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Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

Please stop spreading FUD. We were absolutely nowhere near a successful coup. None of the institutions of power supported any coup so no coup was going succeed. You need a bare minimum of control of the courts, the legistlature, or the military. None of these institutions came close to supporting any coup.

What we had was a scary riot and lots of fear mongering.

Edit: for whatever reasons there are large groups on both sides of the political spectrum that want to pretend that we were much closer to successful coup than reality supports.

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The President of the United States supported it. There's evidence that the National Guard specifically wasn't deployed in order to increase the danger to the legislature.

Rep(R) from Ohio let them in...

It was a loosely coordinated effort. Either by sympathy or by design. The individuals involved are being found. The real perpetrators are completely let off the hook. It’s just a game of chess and a King’s Castle move didn’t work this time.

loosely coordinated --> plausible deniability

Let's say that the rioters had successfully taken congress hostage. A lot more people might have gotten hurt, but we still wouldn't have been close to a successful coup because there simply was no where near enough support for any coup in the military or court system for it to possibly succeed.

It was a signifant event and one that is well worth being strongly concerned about. That does not justify spreading hyperbolic FUD. In my view the seriousness of this event makes it more important that we bring our full rationality to bear when discissing it and try our best to avoid obfuscating the problems it revealed with the usual partisan games of BS and distortion.

Its hard to mischaracterize an attempt to overthrow the government. Whether it was efficiently executed is irrelevant - it was treasonable activity.

The degree to which our institutions worked and did not work in preventing the overthrow of the government is absolutely relevant. If you misrepresent how close something came to success, you dramatically reduce your abilty to learn from the event.

I think people are focusing on the outcome rather than the crime. It's irrelevant whether they were successful, it goes into criminality when a criminal act is actually acted upon, not whether it was successful. It's not illegal to sell hammers, but when you pull out that hammer to hit someone over the head with it, it becomes a crime. Whether or not you actually connected with that other party's head doesn't make the attempt any less criminal.

How is that relevant to what I said? I have made no arguments or statements one way or the other about the criminality. I am trying to call out factually incorrect fear mongering about how close the US government ce to being overthrown.

If they could have killed and captured enough Democrats that the Republicans could have won the floor vote to not certify the election results, we would be in wildly uncharted territory.

You'd have a Congress and President both declaring that a free and fair election was a "Steal" and they would have the votes, the military, and the levers of power.

The people rioting weren't going to overthrow the country and take over, they were a useful tool for trump to overthrow the election and install himself as President for 4 more years.

It helps to be able to recognize authoritarian intent when one sees it. The dude still thinks he should be President right now, and the party is still working to overturn the results.

The intents or desires of our former President only have bearing on his complicity in any coup attempt. They say nothing about how close any such attempt came to success.

Proximity to success has no bearing on whether it was an attempt.

Nobody said it did.

So you agree: there was a coup attempt. My bad.

The word is "Attempt". It doesn't need to be anywhere near successful for it to have been an attempted coup. Rioters acting with the hope of disrupting the transfer of power. That's all that matters in correctly labelling the event.

> barely stopped an actual coup attempt

"Barely stopped" is a modifier to "attempt" that implies the attempt was almost successful.

If you read my comment, rather than being reactionary, you see that I deliberate do not say it was not an attempted coup.

You can accurately say that this was the closest we have come to a successful coup in our lifetimes. You cannot truthfully say that the coup was close to success or that it was barely stopped.

Thank you for clarifying. I was responding in the context of the original comment that denied it was an attempted coup. Given that was the original context that started this, I think reading your comment in a similar light was not unreasonable since your distinction might have been implied, but not explicit. It was merely a miscommunication.

I too would agree that it was highly unlikely to be successful. Had it gone even a few large steps further in seriously injuring members of congress (also unlikely) I still think the worse-case outcome in terms of transfer of power would have been extra days of delay as appropriate cautions were taken to secure congress.

