The First Longest Day

Some people will look at the above video and assume that the Ketamine Cowboy was just feeling very patriotic regarding the installation of his preferred candidate in his new-found home. I am not one of those people. Trump gave a very specific sign regarding what he was all about with the seating of his guests in the Capitol Rotunda--where just four years and a two weeks ago his thugs invaded and committed acts of vandalism and violence--he seated his billionaires in the front row. His Krupp, his Farben, his Siemens, his...

Frick. Do you see where I am going with this? 

The day of service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. was a day of disservice to the fight for equality.  On the day we mourn the loss of the formidable Cecile Richards, the reproductiverights.gov website has gone down, because women I guess don't have those anymore. We are being saved from "gender ideology" (never hurt me one day in my life) only to be left without choices for our own bodies. 

Never Getting Over It

 

At first, I was just not going to get over 1/6/2021, but now that I think of it, I'm not getting over how in only four years, anyone convinced themselves that the disinformation-fueled violence was not just "not a Trump problem", but for some people it was even "good, actually...", so much so that if Trump pardons 1/6 rioters, some will shrug as if Trump having that power makes it right, and insurrectionist boobs like Marjorie Taylor Greene can even suggest a holiday for that event. 

Something very bad got uncorked that day, and we aren't even down to the dregs of it, I'm afraid. 

TWGB: Burning of Babylon

 

"FIGHT fight fight!" - Rod of Iron ministry chants as they burn the 'Babylon Fire' at the Freedom Festival in Pennsylvania pic.twitter.com/VdGWx4AmUw

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) October 13, 2024

The whore of Babylon. You see, I take this personally. The Rod of Iron Ministries is a cult that descends from Reverend Moon, and loves guns, and I guess loves Trump? But where you see "Whore of Babylon" here--see also "Jezebel Spirit" elsewhere--like in the church of Lance Wallnau where weasel-human hybrid JD Vance briefly rallied. Where people spoke from the pulpit to proclaim Kamala Harris was using witchcraft to appear to be a competent leader. 

What if, though, female humans had the same entire mental capacity for leadership? Like Deborah and Judith? They could be intelligent and accomplished. They were better than the men around them. You say "any prophet" and I say Rahab. 

And the walls came tumbling down--very selectively. So much for your "Jericho marches". 

I have spoken of how I think "Fight Fight Fight" is just a desire to see carnage acted out by a deranged mind. But many people following Trump seem to be self-deranging. And are looking at him as a kind of Messiah figure. The casino bankrupt pussy-grabbing guy. Like his redemption redeems something else. 

Playing Footsie with Fascism

 

Trump posts a new ad foreshadowing a second Trump term that says he will create a “UNIFIED REICH,” echoing Nazi Germany pic.twitter.com/z4ZmMSWuRH

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 21, 2024

So, it feels like it's just Monday, right?  Trump posts a video to Truth Social proposing that his second term will be a "UNIFIED REICH"--look, I've been keeping track (here's a sampler from just one particular year) of the giggling "vice-signaling" that Republicans do--effectively winking "We're just playing at being Nazis, you're so silly" when the punchline is: "Oh hell yeah, we are doing totally Nazi stuff given the chance."  Rounding up and deporting people in quantities. Monitoring pregnant people for signs they have taken steps to end their pregnancies. Banning and burning books Culture war. 

With Trump, it's attention-seeking, and not. It's a show of what he can get away with. It's the sort of thing he does --just like his Goon army in front of the NY courthouse that undermines the rule of law--and you never know who might show up:

Stand Back, Stand By? (UPDATED)

 

Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced today to 17 years in federal prison — one of the longest January 6th sentences.

Prosecutors said he “served as an instigator and leader” during the 1/6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. pic.twitter.com/Xx1oKHWYuH

— The Recount (@therecount) August 31, 2023

Fuck around, find out.

