Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

In my day, never was longer.

When I was faster i was always behind.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Repub Venality Open Thread: Rolling Up the Insurrectionists

Repub Venality Open Thread: Rolling Up the Insurrectionists

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Claims, of course, is a word that means nothing, on its own. But the Oaf-Keepers’ loudest supporters have been put on notice: There’s a new team in the Oval Office, now…

… Watkins is central to one of the most aggressive criminal conspiracy cases yet to emerge from the insurrection. The Justice Department indicted her and eight other alleged Oath Keepers on several charges related to the riot, including allegations that the group coordinated their travel to the pro-Trump event, discussed training and weapons beforehand, suited up in body armor and broke through the crowd heading into the Capitol in a military-style formation.

Watkins’ attorney argued in the new filing she isn’t alleged to have been violent in the melee, and that, though she is charged with aiding the destruction of property, didn’t participate in vandalism and encouraged others not to as well. The court filing is the first meaty defense of the high-profile defendant in court.

Prosecutors previously said Watkins had waited for direction from Trump — and believed she had received it before she joined the siege, allegedly leading several others into the Capitol building to fight against Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote.

Watkins’ defense attorney, Michelle Peterson, wrote on Saturday that her client and other supporters of Trump had believed the then-President would invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to overturn what he falsely said was the fraudulent election of Joe Biden. And Watkins and others believed “they would have a role if this were to happen,” the filing said…

Reader Interactions

103Comments

  4. 4.

    SFAW

    @NotMax:
    They won’t all be that incompetent, the next time(s). Were I the “master planner” (or whatever) wanting to bring about Gilead, I’d send a bunch of patsies in first, to see what the contemporaneous tactical response was, and then plan accordingly.

  5. 5.

    Benw

    There’s no bottom to your reality
    THERE”S NO BOTTOM TO YOUR REALITY
    Your desperation is utter and complete
    What you can’t love about yourself
    You have to steal from someone else
    And what you can’t steal
    You have to deny

    Rapid decompression
    RAPID DECOMPRESSION

  6. 6.

    Jeffro

    Wondering if the RWNJs’ full-court press on the Sunday shows was due to concern over all of these investigations ramping up? What say you, Scalise, Paul, Graham, Johnson?

    Lock. Them. Up.

  7. 7.

    Martin

    Reminder:

    Biden hasn’t put his own USAs in yet. And Garland isn’t yet confirmed. The law hasn’t remotely started to come down on these folks.

    But if what Watkins claims is accurate, I don’t see how Trump avoids a criminal conviction here.

  10. 10.

    JoyceH

    So this woman “claims” she had a VIP pass to the rally? If true, should be easy to prove, because you know if any of these Trump cultists had a VIP pass to a Trump event, they would have kept it as a souvenir.

  11. 11.

    Major Major Major Major

    Lol. Fuentes.

    open thread? Went for a nice walk on the lake in Central Park today. Haven’t been out on ice in quite a long time. That was fun.

    Got an invite to clubhouse, the cool new app all the cool kids are talking about (on clubhouse). It’s basically a collection of audio Zoom calls where people discuss various topics in a moderated fashion. Looks like it’s got some cool stuff but is also 40% cryptobros and VCs by weight.

  12. 12.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    In spite of all the good reporting about the Jan 6th insurrection, Trump still maintains great support among flat Earth Republicans.  As long as these assholes continue to live in an alternate reality, this country is seriously fucked.

     

    “We feel like Republicans don’t fight enough for us, and we all see Donald Trump fighting for us as hard as he can, every single day,” Brandon Keidl, 27, a Republican and small-business owner from Milwaukee, says in an interview after being polled. “But then you have establishment Republicans who just agree with establishment Democrats and everything, and they don’t ever push back.”

     

    Most Trump voters embrace a version of events on Jan. 6 that has been debunked by independent fact checkers and law enforcement agencies.

     

    Asked to describe what happened during the assault on the Capitol, 58% of Trump voters call it “mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.” That’s more than double the 28% who call it “a rally of Trump supporters, some of whom attacked the Capitol.” Four percent call it “an attempted coup inspired by President Trump.”

