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:

TWGB: You Can Consider All The Options

 

Recently seen unfurled at Yankee Stadium was an absolutely enormous banner reading "Trump or Death". It showed the dates "1776-2024" which sort of suggests something happened in 1776 that would definitely end in 2024. I guess the opposition of the United States to monarchy, since the weirdos brandishing this flag seem to want to install Trump in office regardless of how the rest of us feel about him.

I encourage Trump followers, of course, by all means, to consider all of their options. No one here gets out alive, etc. 

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, father of Sarah, pastor (?), tv host and promoter of cartoon pseudohistory, certainly seems to think that if Trump loses in 2024 it will be the last election decided by ballots rather than bullets. Wild, if true, right? He subscribes to the idea that Trump is being persecuted for his political beliefs, when those beliefs were that he should be president for life and the hell with what the voters said. OK. Trump's beliefs are very much a problem. The idea that violence is the answer to your candidate losing an election because he isn't popular is the actual stuff of banana republics. Your political candidate deciding he should be president for life is a problem--and yes, this is a thing Trump hinted at. 

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.

TWGB: F'ing Around During Finding Out Season

 

So, it looks like the brilliant press conference displaying the report that was supposed to present "irrefutable proof" of his Georgia win and all-around innocence has been cancelled because his lawyers told him it was a very, very bad idea. This disappoints me so much because I was hoping to bend the report over and give it a right Bishop Berkely refutation (by means of employing one's foot to the meat of the argument). It is apparently not to be. Who knew that reiterating one's fraudulent claims could pose such a hassle?

It is possible something has changed in the atmosphere of TrumpWorld. Even Trump's Truth Social posts are creating a problem for him: is he witness-tampering? Is he giving the message to others to do witness tampering--or even jury-tampering? Because jury-tampering appears to be part of what is going down. Threats against jurors and court officials are now being investigated in the wake of the most-recent indictment. 

And these sad, violent souls think they are "helping".  They also like to apply Trump's new term "rigger" in the way he meant it--a word with two hard "r's". What he always meant by the vote-rigging in 2020  2016 and since isn't lost on me, or anyone with a good sense of who he is. And his race-based theories as well as his voter-fraud theories were and are...baseless. 

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: 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. 

How To Confront the Bigots

 

John Oliver debunks the right's weirdest anti-trans conspiracy yet, that kids are using litter boxes in classrooms: “The fact that you seem to genuinely think that that’s happening is just heartbreakingly stupid” https://t.co/iPVGo1W1SK

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 17, 2022

In part, it has to be mockery. When people believe things (or say they believe things) that are entirely stupid and harmful, there isn't anything else you can do but call them out. On the spot. 

The reality of this urban myth is pretty grim--some schools do have kitty litter on-site--because in the event of an active shooter situation, the kids can't go into the hall to get to the bathroom and have to make do. The problem isn't some weird kids who think they are cats (a fake problem) but the very real problem of school shooters. Like what happened at Sandy Hook, or Uvalde. The kind of thing your Alex Jones just shrugs off and pretends is not even real. Even as the bodies of children pile up.

There are people so abjectly weird they need fake problems because they have no answer for real ones. So abjectly weird they think that armed Proud Boys outside of a library is somehow less fucked up than a drag queen reading a story in front of kids with their parents there is. 

The Litter Box, Or: WTF is Up With These Weirdos?

 

The Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota repeated last week a bizarre hoax claim which has been debunked that children are being allowed to use litter boxes in schools https://t.co/cgxDpN1Lo7

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 3, 2022

I know this is really far down on the list of story priorities, except it isn't really, not when Pizzagate morphed into Q and wankers are trying to storm libraries because gay people are reading stories while dressing in colorful costumes. 

So, when a handful of people try to tell a tale of kids using litter boxes in schools because they "identify" as an animal, wow.  These rubes are actually running for office. I'm not 100% on this, but I think the litter box thing was operant in a recent post of Matt Schlapp of CPAC when he began: 

"We go in the toilets and we believe God creates boys and girls and guns are legal and murders are rare."

In Kansas, they go in the toilets: in some weird dystopian metropolis, there are kids with bunny ears dropping their pellets in a sandbox set up in the gender neutral lavatory. 

Can real people think this is even a thing? That the sanitary concerns would not be something any reasonable institution would balk at? That parents whose children did their business outside of regular indoor plumbing would not be seeking psychiatric help?  

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.

Are You Being Martyred?

 

I have noticed a funny old thing about the Christian right in the US--even when they have been extraordinarily catered to and cosseted, they will still cry "Martyrdom!" when any resistance to their domineering world view exists. They claimed other people getting gay-married somehow violated their rights. Yeah--and that thought persisted.  And I think they feel exactly the same thing about the claim of people who are not the "right kind" of Christian or maybe not any sort of Christian at all (like, for example, Jewish people) who maintain that abortion should still be a right for people who have no religious barrier to receiving or providing that care. 

How dare you punish real Christians by not following their precepts and thus showing disrespect for their insights into the One True Religion? We've come a long way from Christians being pitched into the Coliseum to confront hungry lions, but you can't stop these whiny folks from vociferously complaining that they are being faced with the worst of martyrdoms--being ignored!

