posted January 18, 2021 01:49 PM            

I have also seen footage elsewhere of police letting people in through a door. I don't know what to believe.

posted January 18, 2021 02:04 PM            

It appears to me that people may have entered the building at the same time, but through different doors/windows, almost like they surrounded it.

posted January 18, 2021 02:13 PM            

Inside the Capitol Riot: What the Parler Videos Reveal

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The man’s smartphone camera pans the crowd on the east side of the U.S. Capitol. It’s smaller than what had amassed on the west side, but still an impressive sight. As he pans from atop the steps, he gives a front-line dispatch at 2:10 p.m., an hour after President Donald Trump had finished his remarks goading on the thousands of supporters who had come to Washington to protest the official certification of his electoral defeat.

“The cops were shooting us for a while, then they stopped,” the man says, referring to an earlier series of flash-bang grenades. “We’re up on the Capitol. I think they’re going to breach the doors. It’s getting serious. Someone’s going to die today. It’s not good at all.”

He was right. Someone did die during the assault on the Capitol — not just one but five people, not counting the Capitol Police officer who took his own life three days later. And no, it was not good at all. It was an ignominious catastrophe the likes of which the country had never seen before.

In fact, there is vastly more video to examine because of the circumstances of this protest-turned-invasion. Not only were a great number of the participants using their smartphones to document themselves and their compatriots as they launched the attack, but many of them in turn shared the footage on Parler. That social media service had of late become the right’s chosen alternative to “Fascist-book,” as one participant at the Capitol referred to Facebook. Parler’s failure to “effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others” led Amazon to expel the site from its cloud-hosting servers.

Some people managed to grab the material before Parler went down, and one of them shared a trove of videos with ProPublica. We culled the collection to some 500 videos uploaded to Parler by people in the vicinity of the White House and Capitol on Jan. 6, and sorted them by time and location, thus giving the public an immersive experience that would previously have been impossible to achieve without being there amid the clouds of tear gas and pepper spray and the crush of bodies pressing toward their goal.

The videos are certainly not the last word on the subject, but taken together they do help us answer two key questions about the mob: Who were they and what were their motivations?

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posted January 18, 2021 03:00 PM            

Government can't do a thing when people revolt.

But the revolution be good and have a cause unlike the stupid french revolution where they beheaded royalty and when they couldn't run the government, reached out to the surviving members to run the country lol.

posted January 18, 2021 03:41 PM            

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The uncertainty of the claim to possession of the house manifests itself in the mob’s ambivalence about whether to trash it. Again and again, various people in the crowd decry those who are actually trying to do the violent work of breaching the building that the mob is pushing to enter. When a pudgy-cheeked young man jumps up onto the sill of a large window on the east face and smashes in four panes with his fists and feet and several cops rush over to tackle him, an onlooker shouts out: “The police are just doing their job. He’s breaking the law!” When a middle-aged man climbs up to one of the arched windows over the West Terrace doors that would become the site of the most violent clashes and starts trying to smash it in with a heavy tool, many in the crowd lash out at him as others pull him down. “Oh God no, stop! Stop!” “What the **** is wrong with him?” “He’s Antifa!”

And when two men who have, to great applause, climbed up onto a painter’s rig dangling in front of the building start trying to break the windows, the crowd turns on them. “Don’t break my house!” someone shouts. “No, no, no.” It’s not hard to imagine the perplexity on the part of those attempting the violent break-in: Are you all trying to invade this building, or aren’t you?

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posted January 18, 2021 03:43 PM            

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The shakiness of the claim of ownership is also apparent in the now-famous moment of Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman shrewdly leading the invaders up the stairs and away from the Senate chamber, which one of the Parler videos shows from the perspective of the mob. They might as well be Visigoths sacking Rome, so out of place are the trespassers here. (Driving home the barbarian comparison is the cry of another attacker: “Where are the ******* traitors? Drag them out by their ******* hair.”) The invaders’ disorientation is plain as they follow Goodman up the stairs, haplessly dependent on his guidance even as they threaten him. “Where’s the meeting at?” one calls out. “Where do they count the ******* votes?”

Soon afterward, some marauders do reach the Senate, but it is by this time emptied of senators. They stand aimlessly in the balcony. “Where did you go?” one of them calls out. Another shouts, to no one in particular, “This is our house.” But there is less conviction than ever behind the declaration. If it was indeed their house, would they have been stood up like this?

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posted January 18, 2021 03:53 PM            

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Watching hundreds of Parler videos shows that the disturbing ones that first surfaced publicly, of officers taking selfies with protesters and otherwise laying down for the attackers, offered a picture that was far from complete.