     

    “It looked horrendous, but how are we to know who was actually taking part?” asks Christine Rodriguez, 79, a Republican from Galveston, Texas, who was among those surveyed. “You could have somebody planted there from the left … pretending to be a real Trump supporter.”

     

    “There were a variety of people who were there,” says William Case, 40, an electrician and independent voter from Vacaville, California. “I mean, outside there was a bunch of Trump supporters that didn’t go in, but there’s video proof of other groups that did, antifa being one of them. There were also reporters that broke in and followed everybody.”

     

    h/t https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-defeated-impeached-trump-still-170019540.html

  13. 13.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @debbie: remember the secret service guy who got an approved break from the secret service to work on Trumpov’s birthday…he was in some supervisory position. Wonder if he was involved. Its a pity this insurrection seems to be being ignored by the media right now. Hope interest jumps when the trials get underway.

  15. 15.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Reading about the neo-Nazi infiltration of several spheres of German society, including the police and Germany’s equivalent of Britain’s MI5 and our CIA, I think it’s safe to say the West has a fascism/authoritarianism problem. The most pertinent question that comes to mind is, what do we and our allies plan to do about it? The AfD scares the shit out of me and state-level factions of the CDU have wanted to break the “Grand Coalition” between the CDU and SPD recently that is preventing the AfD from having significant power in the national government

  18. 18.

    Jeffro

    @Benw: yup, good call.

    My musical selections had been getting louder and louder for the past five years.  Working on ramping down once in a while now…  =)

  19. 19.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @Wyatt Salamanca: I hope Christine Rodriguez from Galveston is having fun in her blacked out Republican freedumb paradise of Galveston. Hope she’s enjoying boiling her water. I am sure she’ll blame it on the black guy who didn’t force Texas to follow federal recommendations after 2011 to keep the grid going.

  23. 23.

    SFAW

    @Gvg:

    I have no idea what you just said.

    I don’t know if this will help, but: Goku doesn’t either.

    [Waves to Goku]

  27. 27.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I thought AfD was on the downswing? Don’t get me wrong it’s very bad.

    Kind of. The pandemic has dented their support quite a bit. But they’re not gone

    The weird thing is that us and our allies are all undergoing a democratic backsliding at once, more broadly.

    It’s the internet and social networks, mostly. That, and right-wing media. Climate change is also helping too, what with displacement of people, most famously Syria.

    What gets me are the people who look at the US and go, “America has proven it can never be trusted again” when literally every other first world democracy is having the same problems

  29. 29.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    @Gvg: 
    AfD = Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) – Far right nationalist and populist party.
    CDU = Christian Democratic Union – Traditional centre right party in Germany (links up with the Christian Social Union from Bavaria).
    SPD = Social Democratic Party – Traditional centre left party in Germany.

  30. 30.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Omnes Omnibus: @SFAW:

    All I’m trying to say is that the global radical right is something to be concerned about. That’s it. If most of the major western countries go far-right, there’s nobody who’s going to come to our rescue like there was in WWII.

  32. 32.

    SFAW

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    There was no need to be a jerk.

    Two choices for you:

    (A) Calm the fuck down, or (B) grow the fuck up.

    It was a fucking joke, and I’m reasonably sure that Gvg took it that way

    ETA: Deleted, because it was written before I saw your follow-up. [No my initial ETA contained no profanity]

  33. 33.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @SFAW:

    Understood. Sorry.

    ETA:

    ETA: And, were I serious, or intending to “go after” you, I wouldn’t have written “waves to Goku,” which is semi-universal shorthand for “not being serious, just busting your chops good-naturedly.”

    Ohhh. Ok. Honestly didn’t know that.

  34. 34.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t think you can just point to the Internet. There are plenty of places where it isn’t happening, and of course the Web was invented long ago. I definitely think social media plays a big role but people can’t get off the hook that easily.

