"Jan. 6 committee investigators have asked at least three witnesses to detail the behind-the-scenes rivalry, mistrust, and animus between Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and prominent Proud Boys member Enrique Tarrio during the run-up to the attack on the Capitol"
— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) April 21, 2022
Like thieves, traitors seem to fall out:
… The questions the committee has asked and related answers reveal how it is deeply looking into how far-right groups were potentially riven by intense rivalry, even as they pursued similar and allegedly seditious aims during the Jan. 6 period. It is unclear if this line of inquiry will be included in the committee’s public findings, if at all, as it pushes to finish its work in the coming weeks. Several people close to the committee have said members and aides felt pressure to wrap up their work in the coming weeks even as they explore various investigative paths…
The investigation into the relationship between the two leaders has not altered the committee’s private assessment that members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were able to work closely together on Jan. 6, inspired by Trump and his false claims of a stolen election, two of the people familiar with the depositions said.
Rhodes and Tarrio are two of the highest-profile Jan. 6 defendants facing federal prosecution, with Rhodes awaiting a trial for seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6 attack. Tarrio also remains jailed pending trial on several federal charges, including conspiracy…
An attorney who has represented Proud Boys clients in other criminal cases said the group specifically seeks men only for membership. The Jan. 6 defendants allegedly affiliated with the Proud Boys have roots in larger metropolitan areas, including Philadelphia. Many of the accused Oath Keepers charged in the attack hail from small, rural communities, including southern Ohio and western Virginia.
In particular, the committee has prodded witnesses about the Jan. 5, 2021, meeting between Rhodes and Tarrio in Washington, D.C., hours before members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were accused of storming the Capitol intent on stopping the certification of the 2020 presidential election…
CBS News has also confirmed that the committee is investigating whether far-right leaders felt inspired by Trump’s remarks about the Proud Boys.
At a presidential debate on Sept. 29, 2020, Trump and then former vice president Joe Biden had a heated exchange on the threat of white supremacy. At one point, when asked about the Proud Boys, Trump said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” and then said that violence is a “left-wing problem.”
Lawyers, federal prosecutors, and judges have singled out Trump’s comments in an increasing number of civil and criminal cases stemming from the Capitol siege. They allege the phrase was an inspiration for the violence on Jan. 6, particularly among Proud Boys…
Much more at the link.
From an Feb 2022 story in the Rolling Stone. https://t.co/YTbJD9s1gu pic.twitter.com/Tea3Ll0O8i
— JJ MacNab (@jjmacnab) April 21, 2022
Supplementary reading:
NEW: A massive trove of text messages shows Oath Keeper leaders chatting about plans to provide Jan. 6 security to high-profile Trump-world figures.
Also shows high-level contact with Proud Boys.https://t.co/7axBSBBPeh
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) April 19, 2022
Almost too much to hope for, but it would be very satisfying if a certain lifelong professional ratfvcker got dinged…
It's always been weird that 1/6 was basically a joint op between Oathkeepers (middle-aged, antisocial Facebook addicts pretending to be SEALs) and Proud Boys (stunted 4chan dorks pretending to be their high school bullies.)
And yet it's obvious who was key to marrying the two pic.twitter.com/HbGyjndxLF
— zeddy (@Zeddary) April 21, 2022
War for Ukraine Update 57: Mariupol’s Defenders Still Hang On
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Isn’t this always the trouble point of right wing nationalist hangers-on? Intense rivalry among mediocre people jockeying for proximity to the Great Leader?
Shalimar
It’s not entertainment until someone shoots out Rhodes’ other eye.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
How is Roger Stone real?
in other news, I missed the first airing of the Maddow program tonight, I’m gonna check out the re-run
eachother
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Very quick Jim, Foolish tonight.
Yes Rachel and these authors tonight.
West of the Rockies
Christ but Stone is homely.
Mike in NC
The mob of Trumpian neo-Nazi scum that attacked the Capitol on 1-6-2021 should have been greeted with a few helicopter gunships armed with machine guns, rocket launchers, and napalm. Just to get their attention, of course.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I live in hope, part the nth
HumboldtBlue
This was pointed out as information on these jamokes became available — there are a LOT of domestic//spousal/partner/abuse records and failed businesses among this crowd.
Urza
@West of the Rockies: And yet somehow a successful swinger. Standards must be low among conservative swingers. Can’t imagine a liberal woman seeing the Nixon tattoo and not running away.
