Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Every day Vance writes another chapter in the book called “Worst VP Pick Ever”.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Second rate reporter says what?

The US Supreme Court is on the ballot in november.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

In my day, never was longer.

It’s a doggy dog world.

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

Let me file that under fuck it.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Sorting Out the Rioters Open Thread: … the Insurrectionists!

Sorting Out the Rioters Open Thread: … the Insurrectionists!

by | 140 Comments

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Like ‘… the Aristocrats!’ joke, only infinitely dumber and more awful.

Sure, the bulk of the rioters didn’t mean any harm, exactly… any more than the superspreaders at the Sturgis bike rally last summer intended to kill themselves & their loved ones. They were just, like, deeply involved in fun group events with a few thousand of their closest friends!

… They were mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck with plenty of time on their hands — retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children — and Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer. The president himself almost always spent the night in his own bed and kept few close friends. But his rallies gave the [Front Row] Joes a reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married — and later divorced — by Trump’s second year in office.

In Trump, they’d found someone whose endless thirst for a fight encouraged them to speak up for themselves, not just in politics but also in relationships and at work. His rallies turned arenas into modern-day tent revivals, where the preacher and the parishioners engaged in an adrenaline-fueled psychic cleansing brought on by chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded loyalists. Saundra Kiczenski, a 56-year-old from Michigan, compared the energy at a Trump rally to the feelings she had as a teenager in 1980 watching the “Miracle on Ice” — when the U.S. Olympic hockey team unexpectedly beat the Soviet Union…

Kiczenski met people like Ben Hirschmann, a Michigan legislative intern who posted on Facebook anytime he had an open seat in his car on the way to a rally. She bonded with Brendan Gutenschwager and flew with him to Hong Kong, where they spent 24 hours waving their red, white and blue Trump flags during protests over China’s extradition laws. She occasionally overnighted about an hour outside Detroit with Judy Chiodo, a fellow Trump rally-trotter, rather than drive all the way home to Sault Ste. Marie.

But 2020 proved grueling for the Joes. In March, Hirschmann was among the first Americans to die of covid-19. His death, at 24, shook his Trump friends. “I talked to him more than my own daughter,” Cindy Hoffman, a 60-year-old Iowa woman who ran a tool-sharpening business, said on a Zoom call that the Joes held to grieve…

When Randal Thom, a 60-year-old ex-Marine with a long gray mustache, fell severely ill with a high fever and debilitating congestion, he refused to go to the hospital. He was a heavy smoker who was significantly overweight and knew he faced an increased risk of severe effects from covid-19. Still, he refused to take a coronavirus test and potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch: “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told me. Thom survived the scare, but died months later in a car accident while returning home to Minnesota from a Trump boat parade in Florida…

Kiczenski was in Washington with friends for the Jan. 6 rally. She was convinced beyond a doubt that Trump had been reelected on Nov. 3, only to have his victory stolen in what she described as “a takeover by the communist devils.” She said she believed that, in part, because she had crossed paths with Corey Lewandowski, a well-known and ubiquitous Trump adviser, in the Trump International Hotel the previous summer. Lewandowski told her, she said, that the only way Trump could lose was if there was massive election fraud…

On Jan. 6, she and her friends made their way to the west side of the Capitol, where a mob pushed through police barricades and turned steel bike racks on their sides, leaning them against stone walls like ladders. Some men helped her climb up the rungs. People were everywhere, and it was difficult to move. Kiczenski and her friends scaled one more wall and were within about 100 yards of the Capitol. But it had become so crowded — they didn’t want to lose one another — that they decided to stop on the west terrace, take pictures and soak up the atmosphere…

Kiczenski was inspired by a vista of Trumpian strength and patriotism: the Washington Monument in the distance, the majestic Capitol in the foreground, and freedom-loving patriots fighting like hell to stop a stolen and fraudulent election, liberate their country and save their president. She snapped pictures and recorded videos.

“It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

But when Trump posted a video to social media asking supporters to go home (and saying he loved them) after the riot raged for hours, Kiczenski felt confused and depressed. “We were supposed to be fighting until the end,” she said.

She reminded herself that the president hadn’t technically conceded, and as soon as she arrived home in Michigan, she packed for the next Trump trip. Kiczenski trusted that something was coming and wanted a go-bag ready if she needed to leave for a rally at a moment’s notice.