 UPDATED: So, Joe Biggs broke down and cried a bit at his sentencing hearing because his kids wouldn't have him around. Wild if he didn't know that could happen before he allegedly was "seduced by the crowd." but we know it wasn't the crowd he was seduced by, right? Dominic Pezzola and Ethan Nordean--same story, right? Sentenced (to less than what DOJ wanted) with tearful family in attendance. Where are they going to be, as fathers, husbands, sons of elderly parents?

Here's what Pezzola's wife had to say:

Pezzola's wife, Lisa Magee, said that her daughters "have become victims and harassment, bullying at school." His daughter said, "Take a look at my father, and then take a look at me. I am everything good … I'm a college student, a scientist… I don't do drugs, I don't drink, and he contributed to that." 

Magee also said that she's been "financially destroyed by this, adding that "it's a struggle for me to find out how I am going to feed them. I have had to rely on the generosity of strangers." 

That's what his actions did to their family.

John Eastman and the Republican Fantasy

 

I wanted to expand a little bit on the admission of John Eastman that he did want an insurrection, actually.  His belief that the 2020 election was stolen is uninteresting to me, because I think it means nothing more than Eastman feels that there are some people whose right to vote he can't respect because they are doing it wrong. Once you let the franchise get beyond the possession of white, landed males, surely mistakes will be made. He voices desperation that the country will survive a Democrat in office. 

Well, why not? That's the Flight 93 election theory, isn't it? And John Eastman is a Claremont man. 

It's the idea that the Declaration of Independence is what gives the Trump Administration sanction to encourage an insurrection (or to be more precise, an autogolpe) that startles me. Of course, the Declaration is a fine historic document important to the revolutionary history of the United States. And he's citing it's provisions to...

Deny the right of some of the citizenry to representation because he has bad vibes about it? Let Donald Trump play the part of King George III and put down what Eastman and others assumed would be the actual "insurrection" for which the Insurrection Act would need to be called. (Jeffrey Clark is assumed to be co-conspirator 4 in the Trump indictment, who suggested that the Insurrection Act would be needed to put down the rioters in the places whose votes were denied. You know, like Detroit. Atlanta. Philadelphia. Places with certain demographics. Not dissimilar to the demographics of Washington D.C., where Trump really would prefer not to be tried for his attempt to deny some people their vote being counted.)

But that's what Claremont war-gamed. And maybe that's why some conservatives still want to think antifa or the Deep State was responsible for 1/6. The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, now found guilty of conspiracy and sedition, sure thought the Insurrection Act was about to get called on--not them, but the leftists who didn't have any reason to be there. 

TWGB: Just the Mob, Russia, Echoes of 2016 and 1776

 

Depicted above is Donald Trump, former president, with Skinny Joey Merlino, formerly, to the best of my knowledge, of the Philadelphia mafia, if that's a thing, about which I have little to say. Anyhow, Trump very recently crowed that he had information about every person who came down to Mar-A-Lago and should know who Merlino is and so I would be astonished if this was accidental. Please--he doesn't care. He didn't care about Nick Fuentes, and he doesn't care about Joey Merlino--he needs all the friends he can get. He has long depended upon the kindness of strange people. 

Why is this my lead-in into today's TrumpWorld Grab-Bag? Because this is a long and strange journey spurred by an echo of the 2016 campaign: a former head of FBI counter-intelligence in the NY office was arrested for taking money from a Russian oligarch with ties to the Trump Russia probe.  This is the outcome of an interesting story that gives us a little more about McGonigal back when this was in the grand jury stage. 

The federal scrutiny of McGonigal is especially striking given his work at the FBI. Before his retirement in 2018, McGonigal led the WikiLeaks investigation into Chelsea Manning, busted Bill Clinton's national security advisor Sandy Berger for removing classified material from a National Archives reading room, and led the search for a Chinese mole inside the CIA. In 2016, when reports surfaced that Russia had hacked the email system of the Democratic National Committee, McGonigal was serving as chief of the cybercrimes section at FBI headquarters in Washington. In that capacity, he was one of the first officials to learn that a Trump campaign official had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, sparking the investigation known as Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Later that year, FBI Director James Comey promoted McGonigal to oversee counterintelligence operations in New York. 

