#6 year olds r agents of satan

[casstelli]

good w animals neil josten x good with kids andrew minyard do you see the vision

[pamphletstoinspire]

A LANDSCAPE WITH DRAGONS - The Battle for Your Child’s Mind - Part 2

A story written by: Michael D. O’Brien

________

Chapter II

The Shape of Reality — Seeing the True Form

Just a Fairy Story?

Shortly after our children’s exposure to dinosaurs, I began to read fairy tales aloud to them. As they listened over the years, they each heard the story on different levels. Interestingly, sometimes a five-year-old could grasp a subtle point an older sibling had missed, yet it was clear that they were all tapping into the mysterious power of Story. I rummaged through attics, library sales, and used-book stores in search of as much old literature as I could find. I even began to plunder the attics and box-rooms of my own imagination, inventing bedtime stories for them. This strained my imagination somewhat, and some of the stories were better than others, but a little goes a long way in a family. The children began to compose their own as well, and there were nights when bedtime became rather an elaborate affair. Telling “pretend” stories naturally stimulated a flow of accounts of real happenings. The children began to regard the day-to-day events of their fives as the material of their stories. Conversation grew; communication expanded. As we developed into a full-blown storytelling family, I noticed something interesting happening in our children’s play. First of all, they began to find playing more exciting. Also, they acted out the fundamental dramas of the cosmic struggle between good and evil, embellishing and revising them with startling ingenuity. I gradually came to understand the universal love among all peoples for “fairy stories”.

In his masterful essay “On Fairy Stories”,1 J. R. R. Tolkien describes the vital role played by these tales in the cultures of the world. They contain rich spiritual knowledge. The sun may be green and the fish may fly through the air, but however fantastical the imagined world, there is retained in it a faithfulness to the moral order of the actual universe. The metaphors found in the literary characters are not so much random chimeras as they are reflections of our own invisible world, the supernatural. Whether in dreams or conscious imagination, the powers of the mind (and one must see here the powers of the human spirit) are engaged in what Tolkien calls “sub-creation”. By this he means that man, reflecting his divine Creator, is endowed with gifts to incarnate invisible realities in forms that make them understandable.

For example, magic has been used traditionally in fairy stories to give a visible form to the invisible spiritual powers. But a crucial distinction must be made between the use of “good magic” and “bad magic” as they appear in fairy stories, because for us in the real world, there is no such thing as good magic, only prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and abandonment to divine providence. “Good magic” in traditional fairy stories represents these very realities, symbolizing the intervention of God in the lives of good men put to the test. It is actually a metaphor for grace and miracle, the suspension of natural law through an act of spiritual authority, culminating in a reinforced moral order.

Bad magic in traditional stories represents the evil power that the wicked use in order to grasp at what does not rightly belong to hem — whether worldly power, wealth, or even love. It is also a metaphor for the intervention of the enemies of God, the evil spirits, in the lives of wicked men. As Saint Paul says, “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

Good magic and bad magic in truthful stories correspond to true religion and false religion in our real world. True religion is the search of the soul for God in order to surrender itself to him, the search for his will in order to fulfill it, the search for truth in order to conform to it. False religion is the inverse. It makes a god out of oneself; it makes one’s own will supreme; it attempts to reshape reality to fit one’s own desires. True religion is about surrender, while false religion is about control. Most of us do not learn about the nature of reality through theology, philosophy, or higher mathematics. But all of us readily grasp the language of a parable drawn from the universal human story. The forms may be dressed in elaborate costumes and enact impossible dramas, but they enable the lover of tales to step outside of himself for a brief time to gaze upon his own disguised world. What is the value of this temporary detachment? It is an imaginative withdrawal from the tyranny of the immediate, the flood of words and sensory images that often overwhelm (and just as often limit) our understanding of the real world. A rare objectivity and insight can be imparted regarding this world’s struggle for spiritual integrity. In the land of Faerie, the reader may see his small battles writ large in the wars of titans or elves and understand for the first time his own worth. He is involved, not in a false or spurious world, but in the sub-creation of a more real world (though obviously not a literal one). I say more real because a good author clears away the rampant undergrowth of details that make up the texture of everyday life, that crowd our minds and blur our vision. He artfully selects and focuses so that we see clearly the hidden shape of reality.

