TWGB: One Insurrection, Many Fronts

 

Forgive me for returning to Senator Cruz, groveller, for a minute, because he revealed a dynamic that is both faintly hilarious and deeply disturbing in that he knows that the FBI didn't fucking instigate the melee on 1/6, and he was one of the fuckfaces who gave a speech to rile up the crowd on 1/6 and also had been spewing nonsense about wanting to argue extremely dodgy Texas AG Ken Paxton's lawsuit against the states who voted the wrong way. One of the reasons he gave credence to the whole Epps thing is because he would love something else to be at fault other than literally everything he aided and abetted. And I had thought at the time that Cruz, like Josh Hawley and others, was simply playing a very cynically game and performing stupid tricks for the camera--but these tricks were at least treason-adjacent. But maybe he was an actual believer,

I mean, the insurrectionists thought he was. "What a tangled web we weave...." as the Bard might have put it. 

But the recent arrest of Oath Keepers' founder Stewart Rhodes and 10 others for seditious conspiracy changes things a bit because it looks there was an organized effort to take the Capitol and hold it and bring in more firepower in order to enact more violence for a specific end. (Getting the election decided for Trump, obvs.)  Now, hacks like Byron York or Brit Hume might be dismissive of the "attempted" insurrection in rather the way they scoffed at Trump's attempted extortion of the president of Ukraine, but facts are stubborn things, and when there is violence attached to them, they become harder to ignore. So obviously, if Rhodes and the Oath Keepers were planning before 1/6, they weren't riled up in the few days before-but were...waiting for this and dead certain Trump called them up for this--so says their lawyer!   And their readiness was exploited by cynical political machinations. 

How cynical?  I noted back in December 2020 that Trump supporters were already fomenting violence in contested states and that false electors were trying to put forward their own pro-Trump slates. I thought that was a kind of weird futile stunt then, but obviously unhealthy. But in the paradigm of the Trump Eastman memo and all that, these alternate slates existed in case Pence went ahead and rejected the confirmed states Trump wanted him to. Seven states put in alternate slates of electoral votes for Trump. The likelihood of them being accepted was remote and the process of submitting them was fraudulent, but it also looks coordinated because it wasn't just all these folks in these states having the same bright idea, right? No! That looks like a group effort. I'd love to know is Meadows has a story about that. 

And the folks in Arizona don't want to talk about that, thanks. And Michigan's AG already has a criminal referral for her states' fake electors, and maybe Josh Shapiro should do the same thing here in PA. This was a multistate fraud.  They submitted inauthentic documents purporting to be legitimate in the hopes of subverting a legitimate election. To my mind, ignorance that Trump's claims of "rigging" were false, regardless of their sincere belief in the peerless leader, absent any actual evidence of voter fraud, undermines any claims to their innocence in submitting false docs. What they wanted to be true doesn't matter--what is true, does. 

Anyway, there were militias like Oath Keepers (definitely "security"--just like the Hell's Angels at Altamont) and Proud Boys (standing back until they were standing by, then standing in the gap) and whatever else, there were the false electors--all organized, and somehow supporting the Eastman, etc. model. 

And on another front, we have Tucker Carlson giving aid and comfort to the guy who was going to ferry in the big guns in the second wave of violence. His son works for Rep. Jim Banks. Who seems to think the problem is why is Congress hitting itself regarding 1/6. He's a suspect, not a fig leaf. To my mind, if you're aiding and abetting alibis for the culpable, you are part of the cover-up and that's also part of the crime. 

This insurrection is still ongoing, just as the investigation is. But we have an awful lot of evidence that none of this was right. It was a fraud. There was no voter fraud--Trump and friends made up an election fraud narrative and tried to steal 2020--they just failed. And unless Pence does something more noble than this fucking oped. I hold him accountable even if he stopped it. Because he knows about those forged electors and he knew about the chaos they were planning. He stopped them this time, but he isn't doing shit to make them not try again.

I'm thinking of Edmund Burke's quote, you know, the only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. Where even are the good? And could they even try to find something better than nothing to do?