Subject: Re: Now There Is Proof
Nice picture. Does not appear as an “unruly mob” to me.

Except that they're congregating in an area that it's prohibited for people to be. They've already broken through several police lines to get there - up the staircase, that the narrator you quoted said would be easy to hold.

Look - none of this is "now there is proof." None of this is new information. It is not a surprise that the plumes of tear gas that are clearly visible in photos and videos of the event did not manifest immaculately from the earth itself, but were actually the result of the police deploying tear gas. We knew that. The fact that someone went through all the bodycam footage and found the body cam of the policeman throwing the tear gas - which everyone knew had been thrown by the police - is not sudden "proof" of anything. Nor is it "proof" of anything to discover that, yes, the upper level of the Capitol have to be reached by staircases - a fact so carefully concealed that it certainly wasn't used as the name for a satire-performance group:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I understand the desire for a reframe. It's natural for Trump supporters - and especially the ones who were there - to try to characterize the events of J6 this way. Trump supporters aren't bad people. But good people don't break into the Capitol. So there must be something else - some other cause - for why the Capitol was broken into. What folks seem to have landed on is the idea that this was just a peaceful gathering that was provoked into doing something bad - that there were fed provocateurs in the crowd, that the police instigated it, that people were misled into thinking what they were doing was lawful, etc.

Whether or not you believe that reframe is credible or not, none of this stuff is "proving" anything new. It's just being cast that way so that the reframe looks less like something other than a reframe, an effort at argumentation. You have to do something to make it seem like information was concealed, like there's a conspiracy to hide the truth, an "us vs. them" type of thing. That's more pedestrian than the boring reality that, yes, an unruly mob can do a terrible thing like break into the U.S. Capitol, even if that mob is made up of Trump supporters rather than Biden supporters.