Dragons in Myth, Legend, and Faerie

The term “fairy tale” is used rather loosely, for many of these stories are not about fairies as such but deal with a variety of supernatural beings and imaginative happenings. Ancient hero tales, nursery stories, riddle-songs, legends, myths — all have their place in what is really a very broad field of literature. There are countless tales from hundreds of races and language groups, many dating back thousands of years. With very few exceptions, they display a surprising uniformity in their depiction of good and evil: good is good, and evil is evil.

A rich treasure trove of such fiction grew with the passing of centuries. A pattern of symbols emerged that signified real presences in the invisible world. Beautiful winged persons represented unseen guardians and messenger spirits. At the opposite end of the spectrum, dragons (and a host of other monsters) represented the fiendishly clever spirits that sought mans destruction. These symbols were common to so many races and cultures that they were practically universal. But they were also well suited to the spiritual insights of Christian civilization. The shape of these symbols told the reader in a flash some essential information regarding the invisible realm — a realm that long predated Judeo-Christian civilization and was, even then, a spiritual battleground.

Dragons, for example, appear spontaneously in much of the literature of the ancient world, long before paleontology gave us knowledge of the dinosaurs. Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek, Roman, Aztec, and some Oriental mythologies are full of gargantuan reptiles, and their nature is almost always depicted as malicious and sly. They are frequently associated with “the gods”. In the Egyptian religion, Apophis was the great serpent of the realm of darkness, vanquished by the sun god Ra. In Chaldea the goddess Tiamat, symbol of primeval chaos, took the form of a dragon. A close relation exists especially between dragon myths and the mother goddess cults, which explains in part the persistence of human sacrifice in such religions. The dragon god devours human blood and is placated, which is a diabolical reverse image of Christ’s sacrifice.

The symbol is not perfectly universal: In some Asian cultures dragons are considered good luck, or at worst a mixture of good and evil. Even Greek and Roman mythology, though it bequeathed ample warnings about the terrifying brood of Medusa, the Gorgons, Hydra, Chimaera, and so forth, did at times regard the dragon serpent as a clever dweller of the inner earth, a knower of secrets, an oracle. This ambiguity is due to the blurred distinctions between good and evil in dualistic Eastern religions and in those early Western cultures influenced to a degree by the East. But in Western civilization, founded on the clearer vision of Judaism and flowering in the fuller revelation of the New Testament, the symbol of the dragon sharpened into focus, assuming its definitive identity. Thus, in the literature of the West dragons Have been regarded as powerful agents of evil, guardians of stolen treasure hoards, destroyers of the good and the weak (children, maidens, small idyllic kingdoms), and, on the spiritual level, a personification of Satan prowling through the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Some modern mythologists lamely attempt to explain dragons as an inheritance from the age of dinosaurs, a kind of fossil-memory lingering on in the subconscious. But this theory does not explain why the image of the dragon is so universal when, say, that of the mastodon is not—surely, the prehistoric mammoth would just as deeply impress itself on the mind of primitive man. Neither does the theory explain why there exists alongside the mytho-poetic legends another body of writings that discuss dragon encounters in the factual language of a news report. There are, for example, some forty medieval accounts of encounters with dragons in England. Several of them describe Catholic bishops and missionaries overcoming the dragons by spiritual authority. More frequently the sword is used.

With the rise of Christendom, the slaying of dragons became the crowning achievement of heroes such as Siegmund, Beowulf, Arthur and even Lancelot, the great ideal of medieval chivalry. Beowulf was the earliest English epic poem written in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, sometime between the ninth and tenth centuries. It offers a stirring depiction of the battleground and can be read to children once they develop a taste for the heroic style. Through such tales, universal truths entered the world of literary culture and were passed down. If they functioned in some respects like ancient mythology, they were myths with a crucial difference. Actual dragons may or may not have existed, but that is not our main concern here. What is important is that the Christian “myth” of the dragon refers to a being who actually exists and who becomes very much more dangerous to us the less we believe he exists.

