Capitol rioters weren’t SS troops, just woeful losers living a fantasy

By David McElroy · January 7, 2022

The rioting at the U.S. Capitol a year ago is an ink blot. Most people look at it and see what they expect to see — and what they see seems to line up with their political views. Shocking, huh?

The mainstream progressive left seems to think there was a serious attempt at a coup launched by conservatives. Many of them seem to believe that we came just a whisker from having the federal government overthrown by this motley collection of misfits.

Those in the populist Trump camp believe the rioters were simply “patriots” who were protesting against what they were told was a stolen election. Many of them might agree today that the protest got a little out of control, but they’re convinced it was nothing. (And some genuine conservatives take this view, too, not because they love Trump, but simply because they hate the left.)

The truth is simpler but less dramatic. A pathetic bunch of misguided losers believed a pack of political lies from a narcissist who lost an election. They went to a protest that was a bit like a Trumpified version of Woodstock without the music. A mob of about 10,000 then entered the Capitol grounds and around 2,000 of them broke into the building.

The rioters apparently saw themselves as Mel Gibson in “Braveheart,” but they were really more like the losers from “Revenge of the Nerds” — but without the fantasy Hollywood ending.

Sadly, there were a few deaths and injuries. One rioter was shot and killed. Another died of a drug overdose. And a few died of natural causes.

They trashed parts of the Capitol. They put a serious scare into politicians and their staffers who were in the building. But there was no real plan, so nothing happened and the riot broke up and everybody went home.

I have zero respect or sympathy for the people who engaged in the attack. In fact, everything I’ve seen from those who were arrested for their part in the attacks has confirmed the low opinions I had of them from the start.

The rioters were deluded losers who were acting on irrational beliefs and idiotic devotion to a narcissistic lunatic.

But to hear the interpretation of the progressive left this week, you would have thought this was a well-oiled “far right” machine that almost destroyed “our democracy.” Nothing of the sort happened. Or even almost happened.

Donald Trump has no ideology. His only belief is in his own dysfunctional ego. He has no coherent principles or policies. He is not a conservative and never has been. He is a populist with no loyalty to any particular ideas.

The masses of people who followed Trump are mostly folks who are simply reacting in anger to gains made by the political left over the decades. Most of these people have no coherent ideology, either, which is why someone with no principles can appeal to them. (If you want to understand how this group came about, see what I said about them several years back.)

The people who support Trump (and many other people who don’t support him) are eager to stand up to the continued gains made by the far left. They have the misguided notion that winning a few elections can overturn what the progressive left has taken more than a century to accomplish.

These are the angry and naive people who believed Trump’s lies and ended up rioting at the Capitol. They’re not the best and brightest who oppose the far left. They’re more like the Clown Brigade than SS stormtroopers.

What happened a year ago was pathetic on multiple levels. It’s pathetic that so many people continue to believe the lies of a narcissist who cares only for himself. But what happened a year ago this week wasn’t a serious coup attempt. It wasn’t an indication that Nazi stormtroopers are waiting their chance to take over.

The truth is the same as it was when I wrote about the Trump phenomenon several years ago. (See link above.) There are a lot of angry people who hate the leftward movement of politics in this country and they don’t know what else to do. And they’re going to increasingly listen to the new narcissistic idiots who come along (after Trump) to take advantage of their frustration.

What happened last year wasn’t a wonderful and patriotic protest to “save America,” but it also wasn’t a far-right political coup which almost overthrew the government.

It was a tempest in a teapot which you’re going to interpret in radically different ways if you have political motives for seeing it in those distorted ways.

The truth is simpler and more interesting, but seeing that truth — which is that America is breaking apart at the seams — doesn’t advance the agendas of the angry groups screaming at each other in the media.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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