    This is gonna sound weird coming from me but I think it’s part of a broader crisis in neoliberal capitalism. We got rid of/reduced a lot of the old ways that people developed meaning and communities—church, co-living, multigenerational households, steady jobs—and then forgot to replace them with anything. So now everybody’s casting about on the internet and getting kooky.

  35. 35.

    Barbara

    That filing is a petition for bail pending disposition, but it’s still quite amazing. Basically, “but your honor, my client was actually part of a much larger conspiracy with much more important people!”

  36. 36.

    Jay

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    YMMV. Some Western Democracies are having trouble with Reich Wing Parties and Nazis. Others, not as much.

    eg. Canada. Given a choice between Nazis and Conservatism, the Con’s split up into multiple parties ranging from the Cons, to full on Nazi parties.

  38. 38.

    James E Powell

    @Jeffro:

    Wondering if the RWNJs’ full-court press on the Sunday shows was due to concern over all of these investigations ramping up?

    I was about to same thing, but – for once – I scrolled first.

    We know that the Republicans always coordinate their message & messaging. The question is, why did all four of the broadcast Sunday shows decide to join them in this assault on American democracy. I do not believe in coincidences.

  43. 43.

    Jay

    Q – Is CPSE going to provide payment relief to customers?A: We understand that it would be unacceptable to have customers bear the costs on their monthly bill, so we are working diligently to find ways to spread those costs to 10 years or longer to make it more affordable.— CPS Energy (@cpsenergy) February 19, 2021

  45. 45.

    Sloegin

    Canada didn’t go far enough when they declared the Proud Bois a terror org, they really should have tacked the Oathkeepers to the list.

  47. 47.

    Jay

    Alexander Dial is being charged with a felony for taking a hammer out of the hands of a Nazi who was trying to seriously harm people.This is a petition asking the DA to drop his charges. His trial has been continually delayed. https://t.co/dEPcEn2pDZ— Robert Evans (The Only Robert Evans) (@IwriteOK) February 22, 2021

  48. 48.

    Frankensteinbeck

    There is important context to keep in mind when looking at all these revelations, context that severely muddies the water in drawing conclusions:  All these people making plans are part of a culture where discussing elaborate fantasies of rebellion and violence with your friends is routine.  They go on and on about the civil war that is about to happen and what they’re going to do or what they should do.  They make threatening statements about how there’s nothing left to do now but get their gun and go shoot Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton or whoever.  They buy all kinds of equipment.  Then the bravest go to a rally and stand around in camo with their gun and feel really tough and go home.

    Throw on top of that, Trump and other important Republicans don’t have to have expected or known anything about storming the capitol to have schmoozed with these assholes.  Republicans are white supremacists.  They love these assholes.  And these assholes worshiped Trump, which is a guaranteed way to get a personal invitation to lick Trump’s shoes.

  49. 49.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @Jay: I guarantee you Texas is going to make the feds at least bail them out partially on those bills. Probably end up being in some compromise bill that the Biden folks need to pass.

  55. 55.

    Jay

    One last update (I think!): We just hit $5 million raised for Texans across the state.Thank you ALL for your collective action when people need it most.Charity can’t replace policy, but solidarity is how we’ll face climate change and build a better world. ???Thank you ?? pic.twitter.com/RzdgXllXoS— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 22, 2021

  60. 60.

    Mary G

    @Major Major Major Major: Can’t remember where, but read an article that the permissions Clubhouse requires pretty much are a total loss of any privacy you may have, and they are using the data they get to follow you around cyberspace seeing if they find more people to suggest you invite.

  65. 65.

    burnspbesq

    @Achrachno:

    Indictments are good. Convictions are better. There are no statute of limitation issues. Let the Feds take the time necessary to build bulletproof cases.

  68. 68.

    mrmoshpotato

    Throw the book at them? No!

    Use it to bash in their fucking fascist faces! Cry harder, you maced, fascist trash!

  73. 73.

    Martin

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t think the US will go there. Not saying they won’t try, but I think the Dem coalition knows whats up and is prepared to fight.

    White nationalism is a problem in a lot of places. If the US can get through this period and emerge as a stable multicultural nation, it’ll help pave the way for others.

