it's not just Trump but every other little cog in that huge machine that took over America for 3+ years.
So many interesting things that could be investigated from torture and other war crimes [in the Middle-East], to Epstein, military-industrial complex influence, Big Pharma corruption, lobbies pressuring government to pressure social media to censor, human and fentanyl trafficking at the Southern border and beyond...
This is your average US politician, but somehow Trump is a vicious criminal that must be stopped now, or something
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The argument that black people aren't persecuted because of their race can be bolstered by showing that they benefit from AA, that the media defend them, and there are sympathies in their favor among the establishment. Plus making a direct comparison with other groups by looking at homicide statistics.
Of course had things been opposite and all were hostile this would actually support the idea that blacks are getting mistreated. It wouldn't support the idea that crime rates are fake, but it could explain why black political leaders are imprisoned.
Political persecution of political opponents is something much more common historically than a group being falsely blamed for having high crime rates. Indeed when that happens, it is better to notice and respond quickly to oppose it than to let it escalate.
Beyond that, there was Russiagate which was in fact a criminal conspiracy to get Trump. One that involved members of the FBI conspiring with the Clinton campaign. This in itself is huge.
We also know that entreched bureaucrats were not friendly to Trump. We also know that outside the USA and even in it we have seen the rise of hate speech codes, and intolerant ideology who are against non leftist and especially the right wing ideology on culture war issues and especially immigration. Authoritarian antinativism is persecuting political opposition today.
When it came to J6 we had unprecedent punishments. Nobody expects those who recently invaded Capitol to be punished similiarly. Actual terrorists who bombed the Capitol of a very far left ideology got pardons and people like Bill Ayers were allowed to remain close to the establishment.
The media is also quite partisan, and does not respond not just to Trump but to what it sees as right wing adjacent including figures like Rittenhouse with objectivity with fairness. The attitude is more how they can "get them".
So these are just some of the reasons why we should not take at face value the idea that the prosecutions of Trump is because Trump is particularly bad criminal. The more fair view is that the faction in control of key institutions have demonstrated hostility both towards Trump and other figures ideologically related and are willing to go after them.
Plus it is possible that partisanship unrelated to such ideological concerns also plays a role but to the extend this is the case, we also have a track record of hostility.
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Alright, I feel like I extremely reluctantly have to be the person to remind everyone that our legislative body was invaded by an angry mob and that a seated session of Congress which was counting electoral votes had to be evacuated in fear for their lives.
It is not unreasonable that the judiciary should think that there should be a trial over these and all the other actions actually at stake in this trial. If there were some dispassionate philosopher-lawyer who cared only for the letter of the law and it's enforcement, I would expect them to want to have a trial on these topics.
I'm not going to claim that the prosecutor or everyone at justice or etc. have no political motivations or desire for revenge or etc. at all, nor that everything is always 100% of the time being done in a perfectly professional and dispassionate way that has nothing to do with politics. Of course that's not true.
But, "The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign"?
No, that's a nice side benefit for some of the people involved. There's very plausible crimes being tried here, real things really happened in the real world.
The police opened the doors and guided the mob around. There's direct video evidence of the Q-anon shaman being given a guided tour by police and shown around the place. How exactly can you use the term invaded when many members of the mob were actually invited in by the people meant to be guarding the place? You can drop a reference to January 6 as being this terrible terrorist atrocity that marked the end of democracy in left wing spaces and get away with it, but people are actually allowed to challenge that claim and post the video evidence against it here.
I do agree that there should have been a trial, but I think we would depart very quickly when we start looking at the specifics. There are a lot of people in the government and the security agencies that should have been hauled up before the dock, and I would have loved to give Ray Epps and Stewart Rhodes a few serious questions as well.
Trump actively told the J6 protestors not to do anything violent. If he's culpable in this case then the entire DNC and left wing political apparatus is on the hook for the Mostly Peaceful Superspreader riots, and the case against them is actually stronger than the case against Trump.
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They were invaded by the 2nd politest mob of the covid era. Politest goes to the canadian trucker convoy.
