Jan. 6th. Capital Riot. A merry band of pranksters, shitposters, and REAL AMERICANS, with some starry-eyed conspiracy losers and a few real sociopaths to spice up the meringue, pushed past outnumbered Capital Police and……mostly stood around, mouths agape, seemingly confused by a reality outside of the Internet. “What do we do now?” asked Bobo A of Bobo B. “I dunno, steal a podium?” They came, they saw, they were escorted off the premises, or mostly just got bored and left. Of course real violence attended these shenanigans; a police officer died, and an unidentified trigger-puller killed Ashli Babbitt, shot in the neck as she climbed through a window. She bled out on the marble, all caught on video, with nary a peep from the end police brutality and excessive force crowd, because Ashli was white, and Ashli was a Trumper; she played for the wrong team, so her ticket getting punched didn’t matter. Three weeks later and she’s long gone, memory holed out of the past. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200. No encomium played across social media, no moral opprobrium from the jabbering mouths on TV. She is not welcome in our modern pantheon of martyrs: Saint Floyd, Saint Trayvon. Welcome to the New United States: tribal, Afghanistan without the poppy fields and hordes of illiterates.
On to the aftermath. Frothy emanations from both side of the aisle. The Left, orgiastic with I told you so’s, triumphantly Iwo Jima’ing the moral high ground, positively SPRAYING jizz, blaming Emperor Trump and his vast horde of dangerous rabble. We were lectured about these dangerous people—nuclear reactor meltdown dangerous, bomb timer countdown dangerous—a nation poised on the brink, Lady Liberty sweating out the choice to cut the green wire or the brown wire. Where will they strike next, these “domestic terrorists”? What evil lies in the hearts of these men? What shadowy plots, what cunning machinations? Green wire, or the brown wire? Hurry! Never mind that Team Blue ran the table at the elections, taking the Executive office and the Senate; never mind that big tech moved in concert with the Left to suppress information prior to the election about the Biden clan gorging themselves on foreign cash, then blocked a sitting president’s social media feed before kneecapping the Right wing echo chamber, Parler; never mind that the fever dream of an organized, violent Right is as realistic as all those young men raised on Call of Duty and Cheetos joining the Navy SEALS.
But one thing is clear to all sides: PUNISHMENT IS UNITY. The federal government is gonna straight flex on these fools. That’s fed time, son, none of this one day served equals two days off your sentence; no early release to ease overcrowding. Our public, primed to boil from years on slow-drip Twitter rage and bobblehead punditry, goes full Pavlovian, demands blood to slake the unbearable thirst.
Hence the now-ubiquitous billboard pictured above. I first saw one halfway between Indio and Palm Springs, in the southern California desert, 2,200 miles away from the action.
Punishment is unity, citizen! You too can join in on the fun AND heal the nation! We’re just a phone call away here at your friendly Federal Bureau of Investigation, so put on your best sleuthing outfit, fire up the ol’ Interweb feeds, and give it a try! Snitching has never been so easy!
First thought: You’re fucking kidding me.
Does the FBI seriously need the public to snitch on the rioters? Are their investigative abilities and resources so limited that they desperately need the help of the general populace to identify these deplorables depicted on a thousand live feeds? Of course not. The real message here is: We are powerful. Which leads me to my second thought.
Second thought: Eazy-E, you wise little man; you sage, jheri-curled leprechaun.
Eazy-E grokked the nature of power and he told us what to expect.
In the 1987 hit “Boyz-N-The-Hood” by N.W.A., Eric Wright (aka Eazy-E) raps the chorus:
Cause the boyz n tha hood are always hard
You come talking that trash we'll pull your card
Knowing nothing in life but to be legit
Don't quote me boy, cause I ain't saying shit
Now Mr. Wright grew up on a steady diet of internecine gang warfare, Crips vs, Bloods, revenge and honor killings, turf squabbles, so his Boyz are a bit different than the Boyz at hand here: Federal Power, the true top dog, the ne plus ultra of American gangs, black tinted windows of convoys of Suburbans, unsmiling young men in suits, discreetly packing, curlicued wire of an earpiece visible above the starched collar. But the principle is the same.
Our Capital rioters came talking that trash, so now it’s time for the card-pulling. Hey QAnon homie: your necklace is gonna get snatched, and there ain’t shit you can do about it. You wanted to play revolutionary, so now you get the slammer: up to ten tears for entering a government building-18 US Code Section 1752; new fun terms bantered around like throwing the pigskin before the big game-conspiracy, sedition, insurrection, treason, eggs Benedict with a side of the ol’ ass-pounding.
A threat to power cannot be countenanced, for an assault on the institution without reprisal delegitimizes the institution.
The primary function of government is to wield power. (“Knowing nothing in life but to be legit” remember?) Providing services to citizens is a secondary concern; that’s the sales pitch designed to get you to surrender your liberties to, say, murder your neighbor, build thirty-foot tall shrine to Satan in the public park across the street, or if you’re ambitious and a bit smart, go full warlord—all the guns, all the drugs, all the bitches—before you die in a hail of gunfire directed from a smarter and more ambitious warlord who has more of said guns, drugs, and/or bitches.
But I digress. A government can’t wield power if a collection of shitheels can stroll into your house and put their feet up on your desk, steal your junk, and smear feces on the walls like baboons.
The government doesn’t need your help, nor should you provide it. Stop Snitching!
Be like Eazy. “Don’t quote me boy, cause I ain’t saying shit” Why?
Federal power is a plague.
Some of those Capital Rioters have mothers that are very worried about them, and they would worry even more if Johnny had to move out from the basement to the pokey.
Federal interventions tend to restrict, not enhance individual liberty. Now, since I’m just another polite yet verbally disagreeable smart-average White guy, you get to cry “Racist!” here, claim I have a copy of “The Turner Diaries” under my pillow, and lump me in with every other right-leaning nut job wrapping himself up in the Star-Spangled Banner to ward off the evils of Bill Gates, 5G, and the vaccine.
If I was one of our current special people, a POC, or transgender pansexual ultraqueer amputee, I could point to Tuskegee and no one would get to say another word, not another syllable, about my reticence to engage with a federal government.
So you want context for my disinclination? Fine. What about my hillbilly ancestors suffering horribly under Prohibition? What about that Irish blood positively longing for the ethyl molecule? You mean to tell me, all those years, when Great-Great whoever came home after a long day at the shop, the boss breathing down his neck all day, that he couldn’t kick back with an ice cold Michelob or six, couldn’t feel the warm and gauzy embrace of alcohol, every fiber of his being rejoicing at the ecstatic reunion? That some FED asshole, with an accent from NOT HERE, could show up and smash his stash?
Is that enough context for my belief for you, or are we gonna forget that Prohibition happened? Not the same? Not good enough? I mean, what kind of animal are you?