Perhaps you need to read slower? I see no comment denying that a coup was attempted in any of the parent comments.

The too comment didn't mention the topic at all. The reply to that comment that I replied to mentioned the "recent almost successful coup attempt" and I responded to that comment by pointing out that we came nowhere near a coup beinf successful.

So you, and a large number of other posters, are so locked into the mindset of partisan bickering that you cannot communicate effectively anymore. This is a serious problem that will significanly hurt our chances of preventing similar events.

Wow, you really are determined to make this a flame war. Well, I don't engage in them in general, and HN has a low tolerance for anything coming close, so I'm walking away given that you are not willing to engage in civil discourse free of insults.

I will point out one more fact though: VP Pence made it out of congress mere moments ahead of the mob, part of were hunting him with the goal of hanging him. That seems like a close enough call that the "barely" modifier is not completely unreasonable. If you want to reply to that aspect of the situation without resort to insults or other inflammatory rhetoric, I'm not unwilling to entertain your point of view.

You told me that you had misunderstood what I was saying due to the context. I was pointing out that you were still misunderstanding the context. I didn't insult anyone, but I did feel the the repeated misunderstandings had become so prevelant that I needed to describe the pattern that I was seeing. Edit: As I try to always be civil, I'd appreciate you pointing out where I failed to do so so I can learn.

If Pence had been caught and killed or taken hostage by the mob, that would have brought us no closer to a successful coup. There is simply no way that a single mob can overthrow the US government without significant backing from the institutions of power in this country. To pretend otherwise is to indulge in a fantasy that is completely unrooted in reality.

>If you read my comment

>Perhaps you need to read slower

The above are the things I took as insulting &/or likely to provoke a more inflammatory conversation. I think there are better ways to ask someone to reconsider what you wrote, ways that are less likely to escalate a confrontational tone.

As for Pence, he wasn't a random target. The only reason he was a target was because he had a constitutionally required role to play in the transfer of power. This was a role that the President Trump and some of his supporters wanted him to use to prevent the transfer of power to Biden, but Pence himself had made clear he would not do that.

If killed or kidnapped & therefore unable to perform that role, the next steps to a constitutional crisis were very much on the table:

1) The constitution would require the President to select a new VP.

2) That person then has to be confirmed by a majority of both houses of congress.

3) Given President Trump's urging of VP Pence to use his position to block transfer of power, he would likely appoint someone who would do exactly that.

4) The House would never confirm such a person. Regardless of Senate approval (which would also be unlikely) the confirmation would be blocked, the VP role left empty.

5) The constitutionally mandated terms of the transfer of power could not be met. Biden could not become president.

What would happen from there? I have no idea. Maybe some peaceful resolution. Maybe, with the success of taking the VP out of the picture, many more of President Trump's supporters would feel emboldened to act in some way.

Since VP Pence got away from the situation shortly before the mob arrived.

> The above are the things I took as insulting &/or likely to provoke a more inflammatory conversation. I think there are better ways to ask someone to reconsider what you wrote, ways that are less likely to escalate a confrontational tone.

I'm open to suggestions but the level of continued misapprhension I was facing called for more strong language than the simple corrections I had already repeatedly tried in this thread.

Note the the constitution does not assign this duty to the VP directly, but via his role as the Senate President. Chuck Grassley held the position of Senate President Pro Tempore and the ceremonial duties would have fallen to him.

Now, he may have refused to perfom his constitutionally mandated duty which would have resulted in legal battle that would probably have ended up in the supreme court.

Now, there is maybe an extremely outside chance the supreme court would have invalidated the election and forced a new one. There was absolutely no chance that the Supreme Court would decide that the VP has the unilateral power to completely bypass the counting of the votes and skip ahead in the process to the allow state delegations to select the president.

There would have been chaos and probably a lot more riots and even acts of terrorism. None of that would have allowed the overthow of the US government.

I think you missed the word "attempt".

It is the right wing attempt at "just kidding."

I think you missed the words "barely stopped".

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