net.wars

The chaos is the point.

Among all the things to note about Wednesday's four-hour occupation of the US Capitol Building - the astoundingly ineffective blue line of police, the attacks on journalists, the haphazard mix of US, Trump, Confederate, and Nazi costumes and flags, the chilling in a hotel lobby - is this: no one seemed very clear about the plan. In accounts and images, once inside, some of the mob snap pictures, go oh, look! emails!, and grab mementos like dangerous and destructive tourists. Let's not glorify them and their fantasies of heroism; they are vandals, they are criminals, they are incipient felons, they are thugs. They are certainly not patriots.

One reason, of course, is that their leader, having urged them to storm the Capitol, went home to his protective Secret Service and the warmth of watching the wreckage on TV inside one of the most secure buildings on the planet. Trump is notoriously petty and vengeful against anyone who has crossed him. Why wouldn't he push the grievance-filled conspiracy theorists whose anger he harnessed for personal gain to destroy the country that dared to reject him? The festering anger that Trump's street-bully smarts (and those of his detonator, Roger Stone) correctly spotted as a political opportunity was perfectly poised for Trump's favorite chaos creation game: "Let's you and him fight".

"We love you," and "You are very special," Trump told the rioters to close out the video clip he issued to tell them to go home, as if this were a Hollywood movie and with a bit of sprinkled praise his special effects crew could cage the Kraken until he next wanted it.

The someday child studying this period in history class will marvel at our willful blindness to white violence openly fomented while applying maximum deterrence to Black Lives Matter.

Our greatest ire should be reserved for the cynically exploitative, opportunistic Trump and supporting senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), whom George F. Will says will permanently wear a scarlet "S" for "seditionist" and Trump's many other politicians and enablers who consciously lied, a list to which Marcy Wheeler adds senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). It's fashionable to despise former Trump fixer-lawyer Michael Cohen, but we should listen to him; his book, Disloyal, is an addict's fourth and fifth steps (moral inventory and admitting wrongs) that unflinchingly lays bare his collaboration in Trump's bullying exploitation.

The invasion perversely hastened Biden/Harris's final anointing; Republicans dropped most challenges in the interests of Constitutional honor (read: survival). Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who as Senate Majority Leader has personally made governance impossible, sounded like a man abruptly defibrillated into sanity, and Senator Lindsey Graham's (R-SC) careening wait-for-his-laugh "That's it! I'm done!" speech led some on Twitter to surmise he was drunk. Only Hawley (R-MO), earlier seen fist-pumping the rioters-in-waiting, seemed undeterred.

High-level Trump administration members - those who can afford health insurance are fleeing. Apparently we have finally found the line they won't cross, though it may not be the violence but the prospect of having to vote on invoking the 25th Amendment.

An under-discussed aspect of the gap between politics - Beltway or Westminster - and life as ordinary people know it is that for many politicians and media, making proposterous claims they don't really believe is a game. Playing exhibitionist contrarian for provocation is a staple of British journalism. Boris Johnson famously wrote pre-referendum columns arguing both Leave and Remain before choosing pro-Leave's personal opportunities. They appear to care little for the consequences, measured in covid deaths, food bank use, deportations, and shattered lives.

All these posturers score against each other from comfortable berths and comfortably assume they are beyond repercussions. It's the same dynamic as the one at work among the advocates of letting the virus rip through the population at large, as if infection is for the little people and our desperately overstressed, traumatized health care workers are replaceable parts rather than a precious resource.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect is that this entire thing was planned out in the open. There was no need to backdoor encryption. They had merch; Trump repeatedly tweeted his intentions; planning was on public forums. In September, the Department of Homeland Security warned that white supremacy is the "most lethal threat" to the US. On Tuesday, Bellingcat warned that a dangerous meld of numerous right-wing constituencies was setting out for DC. Talia Lavin's 2020 book, Culture Warlords, thoroughly documented the online hate growing into real-world violence.

Wednesday also saw myriad mostly peaceful statehouse protests: Texas, Utah, Michigan, California, Oregon, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Nevada (with a second protest in Las Vegas), Florida, and Georgia. Pause to remember Wednesday's opener: Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won Georgia's Senate seats.

Trump has 12 more days. Twitter and Facebook, which CNN reporter Donie Sullivan calls complicit, have locked Trump's accounts; Shopify has closed his shops. The far-right forums are considering the results while the FBI makes arrests and Biden builds his administration.

The someday child will know the next part faster than we will.

Illustrations: Screenshot of Wednesday's riot in progress.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.