West of the Rockies
@Urza:
Gross. Stone is vile.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Old School
ed
So how much of this is going to be public ? I mean, we want to watch these rats squeal. Weren’t the watergate hearings public ? In related news…will Marge invoke the 5th tomorrow ?
ian
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If you haven’t read Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, I highly recommend it. Roger has been doing this kind of rogering for more than 50 years.
Martin
Alex Jones offering to cooperate in exchange for immunity. Always a hopeful sign.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ian: I did. Excellent and eye-opening book, but I don’t remember much about Stone from that.
I do remember reading about this in real-time. My recollection is that he’s a Falwell Jr type, likes to watch younger men have it off with his wife
Joe Falco
@Martin: If his testimony leads to Stone finally getting what’s coming to him, I’ll settle for Jones having his freedom while being made destitute by the Sandy Hook parents.
rikyrah
Pass the popcorn
HumboldtBlue
Tony Jay
In every far-Right militia’s life there comes a time when someone says “Your turn to cosplay as the Sturmabteilung“, but no one wants to cosplay as the Sturmabteilung, and so things fall apart.
Speaking sort of on the topic of far-Right fantasists and their role in public life, the FTF Manchester Guardian has plunged a long spoon deep into the blocked u-bend of journalistic gobshitery in order to serve up an article about white nationalism and modern cinema that basically cedes the entire field of film criticism to the Scions of Stormfront and concludes that any film or TV show that fails to make pissing off white nationalists its ultimate creative goal is “some might argue” tantamount to ‘inadvertently’ popularising neo-Nazi propaganda.
I mean, FFS, GOT was a story about brave, white Westerners at war with brown Dothraki was it? Peter Jackson’s LOTR featured hordes of dark-skinned orcs, did it (accompanied by a movie still of said orcs all sporting a skin tone that would make Mitch McConnell look dusky)? That rag is a cesspit of faux-progressive shit-stirring in the cause of corporate click-baiting at the best of times, but its ongoing mission to become the premier megaphone for incoherently lazy Woketalk jingoism is truly a sight to behold and “some might argue” it risks ‘inadvertently’ being widely shared on white nationalist forums as an example of “Libs Getting Kultur Rong”.
Meh. Gobshites. Moon Knight is a lot of fun, though.
sukabi
@ed: not sure she’s smart enough to invoke the 5th, but she’ll probably imbibe a 5th before the day’s out.
wetzel
I want a Proud Boys vs. Oath Keepers chess set.
satby
Good stuff AL! Unfortunate that overnight commenting has dropped off a cliff.
germy
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Jaime Raskin doesn’t seem prone to hyperbole, and I think he is serious when he says the January 6 Committee hearings will “blow the roof off the House.” Beside concrete information regarding participation of well known Representives, I think the Committee will have the goods on people who we yet know little about: their staff members. These tend to be younger and more radicalized. I doubt if they were as cautious in their communications as were their principals.
Interesting that you found @Jackmjenkins’ account of Raskin’s Georgetown remarks through the Twitter timeline of @eclecticbrother, aka Ragnarok Lobster. Mr. Lobster is like a twitter magazine editor, printing other peoples brief articles whle adding his own short editorials. He’s a good source for news, as well as for very fine writers and reporters. His DMs (down mentions in Twitter lingo), introduced me to people like LynnV, Wilson Valdes, Kenneth House of Pfizer, Mangy Jay and many others Including Denis Oliver-Velez. And while I was already somwhat aware of Virginia State Senator Louis Lucas of Portsmouth, I first encountered her fierce tweets pushing back on my new Governor, Glenn Youngkin, from Chicagoland commentator Ragnarok Lobster.
wetzel
@Geminid: Please don’t tell me I have to do Twitter. That place reeks of sulfur. How do you have an argument on Twitter? I’m cranky as any Fox news viewer these days.
I’m with you on the Jan 6 committee blowing the lid of the House, as well as the DOJ investigation. In addition to your points about the near omniscience the committee must be close to achieving on Trump admin and Congressional staff communications, there is also the anchor DOJ has placed in the courts, establishing a fact set, with their successful sedition and obstruction of the vote count indictments starting with the rioters, so there is a clear fact set for federal indictment of the entire conspiracy including Trump, his personal lawyer, former national security advisor, personal fixer and host of others including Alex Jones and at least a half dozen legislators, but also the fraudulent electors and all their enforcers, enablers and cajolers in the national party and in the various state parties.