I guess I'm just being hypercritical of things like this New York Post piece where a Christian complains bitterly of being--criticized for being a bigot. She calls it a "punishment" for being a Christian when she doesn't quite seem to grasp is that claiming one is a Christian doesn't actually make you a great person, especially when your "problem" is being exposed to the reality that other people exist. Bisexual people exist in real life, so they can exist in fictional material as well--it isn't harmful. Religious minorities exist who don't need to be coerced into group Christian prayer--the Supreme Court is actually badly wrong and historically off with this decision (it's been a dumb year for the Court, because some of these characters don't belong here). 

It isn't a martyrdom for someone to acknowledge that people who are not like themselves even exist. Coexisting with people who think you are wrong about something isn't an attack on your religion. If she wants to set herself among the saints, she should be made of sterner stuff. 

With Liberty and Justice?

 

"Strong Families Make Strong Nations." "Reclaim America."

If you don't see the connection between the assault on reproductive rights and ethno-nationalism, you're not paying attention. pic.twitter.com/SUZrAfj5Nz

— Melissa Murray (@ProfMMurray) July 3, 2022

I have no doubt that the Patriot Front fools who made an appearance in Boston may very well appear here in Philadelphia--after all, they like to travel and U-Hauls and Penske trucks are affordable and they were ever so warmly welcomed here last year.  Whether they are received as a threat or have their asses kicked in, the point of these shows of "presence" of the business casual klan variety are about letting you know they exist. They might cover their faces because some employers might balk at the fascism, but by appearing, they intend to normalize this kind of display of street corner thuggery. 

This year, uterus-having people lost a basic right of bodily self-autonomy. This is one way of saying AFAB people were informed by unelected ivory tower assholes that the state can decide whether they can terminate a pregnancy or not, for whatever reason. The Supreme Court did, by way of ontological terrorism, what doctor-murderers and clinic bombers could not, without a single mind of the US populace being changed to think the less of the medical procedure. They assumed a right that a fetus has over an already-born person, an absurdity and a societal disaster. 

They did more damage, in smaller numbers, and made their presence more intrusively felt, than street thugs ever could. 

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. 

What Do You See?

 

The Alameda County Sheriff's office is investigating a group of men who disrupted a drag queen storytelling event at the San Lorenzo Library Saturday with homophobic slurs. https://t.co/46G1IDQzVB

— KPIX 5 (@KPIXtv) June 12, 2022

So consider the scene--people in costume are reading books to children in a calm and unprovocative setting, and then weird violent guys show up and say horrible things with language that has no business being said in front of children. It was not weird until these people decided to come on in and make it weird. It was the Proud Boys--you know, the ones who have nothing to be proud about, accept for being accepted by the Miami-Dade GOP and being affiliated with the insurrectionists. Maybe they haven't decided to be as entirely domestic terrorist as Patriot Front this Pride month, but they definitely decided to make an impact. 

Just as a necessary follow-on to what I posted about yesterday--this movement is aiming increasingly harsh public harassment at gender-nonconforming people in what looks to me like a way to "disappear" LGBT people. Like Gov. DeSantis (who was protested today at Chelsea Piers by Chelsea queers) whose "Don't say Gay" law tries to put people back in the closet and jeopardize the employment of LGBT teachers by focusing attention on whether they mention a basic facet of their personal lives, a lot of the legislation that pretends to "spare the children" from adult topics is really aimed at just making it publicly difficult to be any kind of queer. 

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. 

AFPAC and CPAC Are Like Peas and Carrots

 

“I do not know Nick Fuentes. I have never heard him speak, I have never seen a video. I do not know what his views are so I am not aligned with anything that is controversial,” she said.

He’s behind you, congresswoman!https://t.co/kivga9Wyti

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 26, 2022

This is very funny, because this woman is clearly clued into the whole RW vibe: a Qanon, a friend of Alex Jones. She seemed to greet Fuentes warmly when she showed up, so, it feels weird that she, a fellow traveler with Paul Gosar, who made the AFPAC to CPAC circuit last year, is in any way confused about what she was doing there. Of course, she was just there to connect with der jugend and talk about Christianity. Her brand of white supremacy is theocratic. Why shouldn't we think she's just confused about the stupid things she sometimes does and says?

She's so busy after all. Being a thirsty dominionist stunt queen takes every ounce of her Crossfit enhanced fake weight pressing body builder shagging physique. And as Stew Peters would tell you, isn't that typical of such a RINO?

I think it's great that these things happen at the same time and basically down the street from each other, anymore, because you get to see the sort of fluid exchange of ideas between the two supposedly not at all being the same thing nope not hardly groups. Like, would Papa John Schnatter tell AFPAC that with the right PR he could have weathered the cancellation of saying the n-word like dozens of times? They might have laughed at, not with him, but CPAC listened while he said that, and also that Joe Biden somehow convinced Putin to launch an invasion of Ukraine to distract from stuff happening in the US.

Wow. Russia has probably invested billions with a b on this one and committed thousands of lives to somehow distract from Joe Biden's shit. You can't get a lot of people to say something that "edgy" out loud where people can hear, but CPAC drew that exact too racist to make pizza sort of moron. Cheers, CPAC!

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.