Unlikely that would come up in a secret clearance review.
I’m pretty sure I read that that particular photo was photoshopped; the people in the background are larger than the people in the foreground.
hope not, published by NBC/Getty
14/31
I believe that’s because most of MAGA Nation is fat.
Me too. “Are you planning something nefarious? No? Good, you’re ok, soldier.”
Rudy Rudy Rudy
Too bad, was looking forward to making a Mitch Better Have My Money pun.
Via Getty is a well known MAGA agent.
Good. I hope this means Rudy can still be called as a witness. I’d like to see him undergo some withering examination, maybe enough to make the hair dye run down his face again. Rudy’s always been good for comic relief.
He also has a very interesting article on “stasis” and historical coups carried out by mobs, and in his view this capitol assault was pretty much a coup attempt.
Ha, was just about to post about that!
Yes, it’s an interesting and rather stress-inducing read.
Snippets:
No ancient Greek would have had any trouble in understanding what happened on the 6th or that it was a serious attempt (albeit an incompetent one) to seize power . Having a leader or a political faction move with a mob (often armed, but not always so) to try to disperse the normal civic assemblies of a Greek polis and occupy their normal meeting place was a standard maneuver to try to seize power during stasis . As Dr. Roel Konijnendijk, an ancient Greek history specialist, noted in this excellent discussion on the r/AskHistorians reddit (where he posts as Iphikrates), “In the Greek world, most attempts to seize power by force tended to take the same form: the seditious party would contrive an opportunity to gather in arms while their opponents were unarmed and off-guard, and seize control of all public spaces.”
Just because it looks silly doesn’t mean it can’t work. This was very serious and anyone pretending that ‘censorship’ on Twitter (a private platform, I thought these folks believed in markets?) or mean – but true – words from angry politicians is more consequential than the violent attempt to seize the seat of government is either a fool, an enemy, or both (though I will note that there is a world of difference between ‘fools’ and ‘enemies’ – fools may be persuaded and doing so is essential, see below. We are all foolish at times; it is the cynics that get my dander up).
I don’t know what form the continuation of the trends that led to the Capitol Insurrection will take, if there will be further attempts at violent disruption in D.C. itself, or if we’ll see a shift to a campaign of domestic terror (something like The Troubles, in terms of the violence committed), or if, as with the Nazis after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, the folks who supported this insurrection will focus on trying to use the democratic process to abolish the democratic process. But this is not over . There is abundant polling evidence that among a minority of Americans (but a plurality or majority of Republicans; we’ll come back to that) support for the lies (that the election was fraudulent, which it wasn’t ; the liars were given plenty of chances to provide any evidence at all for their lies and they didn’t) remains high. As in 545, a great many Americans still support Peisistratos. Some smaller subset of them have bought into messianic conspiracy theories like Q-Anon which fairly transparently could lead to considerable violence. The underlying conditions that made the tyrannical attempt possible still exist , so we should expect more.
Maybe this is the essential disagrement here, that they believe USA is a white ethnostate (but they would not produce that description) and other people believe USA is a different thing.
Patriotism to a USA white ethnostate would be still patriotism, just to a different america than other people.
They maybe think “USA is a white people country”
And white people is kind of a combination of mythos and desire, more than reality.
I’m sure that does not mean individual background checks on 20k individuals.
Probably actual background checks on ranking officers, people who actually could cause problems.
But they can cross check names of all soldiers against names posting extremist views, and focus on them.
And, more importantly, the mere claim of background checks sends the message that “We are watching and we care.” A pretty high percentage of people who would join into nefarious activity while feeling anonymous will back off when they do not feel anonymous.
And, on a very blunt level, the message: In case you were in doubt, power is firmly in the hands of those who do not support insurrection.
The CBP systems used to vet people entering the country could handle 20k people as an initial sweep in an hour, popping up alert flags for people who need additional investigation. Given their military affiliation, there’s probably even more info than with regular civilians.
I can’t imagine that to be the case. Beyond the source of the photo being reputable, the Washington monument sits on the peak of a small hill, playing perspective tricks on how much of an individual is seen by the camera - which is why people are choosing to see distortion at the back as a sign of Photoshopping.
The almost universal takeaway from photos like these is that the photos are almost always framed such that it looks like the crowd is bigger than it is. That means keeping the crowd almost entirely in-frame. You can see the edges of the crowd horizontally, and you can see that the crowd ends at the bottom of the photo at security barriers. Same scene, but slightly different framing:
The area involved here is simply not that large. The crowd is blocked off at the edge of Constitution Ave (Trump’s address itself was from the Eclipse, but the crowd wasn’t allowed in), so the depth of the photo is really only about 300m (assuming attendees didn’t want to be on the reverse slope of the hill). The width is substantially less due to blocked sightlines due to trees and using a little Google maps goodness, we can generously estimate the width at 150m. That’s 300m x 150m for 45,000m^2. Now let’s assume that the standard 0.5m^2 per person applies here and the result is a generous cap of 90,000 attendees.
Visually, we can see the crowd get less dense as the distance from the foreground increases as is normal for events such as these, but I’d be hesitant to draw a particular conclusion there because participant spacing is highly variable (and some are probably using substantially less than their 0.5m^2 per person). However, there is substantial tapering from the frontage on Constitution Ave to the back of the crowd, so the real footprint isn’t the rectangle I used for the conservative calculation above.
I think we can draw two good conclusions from this though:
- The crowd is somewhere between the Park Service pre-estimate of 30,000 and the physical space cap of 90,000. I’d personally put it at the lower end of that range, but I don’t have anything concrete enough to use to back that up.
- COVID spread is going to be a thing in this crowd. :(
*Note: In a previous job in the defense industry, I did work calculating crowd sizes like this for high-security events very similar to this (which differs from how more accurate size estimates are arrived at, but we were more interested in conservative estimates and geometries than precision).
Patriots all.
Patriots!
(said in the same voice as “The Aristocrats!”)
Patriots yes…
Just maybe not for the USA!