Rep Kinzinger was armed on January 6

Adam Kinzinger says he 'thought about' having to use his gun at the Capitol on January 6

John L. Dorman

Mon, November 8, 2021, 7:53 PM

Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. Chip Somodevilla/Pool via AP, File

• Rep. Kinzinger said he was prepared to use his gun to defend himself at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

• "There was a moment where I was like, 'Man, there's a real sense of evil,'" he told Rolling Stone.

• Kinzinger recounted the six hours barricaded in his office as the mob of insurrectionists loomed.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger in a recent interview said that he considered using his gun during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, expressing that he was "prepared to defend" himself against his own party.

While talking with Rolling Stone, the Illinois Republican spoke of the "real sense of evil" he felt that day, and even before the insurrection occurred, he felt as though violence, fueled by then-President Donald Trump's unsubstantiated claims of a stolen election, was imminent.

"I knew there was going to be violence. I didn't necessarily know they were going to sack the Capitol, but I knew there was going to be violence. In fact, I warned [House Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy two days prior to it. And he was very dismissive of it, of course," Kinzinger told the magazine.

The congressman described how the day progressed as he tried to get a sense of what was developing on Capitol Hill.

"I asked my staff to stay home," he said. "I came in, it was kind of a normal morning. I was watching Trump's speech and it was crazy, like usual."

He added: "I remember seeing [Donald Trump] Jr. say, 'This is now Trump's party.' And I'm like, well that's creepy. And then Trump says, 'I'm going to go with you to the Capitol.' I'm like, 'Man, this is bad.'"

Kinzinger then recounted how he attended the start of the Electoral College certification in the House chamber, but then left the proceedings and spent six hours "hunkered down" in his office with his gun, where he said he was "prepared to defend" himself.

The congressman noted that at around 2:30 p.m. on January 6, a "bad feeling" took over.

"There was a moment where I was like, 'Man, there's a real sense of evil.' I can't explain it any further than that. ... I just felt a real darkness, like a thick, bad feeling. And there was about a 15-to 30-minute time frame, where, at one point, you realize they've breached the Capitol. I know if they can breach those outer lines, they can get anywhere, including my office," he told the magazine.

He added: "I had been targeted on Twitter that day and prior, like, 'Hangman's noose. We're coming for you.' And people know where my office is. So I barricaded myself in here, thinking, 'If this is as bad as it seems, they may end up at my office, breaking this crap down, and I may have to do what I can.'"

Kinzinger said that he "thought about" having to use his gun because the mob outside of his office doors was unrelenting in their quest to stop the election certification of a president, one of the hallmarks of US democracy, and he knew that they were eager to complete their doomed goal.

"If you're already at a point where you're beating down police officers, and you're willing to sack the US Capitol, which hadn't been done in hundreds of years, if you come face-to-face with Chief RINO in his office, who doesn't believe that Donald Trump won reelection, yeah, they're going to try to fight and kill me, and I'm not going to let that happen," he said.

Kinzinger is now a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, one of only two Republicans on the panel alongside GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

Read the original article on Business Insider

COVID is worse in red (or blue) states?

COVID Gets Even Redder

The gap in COVID’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point. (Getty Images)

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David Leonhardt

Mon, November 8, 2021, 1:13 PM

As 2020 wound down, there were good reasons to believe that the death toll during the pandemic’s first year might have been worse in red America. There were also good reasons to think it might have been worse in blue America.

Conservative areas tend to be older, less prosperous and more hostile to mask wearing, all of which can exacerbate the spread or severity of COVID-19. Liberal areas, for their part, are home both to more busy international airports and more Americans who suffer the health consequences of racial discrimination.

But it turned out that these differences largely offset each other in 2020 — or maybe they didn’t matter as much as some people assumed. Either way, the per capita death toll in blue America and red America was similar by the final weeks of 2020.

It was only a few percentage points higher in counties where Donald Trump had won at least 60% of the vote than in counties where Joe Biden crossed that threshold. In counties where neither candidate won 60%, the death toll was higher than in either Trump or Biden counties. There simply was not a strong partisan pattern to COVID during the first year that it was circulating in the United States.

Then the vaccines arrived.

They proved so powerful, and the partisan attitudes toward them so different, that a gap in COVID’s death toll quickly emerged.

The gap in COVID’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.

In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from COVID, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.

Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe COVID, and almost 40% of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10% of Democratic adults.

Charles Gaba, a Democratic health care analyst, has pointed out that the gap is also evident at finer gradations of political analysis: Counties where Trump received at least 70% of the vote have an even higher average COVID death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60%.

As a result, COVID deaths have been concentrated in counties outside of major metropolitan areas. Many of these are in red states, while others are in red parts of blue or purple states, like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Virginia and even California.

This situation is a tragedy, in which irrational fears about vaccine side effects have overwhelmed rational fears about a deadly virus. It stems from disinformation — promoted by right-wing media, like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the Sinclair Broadcast Group and online sources — that preys on the distrust that results from stagnant living standards.

A peak?

The future of COVID is uncertain, but I do think it’s possible that the partisan gap in COVID deaths reached its peak last month. There are two main reasons to expect the gap may soon shrink.

One, the new antiviral treatments from Pfizer and Merck seem likely to reduce COVID deaths everywhere, and especially in the places where they are most common. These treatments, along with the vaccines, may eventually turn this coronavirus into just another manageable virus.

Two, red America has probably built up more natural immunity to COVID — from prior infections — than blue America, because the hostility to vaccination and social distancing has caused the virus to spread more widely. A buildup in natural immunity may be one reason that the partisan gap in new COVID cases has shrunk recently.

Death trends tend to lag case trends by a few weeks, which suggests the gap in deaths will shrink in November.

Still, nobody knows what will happen next. Much of the recent decline in caseloads is mysterious, which means it may not last. And the immunity from vaccination appears to be much stronger than the immunity from infection, which means that conservative Americans will probably continue to suffer an outsized amount of unnecessary illness and death.

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Above is from:  https://www.yahoo.com/news/covid-gets-even-redder-191319465.html