US Capitol Breached

[Lexicus]

Idk if I've ever heard of it.

 

[Ferocitus]

Trump's Telegram account already has 320k subscribers. Few hours ago it was 270k.
Is this messenger popular in the US?
IIRC Belarus protesters used it to coordinate their actions, because it has end-to-end encryption and allegedly cannot be eavesdropped by the government.

It had 500,000 active users per month at the end of 2020, start of 2021.
Don't know how many are in each country.

 

[sendos]

Trump's Telegram account already has 320k subscribers. Few hours ago it was 270k.
Is this messenger popular in the US?
IIRC Belarus protesters used it to coordinate their actions, because it has end-to-end encryption and allegedly cannot be eavesdropped by the government.

I thought Trump would escape to ***** or something.

EDIT: Huh. I did not expect that to be filtered by our forums. I quoted what the forum believes to be a illegal site that we should dare not mention its name. I did not utter a swear.

 

[Ferocitus]

I thought Trump would escape to ***** or something.

EDIT: Huh. I did not expect that to be filtered by our forums. I quoted what the forum believes to be a illegal site that we should dare not mention its name. I did not utter a swear.

I like it. It allows the reader to project their wishes onto it.

 

[red_elk]

I was half-joking yesterday, talking about Trump moving to VK and Telegram, but it may actually be a viable alternative for him.
VK is a social network with ~600 mln. users (about 1/5 of Facebook), mostly Russian-speakers.
Telegram became popular here after Russian government unsuccessfully tried to ban it.

 

[sherbz]

An interesting piece on the woman who was shot at the Capitol building Ashli Babbit. Ive quoted it in full in case some of our American friends do not have a VPN and are blocked for some reason. But the source is the Guardian Newspaper (UK).

I wonder at a number of things. The first - and most pressing: I wonder what went through her head as she lay there dying after being shot through the neck. Was it shock? Was it disbelief? Was it a feeling of betrayal? Clearly she was upset at the incoming administration and also believed passionately that the election had been stolen from Trump. But one has to question whether these beliefs were grounded in any sane or reasonable fashion. I do not believe that they were. In many ways she shares the same weakness you see in would be ISIS terrorists. The internet is, on the whole, a great and wonderful thing. But it can also serve as an echo chamber for the vacuous and poisonous views of various minorities (yes - i classify her as a minority). I actually think her friends and family failed her. They had the power to persuade her different. And they had the means with which to blunt her extreme and violent views. But they didnt. So forgive me, but i do not feel pity or remorse for them or for her. She got what was coming to her. And so have they.

Much like the thousands of Americans (and others) who have denied Covid exists and then died from it, i find it hard to feel pity for these people. I feel sorry for them, but only in view of their intellectual ******ation.

I think a reckoning needs to be had with these people. They dont understand half measures. And they are emboldened by a president who speaks from the same hymn book - and a media (Fox news) who give succour to complete fantasies. They all need to be brought to book. The fact that Twitter has 15,000 odd tweets with the hashtag #hangMikePence ought to be a wake up call. These people assault democracy brazenly and they are more of a danger than any Russian, Chinese or ISIS influencer. They are home grown. And they are dangerous.

n late December, the incoming vice-president, Kamala Harris, tweeted about her plans for the first hundred days of the Biden administration. She promised “to ensure Americans mask up, distribute 100M shots, and get students safely back to school”.

Among the thousands of responses was an angry tweet from a 35-year-old air force veteran in San Diego.

“No the fudge you will not!” Ashli Babbitt replied to Harris. “No masks, no you, no Biden the kid raper, no vaccines...sit your fraudulent ass down…we the ppl *****!”

Babbitt wasn’t just tweeting. She had a plan to fly to Washington DC the very next week to take part in a major public demonstration demanding that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, be sworn in as president.

Babbitt was shot to death during Trump supporters’ chaotic invasion of the Capitol, officials said, while four other people, including a Capitol police officer, also died.

In the days since Babbitt and other Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on 6 January, forcing lawmakers to flee or hide, her social media has been scoured for insights into her radicalization.

Babbitt’s Twitter account shows a woman deeply engaged for months with a conspiracy theory that painted Democratic lawmakers as evil pedophiles, and then persuaded, and infuriated, by Trump and his allies’ lies about election fraud.

For weeks before she joined the mob in Washington, Babbitt had been retweeting false claims from Trump himself, as well as the pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, alleging massive voter fraud and asserting that Trump had won the 2020 election.

Many of Babbitt’s tweets, according to extremism experts, also marked her as a believer in QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump has been trying to save the world from a cabal of satanic pedophiles, including Democratic politicians like Biden and Hollywood celebrities, and that he will soon bring his enemies to justice.