“We’re all on the edge of our seats waiting to hear about the next event,” she said. “Now we’re like an army, and it’s like boots on the ground. Tell us where we need to go!… “

As innocent, and as deadly, as a cloud of coronavirus particles.

If I haven’t mentioned it before (I keep starting posts about the riot, but there’s just TOO MUCH), HuffPost reporter Ryan J. Reilly’s twitter feed is a great way to keep track of day-to-day developments:

/2 Some people are responding to this with “wait, isn’t it permissible — even healthy and good — to have contempt for the government?” Yes, it is. But you have to pay attention to context.

The context here is the judge’s determination under the Bail Reform Act:….

/3 “Will any combination of conditions reasonably assure” that this person will show up for court and not be a danger to the community?

Here the judge didn’t find this doofus was a danger, though I suspect some judges might have (the judge is right, IMO, on this record).

/4 The judge did find, however, that the defendant’s erratic behavior, including harassment of the court officials supervising him and their families, suggested that he would not comply with court orders regarding showing up in court.

/5 From the judge’s perspective, this is the dialogue:
Judge: “If the court orders to you appear for trial, will you obey, or do I need to detain you to make sure you show up?”
Defendant: “The court can kiss my ass.”
Judge: “Well okay then.”

/6 You can disagree with the judge’s conclusion and think that piling on more conditions would have reasonably assured his return to court — some judges would — but the logic that “this completely defiant person clearly won’t follow orders” is typical detention logic.

/7 From a legal realist perspective, being a gratuitous douche to the court staff (because Pretrial and Probation are arms of the court), and doing creepy threatening things to their families, will make the judge not disposed to give you the benefit of the doubt.

/8 In short, your legal fortunes are best protected expressing contempt for government in traditional American ways, like in the same fundraising appeal in which you also celebrate the unimpeachable divinity of law enforcement and the military.

Reader Interactions

140Comments

  3. 3.

    hells littlest angel

    I feel so sorry for Cindy Hoffman. I hope she gets only ten years in prison.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    I guess it’s important to provide information about the people who were part of the insurrection, but I also can’t help but see it as a version of a Cletus safari.

  5. 5.

    A Ghost to Most

    I was told there would be no sedition, insurrection, or coup attempts. Huh.

  6. 6.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Still, he refused to take a coronavirus test and potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch: “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told me

    To think all this time I actually haven’t been elitist enough….

    “We were just there to overthrow the government.”

    : blinking into the middle distance :

  7. 7.

    debbie

    “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

    Jesus. Can she hear herself? Fuck them all.

  9. 9.

    Citizen Alan

    I feel like I just read an article trying to get me to feel sympathy for the 9/11 hijackers. Or perhaps members of the Manson family.

  11. 11.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @raven: I’m not a psychiatrist, but that woman was nuts.

    and why were they always making those videos while driving?

  14. 14.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    since the topic is addle-pated trumpers, this is trending on twitter

     ⓘ Qpublican f*ckery detected@adelpreore5h
    #LaurenBoebertIsSoDumb she went to the dentist to get her Bluetooth fixed.

  15. 15.

    dmsilev

    We were just there to overthrow the government.

    Is there some other meaning of ‘just’ that would make this a vaguely sane statement?

  16. 16.

    Martin

    Look, that was terrible, but lessons have been learned. Just yesterday we arrested a black member of Congress for <checks notes> singing to protect voting rights.

    Let that serve as a lesson that we won’t be putting up with this nonsense any longer.

  18. 18.

    Martin

    @dmsilev: Look, they earned that cultural dominance through the fair and square process of slavery and lynching, and Democrats can’t just take that from them after all of that work.

  22. 22.

    zhena gogolia

    @Martin:

    Oh, he’s talking about all the pollyannas around here who never worried a bit about there being a coup attempt. He lives in an alternate BJ reality.

  24. 24.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @raven: I heard she was a martyr for freedom. /

    Honestly, I can’t even stand to joke about her. These people are horrifying. They’ve lost touch with reality and are a danger to the rest of us

  28. 28.

    JoyceH

    Just today I was talking to a friend about how depressing it is to realize that there are millions of our fellow citizens who couldn’t seem to listen to Trump and realize within five minutes that he’s mean, stupid, corrupt, and crazy. And they ADORE him! I thought the veneration of Saint Ronny was over the top, but nobody put big ol’ honkin’ REAGAN flags on their boats and pickup trucks.

