The attack on democracy by insurrectionists last week was planned on social media platform Parler, which is was the Facebook for Criminals before Amazon yanked it off its servers for violating community standards.  Apparently, Amazon takes a dim view of threatening mass murder and overthrow of governments, and now that Parler is offline, extremists are being forced back into the dark web, the cozy home for racists and child pornographers.

All that is good, but here’s what’s really good…before Parler was taken offline, hackers (who the press calls researchers) scraped personal data on approximately 12 million users, a lot of whom are white supremacists, anti-government types, Trumpists, and armed insurgents.  What’s REALLY good?  After promising anonymity and more “freedom”, Parler actually was more intrusive than even Facebook.  Like Facebook, Parler followed people around, but even required users to upload their DRIVER’S LICENSE to become a “verified person”.  Also all videos posted to the site captured actual GPS coordinates for the video.  The result?  Thousands of the rioters who carried their phones (all of them) incriminated themselves as Parler captured who they were, where they were, and what they did.  Apparently the hackers captured up to 70 terabytes (that’s a lot) of data including said driver’s licenses, geolocations, deleted messages, and something like 1.1 million videos that included GPS locations.

The FBI has a LOT of doors to knock on now, and that’s a good thing.

Today was the second time that the US Capitol was assaulted in US history.  The last time was 1812.  Trump, along with his enablers, including Giuliani, Flynn, Gohmert, Hawley, and especially Cruz are DIRECTLY responsible for the violence today.  All of the major social media platforms froze Trump’s accounts today for “repeated and severe violations” of their Civic Integrity policies.  This action, which is way too little, way too late is at least something, but it is NOT enough.  The time is now long past for removal of Trump from office with the 25th Amendment.

There are 14 days now until the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  We simply can’t trust Trump to preserve our republic for those 14 days, and it’s now time for Pence to lead the cabinet in a vote to immediately remove him from office before he does something REALLY stupid like starting a war or inciting more insurrection.  Do it now.  I mean NOW.

Then, the federal government should pursue, and arrest and charge, every single individual who trespassed into OUR Capitol building and defiled both chambers or our legislative branch.  This nonsense has to stop, and I mean NOW.