There was only a single death from violence, and it was a protestor shot by security. I think all the other deaths were via heart attack, including the one security guard that people originally claim was attacked with a fire extinguisher.
Nothing was burned down. No one was run over by a car. There were no large scale medieval weapons fights. The "mob" dispersed when asked to.
There were a few groups of FBI informants that roped in a few retards to plan on doing more stuff. They got caught and heavily prosecuted, the same way every other group like this has been caught and prosecuted. The racial makeup and supposed "motivations" of the retards has changed, but the FBI playbook hasn't.
I normally don't care to comment on Trump stuff, but I don't like the massive gaslighting that it feels like we all went through during 2020.
During the summer of 2020 there were massive riots in the streets. Cars, police stations, and businesses burned to the ground and looted. Large physical confrontations in the streets. People out at the wrong time being beaten to death by mobs. It was helpfully pointed out the time that the protestors themselves didn't carry out these beatings or killings. I'm sure the victims of the violence felt much better in their afterlives knowing that their deaths were only tangentially caused by the lawlessness that the protests created.
The health authorities that had insisted on everyone being locked down and not going outside to even mingle within parks also wrote a blank check to these protestors. They were no longer "super spreader" events, but some weird health carve out where protesting police violence somehow made you immune to spreading covid.
That was the context of the January 6th protest. Some people broke some windows and busted down a door, and then a bunch of others just calmly walked through the capital building like they were on tour and took silly photos like it was a fairground. Meanwhile every news station in the country breathlessly talked about the "violence" of the January 6th protest. The same news stations that were talking about the "peaceful" protests that same summer as buildings burned in the background of the newscast.
"They interrupted an important government function" - someone, hopefully not you
No, they interrupted a ceremony of the state religion. The presidential level of politics isn't a place of law and order, its a place of feelings, perception, and group consensus. At most it caused the equivalent of a rain delay, and it was all still done within a day. There was no plausible way that delaying the ceremonies on January 6th would have impacted who was president for the 2020-2024 term. Even if the ceremony had somehow never happened, Biden would still have become president. Because most of the US government acknowledged him as such.
The January 6th incident has caused the media to invent this weird perception that our government is one delayed ceremony away from being overthrown. As if every top leader in the country is a rules following robot, where if the proper procedures aren't exactly followed then they'll just collapse in a heap and stop functioning. We are supposed to believe this despite mountains of evidence to the contrary ... the explicit rules of the constitution have been broken many times, and the typical reaction, if there is any at all, is a collective shrug.
The claim that the Jan 6 mob was polite and peaceful is one of the most astonishing claims I see repeated in this otherwise pretty reality-grounded community. I don't understand how you can make claims like this when we have widespread video evidence of how violent the mob was. Like, are you just unaware of the video footage? Or are you of the belief that the existence of some footage showing peaceful and orderly intruders "cancels out" the violence, like some sort of algebraic exercise? I cannot overstate how baffling I find this.
I'm sorry, what out of the ordinary are you seeing there? At the beginning the Capitol Police just let their dinky barricade get pushed open like barn doors. This act wasn't caused by violence, but simply the accumulated crush of humanity that would occur at any large protest. That it breached the barricades is 99.99% Capitol Police incompetence. Then we go to some people climbing stairs, then walking through open doors. A few go through an open window. But then they just kinda walk around. They keep filling up space as the Capitol Police cede it...the police never engage in anything approaching proper crowd control in the Capitol building (If they just locked the doors the whole thing probably ends there). Then there is some footage of CP surrounded by protestors. Here's how you know its incredibly peaceful compared to a BLM protest: They would be getting stomped on at a BLM protest. If a CPD or NYPD officer was that incompetent they'd likely be dead. Almost all the confrontations on the video are initiated by Capitol Police who aren't engaging in anything resembling proper crowd control. No lines, no use of the natural choke-points and barriers to keep the protestors where they should be, no, instead it looks like a bunch of rogue officers barreling into crowds of protestors one at a time like they are playing Red Rover. At the end we see, seemingly, the one cohort of competent Capitol Police officers holding a choke-point, seemingly a door of some sort. And they get a flag swung at them. So, like, give that flag guy a misdemeanor battery charge?