    I’d always thought that to be a successful demagogue, you’d have to be at least somewhat attractive, as well as smart or clever, and have a strategy and a goal. Which made Hitler a baffling anomaly, but now with Trump added to the equation, maybe they’re all like that.

  29. 29.

    Geminid

    There are a lot of people out there with empty lives. I can understand how these particular ones might need a cause, but they sure picked a bad one. Many of them will get what they deserve.

    I just hope that the authors of this insurrection can be punished. If their culpability can be proven, a charge of felony murder would not be excessive in the case of Roger Stone, Donald Trump, and others.

  30. 30.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    More evidence these are dangerously stupid people.

    What is the difference between masses of people starving to death because they were watering their crops with a sports drink because “it has electrolytes” and masses of people dying because of COVID because the vaccine might have a tracking device?

  31. 31.

    Mike G

    flew with him to Hong Kong, where they spent 24 hours waving their red, white and blue Trump flags during protests over China’s extradition laws.

    Strange, since Trump essentially shrugged at China’s repression of that city and told Xi they should “build more camps” for the Uighur genocide in Xinjiang.

  32. 32.

    raven

    @JoyceH:

     

    Randy Newman

    Rednecks

    Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
    With some smart a** New York Jew
    And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
    And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too
    Well he may be a fool but he’s our fool
    If they think they’re better than him they’re wrong
    So I went to the park and I took some paper along
    And that’s where I made this song

  33. 33.

    HumboldtBlue

    I am enjoying The Cook of Castamar on Netflix.

    The lead character is very good. It’s a Spanish production that feels a bit like an Iberian Downton Abbey with lots of intrigue, interesting staff characters and the usual aristocratic jerks and jerkettes.

    The lead character, a woman, is an excellent cook who suffers from anxiety and agoraphobia but who cooks as if it’s art and who catches the taste buds and the eye of the kindly Duke who has lost his pregnant wife. There’s a mad King, a swimming castrato, a black adopted brother, the stiff domineering housekeeper who has a soft spot and lots of personal liaisons.

    I do wonder at some of the translation, however, and yes, I’m watching with subtitles.

  34. 34.

    Gin & Tonic

    Someone who flies to Hong Kong for 24 hours on a whim is not living paycheck to paycheck.

  37. 37.

    JoyceH

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Someone who flies to Hong Kong for 24 hours on a whim is not living paycheck to paycheck.

    Exactly what I was thinking! People with genuine ‘economic anxiety’ aren’t going to Trump rally after Trump rally or taking part in those asinine boat parades – they can’t afford it!

  38. 38.

    Achrachno

    At one point in there, when reading about them carpooling from rally to rally and couch surfing, they reminded me of deadheads, but just not as benign, amusing or admirable (regardless of how little or much one may admire deadheads).

  39. 39.

    geg6

    I read that completely insane Cletus safari article earlier today.  Jesus Fucking Christ, this country is so fucked.

  40. 40.

    The Thin Black Duke

    Let’s not forget that AOL or Pelosi would be dead if they were caught by these assclowns. They ain’t no joke.

  43. 43.

    feebog

    Most of these folks are too stupid to pull on a pair of pants and have the zipper facing in the right direction.  Pissing off the judge is not a smart legal move.  I’m hoping all of them get maximum time to stew in their own fetid juices.

  45. 45.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @The Thin Black Duke: I can’t imagine they were big Mitt Romney fans either…

    One of the new trump books, I think the Carol Leonnig/Phil Rucker one, says that Ann Romney didn’t want him to go to the Capitol that day because she was afraid there was going to be violence. But the authorities provided about as much security that days as if the Boy Scouts were going to have a jamboree nearby

  47. 47.

    Suzanne

    “It just looked so neat,” she said. “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”

    I thought I had maximized my contempt for these people, but, wow, damn, I think it just escalated.

  49. 49.

    Aussie sheila

    @Geminid:

    My feelings exactly. These people appear to be a combination of outright nutters, angry anti-social a*holes and delusional.

    The real test of US law enforcement isn’t whether the violent trespassers get their punishment in the next year or so, but whether the reactionary elites that manufactured this human lethal device are found and punished even more harshly.

    I am confident that there will be jail sentences for all who are found guilty on the day, but my confidence in the FBI’s willingness and ability to properly source the events of the day, is not so robust.

    I hold some hope that an ambitious and industrious investigative journalist will be able to shed some light on the background to this farcical horror, but I hold no hope for the ordinary processes of the law.

