Eliana Willis

“Are you watching this?” I was crossing the road, five minutes late to pick up the kids, and after reading the text, paused to scroll. Whoa. Instantly, I texted someone else. “Is your TV on?” “No.” “Turn it on.” After pick-up, we ran to a doctor’s appointment, where the receptionist had the TV on behind the desk. “This is insane,” he murmured, as someone in the waiting room read a news report aloud to his teenage daughter. When we got home, a few neighbours had come out of their apartments to mill, masked, in the hallway. “The numbers of people who support this look low, but it doesn’t have to be a majority,” said one, darkly.
The absorption into daily life of disastrous events is one the world has grown used to over the last 12 months, which isn’t to say each new disaster isn’t shocking. This is particularly true in America, where no matter how many times one is reminded that millions of Americans hold opinions that seem, to millions of others, actively insane, their public expression never gets less astounding. When the Trump-supporting mob stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, the most flabbergasting thing was less that it was happening, than that after four years of dire predictions, our imaginations had still failed to prepare us.
This was, partly, a selectivity of memory. “It can’t happen here” is a phrase that, even as it was used in conjunction with darker warnings about Trump, betrayed a bedrock faith in American democracy that overlooks its savage foundations. The white supremacist project, still going strong as an overt tenet of even liberal government policy well into the 20th century – black Americans were largely cut out of the New Deal – should at least have raised as a possibility a white mob storming the government at the behest of a racist president. The fact that they looked, in their costumes and homemade gas masks, so utterly ridiculous wasn’t even out of keeping with precedent: that end of the extra-political spectrum has always gone in for fancy dress and flaming theatrics.
From a processing point of view, what was stranger, on Wednesday, was that an event with the force of a foregone conclusion still broke a fundamental rule of superstition: that by anticipating the worst, we invite the universe to pleasantly surprise us. The word “coup” has been used in relation to Trump plenty of times since November. Prior to the president’s incitement of the mob, however, it was, even in sincere contexts, used if not as hyperbole, then at least with the expectation that by naming it we lessened the likelihood it would happen. You could take Trump seriously as a threat to national security, believe wholly in his efforts to corrupt the election and still not get fully behind the notion he would encourage a power grab – not just because he is lazy, chaotic and a fool, but because, as an extremely broad principle, nothing ever tends to unfold as predicted.
The day still had to be lived through. As with 9/11 and the beginning of the pandemic, the unreality of Wednesday’s events butted up against quotidian matters to make them seem even more bizarre. It is a function of human resilience that no matter what happens, you still, as Sylvia Plath put it in The Bell Jar, have to “eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world”. Many of us ditched the job part of that observation and spent the afternoon trying to dispatch our chores while flipping incredulously between news channels; nonetheless life went on. People from other countries texted. I tried to explain what was going on to my children and didn’t get much further than, “You know how Donald Trump’s a terrible person?”
Once again, the goalposts shifted. With each breach of moral standards, Trump has widened the range of public behaviour that can still be absorbed. His supporters smashed windows and graffitied doors and trashed congressional offices, but they were not an armed militia, which, I caught myself thinking, before turning to analyse the thought in amazement, was something to be grateful for. It could have been worse, as those streaming out of the Capitol building shouted to reporters it would be the next time.
In the hallway outside my apartment, my neighbours and I went over how crazy it was, how we couldn’t believe it, what it all meant and where it would go. “It’s Germany 1933,” said one. And whether or not this was true, we all nodded in agreement, then went back inside our homes to make dinner.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