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Maybe it's you?
Like, seriously; Have you considered that you might have the bias? Even you're example is really weak.
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If that's the worst you can find, it still looks... fairly peaceful?
The crowd is mostly just pushing the riot cops out of position, not even grappling them -- certainly not throwing rocks etc. Like a football offensive line -- the reason it looks chaotic and violent on the officer's side is that their line is too small, and can't stand.
The cops are the ones with the close-quarters pepper spray and wacking people with batons -- the level of discipline in terms of not much striking from the crowd in these circumstances is pretty good, actually!
Yeah, this is the most shocking stuff The Telegraph (obviously a very biased source) could come up with? The audio they spliced in does sound very panicked, but it doesn't match with much of what's happening in the video. I note that nothing was on fire, and the only thing approaching a weapon that any of the rioters used in that footage was a hockey stick (not clear what they were hitting with it, hopefully not a person). Decidedly NOT what you could say about footage of the BLM riots.
EDIT: I mean, I do agree that it wasn't "peaceful and polite". There was clearly anger, and some people went too far.
The Telegraph, referred to as the Torygraph by Private Eye and its readers, is the serious newspaper of the British right (as opposed to the Murdoch-owned Times, which is traditionally pro-Establishment with a mild right-wing bias). They gave Boris Johnson a column after he was fired from the Times for making up quotes, and continued to employ him after several of his anti-EU stories were exposed as fabrications. Needless to say, they endorsed Brexit, Johnson as PM, Trussonomics etc.
Given the lack of a serious right-wing newspaper in the US, the Telegraph is probably the most pro-Trump "reliable source" out there.
Interesting. I admit ignorance here - I just assumed any UK-based newspaper would be very far to the left. (The video itself still seemed pretty biased to me.) Thanks for the correction.
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Then, by my estimation, you're no different than the people who stood in front of the scenes of riots in the Summer of 2020 and declared they were Mostly Peaceful. Sorry.
Can we compare the results of Jan 6th with CHAZ? Which one had children being shot? How to the jail time for participants compare?
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Jan 6th was straightforwardly and very significantly less violent than many and perhaps most of the riots in the summer of 2020. The mob did not show up with guns and begin shooting people. No one was stabbed. The mob did not engage in arson. The mob did not set on individual people and beat them bloody. These are examples of actual, serious violence which were notable or common during the BLM riots, about which a social consensus was rigidly enforced that they did not count as "violence". These elements were entirely absent from Jan 6th, and no other purely physical actions replace them. The Jan 6th mob shoved its way through an inadequate police line, broke some windows, and then took an unauthorized tour of the capitol building. When it tried to push its way into the actual chamber, a security officer fired into the crowd, killing an unarmed woman, and the mob backed off and went elsewhere. Vandalism and theft was extremely limited.
In this thread, as in most discussions, people argue that it's the symbolism that makes Jan 6th significant. They are forced to do that because the simple fact is that Jan 6th was not a notably violent event by the well-established standards by which our society judges such things.
Even if the above were not true, the fact is that our managerial, administrative, and knowledge-production classes did in fact stand in front of the scenes of riots in the summer of 2020 and declared they were Mostly Peaceful. They declared that they were protests and not riots. They frequently ordered police to stand down and allowed the mob free reign. They organized aid and support to those arrested for rioting, declined to identify rioters, declined to arrest them, declined to prosecute them, organized nationwide funding for their legal defense. Many of them publicly expressed sympathy and support for the "protestors", and vociferously attacked anyone who tried to draw attention to the widespread, lawless violence. They zealously prosecuted private citizens who attempted to defend themselves, well outside any reasonable interpretation of the law.
My assessment is that some of them did these things because they thought appeasing the mob would cost less in the long run, while others did it because they recognized the BLM rioters as their allies. Either way, this went on for more than a year, and some parts of it are still going on today.