  50. 50.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Excerpt from the Leonnig/Rucker book. Looks from this excerpt like they somehow got Ivanka trump to try to clean up her reputation

    McConnell and most of his colleagues did not know about the mayhem building outside. But Sen. Mitt Romney had been more attentive than others. On Jan. 2, the senator from Utah received a call from Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, warning him about unsettling personal and specific threats. Milley had shared with King online chatter he had discovered through an app on his phone called Dataminr.

    Pro-Trump rhetoric was interlaced with calls for violence and references to smuggling guns and other weapons into Washington to “stop the steal.” One message said something along the lines of, “Let’s burn Senator McConnell’s house down while he’s in it.” …

    Romney told his wife, Ann, about King’s call.

    “Mitt, you can’t go back,” Ann Romney told her husband. She called his Senate staff and said she feared for his safety

    Milley called King who called Romney…. anybody call the head of the CP or DC police chief or the press to talk about Dataminr? 

  53. 53.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @The Thin Black Duke: Let’s not forget that AOL or Pelosi would be dead if they were caught by these assclowns.

    Probably more accurate to say anyone who these assclowns convinced themselves was AOL or Pelois would be dead if they had got their hands on them.

  59. 59.

    They Call Me Blue

    1. @Jim, Foolish Literalist: can’t speak to the videos, but pre-pandemic I tried to convince my son that we could make a comedy podcast of our rants while we commuted to/from work. (Yes we work together, but as he likes to say “it’s not weird!”)
  61. 61.

    HumboldtBlue

    @mali muso: ​ 
    It’s better than I expected, although I’m not sure what I expected and it’s miles more interesting and entertaining than Reign which is some soapy, silly, frothy stuff despite having a basis for a great series.

  62. 62.

    CaseyL

    Listening to what these pissants say, it seems to me they’re as stupid as their idol.  Not just ignorant (which they are as well), but stupid.

  63. 63.

    NotMax

    @raven

    Thought this might be of some slight measure of interest to you.

    Because of COVID, the best friends from Virginia sat out their freshmen year in college to take a fishing trip of epic proportions.

    “We thought, ‘How can we make this unique?’ We thought of the state fish idea. No one has ever done that,” Konson said.

    The idea grew into a personal challenge to catch the state fish of every state. Last August, the two 19-year-olds packed their fishing gear into a minivan and hit the road.
    [snip]
    They call their campaign Fish All Fifty. The only rule is that both have to catch a state’s fish, so it can take hours, days, even weeks. Source

  64. 64.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @They Call Me Blue: Heh, thanks to Bluetooth, I no longer have to occasionally wonder what I look like to the cars at the stoplight next to me as I rant at… other drivers, the radio, podcast hosts….
    as long as the windows are rolled up

  65. 65.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Apparently Graetz was encouraged to have his rally in Riverside by Southern California officials to keep Graetz out of Disneyland. At lest someone is thinking of the children.

  66. 66.

    mali muso

    @HumboldtBlue: Yes, it got progressively more complex and interesting the farther the story went. The upstairs and downstairs characters interactions and dramas did remind me on Downton Abbey but with more gravitas. Hope to see more series like it show up.

  68. 68.

    HumboldtBlue

    @mali muso:

    So far, they don’t waste a lot of time on ancillary plot lines like Downton where the saga involving Bates and Anna was such a lingering distraction along with other side tracks and silly plot shifts.

    I really like Clara’s character.

  69. 69.

    Ohio Mom

    brendancalling:

    Did I see somewhere that Canada is opening its borders soon? I skimmed right over it because it makes no difference to me, but seeing your nym just now reminds me it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for.

  72. 72.

    Brachiator

    … They were mostly older White men and women who lived paycheck to paycheck with plenty of time on their hands — retired or close to it, estranged from their families or otherwise without children — and Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer. The president himself almost always spent the night in his own bed and kept few close friends. But his rallies gave the [Front Row] Joes a reason to travel the country, staying at one another’s homes, sharing hotel rooms and carpooling. Two had married — and later divorced — by Trump’s second year in office.

    I really get annoyed with this kind of nonsense. It makes these jerks seem to be almost innocent. Like Tie-Dye Deadheads getting together and following the Grateful Dead around, digging the groovy vibes.

    But white Americans are often depicted as innocents who never intend harm, and never know what they are doing. Unlike, of course, nonwhites who are thugs who are born to kill. White people are misunderstood, misguided, little lambs led astray.

