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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 An example of this blurry line is what happened to SBF, where his pretrial release was revoked in part because he leaked Caroline Ellison's diary to the NYT and because he seemed to have been coordinating testimony with FTX's general counsel.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.
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.
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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