Death Eaters in the Capitol

Have you ever heard of the term “excited delirium”? I hadn’t until a week ago, when Colorado called a grand jury to investigate the death of Elijah McClain, the 23 year old Auororan who was stopped by the police for “suspicious activity” while walking, or more accurately: prancing, home on August 24, 2019, and we know the rest of the story. “Excited delirium” describes the “wild behavior and extreme strength” exhibited by suspects under arrest and the term can be employed by police officers to avoid indictment when accused of excessive force. It caught my attention, because “excited delirium” seems to be what has swept across the nation – an easterly wind spewed straight from the Twitter account of you-know-who that has blown across the entire nation, swept up QAnon and Trump supporters alike (there is a difference, right?) and buoyed them into the seat of the nation on January 6th.

I think we can all agree that Trump incited the mobbing of the Capitol on Wednesday, but if you have some perverse relationship with playing devil’s advocate, just listen to Liz Cheney (yup, that Cheney): 

The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. I will vote to impeach the President. (statement here)

Wow. This is the third most powerful Republican in the House (House Republican Committee Chair, as well as Wyoming’s lone Congressperson), flat out saying that none of this would have happened without the President. Even Mitch McConnell approves of impeachment, and unlike the trial back in February of last year, this time around some Republicans voted to impeach Trump. 232 votes were cast in favor of impeachment, 10 of which came from Republicans. Interestingly, 232 is also the number of electoral votes that Trump received when he lost this last presidential election. A bad number for Trump. 

I am not afraid of a bloody insurrection on inauguration day. I think that Jake Anjeli (the guy with the Viking hat who is currently sitting in prison eating organic food and living his best White Privileged life) and friends are scurrying ants, frantic without a leader to tell them a specific date to lay siege to America. What must it be like to have a leader who is two times impeached, unable to scrounge up a scrap of evidence for his most “powerful” claim about election fraud, and who seems to suffer an acute case of excited delirium?  Domestic terrorists must organize through increasingly constricted communication conduits, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see several smaller riots in the days leading up to inauguration. Without a Parler or 8chan account, I can’t tell you exactly when the storm will roll in but I can tell you one thing:

I am disgusted. 

I have been disgusted many times in 2020, but this recent breach of the Capitol has really raised the bar. “STOP THE STEAL,” they chanted before plowing through the police barricade. I just think about how differently Wednesday would have gone down if their skin was a different color. Or if their flags had read, “BLM” instead of “MAGA”, skin color aside. I think about this nation’s horrid history of literally stealing people from Africa, and redlining, and I agree that there has been national theft. I do not envy Joe and Kamala for the work set before them, but I am hopeful that as a nation we can finally agree on who has stolen from who.