    A historian wrote about the banality of evil, and maybe the actions of the January 6 mob suggests an addendum, that sometimes people can get swept up into and foment a descent into autocracy.

    But even though these fools didn’t think everything through to the worst possible outcome, they knew exactly what they wanted and who was their Dear Leader.

  73. 73.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Brachiator:

    But white Americans are often depicted as innocents who never intend harm, and never know what they are doing. Unlike, of course, nonwhites who are thugs who are born to kill. White people are misunderstood, misguided, little lambs led astray.

    QFT.

  75. 75.

    NorthLeft12

    @Ohio Mom: Mid -August…..if you are fully vaccinated and have verifiable documentation to prove it.

    That last item probably means nobody from red states will be allowed in.

  77. 77.

    Gvg

    @Brachiator: I actually noted that it said most didn’t talk to their families much and spoke to each other more, to be revealing, pathetic but also encouraging as in break the cycle.

    although several interviewed families have shown the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  82. 82.

    TriassicSands

    Prosecutions of the hundreds charged in the Capitol riot are just getting started. Defendants could spend years behind bars for ransacking the building – and harsher penalties loom for those who assaulted police and destroyed property.

    I won’t be surprised if we see wildly disparate jury verdicts, with some egregious hung juries. All it takes is a single Trumpist or right wing NRA supporting “Constitution expert” to prevent justice from being done. It will be interesting to see how the trials play out, assuming I live long enough to see some verdicts.

  87. 87.

    Brachiator

    @Gvg:

    I actually noted that it said most didn’t talk to their families much and spoke to each other more, to be revealing, pathetic but also encouraging as in break the cycle.

    Some of the description here reminds me of the stereotype of the crazed shooter who is revealed to have been a loner who didn’t talk much to his family. “We had no idea!”

    On the other hand, that these dopes talked more to each other reminds me of how terrorists are supposedly radicalized. But again, any bad intent or self-awareness seems to be de-emphasized. Little Mary just happened to fall in with a crowd who decided to try to overthrow the government for shits and giggles.

  88. 88.

    StringOnAStick

    I was at my local small organic grocery yesterday and I saw two guys that instantly made me nervous; heavy set, in workmanship clothes and walking that manly, pissed off walk and obviously disgusted to be there as they put things in their cart.  I flashed on the idea that this was about to turn into something ugly, hurried to the front, paid and got the hell out of there.  Then I saw them in the parking lot carrying a ladder and tools, obviously getting on with the job they’d been hired to do in another store in the strip mall.  They’d just been buying their daily work food and stumbled into an organic grocery that wasn’t to their liking so they were acting pissed off and annoyed about it all, but in these times it seemed like it could have turned into a mass shooting; that’s where we are now thanks to these assholes.  Pisses me off.

  91. 91.

    Mousebumples

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    @japa21:

    This was a crazy game of swings. After Khris got the FT to put them up 4, I just started pacing and repeating *no fouls, no fouls* to myself.

    #BucksIn6 #FearTheDeer

  93. 93.

    cckids

    @Gin & Tonic: This!

    I’m just barely ahead of paycheck-to-paycheck, and no fucking way would I have the time these people have for this nonsense. Jesus, they have empty lives.

  95. 95.

    MagdaInBlack

    @cckids: Im in the paycheck to paycheck group too. I have neither the time nor the money for all the swag and weaponry and travel. They are NOT paycheck to paycheck people.

  96. 96.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Last week, all three were patients on 2 West, an overflow ward that is now largely devoted to treating Covid-19 at Baxter Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in north-central Arkansas. Mrs. Billigmeier said the scariest part was that “you can’t breathe.” For 10 days, Ms. Johnson had relied on supplemental oxygen being fed to her lungs through nasal tubes.
    Ms. Marion said that at one point, she felt so sick and frightened that she wanted to give up. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t take it.”
    Yet despite their ordeals, none of them changed their minds about getting vaccinated. “It’s just too new,” Mrs. Billigmeier said. “It is like an experiment.”

    I can just imagine their discharges:
    Thank you so much, Doctor! you saved my life! Where would I be without you

    You’re welcome, ma’am. And please, I can’t stress this enough: Get vaccinated

    Oh, no! It’s too new

  100. 100.

    sdhays

    @MagdaInBlack: I took it to mean people who make a lot of money and spend it all every paycheck by choice. Frivolous, irresponsible people. But it’s still a bizarre way to describe them.

