![]() ![]() Other House Democrats suspected that invaders had gotten inside information on where to go and what to look for. Representative Mikie Sherrill reported that fellow members had been giving “reconnaissance tours.” Ayanna Pressley’s chief of staff found that all the panic buttons in the office had been removed. In fact, it seems likely that scouts had scoped it out well before. Yet when they showed up in Washington, they trained their eyes on the dome on the Hill and declared it the perfect target. The president’s inflamed minions believed in election results altered by manipulated code, information beams shot from satellites, and conspiracy theories hatched in chat rooms and distributed by social media. One of the ironies in the final spasms of the Trumpian nightmare is that an insurgency nurtured in cyberspace needed to conquer physical space, an actual stone structure, to validate its claims. That’s a tragic necessity right now, but it suggests a question for these insurrectionist times: Can a fortress still be the people’s house? The shocking images of January 6 showed us a place of dignity desecrated by dangerous clowns now, we see a public building locked down as tight as a nuclear installation. ![]() And even as the House was meeting to beat back sedition with speeches and votes, their workplace had become a different kind of citadel: ringed by metal detectors, steel walls, gates, and troops. National Guard units, deployed to keep the peace in this unstable democracy, were bedding down on what had so recently been a battlefield. ![]() A week after the storming of the Capitol - and less than a week before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden - the photos emerging from inside the citadel of democracy were of a military encampment on its marble floors. ![]()
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