Perhaps the worst of the demythologizing in recent literature is the message that the basic stories of the Christian faith, especially the Paschal Mystery, are merely our variation on universal myths. It is suggested that many cultures have tales about a hero who is killed and then returns to life. G. K. Chesterton pointed out, however, that the demythologizer’s position really adds up to this: Since a truth has impressed itself deeply in the imagination of a vast number of people of varying times and cultures, therefore it simply cannot be true. The demythologizer does not consider the possibility that people of all times and places may have been informed at a deep, intuitive level of an actual event that would one day take place in history, that would be, in fact, the most important event ever to occur.

The dragon has a vested interest in having us dismiss the account of the battle as make-believe. It is not to his benefit that we imitating our Lord the King, should take up arms against him. He thinks it better that we do not consider him dangerous. Of course, the well-nourished imagination knows that dragons are not frightening because of fangs, scales, and smoke pouring from nostrils. The imagination fed on truth knows that the serpent is a symbol of hatred and deceit, of evil knowledge and power without conscience. If dragons do exist, it is not in the form of green steam engines or painted Chinese masks or overgrown lizards. The dragon that takes no form is the worst kind, and I would rather it not prowl around the neighborhood I call home. Most of all I do not want it infesting my children’s minds. I do not want them befriending it, either, nor do I want it calming their instinctive good fears and perhaps in the process taking possession of their very selves.

At this point I may sound somewhat contradictory. It seems that I do not want dragons in my children’s minds, I say, and yet at the same time I want them to read plenty of stories in which there are dragons that act like dragons and meet a dragon’s end. In fact there is no contradiction here. It is the real dragon against which I want my children armed. Their interior life has need of the tales that inform them of their danger and instruct them at deep levels about the tactics of their enemy. It is good that our children fear dragons, for in the fearing, they can learn to overcome fear with courage. Dragons cannot be tamed, and it is fatal to enter into dialogue with them. The old stories have taught our children this. There have actually been suicides brought about through the “Dungeons and Dragons” cult among adolescents. But it is very important to note that this tragedy is not the result of overheating the young imagination with too much make-believe. On the contrary, it is the result of not believing in dragons until it is too late, of thinking it “just a game”. It is the logical consequence of our ignorance of this principle: The imagination must be fed good food, or it will become the haunt of monsters.

I do not want our children to grow up believing in the actual presence of dragons. But the child who learns fairy stories knows that flying horses and fire-breathing serpents are not to be confused with the cows in our neighbor’s field. Some writers suggest that children do not grasp the meanings in symbol and allegory. This is simply untrue. They may not be able to articulate it in adult terminology, but the young, even the very young, are able to reach across the gap between the real and the sub-created world and find the truths within the mysterious events that are the cosmic drama. They have a natural sense that something mysterious, wonderful, and useful is hidden within the tale, not so much like those trick pictures in which they must find how many bunnies are hidden in the bushes. More like stepping into a marvelous new kingdom where they stand in awe before the fact that angels and dragons are there. The child then asks himself, “Why are they there? And why is it like that?”

Answering the Critics of Fairy Stories

Modern critics of the fairy story have sometimes objected that the world it presents is too simplistic. They maintain that beautiful heroes and heroines are too much aligned with good, and the physically ugly characters are used too much to represent evil. Such an argument is obviously the result of too cursory a glance at fairy tales. There are many stories in which bad characters have, a beautiful appearance. There are some in which ugly creatures have noble princes and princesses hidden inside of them. Generally, however, it is true that the exterior forms that many traditional authors give to the morally or spiritually ugly character tend to be ugly forms. Likewise, beautiful forms tend to express a beautiful interior life. This is a literary device that works well to reinforce the child’s budding awareness of interior ugliness and beauty. Children are not so colossally naive as to think nice-looking people are always nice or that unattractive-looking people are bad. My children know from infancy onward that their grandmother (bad teeth, liverspots, and a big tummy) is the most beautiful person in their life. She loves. She is kind. She listens to them. Also, in their short lives they have met more than one beautiful-looking person who is manipulative, sarcastic, and abuser, of others. They instinctively dislike such people, for their image is not consistent with their substance. Children know this is how the real world works.