Now you are claiming that people who disagree with your assessment of Jan 6th are as bad as the pro-BLM riot people. Suppose that is true: so what? The pro-BLM riot people were rewarded with vast political, financial and social benefit from their actions. Negative consequences were extremely rare, limited to only a very few of the most egregious examples. Why should one be ashamed of an action to which no shame or censure seems to attach?
I'm not sure I'm accurately understanding what you're saying. It seems to me that you're saying it's acceptable to lie about what constitutes violence as long as the other side got away with that lie too? I'm all for holding people to their the standards they set, and as such I don't want to hear one bit of whining about January 6 from people who defended the 2020 rioters. But I'm concerned that some people here seem to be actually believing that January 6 wasn't violent and wasn't a bad thing simply on account of the other side being dishonest about these categories the year prior. I think it matters what's actually true and it's important not to become so focused on pointing out the Calvinball the other side is playing that we convince ourselves that falsehoods are true.
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I just watched the video you linked. It appears to break down into two sections: people pushing and shoving with the police line, and people entering the capitol unrestrained. The police line footage is some pretty serious shaky-cam, but I do not see much evidence of serious violence. People are grappling, shoving, pushing each other around. The cops are using pepper spray. It looks significantly less violent than something like, say, this. Once they break through the police line, they walk around pretty calmly.
The phrase that comes to mind is "mostly peaceful".
That particular phrase comes to mind because it was used to describe riots featuring multiple people getting shot by organized, masked thugs armed with ar-15s and AKs. It was used to justify mass arson, absurd amounts of property damage, random individuals beaten and in some cases killed, mass intimidation of the nation as a whole, and the organized application of indiscriminate violence against innocent victims in pursuit of a partisan political goal, with the tacit and occasionally explicit backing of government officials at the local, state and federal level.
It seems to me that you are attempting to appeal to common ground and common sense. You are pointing out that this is, in fact, a mob, and that this mob is, in fact, physically fighting the cops, and that that is violence, so therefore this is a violent event. This is true. But you are talking to people who have made this exact appeal in the past, in the face of considerably worse violence, and who were told categorically by both their social peers and by the government and knowledge-production class as a whole that what they were seeing was not lawless violence, because the violence was a small minority of a given event, as in fact it is in the Jan 6th video you linked. The common ground you are appealing to has already been burned, and there is no way to get it back. This is the closest to a consensus on political violence that you are likely to ever see. It will only get worse from here as incidents accumulate.
That's all I'm saying!
I'm extremely sympathetic to the complaint of the obvious double standard. I don't understand why we can't acknowledge that 1) both Jan 6 and Summer 2020 were violent and bad; 2) Summer 2020 was more violent; 3) people who defended the Summer 2020 riots should be called out and shamed.
Some people seem to have this bizarre need to believe that if Jan 6 is claimed to be more violent than Summer 2020 but isn't, then that must mean Jan 6 wasn't violent or even bad. No! That's not how logic works!
Why should people be called out and shamed for defending the Summer of 2020 riots? Presumably the idea is that by doing so, we punish them for what they did and therefore disincentivize them and others from doing it again, yes?
Can this actually be accomplished? Do you think that we can, from where we stand today, straightforwardly punish or disincentivize the BLM riots or their supporters in any meaningful way? If you had a way of doing this, it would seem to me to be the preferable course of action.
I can't speak for others, but I do not think you can actually accomplish this in any meaningful way, so I see no benefit in pursuing such a strategy. I think your argument is never going to be anything but an isolated demand for rigor. If this rigor could be applied to blue violence, it would have been done during the 2020 riots. If it could not be applied to blue violence in the 2020 riots, there is no reason to believe that it will ever be applied to blue violence. If it will never be applied to blue violence, there is no reason to accept its application to what you agree is significantly lesser Red violence. It is better to either demand that enforcement be meaningfully applied to blue violence first, or to simply accept that the label can no longer function in any meaningful capacity for either side.