  74. 74.

    Achrachno

    @burnspbesq:  Yeah, I agree with that but in the meanwhile I’d like to get some of them off the street and wondering about their futures. Lock ’em up — isn’t that what they always say? Law’n order.

    Sauce for the goose and all that.

    I’m not advocating cutting any corners on respect for their constitutional rights, but these are very dangerous people who have committed an assault on our republic. We must be clear that we’re not going to tolerate that sort of thing at all and they will get hit with the full weight of the law in so far as possible.

    The problem we have is that their co-conspirators in the Senate may block appointments of the Atty. Gen. and others if some of our people don’t wise up. Too closely divided!

  78. 78.

    AxelFoley

    @James E Powell:

    I was about to same thing, but – for once – I scrolled first.
    We know that the Republicans always coordinate their message & messaging. The question is, why did all four of the broadcast Sunday shows decide to join them in this assault on American democracy. I do not believe in coincidences.

    To paraphrase that noted chrysophilist Auric Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  All four?

    Enemy action.”

  79. 79.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    Watkins is transgender and a former member of the army.

    One of the first things Dump did was throw the transgender out of the service.

    Yet she still worships him.

    Shaking my head.

  82. 82.

    Shalimar

    @SFAW: Counterpoint: Except for those who had to work and couldn’t take a few days off, this was their best.  This was an Armageddon-level event they had to prevent, and they failed.  Their master planner is Roger Stone,  and this clusterfuck was the best he can do.

  84. 84.

    JWR

    Mike Lindell is back hawking his shitty Fascist pillows on TV. I guess he thought being out of the public eye for two whole weeks would make everything alright. I’ve only seen him on MeTV, and only in the wee hours, but at least no Trumpy Bear, so yay for small favors, I guess.

  85. 85.

    Salty Sam

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):  It’s the internet and social networks, mostly. That, and right-wing media…  literally every other first world democracy is having the same problems

    Internet, social networks, and right-wing media are the delivery vehicle, and accelerant, for the message.  But those messages are falling on receptive audiences, and those audiences are susceptible to being frothed up with outrage.

    The big question is “why are some people so receptive to hateful rhetoric, and willing to suspend skepticism and embrace insane conspiracies?”  It seems clear to me that the human population of Planet Earth stands on the precipice of a fundamental change in how we conduct our affairs, and the unspoken directive is CHANGE OR DIE!  There are enough people for whom change=death, and will fight it with every ounce of strength they have.

    T’is sad, but that’s what we’re up against.

  86. 86.

    lowtechcyclist

    @SFAW: ​
     

    Were I the “master planner” (or whatever) wanting to bring about Gilead, I’d send a bunch of patsies in first, to see what the contemporaneous tactical response was, and then plan accordingly.

    Reminds me of my ‘theory’ about Trump.

    Now despite being a born-again Christian and all that, I don’t believe in the Antichrist, the Tribulation, the Rapture, or any of that crap. Don’t even believe in a literal Satan.

    BUT if all that stuff were a thing, if I were Satan, I wouldn’t lead off with the Antichrist. I’d start with someone like Trump to test the waters, see if the time was right. And if I were Satan right now, I’d be saying, yeah, that worked out pretty well, time to finalize plans to send in the real deal.

  87. 87.

    Amir Khalid

    @Salty Sam: ​

    “why are some people so receptive to hateful rhetoric, and willing to suspend skepticism and embrace insane conspiracies?”

    My guess is they’re already full of hate, for whatever reason, and they’ve been looking for someone who can offer them a target and a ready-made rationale for their hate.

  89. 89.

    Ned F

    Hiring the Oof Keepers for security makes as much sense as when The Rolling Stones thought it was a good idea to enlist the Hells Angels at Altamonte speedway.

  90. 90.

    SFAW

    @lowtechcyclist:

    I’d start with someone like Trump to test the waters, …

    … then try “for real” with Greg Stillson/Tom Cotton. [OK, a better-looking, more charismatic version of Tom Cotton.]

  93. 93.