Babbitt had not been a leader or major influencer within the QAnon movement, according to Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who studies QAnon and other extremist groups. She had not posted a lot of original content or sold QAnon-themed merchandise. But she had tweeted regularly about the conspiracy theory since February 2020, and she had posted a lot on Twitter in general, about 50 posts a day, he said. On election day, she had posted 77 times.

Her social media also showed posts skeptical of masks and public health measures. She had responded with fury to an alert in early December that California public health officials were reinstating a stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of coronavirus, which was surging in southern California: “This is that commie bullfeathers.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory, although lurid in its claims about the torture of children, is very much a political movement, not just a personal delusion, experts say.

“The people that went to the Capitol weren’t just trying to save Trump, they were trying to stop the coming multiracial democracy” which they believed would institute “a radical leftist globalist agenda”, Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said.

On Twitter, Babbitt had been sharing messages urging people like herself to take action, with messages like: “Your government doesn’t fear you anymore. That needs to change. ASAP.”

Babbitt was a small business owner and self-described libertarian. She owned a San Diego-based business, Fowler’s Pool Service and Supply, according to California business records. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as the company owner since May 2017.

In one tweet, first reported by Bellingcat, Babbitt said that she had voted for Barack Obama before voting for Trump. In recent months, she had become a devoted adherent of conspiracy theories boosted by Trump and others.

Babbitt also had a history of confrontational behavior. In 2016, she was charged with reckless endangerment, dangerous driving and malicious property damage in Maryland, but she was later acquitted, according to court records. A former girlfriend of Babbitt’s husband wrote in the application for a protection order against Babbitt that Babbitt had followed her in a car and rear-ended her three times, multiple news outlets reported.

“She was screaming at me and verbally threatening,” the complaint states.

Attempts to reach Babbitt’s family were unsuccessful.

Babbitt wrote that she believed the 6 January protest she was joining would be a pivotal moment for the country, and a fulfillment of some of the key events that QAnon believers had been expecting: “Nothing will stop us....they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours....dark to light!” she tweeted the day before the rally, referencing key QAnon slogans.

Since 2018, QAnon has been identified as a potential domestic terror threat and linked to a series of violent and criminal acts.

Travis View, the host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, said posts showed that Babbitt was “100% a dedicated QAnon follower. She was not casual about it. She was deep into it.”

At that 6 January rally, Babbitt would listen as Trump urged his supporters to march over to the Capitol building as lawmakers were in the process of officially certifying the 2020 election results, and confirming Biden’s victory.

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” Trump told them.

“It was amazing to get to see the president talk,” Babbitt said afterwards, in a Facebook video obtained by TMZ. “We are walking to the Capitol in a mob. There is a sea of nothing but red, white and blue patriots.” She was grinning.

At the Capitol, Babbitt would be among the crowds of Trump supporters who pushed and fought their way past the Capitol police and into the building itself, forcing lawmakers to flee or hide, and temporarily halting the certification of Biden’s election victory.

Multiple videos would capture the moment in a Capitol hallway where Babbitt was at the front of a crowd stopped at a door to the Speaker’s Lobby, which has been shut and barricaded. On the other side of the door were members of Congress and Capitol police protecting them, according to news reports.

Video obtained by the Washington Post shows Babbitt and other members of the mob shouting at a cluster of officers who are guarding the door, telling them to step aside, as other Trump supporters pound on the door’s glass, shattering it. The video shows the officers moving away from the door, and members of the crowd surging forward, shouting “Break it down” and “Let’s fudging go” as they try to break through the door.

Other widely circulated videos show Babbitt hopping up to push herself through one of the door’s glass panels, towards the legislators at the other end of the hallway, as a man shouts “Bust it down!” The footage shows a shot ringing out, and Babbitt falling to the ground. Officials would later confirm that she had been shot by a Capitol police officer, and that the shooting is under investigation.

Lawmakers from both parties who were present at the moment when Babbitt was shot have spoken out about the dangerous behavior of the crowd.

“The mob was going to come through the door; there was a lot of members and staff that were in danger at the time,” the Oklahoma Republican congressman Markwayne Mullin said, according to Fox News.

He defended the police officer’s decision to shoot Babbitt: “His actions will be judged in a lot of different ways moving forward, but his actions I believe saved people’s lives even more. Unfortunately, it did take one, though.”

In interviews, members of Babbitt’s family have defended her political views, and her anger.

“My sister was a normal Californian,” her brother, Roger Witthoeft, told the New York Times. “The issues she was mad about were the things all of us are mad about.”

Babbitt had served in the military for 14 years, Witthoeft said. “If you feel like you gave the majority of your life to your country and you’re not being listened to, that is a hard pill to swallow. That’s why she was upset.”