The Jan 6 committee, the coup, and potentially even its connection to Russiagate will be the defining story for the 2022 elections, and I think the long long list of federal indictments going towards upwards of 1000 GOP malfeasors, dupes, crooks, dopes and villains will define the 2024 election. I think people worry too much we’ll be stuck in the messaging loops they draw us into election after election, but for a while anyway, because the GOP, including the national party, took it out of the plane of discussion, debate and elections, and put it into the plane of violent insurrection, we can have a few elections where it is nos accusens and they are guilty. It has to stay on the plane of law. There has to be judgment in the law. That’s the only way we can even think of getting on the debate stage again with the Whigs (they’ll have to change their name back to the Whigs if the GOP is going to make it through what’s coming).
debbie
@rikyrah:
Exactly. Order refills for when McConnell kicks; the infighting should be glorious!
wetzel
In the Oath Keepers vs. Proud Boys chess set, Enrique Tarrio is the queen for the black (Proud Boys), and Stewart Rhodes is the queen for white (Oath Keepers). Both sides have a different version of Trump as their king. For the Oath Keepers, Trump is the anointed Jesus King. For the Proud Boys, Trump is Hugh Hefner. Bishops are Stone, Jones, etc, but rooks and knights are the most Rambo indictees on both sides. The pawns are Q-anon.
Geminid
@wetzel: Well, I don’t like telling anyone to do something so I won’t tell you to do Twitter. But I must say, there is a lot of good debate on Twitter. I happen to follow debates primarily through the accounts of the ardent Democrats I’ve encountered through Ragnarok Lobster.
When used by competent people with something worth saying, Twitter’s brief format lends itself to effective argument. After all, as Shakespeare has Polonius say in Hamlet, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
satby
@wetzel: The Twitter experience, like any social media, is dependent on how you use it and set up your feed. As this once “essential reading” blog has slowly spiraled down in exchanges and comments to engage with I find myself on Twitter more and more. Along with a lot of familiar names from here. And Ragnarok Lobster was one of my very first follows, because he points to great content.
Edit to fix Ragnarok’s name. and edit again to say “what Geminid says”!
wetzel
@satby: I understand how you can cultivate a twitter feed like a garden. I’ve found Josh Marshall’s twitter lists of experts to be useful, first the one he put together for COVID and then his list of Ukraine Military Experts. I’ve made an account and tweeted a bit.
Twitter is good as a way for experts to put up synedoches of something interesting, breadcrumbs that point somewhere else. People say I’m supposed to tweet for my business. Feed people jokes or daily advice or something. There are portals I can simulcast to Facebook and Instagram. I can set my communications for six months at a time.
Here is my problem. If you make a claim, you are arguing. An argument has a structure. There is ethos, pathos, logos and kairos. A claim using inferential logic has evidence and warrants for the evidence. Twitter seems to be a cacophony of unsupported claims degrading human reason by priming decision-making by mood and social modeling.
An argument that is seeking truth, not giving answers, but actually seeking truth, is Rogerian. How do you carefully map out the claims and reasoning for an argument you oppose on Twitter? It’s impossible. How do you make a post-structuralist argument where you have thesis, antithesis and a synthesis that you took a journey to arrive at? You can only understand an argument like that when you’ve walked around the mountain. You have a bird’s eye view.
How you argue is how you learn to think. Twitter is the deconstruction of meaningfulness where the median is the message. Maybe I do not understand its full equipmentality. I cannot seem to make it sing. It does not sing to me. The collaborative discussion framework in the comments here at Balloon Juice is so far above Twitter, so much more productive for everybody, I think, I cannot understand how Twitter could be better for you. There’s got to be something I do not get. Plenty of people I respect use Twitter!!!
Searcher
I’ll admit, it does give me some comfort to know that after they murder all of us, the various flavors of right-wing fascists will turn on each other.
Searcher
Each pawn can be moved by either side in faschess.
wetzel
@Searcher: That’s great!!!! They can mind-control each other’s pawns!!!!
Searcher
@wetzel: hmm, I think to make it a functional variant, you need something like a notion of control — the control of each pawn starts as one, and increases for each adjacent piece of the same color and decreases for each adjacent piece of the opposite color. When the control is positive, it can be moved as normal, when it is negative it can be moved by the other side.
wetzel
There could be an unpredictable Berserker Queen outcome when you queen a Q-anon pawn.