    J R in WV

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): ​
     

    Reading about the neo-Nazi infiltration of several spheres of German society, including the police and Germany’s equivalent of Britain’s MI5 and our CIA, I think it’s safe to say the West has a fascism/authoritarianism problem. The most pertinent question that comes to mind is, what do we and our allies plan to do about it? The AfD scares the shit out of me and state-level factions of the CDU have wanted to break the “Grand Coalition” between the CDU and SPD recently that is preventing the AfD from having significant power in the national government

    WTF AYTA here? [what the fuck are you talking about] This makes no sense writing about undefined 3LAs!!!
    CDU? SPD? AfD? WTF? pointless blather without defining the terms.

    STD English requires full expression of acronyms on first use, followed by the acronym you intend to use. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might not be required, it’s pretty common. But I read a ton of news, and don’t recall any of your three letter acronyms.

    Thanks for reading. I guess.

  94. 94.

    J R in WV

    @Major Major Major Major:

    The weird thing is that us and our allies are all undergoing a democratic backsliding at once, more broadly.

    Not a coincidence, we’re all losing the same undeclared war with Russia, destroying our culture with misinformation. Not a surprise at this point, either.

  95. 95.

    Geminid

    @J R in WV: Yes, it’s not so hard to type out full names or words. And at least on my phone, after a couple letters the prompts below my text usually suggest a whole word I can hit.     But some times when I read this blog I get SAD (Severe Acronym  Dysphoria).

  96. 96.

    Chris Johnson

    @Chetan Murthy: This. My gut level response (remembering that thinking from the gut is a Steven Colbert joke) is that Russia has worked REALLY HARD to amp up all the right wing authoritarianism, and make it friendly to them, in attempts to tear the West apart with terrorism.

    And it’s been more successful than they’d ever imagined: they got Brexit and Trump out of their efforts, which is really mind-boggling. They’re also behind Q, and the whole operation is about using social media to direct people without any sort of two-way interaction: not traditional ‘spies’ in the least.

    I think they’ve depended on being able to do business with big tech and get their feedback in terms of Google Analytics and Facebook demographics, which is so detailed and granular it’s like they get to have spies making detailed reports on how the propaganda is going. It’s just delivered in terms of how the media campaign is going, and it’s facilitated by big social media.

    This might be why some social media (possibly Twitter, for instance) is leaning away from fascism hard enough to upset the rightwingers and techbros: some of these folks will know they are being used, and there are humans out there running these things who understand what’s happening through use of their platforms.

  97. 97.

    Steeplejack

    @David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:

    That’s good to hear. Now that Trump is (somewhat) out of the picture, Joe has jumped on the “‘stimulus’ is too big” bandwagon and trotted out his old chestnut about the the need for “small government.”

    I haven’t watched Morning Joe much lately, but a week or so ago he hosted some economist who was fretting about how the “stimulus” was too big, twice as much as the one in 2009—which I think was pretty much deemed to be too small in the aftermath! It reminds me of someone’s great Twitter joke about worrying about bringing too much water to put out the fire. It’s not a “stimulus” package; it’s a relief package.

    And small government, Joe? You can’t run a 21st-century superstate (if we even are one any more) like some bucolic arcadia of yeoman farmers and plucky townsmen. You know what that looks like? Texas.

  98. 98.

    sdhays

    @Martin: And unlike for impeachment, if he’s criminally prosecuted, he’ll actually need real lawyers, not play-actors who show up at the last minute just to go through the motions and embarrass all of the people who were going to protect him regardless.

  102. 102.

    Jinchi

    her client and other supporters of Trump had believed the then-President would invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to overturn what he falsely said was the fraudulent election of Joe Biden.

    I’m still amazed that these guys think ‘We were going to start the insurrection that would allow Trump to seize control of government’ is a defense and not a confession.

  103. 103.

    planetjanet

    @mrmoshpotato: I love that clip, mrmoshpotato!  The best quote was at the end. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing.  He relayed a story of someone else’s great impromptu line that became a Mythbusters legend.  “The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.”  It really just hit may as incredibly cool.

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