nferraro90's review against another edition
5.0
While I didn’t read the entirety of this 1000+ page behemoth, the executive summary really does a job in succinctly telling the story of what happened on that day. There were times when I was listening to this on audio that I had to remind myself that this was an official government investigation of an attempted coup, and not a Tom Clancy novel. The fact that an event like this happened in a time and place where democracy is something we typically take for granted shows just how fragile our institutions really are. the odds of any one of the key players, in particular Trump, facing any sort of legitimate punishment from this seems unlikely, but you never know. At the very least, this investigation and report serves as a historical undertaking of what happened on, and leading up to, one of the most consequential days in our nations history.
jammasterjamie's review against another edition
4.0
I watched the hearings live and was appalled, but having it all laid out on black and white with footnotes galore really takes it to another level. The amount of malfeasance coming out of Trump's White House around election fraud is unparalleled it's truly frightening how close the checks and balances in American democracy came to failing that day. I know it takes a while to build a good case, but the DoJ has a ton of the work done for them right here, so let's start seeing some of those higher up indictments. Those involved do not deserve to get away with what they attempted and the ongoing damage done by their actions.
sde's review against another edition
4.0
I read this for a political book club because that's the kind of nerd I am. I probably would not have made it through if it weren't for talking about it with other people. It is so jammed packed with information that one reader will miss a lot. I enjoyed hearing what other readers picked out.
Lots of legal cases are going to arise from this. Some readers felt it was almost a blueprint to DOJ and other jurisdictions as to who they should go after and try to prosecute.
Parts of this were actually funny, believe it or not. Little digs were inserted into the report, such as some of the comments people in the administration made about Trump behind the scenes or the fact that money raised by "Save America" went to Melania's designer for "strategy consulting."
Will the electorate's mind be changed by this report? I doubt it. People believe what they want to believe. But I do think it will have consequences for many of the people mentioned. I am also glad that this document was created for future generations to study.
I wish there had been a list of all the players and their positions in alphabetical order. Some, but definitely not all, of the people are in the front of the book, and they are in a seemingly random order. Maybe in the order that they are mentioned in the report? But there are a LOT of people in the book, and it is hard to keep them all straight, even after watching a good chunk of the hearings.
Lots of legal cases are going to arise from this. Some readers felt it was almost a blueprint to DOJ and other jurisdictions as to who they should go after and try to prosecute.
Parts of this were actually funny, believe it or not. Little digs were inserted into the report, such as some of the comments people in the administration made about Trump behind the scenes or the fact that money raised by "Save America" went to Melania's designer for "strategy consulting."
Will the electorate's mind be changed by this report? I doubt it. People believe what they want to believe. But I do think it will have consequences for many of the people mentioned. I am also glad that this document was created for future generations to study.
I wish there had been a list of all the players and their positions in alphabetical order. Some, but definitely not all, of the people are in the front of the book, and they are in a seemingly random order. Maybe in the order that they are mentioned in the report? But there are a LOT of people in the book, and it is hard to keep them all straight, even after watching a good chunk of the hearings.
stevia333k's review against another edition
The good news is I listened to it at triple speed & they were concerned about accessiblity. I probably will consider coming back to this book, but I would really need a table of contents so I could read it like an encyclopedia. To say the least, there's been a trend lately of writing things like "hollywood action movies" (not sure from what era), in order to keep things accessible to the broad population, which, I'm not sure how that got executed here, but I'd rather read this than some other works that say they're using a similar strategy.
Now I'm going to leave off my notes about why the first 45 minutes bothered me, combined with some things I heard from other reviews & by doing a ctrl+f on the PDF version of this report.
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So the audience for this report is the people who didn't pay attention to the fascism the past 4 years. It's the people who are still racist, who use slavery dogwhistles like "roman fidelity". It's the people who focus on procedure & WASP centricity so much that they ignore 1492 as a precedent.
There were other dogwhistles in here, and the ignoring of race by this report is going to be super annoying especially since I have 13+ years experiences of going to schools where there was a risk of mass shootings, and the staffers have that experience too. However, the heads apparently have only since January 6, 2021, even though there was a precedent of Henry Clay A&B a fellow peer in an attempted murder on the congressional floor in the 1840's. i have 11 years more experience than them. The younger survivors of the preK-12 system have more experience than me. People who've been in the ghettos have more experience than me. But even I have more experience than the people doing this report.
There were some other dogwhistles in here too, but their talk about fatigue is really shortsighted because it's the material conditions not the words. We knew this shit for years, and they did nothing to take him out.
Now I'm going to leave off my notes about why the first 45 minutes bothered me, combined with some things I heard from other reviews & by doing a ctrl+f on the PDF version of this report.
---
So the audience for this report is the people who didn't pay attention to the fascism the past 4 years. It's the people who are still racist, who use slavery dogwhistles like "roman fidelity". It's the people who focus on procedure & WASP centricity so much that they ignore 1492 as a precedent.
There were other dogwhistles in here, and the ignoring of race by this report is going to be super annoying especially since I have 13+ years experiences of going to schools where there was a risk of mass shootings, and the staffers have that experience too. However, the heads apparently have only since January 6, 2021, even though there was a precedent of Henry Clay A&B a fellow peer in an attempted murder on the congressional floor in the 1840's. i have 11 years more experience than them. The younger survivors of the preK-12 system have more experience than me. People who've been in the ghettos have more experience than me. But even I have more experience than the people doing this report.
There were some other dogwhistles in here too, but their talk about fatigue is really shortsighted because it's the material conditions not the words. We knew this shit for years, and they did nothing to take him out.