On the morning that the US Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters, I knew it was going to be a pretty big day. Agence France-Presse (AFP) had photographers all over the city and my job was to be inside the Capitol, photographing the joint session where the vote counting would occur. But I had no idea what was coming our way.I have been working in Washington for almost 14 years and this is definitely the craziest day I have ever worked. Never in a million years could you imagine that the US Capitol would be overrun with protesters. It’s completely unprecedented territory.I had started the day photographing the session for 20 minutes and when it was adjourned, I went back to my laptop in another room. Suddenly, an announcement warned us of a “security situation” inside the building, urging us to shelter in place.Being a photographer, the last place you want to be is stuck inside a room when everything’s going on outside. So a group of us went down towards the commotion on the second floor, right outside the door to the Senate chamber. It’s a very inner part of the Capitol – normally a very secured area – so it’s highly unusual to see one protester, let alone the 12–15 that were there.That’s when I got my first big shot. Some of the protesters had face paint and body paint on, and were wearing costumes. One had a Viking hat on; a bunch were carrying Trump flags. Another had a Confederate flag. They were clearly Trump supporters there to disrupt things. They were shouting at police, who were trying their best to defuse the situation. About 12 officers were forming a line trying to prevent them from going any further into the building. For the most part they were trying to engage with them, saying, “How can we resolve this peacefully? How can we get you out of the building?”I thought, this is an area of the Capitol that never has protesters. This is going to be a big story of the day. Little did I know this was just the tip of the iceberg.Usually in a situation like this, the police act very quickly. They will tackle individuals to the ground, cuff them and take them out but that’s not what was happening. All these people had broken in somehow, and it wasn’t clear whether they had weapons, or what their intentions were.I heard commotion elsewhere and turned towards the Rotunda, underneath the dome. Hundreds of protesters were streaming in. That’s when I realized this was a much bigger deal than I could have ever imagined.People put Maga hats on the statues and had them hold their Trump flags, it was almost like a circus atmosphere.I was scared of the police clearing everyone out and getting stuck with them so I went down the tunnel towards the Senate and saw thick smoke in the air. People were retreating. People were running out coughing and there was a general craziness.That’s when we saw people going into the offices of Nancy Pelosi. Normally this is a very secure part of the building; she’s the speaker of the House, second in line from the presidency – nobody can just wander in. But there was no staff, no police. It was just a free-for-all.The protesters were sitting at desks, taking selfies and rummaging through the office. It was just a bizarre scene. I kept moving through the office and saw a guy with his feet up on the desk, looking through the mail and making himself at home. The staff had left in such a hurry that the computers were still on, with emails still up on the screens. I chatted with the guy with his feet up at the desk. I think everyone was just astonished. This is one of the most secure buildings in Washington and here it is with protesters who seemed to have complete control over the second floor of the US Capitol. It was just mind-boggling.You’re always worried people won’t want to be photographed, and you don’t want anyone to become violent towards you. But they either didn’t notice or didn’t care I was there. No one tried to hide their face, no one tried to discourage me from taking photos.Soon the crowd started to get larger and more volatile, so we went through another narrow hallway, turned a corner and came across a police Swat team who had their rifles like you see in the movies – sweeping the area, going room to room and immediately they say, “Hands up! Who are you?” It was definitely startling. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever had a gun pointed at me. They let us through and told us to find shelter. Three of us barricaded ourselves in an office on the third floor where I could charge and check my phone. My wife knew I was at the Capitol and was very worried. At some point she texted saying shots had been fired inside the building, but that’s the only news I got about that. When you’re photographing, you’re on autopilot and don’t have time to think about what’s actually happening.I don’t know how what happened was made possible. During political conventions, inaugurations, even the State of the Union, they set up huge metal fencing around the building. During the Black Lives Matter protests, they set that up around the White House for maybe as much as a month. But that just wasn’t there that morning. During an event like this, it’s human nature to run away from it. But for better or for worse, we have to run towards it. No photographs are going to come from inside a locked office.By 8pm, we got word that the Senate and the House would reconvene to count the electoral votes.Sure, the windows were still broken, the floors were still slippery from the teargas, and there were broken things all over the place – doors, windows and desks in disarray. But Congress was going back to its business. Even then, just five hours after they cleared the building, things were returning to normal. I think that’s what members of Congress wanted to show: that the work of the government will continue.– As told to Poppy Noor More