 

[Ferocitus]

There should be consequences for Trump, I agree.
And any deal should include forcing him to account for what "Covfefe" was.

It's a simple substitution cipher using hexadecimals on the last 4 characters.
The 1st two of those four are letters; the last two are digits.
For letters: e -> d, f -> i. For digits: e -> 9, f -> 1.

It ends up as typical Trumpian nonsense. Nothing too see here, citizen, move along.

 

[stinkubus]

I'm 100% sure that a Civil War would be a bad thing. I've no interest in killing or being killed by my neighbors, regardless of how odious I regard aspects of their ideology.

I hate to be the one who needs to tell you, but some of your neighbors definitely want to kill you for your politics, and those people are *ITCHING* for a fight. We're going to end up with domestic conflict regardless of what anyone wants unless social media companies do a 180 on their willingness to spread far right propaganda. Since the law is largely powerless outside of very specific circumstances I'm not holding my breath.

It will be far better to simply crush the fascists now then allow them more time to organize and plot.

 

[innonimatu]

I hate to be the one who needs to tell you, but some of your neighbors definitely want to kill you for your politics, and those people are *ITCHING* for a fight. We're going to end up with domestic conflict regardless of what anyone wants unless social media companies do a 180 on their willingness to spread far right propaganda. Since the law is largely powerless outside of very specific circumstances I'm not holding my breath.

It will be far better to simply crush the fascists now then allow them more time to organize and plot.

Read your own post. Supposing you crushed the fascists (whatever that means to you), how many years would the social media companies take to produce the next crop?

Crush the social media companies.

 

[Lexicus]

Read your own post. Supposing you crushed the fascists (whatever that means to you), how many years would the social media companies take to produce the next crop?

Crush the social media companies.

The social media companies aren't producing fascism, that's just liberal delusion and refusal to look at the actual neoliberal "core" that is really producing fascism.

 

[Takhisis]

Please, Lexicus, you're addressing a person who claims that the UK Conservative Party is leading the fight against neoliberalism.

btw the president of Mexico, as if he wasn't a horrid enough rich SOB already, claims that Twitter blocking Donald Trump is censorship.

 

[caketastydelish]

A coup is an organised attempt to depose one regime and install another in its place. No such thing was evident in Wednesday's events.

The participants had a vague nation that by, obstructing the senate's ratification of the electoral college, they could buy time for their big beautiful president to play whatever last ace he had up his sleeve. This does not represent an attempt to depose the current regime, or to install a new regime in its place. Perhaps they would have supported such an attempt, if it occurred; but it did not. Many of the participants in last summer's demonstrations would probably have supported a revolution, had it occurred; but it did not, and it would be frivolous to claim that it was a failed revolution on such a basis.

This was not a coup. The reason that some claim it was a coup, the only reason, is that they have spent the last twelve months expecting a coup, had convinced themselves that such an event was inevitable, so when some sort of civil unrest occurred, it must have been the coup they had predicted. The alternative would be conceding that the elaborate story they had built for themselves, a story so-far fetched as to cast geriatric segregationist Joseph Biden as the saviour of American democracy, was hysterical nonsense, and nobody is quite prepared to let go of that just yet.

They wanted to overthrow a democratic government and replace it with a populist leader that appeals to some. Classic coup context, but would be even if Trump didn't have the populist personality type. The electoral college is the backbone of our democracy at the federal level. They wanted to delegitimize it and replace it with something else entirely, and to take away the representation that was given in a fair election. Or if there was any cheating, (between voter suppression for the disadvantaged, hard voter id laws to affect them as well...) the cheating overwhelming helped his side and it still wasn't enough. This is 100% a coup to overthrow what is at least supposed to be a democracy of a government. Why else were they there that day? They were quite explicit and didn't even sugarcoat it.

 

[innonimatu]

The social media companies aren't producing fascism, that's just liberal delusion and refusal to look at the actual neoliberal "core" that is really producing fascism.

Imo neither is producing fascism. But the social media companies are critical to sustaining the neoliberal core as the crisis it causes worsen. Being a bad thing to the vast majority, it requires propaganda and distraction in huge doses. Guided.

 

[caketastydelish]

A coup isn't just electoral shenanigans, it is a regime change. Wednesday's event represent a bungled attempt to intervene in the electoral process, but the regime itself was not threatened, nor was there any suggestion that it should be replaced with a new regime. The participants had no goal beyond disrupting the senate hearings, and it's unclear how many of them understood this to be some part of last-ditch strategy to defend Trump, and how many were just acting out of rage and spite.

The premise of the regime itself is a constitutional democracy with an electoral college to decide presidential elections, which they sought to overthrow and eliminate with their personal ruler who lost fairly.

