After all the warnings and a lot of hype, the "rally" in support for those who have been arrested and charged in the January 6 Trump Insurrection sort of fizzled out. Not only did it not materialize in Washington, DC, but in other cities across the country where organizers planned rallies for support, there wasn't much participation. The main reason for that is that there really aren't that many people in America who are part of the kind of extremist groups that Trump called together on January 6. He really didn't want a lot of law-abiding citizens who respect their country and its Constitution. He wanted criminals, deplorables and anarchists who would destroy, kill if necessary and be his private army to attack "we the people." There aren't nearly as many of those kinds of people around as he might like to think.
Conspiracy theorists are paranoid by nature. So I'm sure all the chatter discouraging attendance had at least something to do with why the crowd just never really materialized. Word went out that the FBI would be roaming around trying to identify those who had been there on January 6, or that there was some kind of "set up" involved to nab more protesters. I think we can pretty well assume that the FBI's surveillance of the event itself is pretty good evidence of who was there and what they did, and whether or not a perpetrator actually comes back to the scene of the crime won't make much difference.
But there is, I think, another reason for the low turnout and that is the fact that most of those involved in that insurrection and rebellion against us--and I use that pronoun because the attack was against "we the people of the United States"--don't really have the kind of popular support that they thought they did when they organized it and after the fact, have even less of it. The estimates of the crowd on January 6th was "in the thousands," which has been more recently guessed at around 3,000 based on the size of the areas where they had gathered. The majority of them were obviously associated with extremist groups like the Proud Boys, an assortment of white supremacist groups, Klansmen, Neo-Nazis and right wing anarchists. For all of his bellocose verbosity, Trump's call to action didn't bring in anywhere close to what he thought it would.
I'm not going to waste time arguing about whether or not Trump, or any of the rest of the speakers at that rally, incited the crowd to attack the Capitol. They clearly did. It's a travesty of justice and an insult to the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution that any of those who spoke at that rally are not already sitting in a prison somewhere contemplating their fate. Their intention was to disrupt the constitutional process of certifying the electoral vote and subvert the will of the people--us--and to pull off a coup that would somehow allow Trump to remain in office.
There is absolutely no constitutional provision that would have allowed that to happen. More damage could have been done, and there might even have been some assassinations of members of Congress or even the Vice President, but it's clear this coup did not have anywhere near the popular support it would have needed to survive and carry out much more than a temporary occupation of the Capitol and a temporary disruption of Congress. They tried, unsuccessfully, to convince police officers to join them. None did. No one who has respect for the law would ever associate themselves with the deplorable human trash that attacked the Capitol on January 6.
This was, and will remain, an extremist movement. That's clear from observing the relatively small size of all of the protests that were organized around the country on the I8th for the January 6 perpetrators. I'm not even sure their ranks have been swelled by the addition of Trump supporters. Those who came out to openly fight against the laws of this country on January 6 should bear the full weight of whatever penalties the law requires in these kinds of cases and that includes making sure that Donald Trump, and the whole slate of speakers at that rally, go to prison for the rest of their lives.
Our Constitution and our laws are so fair, and are so packed with justice, that it is difficult to bring the full weight of the consequences of these actions on the perpetrators. Freedom of speech and free expression are so highly valued that even despicable deplorables like this January 6 mob are protected. But they clearly broke the law and they need to spend a lot of time in prison contemplating what they did, including Trump. Otherwise, they'll make a mess somewhere and cause more death and destruction.
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