Pretty flipping fascinating, no? Anyway, the NY office was described back in 2016 as TrumpLand and definitely leaked info regarding Anthony Weiner's laptop to various people, prompting James Comey's announcement of the reopening of the Clinton email case, which a lot of folks are pretty sure sank the election for her. And I don't know this for a fact and don't want to impugn the NYT's reporters on this, but even though the CI investigation of Trump in 2016 was based in DC, I would not be surprised if the front page news that the FBI found no connection to Russia in 2016 was leaked from that office. Funny how the folks not looking for it weren't finding it. 

TWGB: They Aren't Joking

 

There's a funny thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that if she and Steve Bannon were at the head of the 1/6 insurrection, they would have won, and they would have been armed: she says she was joking, now. But she certainly was not.  We know this because we know her record. She was explicit about what she stood for--talking about "the price of blood" pre-election.  We know in December 2020 she was at the White House meeting with other GOP electeds. We know some 1/6 insurrectionists actually were armed.  What she seems to be saying, and pretending to walk back, is that she would want more bloodshed of Capitol police and possibly her own colleagues in congress. 

Ha ha. The conservatives are getting better at humor, and the libs don't like it, indeed. (See latest iteration thereof.)  Actually, we know what "only joking" means to fascists. (Can't you take a joke? Why are you punching yourself? I'm not the problem, you have no sense of humor. etc.)

When the NY Young Republicans, who I used to think were just twenty-somethings who looked like forty somethings and had the values of the 1950s and wanted to undo the civil rights movement, has VDARE's Brimelow and Posobiec, I start to think we've got people in their thirties and forties who look like they are traitors and have the values of would-be herrenvolk and want to undo Reconstruction. 

So, color me pretty alarmed by that. Also alarmed by Justice Kavanaugh hanging out with the Schlapps, you know, the CPAC wanna-be domestic terrorist Orban enthusiasts. Just a Supreme Court justice hanging out in the most partisan and kinda-fash-leaning crowd, and we're supposed to shrug about that? (And shouldn't RW SCOTUS justices be more on guard about their propriety since we know they are cozy as hell with activists? I mean, Clarance Thomas' wife is a whole activist, which is as cozy as things get.)  

It isn't a joke. 

TWGB: Seditious Conspiracy

 

In very interesting January 6 news, Stewart Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy regarding the violence that day.  It wasn't hard--they had Rhodes talking about civil war and 1776. His mess of people weren't just being security for Roger Stone--they were intentionally looking to disrupt the process of government and take the results of the election into their own hands.

It was an insurrection. 

Ah well. All kinds of people were there. But so many claim they thought they were doing what Trump wanted them to do.

This is because the people swarming the Capitol on 1/6 were taking all their cues from Trump's disinformation about the election fraud that wasn't and saw an opportunity for the overthrow of government. The possibility of being the top dogs in a dog-eat-dog world. 

These dogs are getting kenneled. 

Anyhow, in other news, Mark Meadows is going to have to testify in Fulton County, just like Lindsey Graham did. Stephen Miller testified before a federal 1/6 grand jury.  Tony Ornato testified before the 1/6 Committee and so did KellyAnne Conway. 

It just seems like a whole lot of TrumpWorld business is going to get aired out. And it seems like Trump never expected that aired out life. But he's very welcome to it. 

TWGB: The Damage Bad People Do

 

JUST IN: Oath Keeper Thomas Caldwell has been accused by prosecutors of keeping a “death list” that included the names of election officials on it (he calls it a benign “doodle pad.”)

In a filing tonight, Caldwell revealed the names on his pad:

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss pic.twitter.com/HhKA3nDHJ4

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 30, 2022

These regular people doing a commendable job that supports our democracy were placed on a death list. A "doodle pad" about who needs to die for just doing an extremely useful and necessary job. 

Trump's lie could have gotten them killed.

