Not even the most grotesque feature film in Hollywood could have anticipated an assault like the one that took place yesterday on the United States Capitol. Far from the iconic image of helicopters flying over the building, paratroopers or a great armed hero up to the bars, the hundreds of Americans who managed to access, wander, and even play and break part of the furniture of the senators -recluded- were ordinary citizens dressed with American flags, scarves and caps from the campaign in favor of Donald Trump, led by some of the characters who have encouraged all kinds of conspiracy theories on social networks, and whom the world made a face yesterday.
The most visible of all, Jake Angeli, better known as the QAnon Shaman. A young man dressed in furs and his familiar horns, as well as his face with the American flag. It is one of the forerunners of the idea of electoral fraud. That the presidential elections of November 3 had been rigged before the popular vote itself. QAnon’s is one of the main conspiracy theories of the American extreme right that details an alleged secret plot organized by a supposed ‘deep state’ against Donald Trump and his followers. The theory had already been around for more than three years shortly after Trump arrived at the White House.
Internet forums have served as a breeding ground for interpreting what happened yesterday in the US One of the platforms that has most encouraged theories of all kinds has been the website thedonald.win, which emerged a year ago in full election of the presidential candidates. The source is the Reddit forum, with a sub-forum created to analyze Trump’s election campaign five years ago. That was the focus of the 2017 Charlottesville supremacist marches. In June 2020 it was closed for good.
The messages on each of the assailants’ sweatshirts, hats and T-shirts revealed their political intentions. “Make America great” (‘Make America great’), “1776 Forever Free” (1776 Always Free, in reference to the independence of the United States) or T-shirts with Nazi slogans completed the entire list.
According to some US media, such as ‘Washington Post’, in thedonald.win they included messages encouraging people to carry weapons (“yes, it is illegal, but we are at war and clearly in a post-legal phase of our society”) no longer accept The results: “We, the People, will not tolerate robbery. We won’t back down, we won’t give up Give back to our president what you have stolen or face the consequences. Its users even hinted at how to enter the Capitol “and kill all the traitors to take back the country.”
Many of the participants in these forums call themselves “patriots” and are already talking about the “betrayal” of the vice president, Mike Pence, for allowing the holding of the session that was to qualify the Democrat Joe Biden as president.
Among all those who yesterday walked the corridors, offices and the headquarters of the Senate were loyal followers of Donald Trump who had come from the other end of the great avenue that connects the White House with the legislative branch. Married couples dressed in American insignia, but also with Confederate flags, allusions to the electoral “trap”.
Telegram groups and also in Parler, a social network launched in 2018, have been the focus of this assault, much more agile than many comments hinted in recent months. Another of the networks used by the extremists is Gab (400,000 followers), also an alternative to Twitter. According to Bloomberg, many assailants posted photos and selfies from inside the Capitol on this network.
However, other networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat blocked the accounts of the president of the United States last night. In the case of Twitter, the blockade will last until 12 hours after the president deletes three messages that the platform considered misleading and dangerous.
Trump himself had encouraged the supremacists of the Proud Boys weeks ago, whose symbols were also seen in the headquarters of the US legislature, a few weeks ago. Wait for the signal. “We never give up. We will never concede, “” we are going to stop the robbery, “Donald Trump was saying to the crowd in Washington just before the Senate named Biden president.
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