In the 24 hours since the US Capitol in Washington was seized by a Trump-supporting mob disputing the results of the 2020 election, American social media companies have barred the president from their platforms for spreading falsehoods and inciting the crowd.Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch suspended Donald Trump indefinitely. Twitter locked his account temporarily. Multiple platforms removed his messages.Those actions, coming just days before the end of Trump’s presidency, are too little, too late, according to misinformation experts and civil rights experts who have long warned about the rise of misinformation and violent rightwing rhetoric on social media sites and Trump’s role in fueling it.“This was exactly what we expected,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who studies the rise of movements like QAnon. “It is very consistent with how the coalescing of different factions responsible for what happened yesterday have been operating online, and how platforms’ previous attempts to deal with them have fallen short.”Over the past decade, tech platforms have been reluctant to moderate Trump’s posts, even as he repeatedly violated hate speech regulations. Before winning the presidency, Trump used Twitter to amplify his racist campaign asserting, falsely, that Barack Obama was not born in the US. As president, he shared racist videos targeting Muslims on Twitter and posted on Facebook in favor of banning Muslims from entering the US, a clear violation of the platform’s policies against hate speech. He retweeted to his tens of millions of followers a video of one of his supporters shouting “white power!” in 2020 June. He appeared to encourage violence against Black Lives Matter protests in a message shared to multiple platforms that included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.Trump’s lies and rhetoric found an eager audience online – one that won’t disappear when his administration ends. Experts warn the platforms will continue to be used to organize and perpetuate violence. They point, for example, to Facebook and YouTube’s failure to curb the proliferation of dangerous conspiracy theory movements like QAnon, a baseless belief that a secret cabal is controlling the government and trafficking children and that Trump is heroically stopping it. Parts of the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to bar the certification of Trump’s election defeat donned QAnon-related merchandise, including hats and T-shirts, and the action was discussed weeks in advance on many QAnon-related groups and forums.QAnon theories and communities have flourished on Facebook this year. By the time the company banned QAnon-themed groups, pages and accounts in October, hundreds of related pages and groups had amassed more than 3 million followers and members.YouTube removed “tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and terminated hundreds of channels” around the time of Facebook’s measures. It also updated its policy to target more conspiracy theory videos that promote real-world violence, but it still stopped short of banning QAnon content outright. A spokesman from YouTube noted the company had taken a number of other actions to address QAnon content, including adding information panels sharing facts about QAnon on videos as early as 2018.Trump’s leverage of social media to spread propaganda has gone largely unchecked amid a vacuum of laws regulating government speech on social media, said Jennifer M Grygiel, assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and expert on social media.Grygiel cited the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which regulates the distribution of government propaganda, as an example of one law that limits the government’s communication. But such regulation does not exist for the president’s Twitter account, Grygiel said. Instead we have relied on the assumption the president would not use his social media account to incite an insurrection.“What happened this week is the product of four years of systematic propaganda from the presidency,” Grygiel said.In the absence of any meaningful regulation, tech companies have had little incentive to regulate their massively profitable platforms, curb the spread of falsehoods that produce engagement and moderate the president.That’s why experts say things have to change. In 2020, Republicans and Democrats amplified calls to regulate big tech. The events this week underscore that the reckoning over big tech must include measures aimed at addressing the risks posed by leaders lying and promoting violence on their platforms, some argue.“The violence that we witnessed today in our nation’s capital is a direct response to the misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech that have been allowed to spread on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc,” said Jim Steyer, who runs the non-profit children’s advocacy organization Common Sense Media and helped organize the Stop Hate for Profit campaign (with the ADL and a number of civil rights organizations), which called on advertisers to boycott Facebook over hate speech concerns and cost Facebook millions.“Social media platforms must be held accountable for their complicity in the destruction of our democracy,” he added, arguing that in absence of meaningful enforcement from social media, Congress must pass better legislation to address hate speech on these platforms.Facebook and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.Grygiel said it was time to move away from the idea that a president should be tweeting at all. Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s subsidiary Instagram, said on Twitter on Thursday evening that Facebook has long said it believes “regulation around harmful content would be a good thing”. He acknowledged that Facebook “cannot tackle harmful content without considering those in power as a potential source”.Grygiel said: “We need non-partisan work here. We need legislation that ensures no future president can ever propagandize the American people in this way again.” More

This article is more than 1 year old Congress certifies Joe Biden as next president hours after storming of Capitol This article is more than 1 year old Trump loyalists objected to certification of election result before session interrupted as mob breached security US politics live – follow the latest news Who are the key […] More

