AOC Talked About Her Role As A Latina Lawmaker Witnessing How ‘deeply affected lawmaking’ Was By The Capitol Riots
Yes, it’s true: 2020 set the bar low but 2021 has proven that it will also have no chill.
January marked the first headlines of back to WFH offices in the new year for quite a few people. And though so many of us expected that the break would bring a relaxed mood for even just a little bit, Republicans ruined the tone and extremists came out guns blazing. Literally. At the start of January Trump supporters infiltrated the U.S. state Capitol in a coup and ever since many of them have continued to pay the price.
So have we.
Capitol rioters learned their actions have consequences.
According to reports, twenty federal criminal defendants related to the deadly pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol “have been rounded up across the country since the insurrection, with the allegations showing the danger of the mob.”
About the riots which took place four months ago, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. said she still thinks about the “extraordinarily traumatizing event.”
“Pence was taken out of the Senate chamber something like 60 seconds before these terrorists, insurrectionists got into the Senate chamber,” Ocasio-Cortez told journalist Maria Hinojosa on an episode of “Latino USA.” “Pence was the one person, arguably, that had one of the most important roles in making sure that procedurally the Electoral College counts went on as proceeded. Sixty seconds could have meant potentially the difference between what we have right now and a martial state. This was an all-out attempted coup. If 60 seconds went differently, if a different door was opened, if a chair wasn’t barricaded in a certain way, we could have a completely different reality right now. We don’t want to acknowledge that that’s how close we got, but that is how close we got.”
One of the federal defendants, Jacob Chansley, who stormed the Capitol building while wearing a bearskin headdress, face paint, and horns was in early January. According to court documents, he told the FBI he came to Washington “as a part of a group effort, with other ‘patriots’ from Arizona, at the request of the President that all ‘patriots’ come to D.C. on January 6, 2021.”
It’s important to note here while the Capitol riot resulted in the arrests of several people, “the charges filed so far have dealt with issues such as trespassing, disorderly contact, and weapon possession, not terrorism” according to Snopes. “While officials have opened domestic terrorism investigations, the FBI has not made any announcements designating everyone in attendance at the rally as a terrorist.”
This means that despite the then-trending Twitter hashtags, many of those who took part in the coup were not being kicked off of lights as they attempt to fly back home.
As Snopes noted the people in the videos had not actually been added to no-fly lists.
On Sunday, Jan. 10 a video claimed to show a person discovering that they had been placed on the no-fly list for participating in a pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol went viral. In the video, the man could be heard saying: “This is what they do to us. They kicked me off the plane. They called me a f*cking terrorist, and they f*ckin’ want to ruin my life!”
The video does show a person being kicked off of a flight, but it doesn’t seem that they were added to a “no-fly list” which is managed by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center and prohibits terrorists from boarding commercial aircraft. Instead, it seems the footage shows anti-maskers being escorted off of planes for refusing to wear their masks.