We seem to have lost sight of a keystone that was firmly in place in the culture of classical civilization, one that has been crumbling in the West for a long time and at an accelerated rate since the industrial and the technological revolutions. We have lost our sense of the holiness of beauty, our intuition that at some level it reflects back to him who is perfect Beauty. If a bad character betrays that beauty by sin, this in no way negates the authenticity of beauty. By the same token, when exterior beauty is in harmony with a character’s interior beauty, then the sign value of the tale or the character is greatly enhanced. Similarly, when worship of God is done poorly, it is not necessarily invalid if the intention of the worshiper is sincere. But when it is done well, it is a greater sign of the coming glory when all things will be restored in Christ. Clearly God is better glorified by a humble hunchback mumbling badly phrased prayers in a ditch than by a proud aesthete singing hymns perfectly, solely as an art form. Yes, give us that poor, godly hunchback over the vain successful man, rich in his religiosity! But what if the beautiful heart of that hunchback were to dwell in the developed art of the aesthete? Would not a greater glory be rendered to God by the restoration to harmony of both substance and form? In literature we have a medium in which it is possible to express this and, more than that, in which it is possible to show our children that it is possible to live this.

Some modern critics have accused the traditional fairy story of being too fixated on punishment of evil characters. They maintain that children are being conditioned to want revenge, that violent instincts are being incorporated into their personalities, and that they will grow up lacking compassion. Such anxieties stem from the modern preoccupation with peace at all costs, from exaggerated fears about conflict, and from the mistaken belief that sin can be educated out of fallen human nature. Such people believe that children (especially male children) will grow up to be happy nonviolent adults if they are prevented from playing with toy weapons. This is naive. Little boys deprived of toy swords and guns will simply make their own out of anything that comes to hand (such as Lego, sticks, and even pieces of toast). I draw the line at buying plastic machine guns or bazookas for my children, but I do not consider it unhealthy to spend an hour in the woods with my son finding just the right willow sapling to bend into a bow for him. The principle at stake in this issue is not so much our laudable desires to raise compassionate children. The real question is: What approach will best raise compassionate and courageous children? Normal childhood play, riddled with joys and conflicts as it always has been, “educates” at a profound level. The secret is not to deprive a child of his sword but to make the sword with him and teach him a code of honor. In other words, chivalry. Responsibility. Character. Justice. It is a distinctly modern prejudice that holds that a boy with a sword will probably run it through his little sister. The truth of the matter is, most boys, unless they are mentally disturbed, quickly learn that it is far more heroic, exciting, and rewarding to protect a little sister with that very sword by chasing off dragons and bullies.

Unlike the sword or bow and arrow, the mystique of the gun is something of a different problem in the modern era, because it means different things to different people. The word stimulates immediate emotional response in everyone. For those who live in rural areas, where a gun is used for protecting livestock from predators or providing food for one’s family, it is like any other useful but dangerous tool. Is it reasonable to propose that we can create a safer world by eliminating references to guns? Can we clean up humanity by sanitizing literature? If so, should we also drop all references to cooking because sometimes an irate housewife will throw a rolling pin at her husband, or banish references to chain saws because sometimes people have accidents with them when cutting firewood, weed out every reference to automobiles because many people use them badly and even kill others with them? After all, a far greater number of people die violently as victims of car crashes than die at the wrong end of a gun, or a sword, or a bow and arrow. For the urbanite, however, guns conjure up images of Belfast, Bosnia, gang wars, and high school murders. But this, I believe, has more to do with the power of television than the influence of fairy stories—I suspect that terrorists and drug lords have read very few.

