[lolinder]

It's a fear campaign, and the leaders of the Democratic party know it.

Trump regularly behaves completely irresponsibly and is a terrible loser, and Trump is definitely capable of (intentionally and otherwise) inciting violence, but if you compare the actions of the Democratic leadership to their rhetoric you can clearly see they don't believe the full extent of their own rhetoric about him.

They play up the apocalyptic fears for democracy itself because they know it's the only card they have left after nominating Biden. If they were serious about protecting democracy they'd have kicked him out last year when there was still time to build momentum for an electable candidate, rather than continuing to protect his ego. If they were serious about protecting democracy they would have tried harder to court the moderate voters (who are very courtable right now if anyone cared to try). If they were serious about protecting democracy they would have done anything other than focus exclusively on how terrible Trump is for the last four years, because they know that you don't beat a fire by fanning it. They would have deescalated, but instead they escalated, and they absolutely share responsibility for this.

[yongjik]

I remember seeing a comment in HN that went like "So some group of people walked into a government building. Big deal."

I guess, for people whose world view is so malleable that they can look at an attempt to overthrow the government and say "Some people walked into a government building," it makes perfect sense to feel sorry for Trump being demonized by the Left.

[mlindner]

What actually constitutes an "attempt to overthrow a government"? Do you think a random mob would be followed by the country as a whole? Do you have so little faith in the government's institutions that they'd just agree to follow them? Do you think the military would?

If an "attempt" is so far flung from reality as to be impossible does it actually make it an attempt? If the mob had been half its size, or a quarter its size, or even one person, is that still an "attempt to overthrow the government"?

Even if they'd literally walked in with their guns blazing and killed every single politician they could find, while it'd cause a ton of chaos, the government would still have elections to replace those people killed and government would continue.

[verzali]

That's an extremely naive statement. Massacres of politicans are rarely followed by everything going calmly back to normal, it's much more likely to be followed by more violence, a crackdown on freedoms and liberties and a slide away from democracy.

[belorn]

> Massacres of politicans are rarely followed by everything going calmly back to normal

That is correct. Massacres of politicans are generally followed by military factions taking control of a country, also generally a military faction that participated in the massacre. Those are coups.

When we have massacre of politicians like the 2011 Norway attacks, we call it a domestic terrorism and throw the guilty into jail, and then everything goes mostly calmly back to normal. The risk that those actually succeed in changing the government of a democracy is thankfully very slim. Obviously they are still very horrible acts.

[mlindner]

How is it naive? Americans have allegiance to the Constitution, not to whoever happens to be sitting in the seat of government. This is foundational to thinking of your average American.

And yeah there would probably be some nation-wide violence in response and some laws passed that would push the limits of what the Supreme Court would allow.

It doesn't mean that people would follow the idiots who did the shooting.

[tga_d]

Polling says ~70% of Republicans, or over one third of all Americans, think the 2020 election was stolen.[0] That's a lot of people who disagree over what "allegiance to the constitution" means.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/01/02/jan-6-pol...

[ithkuil]

Yes institutions and democracy can resist and win against a small group of armed people taking over the physical seats of the government.

But in order to win people have to agree that the act is profoundly antidemocratic and a punishable offence.

It becomes more problematic when a sizable part of the population dismisses it as a non-issue. That very fact raises the level of concern several orders of magnitude. The more people dismiss the level of severity of an act of subversion the less faith you can have that the problem will just fix itself.

So yeah, it's not a big deal, provided that we all agree it is a big deal. Otherwise it becomes a big deal.

[willcipriano]

Lucky they all forgot their guns that day.

[Timon3]

Multiple people were convicted of carrying firearms inside the Capitol on Jan 6th, and it's been documented that weapon caches were prepared close by.

[willcipriano]

If they were all armed (looks like a guy had a knife and another claimed to have had his handgun), why didn't they use them?

[Timon3]

Because, due to the actions of a few brave people, they didn't get the chance to use them on any politicians.

Let me turn this around - why lie about such an easy-to-check fact? Even RFK has stopped pushing this, why do you continue when it's trivial to disprove?

[willcipriano]

Was the plan to run back for the weapons once the politicians had been spotted? They assumed no resistance until that point? Why wouldn't you arm everyone?

As far as what was brought into the building I only see mention of a potential concealed carry handgun or two? The only person shot was a unarmed woman who apparently caused the capitol police to fear for their lives. If they had guns as you claimed then they forgot to use them?

Sort of sounds like they forgot the guns, make sense given so many of them were elderly.