It seems to me that this rejection of the label in its entirety is, in fact, the best available punishment for the defection of the 2020 riots. If the way people treated those riots was wrong, if that wrong should have consequences, this is the best possible consequence available to those of us who actually care.
You claim that people are ignoring physical reality. It seems to me that you are ignoring social reality. "violence" is a label, a social tool. It is a word, not an integer or a rigorous equation. It is supposed to be an objective term applied fairly. If it is not used in that way, it would be better to not use it at all, and I think this is more or less the position of the other people you are arguing against as well. You don't get a consensus you can't maintain, and this is a consensus you definately can't maintain.
It's not enough to recognize a double-standard. You have to either remove it, or adapt to it. We can't remove this one, so adaption is the best option available.
Even granting everything you just said for the sake of argument, I still don't understand how that can or should result in someone actually believing in the privacy of their own mind that Jan 6 wasn't violent and bad. Or do you suspect that the people on The Motte claiming such things are being mask-on even here?
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People aren't oblivious to the logic. Well, maybe some are. I dont think most people here. But you said this take was out of step with a community thats supposedly grounded to reality. I think from the responses you can maybe see that it is based in reality - such as it is.
One of the consequences of institutions playing favorites with mob violence is that it causes many individuals to second-guess their own definitions. If the BLM riots didn't qualify as violence in popular sentiment, then who is to say J6 should? Am I being cheeky, or am I being serious? Could you even tell? Honestly, I'm in limbo between both states. Where does 'reality' have a say? That's a socially mediated phenomenon, as demonstrated quite clearly since 2020 onward.
'Violent' is one of those fuzzy terms that can mean anything from a playful shove, to murder, to mean insults. We probably had more national consensus on the thresholds for qualification in prior decades, and then that was wrecked in 2020. That you now see so many (what you regard as) peculiar opinions on this subject shouldn't be too surprising. And while it's hard to often tell if this is sincere or troll-ish (just reacting to progressives 'reality'), I think its often both.
You are! And I am! As intelligent beings capable of reasoning on our own. It's fine to say to a Blue Triber who defended the 2020 rioters, "Hey, if you thought summer 2020 wasn't violent, then I won't grant you that Jan 6 was violent. Your rules!" But you shouldn't believe that yourself in the privacy of your own mind merely because you're rubbing your opponents' noses in their hypocrisy.
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By the standards established by the media in 2020 it was peaceful.
That is my claim.
It is a different claim than "it was peaceful".
The media and most of the country was happy to apologize for a base level of violence and conflict at protests in 2020. I'm not arguing this is a good standard, I'd in fact be happy to return to the old standards. But the old standards for everyone, not just politically approved protests.
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Extreme minimization of the symbolic importance of a mob invading the seat of government. According to this perspective, the march on rome was just a health-conscious bald man taking a stroll with friends. Any state in such a situation is justified in using lethal force, and lots of it, way earlier than the US actually did here. It's a threat to democracy in a way burning the whole city of minneapolis to the ground isn't.
Ah, sorry was there a military general leading armed troops into the capital? I must have missed that news story.
Protests that get talked about tend to either be symbolically important, or violent. There is often a claim that the January 6th riots were violent. I'd say by all standards established in 2020 the January 6th protest was peaceful. Was it symbolically important, yes, obviously.
It wasn't a threat to democracy. It was a threat to the illusion and symbology of our democracy. There is a big difference. A threat to democracy would be something like withholding news of a major medical intervention until the day after the election. Or lying about evidence that suggests one of the candidates has a corrupt family member taking bribes from foreign governments. Or changing the rules of how the elections are carried out and risking massive security breaches in an untested process. Or working with all major social media platforms to censor your political opponents. Those things all hamper a people's ability to govern themselves. You cannot effectively govern if you are lied to, can't talk with one another, and can't trust the means of giving your voice to the government.
January 6th burned the symbol, but the deep state and media were busy trashing the thing it was supposed to symbolize for the last 4 years. We woke up afterwards, looked around and realized the power of the symbol was gone, and you blame the people that burnt it, not the ones that spent all their time undermining it.