To queen a Q-anon pawn, you have to roll two six sided dice first. If it’s snake-eyes, she changes her allegiance to the other Trump and becomes his queen, so the new queen goes over to the other side without thinking. If it’s box-cars, she stays yours but can only move like a Trump king and can be check-mated. There’s the real game and the delusional one, which his hers, but you can lose through her channel, just as easily now, because she’s no more nuts than Stewart Rhodes or Enrique Tarrio! Imagine their meeting in that parking garage on Jan 5 with their security precautions, their tactical gear. They are deeply comic characters. I’m sorry. It is hard to feel sorry for those two.
satby
@wetzel: you can easily argue on twitter, I do so all the time. But it requires brevity and that’s a challenge for some. But it’s no big deal if it’s not your thing.
wetzel
@Searcher: I think it will be a bigger hit at Milton Bradley if it is a physical set you plan normal chess rules. Maybe some Calvinball with queening.
The police officers could have devils horns in a video game and there are naked Trump cherub angels flying around, or the capital police are like communist orcs from Stalin’s lord of the rings. It’s really hard to imagine what was going on inside those people’s heads in the riot.
I find it deeply disturbing the right wing knows it can raise an army of 10,000 lunatics if they coordinate messaging to bring them out. Glad the trucker thing fizzled. The right wing is searching for a capability to destroy the public order and force things into an extra-constitutional domain.
Maybe the game needs to be able to break itself. Maybe the end-game is the feds show up with their own pieces after a certain number of moves. The feds have three rooks they can place anywhere to start mopping things up. The real game starts then when player 3 joins.
Searcher
@wetzel: or when you elevate a Qanon pawn, they move to the side to the right of the player who elevated them, and are arranged as if starting with all pieces that player previously captured. A passerby is conscripted to play the new side in opposition to the other two.
wetzel
@satby: No. I’ll endeavor to persevere with Twitter. I will take your recommendation and Geminid’s. It might be there is a sense you are nobody when you first start. I might be avoiding the emotional pain of social isolation I feel when I tweet. I will rationalize a rainbow bridge to rock candy mountain. It might or might not ultimately suit me. I’ve switched to agnostic about it. Thanks. That’s in the positive direction!
wetzel
Thesis: Twitter sucks
Antithesis: Dude, it’s alright
Synthesis: Okay, if you say so
I can see how you can have a whole argument with other people on twitter, so it could be good like that, I think, but you can’t go out on a limb and saw it off yourself. You’re not learning through your own writing. There’s a whole side to thinking and writing that gets lost in the Twitter format. There are methods. It’s like trying to paint with seven crayons. I’m agnostic about it.
wetzel
There’s the sense where the medium provides positive and negative forms of feedback. Some of my feelings using Twitter are positive, and some are negative. Negative feelings have the same neuroendocrine basis as physical pain. From the perspective of Skinnerian behaviorism, that provides the opportunity for Twitter to be operated as a Skinner box, both by its designers for Twitter’s corporate goals, but also by influence operators, state and non-state, vying within Twitter’s sprawling domains.
For a user, Twitter provides all four aspects: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment. There are also cognitive forms of learning, latent learning, priming, assimilation and accommodation. It presents a world. It’s a world I find to be panoptic and weirdly conditioned like I’m wrestling Goliath while the words are falling away into a flowing stream. I’m like Ignatius Reilly with his valve about to blow!
Blow up your TV
Throw away your paper
Go to the country
Build you a home
Plant a little garden
Eat a lot of peaches
Try an’ find Jesus on your own
Part of it is I’ve been sitting in front of a Macintosh computer since the introduction of Macs. I once paid $5800 for a Quadra 800. I’ve been on a computer for fifteen computers. I’m like Marlowe’s ghost. People don’t get out enough away from projecting ourselves into computer world, I think, enough as it is, and Twitter is a rarefied kind of consciousness with a conditioned and programmatic unconscious. It smells of sulfur!!!! Maybe Elon the Anointed will seize control of Twitter from Prince Bonesaw, make Twitter truly a magical place like Godzilla defeating Ghidorah!!!!! I don’t know. I am overwrought about it, for sure.
MisterDancer
As someone who also has been using computers for decades, I’ll say — why is it so important to understand Twitter as a place to have debates? I don’t feel I need to understand how to have a logic-driven rhetorical debate on Twiiter is critical to using it, no moreso than I have to understand how to edit Tiktok videos in order to use it.
I’ve had a Twitter account for so long, it was old when the Arab Spring, sprung. I’ve chosen to rarely have direct engagement on Twitter, and to leverage it as a source of information. Indeed, the last time I did direct engagement, I think, was when I disagreed with one academician whose attempt at a nuanced rebuttal was too easy to abuse by people with ill intent, in my and other’s opinions (including Nikole Hannah-Jones).
In general: IT’s OK to just, you know, use Twitter the way that’s conformable for you, and just set aside the rest. Especially as so many otherwise marginalized voices depend on the ease of use of Twitter, I think it’s critical to have an account there, and to pull understanding and intelligence from the rich and complete diversity of voices that do find it useful and congenial. I can then take their knowledge and boost it elsewhere, like here!