It has been suggested that fairy stories would be much improved if they were rewritten without references to weapons, violence, and punishment. Perhaps a few of the Grimm brothers’ tales would benefit a little from this, but to apply such “cultural cleansing” to the entire field of children’s literature is really a symptom of naïveté about human nature and about the role of literature. The point we must keep in mind is that the fairy story is a literary heritage, containing the imperfections that fallen human creators bring to their art. If we were to try to cleanse every work of traces of original sin, we would have to burn a great deal of the literature of the world, and a fair portion of the Bible as well. In the Gospels, for example, Judas does not end well. Neither does Herod, nor a host of odious characters in the Old Testament. “Where is compassion in those texts?” we might ask ourselves, “Where is mercy?” I think the answer, at least in literature, is that stories teach us, and this passing on of the truth is their chief act of mercy. Part of their task is to warn us, to posit the possibility of damnation. Furthermore, a literary figure is not in fact a suffering person but an image in the mind. And the dire image of a witch’s death may suggest in the mind of a child that witchcraft is so absolutely a violation of their souls, of their personhood, that a dire punishment is warranted. Even very young children realize that no one is going to make a witch dance herself to death in red-hot shoes (a cruel and unusual punishment if there ever was one). No, the modern witch will be left very much to do as she pleases—perhaps have an interview on a morning talk show, write a best-selling book, or gather a group of devotees about herself. At worst, she may have to suffer some insensitive comments from her critics.

The fairy story is not an incitement to violence; it is an incitement to reflection on the truth. It does not really propose violence against the sinner (the witch); it reminds us to do violence against the sin (in this case, witchcraft), but more importantly against our own sins, just as the Scriptures command us to do—“If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out!” The merit of a bad end to a bad fictional character is that it imparts a warning about the act. There are worse things than turning into a donkey or dancing to death in red-hot shoes, eternal damnation and diabolical possession being two of them.

The concept of justice is not always easy to grasp, especially in a culture that has been conditioned to exalt rights at the expense of responsibilities, that suffers from the impression that punishment is always a cruel thing. One of law’s important functions is to instruct and to deter on an objective level those whose inhumanity (and they will always be with us) impels them toward the ruthless use of other human beings. There is great need for a return to objective warning signs strong enough to prevail over the massive subjectivization of the modern mind — a mind, by the way, that has abandoned the stern messages of right and wrong that one finds in traditional fairy stories; a mind that is instead pumped full of images that glamorize the diabolical. Without dear deterrents, the imagination will soon be influenced by, and eventually infested by, many demons. If that process is not reversed, the malformed mind, pacified by neutered concepts of justice and mercy will find itself without defenses; it may even in the end come to believe that evil is good, and good is evil.

The purpose of dragons in literature, and of the fascination children have for them, is to arm the soul with an ever-developing, discernment of spirits. The purpose of the fairy tale is not to breed superstition but rather to defend the mind against superstition. As I write this I am gazing out the window at an epic being enacted on our hillside. The children are galloping over a yellow carpet of birch leaves on this sunny afternoon, running through the woods with swords they have cut from branches and silver shields they have borrowed from the tops of our trash cans. They are stalking the shadows lurking in the forests and caves. They are armed with homemade bows and arrows, willow rods bent to the breaking point by twine, and wobbly shafts outfitted with chicken feathers and armed with arrowheads they have chipped from stone. Are we training them to be aggressive little militarists? Not at all. They seem rather kind and gentle children, until roused by a real enemy — dragons, for instance.

They do seem to be developing a great deal of character, and it might be important to note here that violent people, on the whole, tend to be lacking in character. The children’s play is filled with an implicit moral consciousness of natural and supernatural law, even when, on occasion, they break that law. The point is, they know the law — and the spirit of it.

It is encouraging for us to see how their friends are drawn magnetically to the fantasy life of our young tale-bearers. A community of questers is born on an ordinary Saturday afternoon. For a brief, burning moment they know that nothing is ordinary, least of all themselves. When the moral order of the universe is reinforced, as it is for these children, man begins to know who he is, where he is, and what he is for. When the moral order of the universe is corrupted, his perception of reality itself collapses. The collapse may be slow or rapid, but the end result is a mass submersion into a swamp, in which creation is radically devalued, life becomes meaningless, and man, no longer able to know himself, is driven to desperate escape measures.