  101. 101.

    MagdaInBlack

    @sdhays: “Economically comfortable people who piss away their money on foolishness” probably doesn’t garner as much sympathy ?

    Eta: See also: deplorables.

  102. 102.

    L85NJGT

    @HumboldtBlue:

    Watch Downton with the assumption that everyone born to it is garbage, and all who fall into their orbit are corrupted. That informs the subtext of the soapy plot lines.

    Bates killed those people, understanding that his liege would use his wealth and power to get him off the hook. Edith exploits a delusional soldier in an attempt to wrest the estate away from her sister. Tom was working for the Black & Tans in Ireland.

  105. 105.

    r€nato

    These are the folks who spent eight straight years hysterically accusing Obama voters of “worshipping their messiah”. More #projection than a 24 screen theater.

  106. 106.

    r€nato

    estranged from their families

    Huh, it’s almost like being a Trump cultist is a leading indicator for being a shitty excuse for a human being that even those closest to them can no longer stand to be around.

    (currently estranged from two of my three parental units for that precise reason)

  107. 107.

    JWR

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:
    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Local TV has been covering the Gaetz-MTG trainwreck. Here’s a short video:

    After 3 Cancellations Of America First Rally, Supporters Held Impromptu Rally At Riverside City Hall

    At the 1:30 mark, an attendee says “We’re never going to stop fighting for America. We’re not going to Socialism”. That last bit made me LoL, because where the hell is this place she calls Socialism, and once we get there, how do we do it?

    Slightly longer video, with talk of the loony-toon goon squad threatening legal action against the venue, and if that don’t work, to the streets!:

    Impromptu Rally Held Outside Riverside City Hall After 3 Southland Venues Cancel on ‘America First’ Rally Organizers

  108. 108.

    sab

    @raven: Wow! Yes, we all need to see that. Hate-filled nut job. Not the sweet, loving, kind soul her family has been teling us about.

  109. 109.

    James E Powell

    I don’t really have a dog in the NBA Finals fight, but I being from Cleveland I lean toward the unfairly disparaged Great Lakes city.

  110. 110.

    James E Powell

    @sab:

    From the two videos I saw, Babbitt is pretty aggressive. There is pathos because she is quite small and we know how it turns out, but she is on fire, shouting at the police who were standing in front of the glass doors. She pushes her way forward to be the first through the window.

  111. 111.

    Tony Jay

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Oh yeah, the creepy is strong in that one.

    “I stand here today and you know what I see? I see Proud Americans who know what this country needs and what to do about it.”

    “Hell Yeah! Say it Matt!”

    “I look at you and I see wisdom. I look at this crowd and I see Faith. I see brave veterans and manual workers. I see citizens who know their Constitution, bitches who know how to keep their mouths shut, and patriots who understand that Revolution doesn’t come easy.”

    “Woooh. Yeah! We hear… wait, what did he…?”

    “Standing here surrounded by all this Red, White and Blue Power I gotta tell ya, I feel energised. We’re not just a movement, or a political Party, we’re a family! We’re the American Family. We’re hard working fathers and mothers, obedient sons and sweet supple daughters. We’re the Right kind of Family!”

    “U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.Ahhhhh….hang on just one….”

    “And though they’ll try to Cancel us. We won’t let ’em. They want to Cancel our Police, but we won’t let ’em! They want to Cancel our Religion, but we won’t let ’em! They want to cancel our consentual relationships with girls we thought were of legal age, but we won’t let ’em! They want to Cancel our Country, but we won’t let ’em! Not this Country. No, Sir. This Country where a man can be free, and there’s nothing the Woke Zombies or the BLM Thugs or the FBI’s Human Trafficking Taskforce can do about it! Can I get a Hell No?!?”

    “……………”

    “Let’s hear it for Our President!”

    “Trump! Trump! Trumpetty-Trump!! Trump! Trump!! Trump!!!”

    “Well, there’s the sirens. Time for me to move on and keep spreading the word about why America is First. Please donate like your country depends on it, and if you’re young and know how to keep a secret contact my office to discuss exciting new ways you can explore the limits of Freedom!”

    Excerpts from ‘White House or Big House – The Matt Gaetz Story’ – Regenery Press (2022)

  112. 112.

