TWGB: Meetings of the MAGA Minds

 

It's been a weird Trump World kind of day for a day when a scheduled 1/6 Committee Hearing had been postponed, but we nonetheless got very good 1/6 information. In my heart of hearts, I feel like the postponement isn't just some technicality thing, but probably is (fingers crossed) something more interesting, but I will take what I can get. 

I think the penny being dropped on Rep. Loudermilk's 1/5 Capitol tour is pretty interesting because of all the different stories he had about it. Does someone tell several different stories and file an ethics complaint against people trying to tell the truth on them just to get showed up like this, ever? Someone needs to be Whey Quieter, am I right? Ok. That sucked. I am having one of those days. And I do not believe that some totally innocent people are just super-excited about sconces. I remember a lot of people had stories post 9/11 about law enforcement getting freaked out about people taking photos at out of the way places around national landmarks. In the criminal vernacular, these folks are casing the joint--

(Although they didn't apparently take note of security cameras?) 

Now, interestingly, this idea that people expecting to go "wild" on 1/6 would infiltrate and occupy government buildings was backed up with a document, "1776 Returns", that was filed as a part of a Proud Boys' sedition case. Here is the meat of it:

The nine-page document, filed in federal court Wednesday, lays out a plan to fill buildings “with patriots and communicate our demands." Its stated goals include maintaining control "over a select few, but crucial buildings in the DC area for a set period of time" and getting as "many people as possible inside these buildings." 

 “These are OUR building, they are just renting space,” the document reads. “We must show our politicians We the People are in charge.”

Loudermilk's tour group was casing the area for the benefit of people like this, who wantedto do domestic terror to accomplish deeply misguided (because Trump lied to them about the election) goals. And the 1/6 Committee says there were other tour groups, and since at least one member Tweeted "This is 1776" I would be very interested to know more. 

As it was, we had people like this guy and his son and their Confederate flag showing up where they had no business being. 

That image will never fail to rouse something in me--maybe about how the past isn't even the past--but maybe about how we need to put the ghosts of the past all the way down if we want to move forward. 

Does it seem, after all this, gratuitous that we learn that the committee has emails showing that Ginni Thomas and her husband's former clerk, John Eastman, corresponded? Or should we have already fully expected as much? I would think that additionally raises the likelihood that the current Supreme Court Justice should try and make himself a former Supreme Court justice, because his foreknowledge of his wife's interference in the lawful transition of power seems awfully likely. If he wouldn't do that for the benefit of the dignity of the court, at least he could consider it for his own historical legacy? 

What I am seeing here is a meeting of the MAGA minds--people so far gone that the law was no longer a barrier to trying to continue Trump's reign of error because they felt they were at active warfare with the existing government for simply--not substituting actual reality with their own, warped version. 

It's like Pete Navarro's perverse idea that people who disagreed with him were part of the "deep state"--a charming (not!) idea that people who maintained the rule of law and acted as guardrails against the mayhem of abuse of power were just being...meanies. Their insistence on the law applying to all was the real way Nazi Germany got started! (Extreme and painful eyeroll.) 

And yet--there is a paradox to what should look like the obvious story that the 1/6 shitfit was ugly and out of pocket. When Ryan Kelley got picked up for his involvement in the 1.6 insurrection attempt, my first thought was, ok, next do Doug Mastriano. (His Reichstag theory is amusing because I think something similar--except the GOP wanted to blame antifa to take over the way the Fascists blamed Commies--and I think I have the right of that one, TBH.)  But I am not so sure anymore, because the way butthurt Republicans deal with adversity is apparently to circle the wagons. (I don't want to belong to a party that acts like a cult, but when Democrats are in a little trouble why aren't we more like this, right?) 

I understand why Merrick Garland is staying quiet--I do. But the answer isn't to not prosecute these SOBS anyway. You only just have to get enough of them to make them know the law is the law.