________

1 The essay can be found in J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1988).

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Participating groups

Supporters of the boogaloo movement, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, QAnon, the Groyper Army, and National-anarchism, as well as Neo-Confederates and Black Hebrew Israelites, among others, were reportedly present or wore emblematic gear or symbols during the riots. Neo-Nazi apparel was also worn by some participants during the riots, including a shirt emblazoned with references to the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camp and its motto, Arbeit macht frei (German for "work makes you free").[85] Following the event, members of the Nationalist Social Club, a neo-Nazi street gang, detailed their participation in the storming and claimed the acts were the "beginning of the start of [the] White Revolution in the United States".[86]

"Save America March"

On the morning of January 6, protesters surrounded the Washington Monument to rally. Trump, his lawyer and adviser Rudy Giuliani, and others gave speeches on the Ellipse. Giuliani addressed the crowd, repeating conspiracy theories that voting machines used in the election were "crooked" and calling for "trial by combat".[88] Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) told the crowd, "Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass."[89]Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) said, "This crowd has some fight."[90] 

Trump gave a speech from behind a glass barrier, declaring he would "never concede" the election, criticizing the media and calling for Pence to overturn the election results, something outside Pence's constitutional power.[66][91]

Trump urged his supporters to march on the Capitol, where Congress meets:

You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard today.[92]

Trump also told his supporters to "fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." He declared they would be "going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country".[35]Trump's speech, replete with misrepresentations and lies, inflamed the crowd.[93] 

Trump's sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, also spoke, naming and verbally attacking Republican congressmen and senators who were not supporting the effort to challenge the Electoral College vote, and promising to campaign against them in future primary elections.[94] In the early afternoon, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) passed by the protest on his way to the joint session of Congress, and greeted protesters with a raised fist.[95][96]

Rioting in the Capitol building

Encouraged by Trump to help him overturn the election result, a crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue after the rally and advanced on the Capitol. Alex Jones was a leader of this march.[97]

Another crowd was already gathered there. Around 1:00 p.m. EST, hundreds of Trump supporters fought with officers and pushed through barriers along the perimeter of the Capitol.[98][99] The crowd swept past barriers and officers, with some members of the mob spraying officers with chemical agents or hitting them with lead pipes.[1][100] Although many rioters simply walked to the walls of the Capitol, some resorted to ropes and makeshift ladders.[101] Just after 2:00 p.m., windows were broken through, and the mob breached the building and entered the National Statuary Hall.[1][42][102][103] As rioters began to storm the Capitol and other nearby buildings, some buildings in the complex were evacuated.[41] Outside the building, the mob put up a gallows, punctured the tires of a police vehicle, and left a note saying "PELOSI IS SATAN" on the windshield.[1]

Several rioters carried plastic handcuffs, possibly with the intention of using them to take hostages.[70][104][105] Some of the rioters carried Confederate battle flags[1][106][107][108] or Nazi emblems,[109] while others wore riot gear, including helmets and military-style vests. For the first time in U.S. history, a Confederate battle flag was flown by insurrectionists inside the U.S. Capitol building.[110]

At the time, the joint session of Congress—which had already voted to accept the nine electoral votes from Alabama and three from Alaska without objection—was split so that each chamber could separately consider an objection to accepting Arizona's electoral votes that had been raised by Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and endorsed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). Both chambers were roughly halfway through their two-hour debate on the motion.[111][112]

At 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted that Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done". Afterwards, Trump followers on far-right social media called for the vice president to be hunted down, and the mob began chanting, "Where is Pence?"[118][119] Outside, the mob chanted, "Hang Mike Pence!,"[120] which some crowds continued to chant as they stormed the Capitol;[121][122] at least three rioters were overheard by a reporter stating they wanted to find Pence and execute the vice president as a "traitor" by hanging him from a tree outside the building.[123] All buildings in the complex were subsequently locked down, with no entry or exit from the buildings allowed. Capitol staff were asked to move into offices and lock their doors and windows; those outside were advised to "seek cover".[39]