Newsflash, for the idiots who think election workers at any basic site have enough input to finagle an election loss or win: fuck you. Counting is just a cumulative effort. They have no way of knowing within the process where any count stands to know how many votes it would take to shift things another way. There just isn't any dependable way to steal an election by fucking with votes, because polls aren't votes. If they were--Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016. 

The idea that the vote could be finagled with is a conceit made up by the people who want to retcon the election. That is to say--Trump election deniers. Because, and please think about this deeply and truly, if you couldn't win on your own, and didn't know how many votes you would need to win, wouldn't the easiest way to try to win be to just throw out votes that weren't for you after the fact?  That's what the Trump scheme was. He and his friends badgered election officials in Georgia and Arizona, etc., to just not count the votes that were from the people Trump preferred not be counted. 

Now, Oath Keepers are just some variety of thugs, and let's not mistake the people who Trump's permission structure temporarily and feloniously deputized in the heat of the insurrectionist moment for being sheriffs or bailiffs who could cart away the ballots that made Trump an irrelevancy. Trump gave the worst people the best shot at doing their worst.  That's why the insurrection went down the way it did. Every soft-skulled crab felt deputized that day. That's why they did their worst. They thought they were being deputies of Team Trump.  

We are learning that not only did the Secret Service, but also Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli have missing texts from that day. Wow, and how much does it definitely look like not an accident, but an "on-purpose".  Realistically, it's hard to look at the Secret Service reset as anything but a coverup based on the timing. 

I am not even sure how to convey the badness of everything Trump touched in retrospect,  But it looks like Trump's corruption damaged whole government agencies because he put bad people in charge and they, too, acted like his deputies, not like honest people.  And dishonest people can do a lot of damage.

TWGB: The 1/6 Committee Is Getting Very Close

Just as the 1/6 Committee hearing was underway, I saw Mother Jones dropped a story regarding leaked audio from Steve Bannon from before Election Day, explaining that Trump was just going to claim he won regardless of the outcome. Because that was always the plan/

They aren't exactly ahead of the reporters, the 1/6 Committee, because a lot of what I'm hearing now, I know I knew either contemporaneously or from later investigative reporting, but now it's even more substantiated. And I don't feel in the least jaded. My word! 

Tie the latest thing about Steve Bannon's speculation that denying the election results and claiming they were always rigged via Mother Jones (which he was always going to do, c'mon, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to see that) with the revelation that Trump was calling Bannon pre-1/6, and this was exactly where his podcast's claim that all hell was going to break loose came from. That's a sign that Trump was directing his flying monkeys in the right- wing media system to send troops where he wanted them. (The 1/6 Committee video of this was effective.) 

This has echoes of Julian Assange's suggestion in 2016 to Don Jr. that it might be more interesting if his father lost, because he would then be able to create fuckery by claiming the system was rigged. It also serves to remind us that "Stop the Steal" was created by Roger Stone in 2016 for just that kind of fuckery. What we have is a big picture coming into focus.

Standing Back and Standing By Until They Weren't

 

Four leaders of the Proud Boys, including Enrique Tarrio, have now been charged with seditious conspiracy over the 1/6 insurrection, joining the Oath Keepers who had previously been charged. It certainly appears that at some point there was a "meeting of the minds":

In recent weeks, prosecutors have introduced as evidence in the latest case a video of a meeting in an underground parking garage near the Capitol among Tarrio, Rhodes and Kellye Sorelle, an attorney who has worked with the Oath Keepers, on the eve of the rioting. Leaders of two right-wing groups, Joshua Macias of Vets for Trump, a scheduled speaker the following day, and Bianca Gracia, head of Latinos for Trump and a Jan. 6 event organizer with White House ties, were also at the meeting. 

Snippets of audio released do not capture what the group discussed. Tarrio has said he was only interested in connecting with Sorelle because she was a “good attorney” after he was released from jail and ordered to leave Washington pending trial for a separate incident, the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a church in the District in late 2020 after a different pro-Trump rally. Tarrio pleaded guilty in the banner-burning case and completed a four-month jail term earlier this year. 