Also the Roman Senate deserved what they had coming to them, they deserved much worse than Julius Caesar. It was a morally bankrupt empire that filled its coffers by looting foreign countries. They deserved to be ruled by force, because that is the way they sought to rule the rest of the world. So sad that one of their best looters realized he didn't need to ride all the way out to the frontier to do some good looting. Read the story of Carthage's fall and I dare you to tell me you don't hope there is a special place in hell for those people.
Mussolini, not Caesar, reference, but they were both bald, so understandable.
Same thing. Power resides where men believe it resides. You're telling me about BLM and the democrats did this and that, and I sympathize, but really, it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Anyone attempting to take the symbol of power by force should die for it, doesn't matter who it is. It's sacro-sanct, like a vestal virgin or a tribune of the plebs. We have elections and stuff to decide who gets to hold the magic scepter.
Also, Rome.
Also, this guy was one of two generals that organized the "militants" for the march.
I mean, the italian army could have swatted mussolini's rabble like flies if vic emmanuel hadn't been such a wet noodle. Caesar's XIII's legion, and later the rest, could not be swatted, it turned out.
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Even by that standard Jan 6th was harmless. Do you or anyone else believe that delaying that event changed who is president, or who won the election?
I made the comparison in another post but I'll bring it up here. Man buys his girl $5000 engagement ring and proposes. A few months later she catches him cheating and throws out the ring in anger.
Man: "You are crazy why did you throw out the $5000 ring?"
Woman: "You cheated on me you asshole!"
Man: "I get that you feel bad and all, but what does that have to do with the ring? Can we please focus on the issue at hand."
Don't ruin the thing that is being symbolized and then complain that someone has trashed the now meaningless symbol. All of the complaints about ruining something sacred sound hollow.
No, it did nothing. But it may have emboldened the next mob, the next coup , and that is reason enough to crush it.
Seems like you’re implying I ruined things, but I’m not blue tribe, american, or progressive. And you owe me one ring. Sex is sex, but money is cash.
I don’t get your point. It’s over, democracy means nothing anymore, is that it? Boogaloo Day? Can’t tell the difference between the worst civil war and your day-to-day life? Wouldn't have pegged you as a blackpill overdose patient.
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Ah, but then the true attack on democracy was the media telling people it was an attack on democracy!
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This happens routinely. Hell, it happened yesterday. For some reason it doesn’t seem important to the powers that be.
I’m just telling you what a self-respecting sovereign would do in his house. Put one of those ‘we don’t call 911’ signs at the entrance, and machine-gun anyone who enters without knocking.
That's honestly what I'd always assumed would happen if someone tried to jump the fence at the White House until this weird incident:
In retrospect, my perspective seems childish, but I legitimately thought that leaping the fence and running towards the White House would get you sniped, or attacked by guard dogs, or... well, at least something.
I don’t think it’s childish, it’s necessary. Current responses are too soft, dare I say, decadent. It is not unthinkable, and it has happened in history, that one day a mob will just waltz in there, slap the president around a little, declare they’re in charge now, and everyone will go: ‘What are we supposed to do, spill blood? We are civilized, let’s just do what they say and hope for the best“.
It comes down to the same disconnect I talked about last time, that somehow public life does not matter, only your private red lines. This is a gigantic collective red line, representing an almost unfathomable amount of lethal force directed at everybody. If it is not defended, nothing ever should be.
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Well Biden's got the attack dogs covered now I guess -- the Secret Service will need to pry them off of themselves first though!
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Arguably that is the most important government function. The shared illusion we all (for a given value of all) pretend to believe. The ceremony is more important than the actual way the system works. Any threat to that isn't a physical or procedural threat, it is in fact an existential threat to the entire edifice. Almost any type of government from feudal to oligarchic to democratic to republican has legitimacy as long as people believe in the ceremonies, whether that is the crowning of the King enshrining their Divine Right to rule or the counting of electoral college votes enshrining the victor has been chosen by The People.
We can run out onto the air off a ledge as long as we all agree not to look down...
A ceremony is supposed to symbolize something.
