We’re all sharing cookie recipes on the blogs today, right? Some baking tips, too? No? Okay, then, I guess we’ll talk about the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol yesterday.

Number of times I’ve felt compelled to watch a January 6th election certification process? Zero, but Election2020 has brought all the weird so yesterday found me camped out in front of CNN. I had an hour to kill so I figured I’d catch part of Trump’s rally which was…something. In summary: rigged election, fake news, stop the steal, DO THE RIGHT THING MIKE, cancel culture, HunterBidenBillBarrHillaryClinton, CHEATER CHEATER PUMPKIN EATER, let’s go to the Capitol.

Okey dokey then.

Fast forward to the joint session of Congress. I was trying to process this whole okay, objection, break for two hours of debate then gather and move on to the next state thing when stuff started to pop on twitter. The clips were alarming – angry confrontations, people screaming about traitors while pushing toward the Capitol. Not unheard of but it seemed to be escalating quickly and just as I told BrightSide surely CNN would break into their coverage if it was serious the scene flipped to outdoors where all hell had broken loose.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I stared at my tv in horror for the rest of the afternoon. HORROR. I watched rioters storm the U.S. Capitol where representatives were trying to finalize election results. People fought the police, people scaled the damn wall, they climbed the stairs and hung from scaffolding and I swear I was more scared than I’ve ever been. We got the kids and dug in.

Reporters kept saying that “hopefully” it would remain a bloodless coup attempt up until a woman was shot after the mob breached the building. Rioters roamed the Capitol as lawmakers were evacuated to a safe location.

I had 9/11 flashbacks all over the place. Glued to the television all day long, afraid to look away for fear something would get blown up. Which as it turns out wasn’t outlandish since three pipe bombs were located and diffused in D.C. yesterday. By now mobs had been rioting for a full ninety minutes with nary a word from the White House and people started demanding Trump send his goons home. The mayor had declared a 6:00pm curfew but the insurrectionists declared it “a new 1776” and rioted on.

Trump and Ivanka both tweeted a version of “go home” because apparently twitter is MAGA’s primary language. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work. After President Elect Biden called on Trump to step forward and speak Trump posted a video to twitter that was, to put it succinctly, bullshit. Even if they hadn’t deleted it I wouldn’t repost here simply because I won’t force that nonsense on anyone who managed to avoid it the first time. Ava DuVernay summarizes it well.

Yesterday’s feeling of where the hell is law enforcement was disorienting, to say the least. I’ve developed a healthy skepticism regarding how helpful police will be in a situation but as I stared at these idiots raging through our Capitol building, damaging property and hunting for reps, I thought damn, SOMEBODY’S gotta flush them out. Watching police eventually open a back door and calmly usher them out is a post for another day. Then again, they let them in so…

Another rabbit hole I won’t go down: Everyone had two months’ warning about this freaking rally that we all knew would turn violent. Trump publicly invited his followers to come protest the election certification so what we saw yesterday wasn’t a result of being unprepared.

As for yesterday, I’ll say this. I never thought I’d a) witness American extremists attacking the seat of our democracy and b) do so with little to no repercussions. Not gonna lie, I actually thought you’d be shot for rushing the Capitol. Food for thought.