    Geminid

    @James E Powell: I take no joy in Babbitt’s death, but under the circumstances, her shooting was justified. That was a fraught moment. Video shows police reinforcements with riot gear on the stairs outside, poised to secure the doors from the outside. But the people defending members of Congress inside the doors could not know this. If there had been some officers similarly equipped inside the doors as a first line of defense, Babbitt would have been clubbed, not shot, when she tried to crawl through the window. But there weren’t, and the officer who shot her did what he had to do

    I probably would be happy if that shot had killed Roger Stone, or one of the other organizers. But the shrewd  Stone was catching a plane out of town, and I think the others were a mile away when Babbitt was shot. It appears some mid-level organizers have been  charged, and some may cooperate. I think prosecutors will work their way as high as they can go. If they can get to Stone, or those meeting the night before at the Trump hotel, we won’t know this for some time.

  113. 113.

    Procopius

    @zhena gogolia: I’ll tell you what, I live in a country where we actually have coups. Used to be every four years, just like elections are elsewhere. We’ve had a few of elections, too, but mostly coups. Because of this I have some preconceived ideas about what a coup is. What happened on January 6 was certainly a riot. I can even accept the word insurrection (“We were just here to overthrow the government”), but if they don’t have a plan to take the leaders of the government into custody or kill them AND take control of the means of communication AND the military AND the police, then it’s not really a coup. Sure, in the heat of the moment a lot of them got the idea of kidnapping and/or killing the Vice President and Speaker of the House and I guess any random unlucky congressperson or senator they could get their hands on, but that gallows was not a real thing. It was much too flimsy to support a hanging body. There was no coordination. Most of the people just got caught up in the madness of the crowd. Now, some of those people could become threats. Many of them are too delusional to ever be dangerous except to the people in their immediate vicinity (mass shooting, driving a car into a crowd, attacking people with a machete). Apparently there was a primitive attempt at coordination between some members of the armed gangs (they are NOT  militias), but they don’t really know how to do it, even those with military training and experience.

  115. 115.

    SFAW

    Thom survived the scare, but died months later in a car accident while returning home to Minnesota from a Trump boat parade in Florida…

    I know doing so doesn’t make me a bad person — I crossed over that line a long time ago — but I chuckled when I read this.

  116. 116.

    evodevo

    @JoyceH: ​
      They all think he looks like those McNaughton paintings…or that obscene trumpy flag with his face pasted over a Rambo cutout…

  117. 117.

    smith

    @Procopius: It was certainly a slapdash affair, and probably had no chance of actually overthrowing the government, especially in light of what we’ve heard recently about the refusal of the military to cooperate. However, the intention was there, and involved the collusion of people at very high levels of government, including TFG himself. As many have pointed out, if these had been intelligent people with a better idea of how to carry out a coup, it could have been very different. The alarming thing is, this crossed a  line that’s never been crossed before in this country, and one of our major political parties is unwilling to dissociate itself from either this attempt or potential future ones.

  118. 118.

    evodevo

    @Geminid: ​
      I’ve watched videos of that moment from several different angles and sources…the cops that WERE in front of the doors, moved out (???), allowing the rioters free rein to begin battering the doors again….WHAT WAS UP WITH THAT? I saw nothing about what was going on in that corridor at that time explained during the hearings. Is there any info on who was in charge there? Or what orders were being executed at that moment? ‘Cause it sure looked to me like they were just standing aside and letting the rioters go about the business of breaking down the doors at will…

  119. 119.

    Brachiator

    @Procopius:

    What happened on January 6 was certainly a riot. I can even accept the word insurrection (“We were just here to overthrow the government”), but if they don’t have a plan to take the leaders of the government into custody or kill them AND take control of the means of communication AND the military AND the police, then it’s not really a coup.

    Very true. But Americans lack practice with home grown domestic insurrections and have to start somewhere. There are mainly white people who have long flirted with the fantasy of taking on a despotic federal government in a glorious Second Amendment Shootout. This has now degenerated into a new fantasy that angry white people have a right to nullify the results of an election if they don’t agree with the outcome.

    Of course, this has been done before in the post Reconstruction South. So there is some precedent. And so now the groundwork has been laid for future mischief if people do not step back from the abyss.

  124. 124.

    different-church-lady

    Today’s GOP: government of sociopaths, by sociopaths, for sociopaths.

  125. 125.

    Geminid

    @evodevo: I have not watched the videos closely, and am going by still photos. I saw a file of what I believe were DC police in riot gear, the point man at the top of the steps. It looked like they were poised to rush the rioters at the doors at the time Babbitt was shot.

