By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

January 6th was a day that will live on in infamy, or at least so I’m told. Maybe I’ve just become too jaded in my young age, but three weeks later and I still don’t see it. The great Capitol Hill Siege sounds terrifying coming from some breathless dweeb at CNN but the whole thing seemed like a pretty second rate shitshow from where I was sitting. With the last gasp of Orange Man Bad, the Administration Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight whooped up a few thousand devoted MAGA monsters with tall tales of stolen elections and sicked them on a congress playing democracy with the Electoral College. Shit got out of hand and some of the loonier tunes in the bunch invaded the building, chasing off our dear leaders and goofing around the hallways and offices until the pigs who let them in lost their patience. Five people died, which is always tragic, but most of the deaths were freak accidents that could have just as easily occurred if that many out of shape fogeys attended Coachella. I’m sorry if I’m being a dick but I just don’t see this septuagenarian riot as being the new 9/11.

But that is exactly how the Washington politicos and their mainstream media hype-men are playing this. According to them and all their corporate think tank “experts,” this thing was an act of terrorism. It was a neo-Nazi coup, and the next one is just around the corner. Speaking as somebody who actually kind of gives a shit about the civil liberties that these new Brown Shirts supposedly threaten, I’m far more concerned by the perfect synergy of the mainstream establishment’s response to January 6 than January 6 itself. Within hours, the faceless scions of social media were launching sweeping crackdowns that banished far more than just Trump and QAnon from their pages. After a single patch was photographed on a Capitol Hill hooligan, the largely post-racial third positionists of the National Anarchist Movement were completely scalped from the internet. All of their Facebook pages were gutted like a carp and it turns out the asshole with the patch had been kicked out of the group years ago, precisely for his support of Trump and his fascist policies.

This was far from an isolated incident and the social media purge which is promised to just be beginning is only the tip of the spear. The talk from Washington is far more severe. On every news channel we see a bipartisan consensus on the need to pass sweeping legislation to crack down on the vague rising scourge of domestic extremism. Our new president himself is talking up his tough on crime credentials as he turns the Capitol into a dystopian police state, and this is one promise Joe is likely to keep. After all, he was the author of the draconian Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 that his neocon homie, John Ashcroft, used as a blueprint for the Constitution shredding Patriot Act.

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