At 2:30 p.m., the Senate chamber was evacuated.[124][125] After evacuation, the mob briefly took control of the chamber, with some armed and armored men carrying flex-cuffs and some posing with raised fists on the Senate dais that Pence had left minutes earlier.[1][126] A source close to the vice president subsequently told CNN that Trump and his top aides did little to check on Pence's safety during the crisis and appeared unconcerned at the possibility that "an angry mob that he commanded to march on the Capitol might injure the vice president or his family."[127]

Improvised explosive and incendiary devices

Improvised explosive devices were found in several locations in Washington, D.C. A device suspected to be a pipe bomb was discovered adjacent to a building containing Republican National Committee (RNC) offices. A search of the nearby area found another suspected pipe bomb under a bush at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters.[7] The devices were believed to have been planted prior to the riots.[147] Both the RNC building and the DNC headquarters are a few blocks from the Capitol.[148] The RNC and DNC devices were safely detonated by bomb squads, and police later said they were "hazardous" and could have caused "great harm".[7] The FBI distributed a photo of the person who they believe planted the devices and issued a reward of up to $50,000 for information.[147] Another suspected pipe bomb was found on the grounds of the Capitol complex.[149]

A vehicle containing a semi-automatic rifle and a cooler full of eleven Molotov cocktails was also found nearby.[150][151] The driver was subsequently arrested.[152] He also had three handguns.[153]

Casualties

Fifteen police officers were hospitalized,[191] and more than 50 injured.[112] Members of the mob hit Capitol Police officers in the head with lead pipes and other weapons, some disguised as flag poles.[192] Five people died during or shortly after the event, including one police officer.[193]

Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, 42, a 15-year veteran of the force, was fatally injured by rioters. The specific cause of Sicknick's death was not initially released, though law enforcement officials told The New York Times that he had been struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.[3]

During the riot, Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt,[200] a 35-year-old unarmed rioter from San Diego, was shot and killed by Capitol Police as she attempted to climb through a shattered window in a barricaded door leading into the Speaker's Lobby, immediately adjacent to the House Chamber, where Representatives were sheltering.[201][202][203][201] The incident was recorded on several cameras.[203][202] ...  Babbitt was a follower of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, and had tweeted the previous day "the storm is here", a reference to a QAnon prediction that Trump will expose and defeat a global cabal of perceived Satan-worshipping pedophiles.[206][207][208]

Three other protesters also died. They were identified as Rosanne Boyland, 34, of Kennesaw, Georgia; Kevin Greeson, 55, from Athens, Alabama; and Benjamin Philips, 50, of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.[209][210][211] Greeson died of a heart attack while Philips died of a stroke.[212] Boyland's cause of death was disputed; one account said she was crushed to death, while another said she collapsed while standing at the side in the Capitol rotunda.[213][214][215][216]The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that there was "no indication Philips himself participated in the raid on the Capitol."[217] Phillips started the social media site Trumparoo, intended for Trump supporters.[218] Greeson's family said he was "not there to participate in violence or rioting, nor did he condone such actions." However, his social media posts included calls for people to "Load your guns and take to the streets!" and "given them [a] war."[219]

[mbovettwrites-blog]

@katefarron Thanks for tagging me, sweetheart! I’ve been meaning to get around to doing this tag for an age, and now seems like a decent enough time to catch up and join in.

-

1. Do you listen to music when you’re writing?

Yes! I have a playlist on Spotify called ‘on broken wings’ which I use as a sort of soundtrack to Blackbird to keep my spirits up when I’m writing. If I’m doing poetry for Write the World, I use ‘suspended in the universe’ instead, if only for the aesthetic.

2. Does your family/friends know that you write stories/poems/etc.?

Everyone’s aware that I write a lot; not everyone knows about my WIP. My mum, however, is highly invested in it. She is hell-bent on me creating a character who could be played by Tom Hardy in her fantasy movie adaptation, despite being reminded countless times that that’s never going to happen.