Meanwhile, multiple Oath Keepers members provided security for Trump confidant Roger Stone on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, court records show, while at previous pro-Trump rallies he surrounded himself with Proud Boys, including Tarrio, who has served as an aide to Stone. 

In the Oath Keepers case, a defendant this spring made public the transcript of a Nov. 9, 2020, videoconference call of the Oath Keepers, in which Rhodes has Sorelle debrief members on “multiple pods working” to challenge Biden’s election victory. Sorelle said those in the pods included the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, QAnon supporters and the legal team of Rudy Giuliani.

I very helpfully put that last paragraph in bold for you--this wasn't spur of the minute, and people in the Trump campaign were aware. But this was telegraphed earlier, wasn't it? I mean, during the debate back in September 2020, Trump darkly hinted that there was going to be a use for them in the future.  You know, in the same way he hinted that he wouldn't accept the results of any election he didn't win. 

He was never going to accept a loss and potentially violent options were on the table--including sending armed people to gather the voting machines. You know, because just like people, if you don't get the numbers you want from the machines, try to shake 'em down harder. 

This was a thugocracy, and the people still covering up for it and trying to distract from what had taken place are scoundrels. 

TWGB: Are We New to This?

 

Trump "ReTruthed" a comment regarding civil war on his lil' Mastodon knock-off, and yes, it is pretty serious that he's endorsing the idea after an attempted coup and on the same weekend he's shared a CPAC event with a notorious racist (I mean, among other notorious racists, c'mon....) but to be quite honest--there have been echoes of civil war with Trump for a very long time. This is definitely not the first time, and it hasn't even been subtle. 

"Civil War" was even a branded clothing item worn at the 1/6 insurrection. This isn't new, and long past disturbing. 

This is why I don't doubt the story that Trump suggested that MI elections official Jocelyn Benson be tried for treason for not overturning the results in that state. It is partially a joke to call Trump the "MAGA king", but in his mind, this person who likes to talk about shooting people in the legs--is it too far out to think he might declare "Off with her head!" like some demented monarch? 

It also isn't so far out to think he directed State Department officials to meet with activists pushing, let's be entirely clear, fraudulent election fraud narratives. How in the hell is that State Department business? you might ask, if you didn't already know Trump's attitude was "L'etat c'est moi." 

TWGB: Fraud and Sedition

 

Photograph of *Roger Stone* on *JANUARY 6th* with Joshua James, who just pled to SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY and obstructing an official proceeding and is facing 7-9 years in prison as part of a full cooperation agreement.

This is going to get quite interesting. pic.twitter.com/5LpeHDLTVY

— Spiro Agnew’s Ghost 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦 (@SpiroAgnewGhost) March 3, 2022

That's right: a member of the Oath Keepers just copped to seditious conspiracy, and allowed that the intent of the riot that day was to obstruct the official proceedings of Congress in certifying the 2020 election. The information about the Oath Keepers' part in this conspiracy suggests a lot of planned armed violence.  

But in addition to that bit of news, the January 6th committee has determined that John Eastman hasn't any reason to claim attorney/client privilege because he conspired with Trump to defraud the US people by fabricating a fraud to steal an election. Trump was advised he lost, Eastman also understood what the vote meant, but maybe there was a legal strategy to overcome the facts? 

I don't hate lawyers, but this sort of shit is why lawyers get a bad rap, you know. Trying to steal whole elections, Circumventing democracy. Basically undermining the entire jist of our American experiment because some rich dude said it was okay to get funky with your bad theoretical self and imagine facts weren't so. 

The election-theft lie was always specious and kind of stupid: Italian satellites, German servers, Chinese thermostats and Venezuelan voting machines is just conspiracy theory Mad-Libs: references to odd, random fictional data points to have conspiracy theorists play connect-the dots with shit that isn't even part of the same puzzle book, let alone the same page, as the problem of why Trump didn't win. 

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.