In this case a ritualized agreement that 'hey it was a good fight in the election, but we all agree it was fair, and we will now crown the winner'.
The obvious problem is that it didn't actually symbolize that for a decent portion of the country. I personally believe the actual votes were generally tallied correctly, but that it was not a "fair" election in many other senses of the word.
January 6th broke the symbol, but they certainly didn't break what it was supposed to symbolize. That was slowly broken over the preceding four years, and then quickly and fully broken in 2020.
I also generally believe that attacking symbols of a group is a bit more civilized than the alternative ... which is just directly targeting people in that group. When foreign protestors burn the American flag, its sometimes because they don't have an actual American to burn or behead. Taking a crap on pelosi's desk is better than showing up to her home and taking a hammer to her husband.
Oh sure, they had already lost faith in the symbology, for sure, they had already looked down so to speak. And on a personal scale you are correct attacking a symbol is much less severe than a person.
On a civilizational scale though, people are replaceable, shared symbols are not (though their physical representations can be). Very few people are as individually important as a shared belief system to the stability of a polity.
It feels very much like blaming a whistleblower for the crimes they uncover.
Or the toxic relationship equivalent of a guy calling his ex-fiancee "crazy" for throwing away the engagement ring when she caught him cheating. Yes, I get it dude, it was a $5000 ring, but maybe its your fault for cheating and ruining the relationship in the first place?
What people tend to forget is that a symbol being destroyed only really matters when the thing it symbolized has been hollowed out and rendered useless. If there had been a freak accident and the capital building was rendered unuseable on that day in January 6th, would democracy have been in danger? No, obviously not. They would have just reconvened and done the thing again. If that $5000 ring had been lost but they were a happy loving couple, its not like they would have called the wedding off. Even when the Capital buildings were burned down in the war of 1812 it was not a real threat to "democracy" or republican rule. Those institutions were strong at the time, and it meant they just put the symbol right back up and it continued to have meaning. And the fresh coat of white paint to cover up the burnt sections just became a fun new little tradition.
Sure, we're looking at a meta standpoint here. At this level we're not looking to blame individuals. At this level their behaviors are outcomes of society wide events and situations. Jan 6th is a symptom, and part of a cascade.
If you want to arrest the cascade (ie, you think the illusion is still worth propping up) you might need to take action against individuals/groups. But at this level they aren't specifically to blame, more agents of what social events are going on.
Is prosecuting Jan 6th protestors going to be the white coat of paint? Or the catalyst for further symbol failing.
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I want to emphasize the flip here once again, because I feel that many people either fail to remember how extreme it was or claim that it was exaggerated. In back-to-back blog posts, my county public health department went from this school-marm scolding:
To this endorsement of mostly peaceful protests:
...
There's some pro forma muttering about continuing to wear a mask, but it is just absolutely wild to imagine the shift from telling people that playing Frisbee is too dangerous to saying that the protests are "essential".
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I'm pretty sure the point of this prosecution is to put Trump in prison.
That would indeed hamper Trump's efforts to campaign, but I honestly think they would prefer it if he was ostensibly free yet unable to actually talk or campaign. I think putting him in prison and actually sending him to gaol would be too big of a boost to his campaign - a lot of swing voters find things like putting the opposition candidate in prison for spurious process crimes while ignoring serious corruption and malfeasance committed by your son to be somewhat offputting.
It's really weird to me how many people (including Trump himself) can apparently only see these cases through the lens of their political implications.
The plan isn't to smear or discredit Trump and therefore make him unpopular. It's to lock him up for the rest of his life.
Why should the political implications not predominate in the mind of anyone but Trump himself?
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He’s never getting locked up for the rest of his life. The state cases he can avoid by staying in a red state, and the federal cases he will - at worst - be pardoned by the next GOP president.
Trump's 77; life expectancy for 77-year-olds in the US is 9.3 years. "The rest of his life" is not likely to be that long.
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I don't think that works.
