#CKStrong

DAWN BANCROFT, a 59-year-old gym owner from Pennsylvania, travelled to the national capital a year ago this week to hear Donald Trump speak, not to commit terrorism. Yet as she marched up Constitution Avenue, with the former president’s instruction to “fight like hell” ringing in her ears, Ms Bancroft apparently mislaid her moral compass.

Forcing a way through the mob outside the Capitol building, she and her friend Diana came to a shattered window and clambered through it. “We got inside, we did our part,” Ms Bancroft later explained in a video message to her children. “We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin’ brain. But we didn’t find her.”

After hearing the women plead guilty to a misdemeanour last September, Judge Emmet Sullivan wondered “how good people who never got into trouble with the law morphed into terrorists”. 

… Most made no effort to hide their identities. A Texan estate agent plugged her company while live-streaming the attack; an Ohioan kicked in a window of the Capitol wearing a jacket bearing the name and phone number of his decorating firm. The riot, as the biggest prosecutorial effort in American history has already made clear, was the logical expression of Mr Trump’s big lie, proudly carried out by 2,000 of his devoted supporters. To repudiate the violence, Republicans had no alternative but to repudiate the lie. Having failed to do so, they are instead normalising it. – The Economist

How Close Is The US To Civil War? Closer Than You Think

Wow!  The data say the U.S. no longer qualifies as a democracy.  Check out the video.