President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden has been the center of uncountably many Republican-crafted conspiracy theories, all of them after Donald Trump came to believe that Biden would be his 2020 general election opponent.
Hunter himself has mostly chosen to remain silent, but this past Thursday, he published an opinion column in USA Today condemning the effects the omnipresent Republican hoaxes might have on other substance abusers fighting to recover.
What troubles me is the demonization of addiction, of human frailty, using me as its avatar and the devastating consequences it has for the millions struggling with addiction, desperate for a way out and being bombarded by the denigrating and near-constant coverage of me and my addiction on Fox News (more airtime than GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis) and in The New York Post (an average of two stories a day over the past year).
The New York Post running two Hunter Biden stories a day for an entire year is evidence of a different sort of addiction. It's not clear why one is considered more disgraceful than the other.
The science of addiction and recovery has made great strides in just the past decade. However, far too few will ever experience the miracle of recovery unless we change the stigma around addiction.
For those of us who live in recovery and for those who love someone in recovery, we know how hard fought our newfound lives are in letting go of the shame and making amends.
The weaponization of my addiction by partisan and craven factions represents a real threat to those desperate to get sober but are afraid of what may await them if they do.
Notably, the younger Biden specifically names some of the worst offenders.
My recent haircut turned into a wild conspiracy to evade drug tests, tabloids steadily splash nude pictures of me on their covers, and even a member of Congress displayed revenge porn of me on national television.
My addiction doesn’t justify Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui posting altered nude photos of me with “editorial creativity over the pictures.” My addiction shouldn’t permit the likes of Rudy Giuliani or a former Peter Navarro aide to debase and dehumanize me for their own gains.
What Hunter Biden doesn't mention is that the hoaxes Republicans have imposed on him have the strong stench of criminal behavior—and not on his part. Trump's first impeachment came about because Trump withheld aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the Ukrainian president into announcing a supposed "investigation" of a Rudy Giuliani-pushed hoax targeting Hunter. The hoax was debunked before Trump ever made the move, but the extortion attempt continued anyway.
When Giuliani and other Republican operatives later announced they were in possession of stolen data they claimed came from a Hunter-owned "laptop," it became the focus of a new ecosystem of hoaxes and conspiracy claims. But it now appears far more likely that the leaked data was obtained through criminal hacking efforts—and that the "laptop" itself never existed.
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): Primetime finally figured out why gold bar-Bob Menendez is being taken out. The president of Turkey, Erdogan, wanted to buy F-16s from us, but gold bar-Bob, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee put a hold on the jets. And now that the hold is lifted, Turkey's on an F-16 shopping spree.
Erdogan admitted it, saying this: "One of our most important problems regarding the F-16s were the activities of U.S. Senator Bob Menendez against our country." But it wasn't just a $20 billion sale that cleared, Turkey was holding up Sweden's application to NATO until they got their F-16s. And now that gold bar-Bob's gone, Turkey gets their jets, Sweden gets its NATO membership. Look how nicely things fall into place for Biden and his boys, when two gold bars are found in a Senator's house. Eh, it's probably a conspiracy theory.
That's the Media Matters transcription from Fox News' Oct. 2 broadcast of “Jesse Watters Primetime,” the program that replaced Tucker Carlson's show after Tucker got too big for his conspiracy britches and had to be sent to a farm upstate. And yes, there are elements of actual news stories rattling around in there. Now-indicted Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez did indeed use his chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to block the sale of F-16 jets to ostensible NATO ally Turkey, a hold that Menendez based on Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's stonewalling of Sweden's NATO membership, "aggression against [Turkey's] neighbors," and dismal human rights record. It’s worth noting that the committee’s new chair, Sen. Ben Cardin, seems to be in no hurry to lift the block.
Erdogan was nearly giddy about Menendez's indictment, saying last week that his removal from the chairmanship "gives us an advantage."