To me, that’s far more useful, and aligned to my own skills and experiences, than trying to bend my mind into becoming a great Twitter debater. Those who do that, I respect; it is a skill and a think skin that I know I don’t have! But just because I don’t have that skill, doesn’t mean it’s not a real skill, and just as valid as the rhetorical models we who took Logic in college might have learned.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: The Blues Brothers is great because of how they treat the Nazi losers.
wetzel
@MisterDancer: That’s a good way to look at it, though it’s hard not to be mindful of the turnkey totalitarianism being constructed through purposeful destruction of the inferential logic underlying the verifiable criteria for meaningfulness we use to create a coherent picture of the world, as Twitter, Facebook and Reddit close us off in mutually non-justifiable epistemic spaces.
wetzel
What I mean is that we can go to the Threepenny Opera, thinking fascism is only working on the irrational and uneducated. Fascist governments can employ the spectacle of atrocity to cause a change cognitively because you cannot understand and assimilate inhumanity. I think the information war is on a much more sophisticated plane with actors like FSB in Russia, which have institutional continuity on the social construction of reality in scientific totalitarianism going back to the 1930’s.
Although it is difficult to justify inferentially, but given the fact-set from 2016, Brexit, Le Pen, and Jan 6, I definitely do believe that there are operant models being employed for the instrumentalization of things like Karma systems and twitter ‘likes’ within Western societies in black propaganda by totalitarian state actors. I believe cognitive models of learning for priming, false truth effect, cognitive restructuring through PIaget equilibrium. I think disordered thinking in schizopherenia is modeled in purposeful construction of signs, portents and synchronicities to drive the schizoid and manic to delusional states activated with a concrete idea. I think Q-Anon was a programmatic application of that type of propaganda operation, maybe the first. In the United States, we have had this type of black propaganda, in this case cognitive priming, in our domestic politics since the Gingrich GOPAC Memo
How does Twitter figure into a world where a major political party employs Language as a Mechanism of Control. We’re going to figure it out on Twitter? Maybe so, but we’re still going to hell in a hand-basket and in the world of Twitter, I don’t see any efficacy to prevention only facilitation to the move towards totalitarian fascism, which is irreversible and spontaneous. This isn’t a problem with anybody’s individual use of Twitter, but with Twitter as a whole.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
I’m usually awake around 4:30 or so, but I’ve given up looking for a late-night thread because lately there’s never any besides Silverman’s, which is a bit heavy for that hour of the early a.m.
Geminid
@wetzel: I don’t do any arguing on Twitter. In fact I have yet to make a tweet. I just inflict my arguments on the people here.
I use Twitter passively, as a means to see other people’s arguments and to follow news stories they link to. If you are looking for good Twitter authors, I would recommend Magdi Semrau for one. Her account is @Magi_Jay and her Twitter handle is Mangy Jay, the name her elementary school students gave her. Semrau can tweet a good coherent essay in four parts.
Magdi Semrau’s longer writings can be found in Foreign Affairs, Dame Magazine, and on John Stoehr’s The Editorial Board.
wetzel
@Geminid:
I don’t feel I lack of Twitter. I’ve got plenty for my attention, and I’m not really the type that gets bored easily. I’ve got plenty on my plate. I don’t care about it in terms of my personal shopping experience for information. I can take it or leave it. But I think I will make a list of Twitter authors and look out for those who are having a good experience with the channel. I will take your advice and go follow Mangy Jay if only that person.
What I am saying is that Twitter is both more and less than it appears to be. So are Facebook and Reddit. They are more than propaganda tools in the sense Robert Reich wrote last week in the Guardian, sources of fake information.
It’s really important to understand that the emotional pain of getting a comment downvoted is no different physiologically at the neuroendocrine level than the physical pain of burning or gouging. Social isolation is a Skinnerian punisher. It is a feeling which can be easily engineered for any person with a certain point of view through brigading on both Reddit and Twitter. In both Russia and China these techniques are perfected firstly on their own population. I think we shall all assume this deep into Russiagate that it is widespread and programmatic throughout social media in the West, and we have our own fascists here at home who are also busy as beavers I suppose. We should all go on strike against likes and karma. That’s what’s good about Balloon Juice. I don’t get a panoptic vibe. We don’t downvote each other. There is a general environment of mutual respect and positive feedback, which I think is very hard to accomplish online. I appreciate Balloon Juice a lot.