    The Select Commitee of the House most certainly has experienced investigators who will examine this as well as other incidents of the insurrection, and  determine as much as possible as to decision making on the part of law enforcement. What facts they develop will be in the Commitee report, if not brought out in open hearings.

    This may take months, but I can wait. I keep in mind the hot takes the night of the January 6, when people were outraged by the apparent acquiescence of law enforcement. We only learned in the days following about the determined resistance of many Capitol and D.C. policemen.

  127. 127.

    Geminid

    @smith: There certainly was higher level coordination of the insurrectionists, and I think it went up to the president and some people  around him. It’s easy to see trump as a lazy, churlish buffoon, and he surely is. But trump has a lizard brain cunning that took him a long way. So when he tweeted in December that his January 6 would “be big,” he and his closest henchmen probably had a plan, or an idea of a plan. trump himself is a weak and disorganized man, but there were people close him who were better organized and just as powerhungry.

    trump was a desperate man. George H.W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter before him, lost their reelections, but they had good lives to go back to. Not so trump.

  129. 129.

    J R in WV

    @CaseyL: ​
     

    CaseyL

    Listening to what these pissants say, it seems to me they’re as stupid as their idol. Not just ignorant (which they are as well), but stupid.

    As my grandma used to say, “You can fix ignorant with education, But you can’t fix stupid at all.”

  130. 130.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Geminid: George H.W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter before him, lost their reelections, but they had good law-abiding lives to go back to. Not so trump, who needed the Presidency to shield him from prosecution for numerous personal and financial crimes, including possible asset forfeiture, until the statues of limitation ran out.

    FTFY, not that it’s news to anyone here, but for completeness’ sake.

  131. 131.

    J R in WV

    @lowtechcyclist:

    So I listened / watched a few seconds of that, she actually was driving along while she videoed herself yelling in her car. I had at first thought she must have been parked to do it.

    Wasn’t interested in any more than about 8 seconds of that crazed bullshit, though. Stupid can’t be fixed, and she’s got it bad, obviously. Or had it bad. Nut job!

  133. 133.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Procopius: ​
     

    I live in a country where we actually have coups. Used to be every four years, just like elections are elsewhere. We’ve had a few of elections, too, but mostly coups. Because of this I have some preconceived ideas about what a coup is. What happened on January 6 was certainly a riot. I can even accept the word insurrection (“We were just here to overthrow the government”), but if they don’t have a plan to take the leaders of the government into custody or kill them AND take control of the means of communication AND the military AND the police, then it’s not really a coup.

    If you’re trying to change the head of government by force, it’s a coup attempt. (AFAIAC, you only drop the ‘attempt’ if it succeeds.) That’s what they were doing, so what happened on January 6th was a coup attempt.

    You can argue over how sophisticated a coup attempt it was (not very), or what its likelihood of success might’ve been, but it was an attempt to overthrow the government by force. IOW, a coup attempt.

  135. 135.

    lowtechcyclist

    @germy: ​
     

    Good Lord, that happened twenty minutes away from where I live. Been through that intersection hundreds of times.

    I thought she was from California, and I gather she was for the most part, but this BBC story from January adds this:

    Before moving to California, where she ran a pool supply company with family members, Ms Babbitt had worked security for a nuclear plant near Washington DC.

    In 2016, while living in Maryland, she was charged with reckless endangerment after hitting another woman’s car repeatedly in an incident described by authorities as “road rage”. She was eventually acquitted.

    Yeesh. I feel lucky that her path never crossed mine when she was living around here. Or when she was living, period.

  136. 136.

    lowtechcyclist

    @J R in WV: ​
     

    Wasn’t interested in any more than about 8 seconds of that crazed bullshit, though.

    Can’t blame you. If you’re of a certain age, you may remember Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” and may even remember the flip side, “!aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT oT gnimoC er’yehT” which was the A side played backwards.

    Her rant makes about as much sense as that flip side.

  137. 137.

    Kattails

    @J R in WV: as Jim Wright likes to say, you CAN fix stupid, but you need a strong tarp, some duct tape and a trusted accomplice friend.

  138. 138.

    Mike in NC

    I downloaded an excerpt from Michael Bender’s book yesterday. It was fucking terrifying to read about these lunatics who worship a Fat Orange Clown in a baggy blue suit.

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