White death Capitol rioters now beg for pardons? Do tell.
White-privileged Internet-fed Trumpists are discovering what we black folks already know about being on the wrong side of state power.
From today’s Guardian:
Jenna Ryan, a Texas real estate broker who took a private jet to Washington to join the attack on the US Capitol, has pleaded with Donald Trump to pardon her after she was arrested by federal authorities. After surrendering to the FBI on Friday, Ryan said: “We all deserve a pardon.”
“I’m facing a prison sentence,” she told CBS11 at her home. “I think I do not deserve that. Turning to look into the camera, she said: “I would ask the president of the United States to give me a pardon.”
Ryan said she had been “displaying my patriotism”, adding: “I listen to my president who told me to go to the Capitol.” …During a live Facebook video at the scene of the incursion, Ryan stated: “We are going to fucking go in here. Life or death, it doesn’t matter. Here we go.”
Don’t scream yet. There’s also this:
A lawyer for Jacob Chansley, an Arizona man who wore horns, animal skin and face paint while carrying a spear and entering the Senate chamber, said Trump should do the “honourable thing and pardon those of his peaceful followers who accepted the president’s invitation”. Albert Watkins said his client had no criminal history and was an “active practitioner of yoga”. He also mentioned Chansley’s diet, which has caused him to reject non-organic meals in federal custody. Chansley faces six federal charges. On Friday, a judge ordered him held without bail.
Okay, scream.
These clowns — Ryan plugged her realty business for cameras at the Capitol; Chansley’s theatrics speak for themselves — would be just another Trump joke if this weren’t literally dead serious. People died that day. A horde of armed white people promising to kill the Vice President and others broke into the U.S. Capitol — some reportedly had doors opened for them — and were later allowed to walk out and go home. Black Americans die steadily for legally walking down the street. An identical Capitol invasion by a black crowd would have covered the place with corpses — if they’d have even made it to the Capitol. And the obscenities of this debacle keep growing, including the, uh, suspicious way in which officials’ inaction mirrored the desires of their ultimate boss, the dictatorial president who lit the fuse for the whole thing in his own interest.
But what’s deadliest here is the 400-year mountain of black corpses stacked up and forgotten in the course of official, even blasé, white American authority, while a simpering white realtor and a white cartoon of a shaman can crash into the very chambers of a U.S. Senate session in progress, promise death to elected officials while mugging for their own cameras, take furnishings as souvenirs, and pass through open doors to go home.
The Monty Python-ish absurdity of these white people’s giddy privilege — the fact that they are free to wield self-styled rebellion against what is indeed a wickedly corrupt corporate American state and then gleefully return home after having played at rebellion — is the real monstrosity of this story.
Especially since a battle with full-bore white supremacists who may or may not be afraid of prison or death may be yet to play out.