3. What was your favourite book as a child?

Everything and anything by Enid Blyton. The Famous Five, The Magic Faraway Tree, The Secret Seven, The Adventure Series… I have them all still in their box sets, tucked away on my bookshelf, waiting to be opened up and read for the thousandth time.

4. Tea or coffee?

Both. You will never find a way to make me choose between them.

5. Notebooks and pens or laptop/computer?

It depends. I keep a notebook to jot down ideas and thoughts in, but major projects like Blackbird are kept on my laptop.

6. How old were you when you started writing?

Honestly? As long as I can remember. However, about four years ago when my mental health plummeted into hell, I stopped for about two to three years. I’m quite newly back into the practice, but like with riding a bicycle, once you’ve trained yourself to be a wordsmith, you’re one for the rest of time. You never forget something you love.

7. What is the first line of a WIP you’re working on?

“Being an ex-heiress of the White Eagle crime family meant that Ingrid Neropiuma had been forced into many undesirable situations in her eighteen years of miserable existence, but even she would have to admit that this was a candidate for the top ten.” - B L A C K B I R D

8. Do you base your characters on real people subconsciously?

I think I might do so without realising it. The relationship between Ingrid and Rouge, and the characters themselves, have startling connections to @bitteredplum and I which I only noticed after I got a couple thousand words into the WIP and started having them interact for the first time. It was like an out-of-body, incredibly surreal moment in which I realised what I’d managed to do by entire accident.

9. What does writing mean to you?

Everything and anything. It’s an art - it can be whatever you need it to be in the moment. If you need advice and guidance, spill your mind onto paper and mentor yourself. If you need to vent your emotions, channel your anger into your poetry. If you need to forget yourself for a while, delve into a world entirely of your own creation. Writing is the most beautiful thing to grace the earth, because it can be whatever you want. It’s like a highly abstract Room of Requirement.

10. What is your least favourite trope to write?

You will never, ever catch me writing any form of the damsel in distress trope. Subvert it all you want, I will never enjoy writing or reading it, period.

11. Do you have any favourite authors?

·         Leigh Bardugo, author of the Grisha trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, The Language of Thorns, and Wonder Woman: Warbringer

·         Sarah J. Maas. Hear me out, because this is a problematic one. I used to love the worlds she created in Throne of Glass, but when I read the ACOTAR trilogy, I noticed some… questionable themes. Exhibit A: The love interest for the second two books is introduced in book one as the biggest, most moronic, sexist, violating pig imaginable, and his skin-crawling behaviour is excused because it’s for the MC’s own safety. Exhibit B: Erotic scenes with aforementioned dickhead love interest every other damn chapter. In a YA novel. I have now picked up on these themes throughout all of her books and she’s on the list of favourite authors not because I adore her books, but because her convoluted prose and questionable research skills are hilarious.

·         Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy = religious self-insert fanfiction of Dante being escorted around the afterlife by his senpai in a quest to find his dead girlfriend. Also, the Hell City of Dis is entertaining. And Satan is frozen up to his tits in an ice field.

·         Neil Gaiman. I’m in the middle of reading American Gods and I love every bit of it.

·         Rick Riordan. This requires no explanation whatsoever.

-

Ok darlings, here are my questions for you:

1.      How long have you been working on your WIP(s) for?

2.      What song would you assign as your protagonist’s theme tune?

3.      Do you have any favourite spots (gardens, parks, cafes, etc.) where you like to write?

4.      Poetry or Prose?

5.      Where do you draw inspiration for your writing from?

6.      Is there any popular book that you wish you had written and why?

7.      What’s your planning process when you start working on a new WIP?

8.      Do you work best in mornings, afternoons, or at night?

9.      Would you prefer to self-publish or work with an agent and publishing company and why?

10.  How do your emotions/moods affect your writing?

11.  What’s your favourite line of your WIP/one of your poems?

Tagging: @gingerly-writing, @brynprocrastinates, @ramblingrubyred, @gameranilah, @scribble-dee-vee