The Capitol Police WERE “defunded by default” for reasons that still need to be investigated for national security purposes. For example, their initial support forces were too low despite their leaders’ requests to bolster them, the National Guard wasn’t sent in when requested along with other matters. I don’t challenge that there is a need for police reform nationally, but I am pointing out that this was an attack on the nation’s Capitol that has many other dimensions to it. And whatever their flaws, being a police officer is a hard and increasingly thankless job. While I was proud to see the outpouring of support for the African American community after the killing of George Floyd, I also know what it’s like to have a group of police officers protect me by literally putting their lives on the line and risking a bullet from somebody whom they can’t even precisely locate.
To get a feeling for what it was like to be a Capitol Police officer on January 6 watch the embedded video of Eugene Goodman fending them off in an article titled “How Would Martin Luther King Confront the Capitol Riots and the Prospect of Martial Law Under Donald Trump?” [https://medium.com/illumination-curated/how-would-martin-luther-king-handle-the-inaugural-capitol-riot-trump-and-the-threat-of-martial-law-2bbb8236fc4?sk=2b1ae1ec9a766553e79b6422c5222c95]
The fact that there were police officers taking selfies with the insurrectionists and potential infiltration of the National Guard by white supremacists is a national security threat. Donald Trump’s instigation of the white supremacists who attacked the Capitol is absolutely despicable, but he, too, is a national security threat as long as the military, law enforcement and intelligence levers of power of the federal government are at his command.. An October article titled The War After the Election [https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-war-after-the-election-545de96aa4ca?sk=627c55d616d9296af3e398f1686493a4] predicted almost everything that has happened from before the election and since, and it strategizes how to get Donald Trump out of power in the last days of his term so that there will be no recurrence of January 6.
