January 6th

A witness to January 6th interviewed other witnesses to analyze what really happened.Excerpt from book:What really happened that day? Well, if you listen to the internet, behind every corner there's an evil genius who masterminded it. Trump! Antifa! The Proud Boys! The Police! They're all brilliant strategists who knew exactly what would happen months in advance! But you should never bet on genius when stupidity explains just as well. When I look at this day I see a stupid mayor who passed up federal reinforcements for cheap political points, a stupid president who told a crowd the election was "e;stolen"e; then directed them to walk across the city with no recognizable supervision, a stupid crowd who believed getting inside the building would give them magic powers but hadn't planned beyond that point, and stupid police who, despite some individual bravery, utterly failed to present a coordinated response to the obvious and predictable threats they faced. Stupid at every level. A Perfect Storm of Intersectional Stupidity.I'm sure there were some nefarious plots going on; if you want suspects I'd say look hard at the militias who everyone said were massing armed forces, look at whoever spread the online story that just getting inside the magic building would somehow achieve something (QAnon forums?), and look at that one person with homemade bombs;[i] they were all probably up to something, as were doubtlessly others. Criminals abound from this event and I hope they're all caught. But the nefarious plotters just took advantage of the situation, they didn't create it. The Event was created by our overlapping stupidity. And all the stupid people learned nothing, by the way. On both sides of the great political divide, they continued to double down on their stupid ways, doing their same stupid things that were, in the words of the guy I watched the certification with, "e;paving the way for somebody so much worse than Trump."e;