We seem to be one arrest short
According to a story in the Washington Post and pretty much everywhere else, so far 725 January 6th rioters have been arrested and charged with crimes and I took the opportunity to suggest they round that number up to an even 726.
Google “what is incitement to riot” and you’ll find a britannica.com entry that describes it as:
“The offense of incitement or solicitation consists of urging or requesting another to commit a crime.”
Donald Trump urged the rioters to “fight like hell” and then they did, so you might think that would qualify as “incitement to riot” unless you make the fatal mistake of over-researching and also read this “incitement to riot” explanation from the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute which is a wonderful example of why we have to pay lawyers $350 an hour to clarify what they just said:
“As used in this chapter, the term “to incite a riot”, or “to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot”, includes, but is not limited to, urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts.”
Screwed-up paragraphs like the last one (and I’ve got some expertise in the screwed-up-paragraph department) might help you understand why analytic advocates insist on measuring a baseball player’s worth with a dicked-up metric like Wins Above Replacement (and I’ve got a whole article on that which I should post) because Wins Above Replacement confuses the rest of us and means we have to hire a sabermetrician or a lawyer (or if things get really confusing, a lawyermetrician; a job I just made up, but the way things are going will no doubt eventually exist) to explain what they mean and anytime language is used to obfuscate and not clarify, the obfuscator is probably up to no good.
In fact, one of the signs of financial fraud is things being way more complicated than they need to be so the average person doesn’t understand just how the hell his money disappeared like a magician’s assistant.
Anyway…
Donald Trump is now claiming he “wasn’t involved” with the riot and if you look at what he said it was “extremely calming” which you know isn’t true because just writing what Trump is now claiming pisses me off.
Now here’s a story about that:
If Donald Trump is not guilty of anything because he just told the rioters what to do and then went back to the White House and had another Double-Quarter Pounder lunch while watching them fight like hell on TV, does that mean Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto wasn’t responsible for Pearl Harbor because he didn’t fly an airplane?
(Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?)
And if the rioters aren’t responsible because they just did what they were told to do, does that mean the Nazis who ran the concentration camps were also not responsible because they were just following orders?
(And I’m guessing you saw that one coming a mile away.)
And all these people trying to blame somebody else are part of a party that believes poor people need to take personal responsibility for not being born into a family that has a trust fund set up for their ne’er do well kids which is a really weird saying and indicates rich people are so goddamn lazy they don’t want to pronounce the “v” left out of “ne’er.”
Now here’s an article about the 725 people who are now very sorry they got caught:
https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-riot-725-arrested-seeking-350-more-2022-1
Nevertheless, I think you have to commend the January 6th rioters because all too often criminals forget to make videos of themselves committing their crimes and then posting them on social media and I’m assuming if Instagram and cell phones had existed in 1963 the guys on the grassy knoll would have made a video of themselves yelling:
“Woohoo, guess what president we just shot!”
Right here in Kansas City (AKA America’s Heartland or…for those of us who live here and know better… America’s Lower Intestinal Tract) doctors are pleading with politicians to stop making their jobs harder by doing dumb things like dropping mask mandates which politicians are doing to suck up to the same people who are so stupid they make videos of themselves committing crimes.
Speaking of which:
According to a St. Louis TV station website, 18 Missourians have been charged for their involvement in the January 6th riot and one of them was Emily Hernandez (shown holding a piece of a broken plaque for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) and her lawyer says Emily didn’t really mean to go to the Capitol building or participate in a political rally and calls Hernandez a good person who got caught up in the mob so I guess if the mob had decided to lynch somebody Emily would have wanted a selfie with the rope.
Also:
According to the story this “good person” is suspected of driving while intoxicated in a wrong-way fatal accident the night before the one-year anniversary of the January 6th riot, so clearly Emily has learned her lesson about impulsive, reckless behavior.
Here’s the link to that story:
So if 725 people have been arrested and 18 of them are Missourians, that means we’re doing way more than our part because 18 x 50 is 900 and I was about to blame those slackers in Hawaii, but I just googled “has anyone from Hawaii been arrested in the January 6th riots” and it turns out the founder of the Proud Boys of Hawaii, Nicholas Robert Ochs, got arrested by the FBI when he returned to Hawaii after the riots and I think you have to admire Nick for his commitment to stupidity.
I’ve flown to Hawaii and it takes a lot longer to get to Washington, D.C. than it does from Missouri and this Proud Boy Criminal Mastermind might have made the tiniest slip up when he tweeted a picture of himself inside the capitol smoking a cigarette with the caption:
“Hello from the capital lol.”
And yes, Einstein misspelled capitol.
So focus on the idea that these are the people our politicians are sucking up to and then start drinking heavily because we’re clearly screwed.
Anyway…
Do the math on arrestees and clearly somebody is not doing their part and I just googled “has anyone from Vermont been arrested in the January 6th riots” and the answer is no and here’s an article from the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and they seem pretty proud of the fact that as of yesterday no Vermonter has been arrested for January 6th crimes and turns out there are three other states without arrests – Nevada, North Dakota and Wyoming – and I guessed Vermont all on my own, but if I was on Who Wants to Be a Bajillionaire? I never would have guessed North Dakota and Wyoming, but Nevada kinda makes sense because they’re just the kind of state that would figure the odds and not place a bet.
And speaking of Nevada…
As often happens, political cartoonists take a real thing – like casinos making record profits in 2021 – and then steer that real thing in a different direction like this cartoon about people who have chosen to not get vaccinated during a pandemic.
Conclusion
The Times Argus went to Robert Sand, a professor at Vermont Law School and asked what no Vermonters being arrested meant and Bob was smart enough to say maybe not much because the investigations weren’t over and investigations tend to unfold in layers and the first layer was the people who committed the crimes, but the second layer might be the people who “conspired with or aided either before an act or after” which is just convoluted enough to make you think Bob really knows his law.
So maybe we’ll get to that 726th arrest and I certainly hope so because I could use the cartoon material.
This piece could have been written specifically about a couple of folks in my neighborhood. Except they think capitol starts with a "k" and got lost while hunting for D.C. in Washington state. Thanks for another painfully accurate post!