From about 2:15 forward on 1/6/21 I remember doing nothing else than following this, principally on the Times website. As its own reporters were on scene I was confused by what was happening. The posts by reporters were confusing me. The coup perpetrators had broken into the Capitol building, a violent crime, and the reporters and politicians were certainly afraid. That fear was not always grounded in fact. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez embarrassed herself with a long, tearful video account of her own fear that day when confronted by "a white man" calling out repeatedly and loudly, "Where is she?!". It was a Capitol police officer who directed her to safety. None of the images I had seen nor the posts by reporters showed or mentioned the perps being armed. Senator Chuck Schumer has recalled, “I was within 30 feet of these nasty, racist, bigoted insurrectionists. Had someone had a gun, had two of them blocked off the door, who knows what would have happened."
How were they able to overrun Capitol security so easily was one of my recurring questions that day. And then, I think this was later, maybe around 4 pm, I remember a post by one Times reporter, I think it was Maggie Haberman but I could be wrong, that the Capitol police sure seemed to be polite to the perps! Holding the door open for them, escorting them into the Senate chamber just evacuated by the vice president and senators,. It was surreal and so, so different from the clearing of Lafayette Park for instance. I was confused: was this a real break-in or, and here I drew upon my study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, was it, I remember using the word, a "Potemkin" break-in, real, but not real-real with people playing assigned roles. Would they have really hung Mike Pence if they had gotten their hands on him or was the scaffold and noose part of the "set"? As I sit here today, I do not believe that they would have, nor did I ever believe that they would have. I don't remember when I learned that someone had been shot and I assumed, of course, that it was one of the perps who did the shooting. I saw the violence against the police leading to the break-in but not the bear-spraying of the officer who died.
Or, a third option I was mulling, still mulling a year later, and half-settling on: was this an inside job? Were some members of Congress in on it? Remember that "tour" given by Boebert or one of the female fascists a day or so below the coup? Remember Boebert tweeting "The Speaker has left the chamber? Were some of the police in on it? Why were they so completely overwhelmed? Why weren't more of them armed? Why didn't those who were shoot? In one iconic photograph an officer inside the Senate chamber had gun drawn and pointed at the window, through which you could see a perpetrator's face, the door to the chamber barricaded, but he didn't fire. I remember writing later in the day when the Capitol building was completely occupied by the coup perpetrators that if I were the head of the police I would have had officers standing inside the building with machine guns, taunting the perps to bring it. Then I would have mowed them down. There would have been hundreds killed. That appealed to my rage but not to my conscience.
A fourth strain of thought was that the police were showing admirable restraint in making a distinction between violent property crime and violent personal crime. At the end of that day I remember walking to get something to eat and texting the (second unfortunate) ex-Mrs. Harris, "I don't think we made out too badly today."