The police visible in the videos fought tenaciously, and the resulting sense of betrayal in the crowd is palpable. All summer, as the police had battled with Black Lives Matter protesters and rioters, the American right had defended them as guardians of law and order. And this, the Capitol protesters seemed to be saying, is how we’re rewarded — with billowing tear gas and blows from batons? “You ************* ,” shouts a middle-aged woman in a wool pullover and a “Spread Love” cap as another tear-gas canister whistles down.

Also on the west side of the building, another woman shouts: “We’re done with the police. You’re going to have Antifa, Black Lives Matter and the Republicans all hating you guys!” Nearby, a man joins in: “You’re on the wrong side of history, guys.”

The cries echo for hours:

“Oath over your paychecks! **** you, guys. You can’t even call yourselves Americans. You broke your ******* oath today. 1776, ***** .”

“You should be ashamed, ******* pansies.”

“They’ll play like your friend, then stab you in the back.”

“You serve us.”

“They don’t treat Antifa like this.”

“They’re gonna fire on Americans, these ******** . You treat us like China. This isn’t China.”

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posted January 18, 2021 03:59 PM            

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And here and there are glimpses of the men who fancy themselves closer to actual warriors, like the twentysomething ones furtively removing their black tactical gear under the cover of a tree outside the Capitol as the action is subsiding and pulling on red MAGA sweatshirts to pass as mere Trump supporters. But there are actually few such ominous glimpses in all these videos — perhaps because these men are too discreet to be caught on camera, or possibly because there were actually relatively few such organized elements in the mix. If the latter, it would help explain why there was not more violence done within the Capitol itself, or why there was such chaos on display that at one point, a man was left hollering hopelessly at a motley crew of invaders inside a Capitol corridor, like a nursery school teacher before naptime: “Quiet! Quiet! Calmly and quietly sit down in this room.”

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posted January 18, 2021 04:02 PM            

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One young woman accidentally whacks a young man with her flag and apologizes profusely. “Oh, my goodness, you’re fine,” he responds, smiling. “What better flag to be hit with?”

There are many such snatches of fellowship in the videos: strangers advising each other on how to get the pepper spray out of their eyes, or sharing news updates from the Electoral College proceedings inside the Senate, before the senators fled to safety. Watching these moments of cooperation and social warmth, the same thought crossed my mind as did in watching last year’s mass protests over the police killing of George Floyd: that these events were grounded in political anger but intensified by the social dislocation of a pandemic and its associated lockdowns, which had left so many hungering for human contact and stimulation more than they themselves probably even realized.

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posted January 18, 2021 10:56 PM            

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Originally posted by PhoenixRising:
Nice videos. Why is big tech banning videos? I don't trust any of them now, Google, Amazon etc.

Government can't do a thing when people revolt.

But the revolution be good and have a cause unlike the stupid french revolution where they beheaded royalty and when they couldn't run the government, reached out to the surviving members to run the country lol.

Even Pence did nothing so this is just one of Trumps demeanor we are dealing with and not a revolution but patronizing people one.

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posted January 18, 2021 10:59 PM            

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Originally posted by Voix_de_la_Mer:
The second video under the 'Inside Capitol' clearly shows civilians breaking and entering a door with a bar of some sort. While the first shows civilians climbing in through windows.

I have also seen footage elsewhere of police letting people in through a door. I don't know what to believe.

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posted January 19, 2021 05:00 AM            

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Originally posted by teasel:
I’ve only watched a few of the videos, I’m still really tired, but footage of the really bad stuff came out in the days after the attack. I saw the woman get shot. in a video on Twitter. She was trying to break into the chamber, to get to the politicians.

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I saw that one too.

I read in the analysis of these videos on Propublica that early on the police appeared to be trying to lead the crowd away from where the politicians were. This may explain why they appeared to invite them into the building initially. However it's clear from the footage visual and audio that some people in the crowd were hellbent on getting to the politicians. I think this is probably where the police started pushing back. But by this point, they had a sea of people trying to get in. I don't think all of them wanted to be destructive or violent. You hear people actually reprimanding others for damaging things, but the crowd was so large and mixed, and the police effectively outnumbered, once that ball was rolling, it wasn't going to be stopped.

It looks like some people just wanted protest peacefully and to see inside the building, but they were mixed up with people who wanted to commit violence and derail the session. The problem is that they were all mixed together and pushing through the doors against the police. It would have been near impossible for the police to determine the intentions of individuals in that context, it escalated too quickly.