At least since 1987, interstate extradition is not optional, and governors must cooperate with an extradition request so long as the paperwork is correct. And even were a red state governor willing to flip the bird to SCOTUS (or order his entire executive branch to pretend they can't find him under a lamppost), and willing to get jailed for contempt themselves when they receive an order from a court, the federal government has a pretty big branch capable of serving arrests and then finding out whether the arrests were 'right' or not later.
((I'm... also skeptical that a Republican President other than Trump pardons Trump.))
A red state will keep him and have him guarded by the state guard or state cops, and the US Marshalls aren’t going to start a civil war. That in turn will lead to a further standoff and years of legal issues.
Trivially, you need state guard or state cops willing to deal with Trump in person, and Trump not doing something stupid, and nothing Weird happening with the Secret Service.
More seriously, that's the sort of behavior that gets federal jurisdiction in the courts and a very quick contempt of court orders for the gov in question. If the US Marshalls don't want to do it, the courts have fun tools that don't involve them. (Fines per day?)
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Are those not the same things? If Trump was some other dude most of these charges would never be filed. Atleast half the charges are novel legal theories. The only case that doesn’t seem to be a novel legal theory would be the documents at Mar-a-Lago.
I agree with you the goal is to lock him up for the rest of his life because then he can never run for POTUS again.
It's pretty novel too -- previous presidents have all had large collections of classified materials that they were allowed to go through (in their own good time!) prior to submitting to the archives. I think most previous presidents retained their clearance and were allowed access to current classified materials, actually?
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Why not? Unlike Debbs, Trump might actually pull it off, which would be a lot more damaging to the regime then giving him a second term.
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In this case, the political implications really do override, because it's a federal proceeding and therefore if he wins the election from jail he just pardons himself to get out.
I still think the funnier outcome is SCOTUS tells him he can't pardon himself and he has to rule from jail or give even more weirdly convoluted orders to the feds to get out.
Better would just put him in solitary and refuse to administer the oath of office, then per Article II he can't exercise any presidential powers.
Are you serious?
Remember that he won an election in this case given that we're talking about pardons. "Hey I know you won the election, but the losing side decided to put your president under arrest so you actually lose the election anyway." is not a message that would go over well with the general populace.
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That's true of the federal cases, but he can't pull that trick with the Georgia RICO case.
Hence FirmWeird's "this prosecution" and my "this case".
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See, the problem is that doing this will actually make Trump's cause stronger, and while they would like it if he was locked up for the rest of his life... that's not something they're going to be able to do before the election without severe and serious consequences. I agree that they aren't doing this to discredit him and make him unpopular, but I never actually made that claim. The claim that I made was that the goal is to hamper his ability to campaign - and that's actually a very reasonable assumption, especially when you know the broader history of the efforts from within the government to defeat him.
The documents case and the Georgia case will take longer because they're more complex, but it seems pretty clear the federal Jan 6 trial will happen in March. It'll take a while, and sentencing will take a while after that, but he's most likely going to be in prison during the conventions. Consequences be damned.
Perhaps he could use the time to write another memoir, this time about his political struggles rather than his business career.
The Art of the Steal, perhaps?
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I must say that's pretty funny.
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That would be extremely good for Trump's chances at re-election, but I don't actually hope for this outcome because I think the destruction of norms governing the prosecution of opposition candidates is far worse.
Not necessarily. It would be extremely good for Trump's popular support, but a conviction here would be used to buttress the efforts to take him off the ballot under Amendment XIV. Doesn't matter how many people support him if he can't be voted for.
Of course, that doesn't make it a good idea; the real result of taking Trump-as-Republican-nominee off the ballot isn't "Democrats win by default", but rather "civil war".
Honestly, I only see three ways out of this without Boogaloo: the Democrats can realise this is literal suicide and relent, the Republicans can nominate someone not Donald Trump Sr., or Trump is not able to run for reasons other than "banned" (e.g. being dead).
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The norms have already been broken. The best outcome for norms is for the prosecution to be successful but Trump to win in a landslide and be gracious in his victory. Presumably no one would try and pull this shit again after the electorate rejects it.
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