Our elected leaders, our democracy, and the very fabric of our nation are being threatened by the current attempted coup in Washington. MAGA protestors have invaded the Capitol Building and threatened the lives of our elected representatives. They are carrying guns, and disrupting democracy. They are terrorists, and they are not being stopped.

January 6 started as a triumphant morning for Democrats. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their races in Georgia. U.S. representatives gathered in the Capitol to count Electoral College votes. Even Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence renounced Trump’s continued attempts to take over democracy. It seemed like a transition of power was going to happen smoothly.

But President Trump’s supporters weren’t going to let that happen. Their protest started peacefully outside the Capitol, and seemed like another group of Trump supporters making their last stand.

But somehow, MAGA protestors, Proud Boys, and attendees of this so-called “Save America Rally” broke through barricades and forced their way into the Capitol Building.

Somehow, improbably, the police and security allowed some to break into the building where our government officials — the people carefully and fairly elected to represent us all — were attempting to confirm the election of the next president.

The response to these protestors, and the inaction of the police and the National Guard, is almost unimaginably hypocritical. At Black Lives Matter protests throughout the summer, we saw teeming rows of cops circling protestors, shooting them with rubber bullets and arresting them in droves, often simply for marching.

Today, after destroying government property to break their way in, protestors appear to be walking peacefully around the Capitol, walking on the Senate floor, invading Nancy Pelosi’s office, destroying property, striding over the marble floors, carrying machine guns. Members of Congress have been evacuated to secure locations.

If these had been Leftist protestors, if these had been Black and brown protestors, they would be in jail at best, or more likely shot by police.

Republicans constantly claim that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are necessary to preserve the safety of Americans and that the military requires billions to protect America. But where are these people now, as American extremists storm the Capitol?

What about when our own president goes against the prevailing logic of almost everyone else in positions of power and quite literally incites violence against the government? Where is the military, which is supposed to protect America, today? Where is the National Guard? Where is America?

Lost, certainly. Dead, possibly. It will take an act of magic or a miracle to revive us from this.

What we are witnessing is a collapse of massive proportions, an attempted coup that reveals the fragility of our democracy and the way Donald Trump has torn us all apart.

Currently, protestors are on the Senate floor. Members of Congress are cowering inside, calling their family members and assuring them they’re alright.

A woman has been carried out on a stretcher, drenched in blood.

People are calling on the president — that insecure, unstable man — but his only responses have included tweets that demand the protestors to stay peaceful and respect the cops.

Perhaps some of Trump’s supporters’ delusions that he is remotely competent or sane are finally collapsing, but it is too little too late.

Let us never forget that the President urged protestors to fight. There is no logic here except the logic of a coup, except the logic of violence, except the logic of extreme greed and insanity that has always defined Trump but that has now exploded out of the woodwork and infected the minds of thousands of Americans.

There is no logic here, just the abstract soundscape of collapse. Yet no one should be surprised. We knew that the Proud Boys were planning a boogaloo, a Civil War. The threads and the comments and the threats were all there. Time and time again, we ignored them.

We know that Trump supporters subsist on lies on media outlets. We know that they are being inundated with lies — disproven by countless lawsuits — that our election was fraudulent. We know that many of our Republican leaders sowed these seeds, continuing to support Donald Trump as he built up his firestorm of lies and insanity.

We know that there are so many factors to blame here, a buildup in tensions from the pandemic to Black Lives Matter to Democratic victories that has exploded here today. We know that Americans are suffering and afraid, all of us.

And yet never — not in the whole summer of protests, not ever in recent American history — have we seen an unobstructed invasion like this.

On the news, the scene is horrifyingly mellow. White supremacists are walking around the Capitol, guns flying, without opposition, without election, without fact to sustain them. Everyone else is absent or cowering in fear. These people are, unforgivably, not being punished; they are being allowed to walk free.

How do we even comprehend this? For now, some of us can at the very least hold fast to the fact that when Republicans criticize the “radical Left” for “violent” protests (AKA looting and damaging of empty buildings, at the most extreme), we will be able to remind them of the time when the more radical sect of their party — led by their beloved president — quite literally committed terrorism and infiltrated the Capitol and threatened our elected representatives’ lives.

If we get through this, we know that we have a Democratic Congress. We must hope that in addition to addressing the pandemic, these bodies of government somehow figure out how to stop this from happening ever again.

It’s getting dark soon. Stay safe, stay strong, Americans. Realize that this is white supremacy knowing that it is losing power and lashing out in the way it always has — with violence, intrusion, and destruction.

Realize that this is in America’s blood and we are in the process of draining it out, but it won’t go quietly.

Realize this is the spirit of American violence — colonialism and racism and all of their aftereffects — rearing its many ugly heads and, like a hydra, refusing to die, just growing back.

Realize that there are terrorists in America, wearing familiar faces — faces we have been taught to respect but also faces that are willing to corner our democratically elected representatives, faces that are allowed to do so and, as I write this, are still doing so.

We are somehow closer and further than ever before from actualizing the dream of America, a world where everyone can be equal.

We are on the edge of Rome burning. We are both a promise of the best of humanity and a collage of the very worst of it. We can only hope that the truth will prevail in the end.