The Senate and the House of Representatives convened on Wednesday to perform what is traditionally seen as a purely ceremonial vote: to certify each state’s presidential election results.
At a rally before the vote, Donald Trump continued to baselessly insist that the election results – which he lost to Democrat challenger Joe Biden – were rigged and the US president helped instigate a mob to storm the US Capitol building and halt the process.
The attack shocked many Americans but even after the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol, a handful of Republican senators and more than a hundred Republican representatives continued to back Trump’s false claims and objected to certifying the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
The list of Republican lawmakers who objected to both results includes Texas senator Ted Cruz, who ran against Trump in 2016 presidential election only to have Trump suggest that Cruz’s father was involved in president John F Kennedy’s assassination. It also include Missouri senator Josh Hawley who is seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate. And it includes the majority of Republican House members.
Here’s the full list.
Full list of people rejecting certification More

A journalist captured the moment a lone Black police officer was confronted by pro-Trump supporters who had stormed into the US Capitol in what some lawmakers condemned as an attempted insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the presidential election.
A politics reporter at HuffPost, Igor Bobic, filmed the officer as he was chased up the stairs of the building by Trump loyalists who objected to the certification of Joe Biden as the next president, which was taking place in Congress during a joint session. Four people died during the violent occupation
American carnage: how Trump’s footsoldiers ran riot in the Capitol
Full report: Congress certifies Joe Biden as president More

A mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill and clashed with police on Wednesday afternoon, apparently driven by the prospect that they might stop the certification of the 2020 federal election in favour of Joe Biden. The attack came after Trump urged a crowd of supporters to march on the Capitol and undo his November election defeat.
A woman shot in the chest on Capitol grounds as the pro-Trump mob stormed the building died soon afterwards. Earlier reports indicated the woman was in a critical condition after being shot in the chest as the Capitol was breached. Dustin Sternbeck, a spokesman for the DC police, confirmed the woman’s death.
The mob managed to enter the Senate chamber where minutes earlier the election results were being certified. A rioter stepped on to the dais and, according to a reporter on the scene, yelled: “Trump won that election.”
Donald Trump praised the mob as “very special” people. The president justified the violence by citing baseless claims of widespread election fraud. In a video that Twitter has since deleted from his account, the president urged his supporters to “go home”, but also gave legitimacy to the falsehoods that fuelled Wednesday’s attempted insurrection, calling the election “stolen” and telling the angry mob, “we love you”. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have since locked the president’s accounts in order to address misinformation and the incitement of violence.
Joe Biden called on Trump to “demand an end to this siege”. The president-elect said in a speech in Wilmington, Delaware, “It’s not a protest; it’s insurrection. The world is watching.” Former President George W Bush also used the term “insurrection”.
Barack Obama said history would rightly remember the violence at the Capitol as a moment of great dishonour and shame for the nation. Obama said it should not have come as a surprise, and that for two months “a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth”.
Four hours after the breach, officials announced that the Capitol was secure. The siege was among the worst security breaches in American history. Senators were then escorted back into the Senate chamber to resume the certification of Biden’s victory. Vice-President Mike Pence opened the session, saying”: “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today: You did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins. And this is still the people’s house … Let’s get back to work.”
The DC police chief, Robert Contee, said 13 people had been arrested so far in connection to the “riot” at the US Capitol. During the protests over the police killing of George Floyd, more than 400 people were arrested, mostly for curfew violations.
A curfew in Washington DC went into effect at 6pm and will be in place until 6am on Thursday. As the curfew kicked in, an announcement played at the Capitol that anyone still on the grounds after 6pm would be subject to arrest.
Representatives Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for Trump to be impeached. Omar said that she was filing articles of impeachment.
Facebook announced it would remove all photographs and and videos posted from the protest, as well as praise for the protests or calls to bring weapons to the protest or anywhere else in the US. The posts, “contribute to, rather than diminish, the risk of ongoing violence”, it said.
Melania Trump’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham reportedly resigned, effective immediately, over the violence at the Capitol. Grisham was the former White House press secretary.
The attacks were condemned by leaders around the world and within the US, though Trump allies including Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro maintained their support. More