 

[stinkubus]

Read your own post. Supposing you crushed the fascists (whatever that means to you), how many years would the social media companies take to produce the next crop?

Crush the social media companies.

I'm pretty sure the state has the resources to do both. We're in for years of domestic terrorism if this isn't nipped in the bud. I agree that "coup" is a bit of a reach to describe the events at the Capitol; but if the term terrorism means anything at all then it certainly was such an act. The violence was politically motivated on its face. I don't care if the people who actually showed up were just a bunch of clowns who were clearly egged on by social media (just look at how many of them filmed or took pictures) someone went to the trouble of whipping them into that frenzy and instructing them as to how to channel it and that someone needs to go. IDC if it's prison or their life especially if they want to pick a fight with whichever tiny sliver of federal power that would be dispatched to unceremoniously crush them.

The authoritarianism you fear so much is already in power in the US and not going anywhere. I'm not a pacifist, nor am I any sort of high minded idealist. I do believe in examining historical context and what that tells me is that calling the MAGA movement which surrounds Trump fascist is not at all a stretch and the danger of fascists taking power in the US is so great that stopping them by any means necessary is the only sensible option.

@Lexicus The rise of the far right around the globe can be attributed almost entirely to Facebook. They literally market themselves as a coup machine to right wing interests all over the globe. They are as responsible as anyone because they have a unique ability to deliver quick hitting propaganda to a massive and largely uncritical audience.

Where I live voted for Trump by a healthy margin, but the only enthusiastic supporters of his that I know are people who are absolutely glued to their phones.

 

[caketastydelish]

The US military slaughtering hundreds of civilians on the barest pretext seems like the surest way to bring about the civil war that internet weirdoes have been fantasising about since the Bush administration.

They were traitors and terrorists. Bush would have most likely approved.

 

[caketastydelish]

Lethal force won't make them realize they were wrong. It will just give the ones who live a martyr complex.

They are not going to think what they did was wrong regardless of the consequences because of their ideological point of view. All we can do is make them fear it.

 

[Kupe Navigator]

Some moron used NORTH KOREAN FLAG in the riot, thinking it was a texas flag

S.Koreans are mocking in the twitter: Translated it says: you morons! that is Not a Teaxas flag bt N.Korean Flag.
How the heck can you mistake it ( texas flag) with N.Korean flag... It isn't even a flag of Chile...
Again proving that Trumpests probably hasn't even graduated kindergarden.

 

[SG-17]

The social media companies aren't producing fascism, that's just liberal delusion and refusal to look at the actual neoliberal "core" that is really producing fascism.

Whats producing fascism is the insane income inequality and needlessly burdensome stresses of living in a backwater ******** like the US.

Typically in this kind of scenario the uneducated and/or previously bigoted people trend towards strongmen and fascism while the educated trend towards socialism.

The latter obviously being waaaaaay better.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Amazon will shut down Parler on Monday. They host the site and will terminate them then. Parler will have to find a new home and that make take some time.

Amazon suspends Parler, threatening to take pro-Trump site offline indefinitely

Amazon suspended the pro-Trump social-networking site Parler from its web-hosting service this weekend, a move that threatens to darken the site indefinitely after its users glorified the recent riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The e-commerce and web hosting giant said Parler had violated its terms of service given its inadequate content-moderation practices, adding in a letter to the social network that it would implement its punishment just before midnight Pacific time Monday.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed Amazon AWS had communicated its suspension to Parler on Saturday.

Parler also did not respond to a request for comment. But its chief executive, John Matze, said in a post on the site that Parler could be “unavailable on the Internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch.”

The move by Amazon AWS is the latest blow for the pro-Trump social network, after Apple and Google this week each took action to remove its app from their stores for smartphone downloads citing the potential risk for violence.

Troubling those tech giants, Parler users in recent had praised the mob that left the U.S. Capitol on lockdown, threatening a potential “war.” The pro-Trump attorney L. Lin Wood, meanwhile, at one point urged Trump-supporting “patriots” on Parler to keep fighting, saying, “Almighty God is with you. TODAY IS OUR DAY.”

Matze, however, blasted tech giants for engaging in a “coordinated effort” designed to “inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies,” referring to Twitter’s recent decision to permanently suspend Trump out of concern that his tweets threatened to stir violence during soon-to-be President Joseph Biden’s inauguration.

In cutting off its web hosting, Amazon threatened to deal a massive blow to a service that had risen in popularity among conservative users who have fled Facebook, Twitter and other mainstream sites that have sought to crack down on harmful, viral falsehoods. Such suspensions can incapacitate a website: The extremist forum *****, which became a haven for white supremacists, disappeared from the Internet for weeks in 2019 after hosting companies rejected it.

BuzzFeed News first reported the suspension.