From these facts, we get a Watters snowball of speculation that even he has to pass off as a conspiracy theory, though only after lodging it inside Fox News viewers' gullible heads. So President Joe Biden "and his boys" get things to fall into place by, uh, planting gold bars in a senator's house? Biden and his boys got Menendez "taken out," framing a Democratic senator for acts of corruption because, uh, Turkey really wanted those jets?
What the airborne monkey heck are you going on about, Jesse? Is it your genuine premise that an innocent and hapless Menendez was taken down by the Biden regime for offending Turkey's would-be strongman or for holding up a big defense contract?
Have you been guzzling any off-brand cough medicine lately, buddy?
Alas, this is par for the course for Fox News primetime hours and is one of the reasons why as far back as 20 years ago, studies concluded that watching the network somehow made viewers even less informed about the news than people who watched no news at all. The reason Watters was pushed into the primetime slot vacated by Carlson was because he best matched Carlson's own brand of flagrant racism and bizarre conspiracies, providing Fox with the best chance of keeping Carlson's viewers glued to their TVs.
You would definitely be less informed after watching Watters’ latest rant. Turkey has not gotten its jets. Sweden is not yet a NATO member (though Turkey did relent on its opposition), and Turkey's "shopping spree" doesn't consist of anything more than wanting the jets they originally ordered. If this is a conspiracy by the so-called Biden crime family to dispose of a senator who was being too mean to Tayyip Erdogan, of all people, they may have to smuggle gold bars into a lot of other senators' houses.
The Menendez indictment has highlighted the conservative movement’s disbelief that anyone would want to prosecute felonies committed by "important" people. Watters and other conservative pundits appear to be totally flummoxed by the thought that prosecutors would indict someone not for political reasons but instead because doing crimes is illegal even if you're wearing a flag pin and proclaiming yourself above such laws. Instead, they speculate, Menendez must only have been indicted because he was getting in the way of international arms deals or because the Justice Department needed to frame an important Democrat for committing crimes so that their indictments of Donald Trump for committing other crimes would look more legitimate.
Republican lawmakers launched an impeachment inquiry into President Biden as an evidence-free act of retaliation against Democrats for impeaching Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 coup attempt and other corruption. It's already clear they don't consider the rule of law to be anything but a tool to be used against political enemies, one to be hidden away again whenever one of their own gets caught doing a crime (or 10).
All of that said, Watters will likely get into huge trouble on this one from the higher-ups, and not for the reasons you might think. Watters is mocking Menendez as a goldbug, calling him "Gold Bar Bob," but precious-metals companies prodding conservatives into hoarding overpriced gold and silver are some of Fox News' most reliable remaining advertisers. Jesse is making fun of the network's most-valued viewers here, and you know network bigwigs aren't going to let that one stand.
Rep. Lauren Boebert is getting the kind of attention that even she presumably doesn’t like. Last week she was kicked out of a Colorado theater for vaping, recording the show, and other disruptive behavior. After Boebert denied vaping, the theater released security footage showing her doing just that—and more. She and her date were fondling each other in ways that had to be uncomfortable for their neighbors.
To her credit, Boebert has apologized for her behavior. However, not content with the explanation that Boebert is who she has always appeared to be, some on the right have turned the incident into a conspiracy theory: Boebert was set up.
The New York Post emphasized that her date was a Democrat who owns a bar that’s hosted at least one drag show, and many took this as evidence of Boebert’s hypocrisy, while others used it to bolster the notion that she was set up. The latter claim is showing up all over social media, led by so-called journalist and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin. “It turns out Lauren Boebert's mystery man is a Democrat bar owner,” Crokin tweeted. “If I was a wagering enthusiast, I would bet this guy was paid to set her up.”
Crokin laid out an elaborate scenario: “She’s coming off a divorce, and she’s vulnerable. This guy comes into her life, charms her, seduces her and then probably gets her liquored up and takes her out in public. Stage set.” Honestly, Boebert probably is vulnerable as she divorces her longtime husband, and she gets to be privately messy over that if she wants to. But this was public misbehavior that impacted other people and ended, according to reports, with her repeatedly busting out the classic, “Do you know who I am?” That’s a statement of entitlement: I get to disrupt other people’s theater experience because I’m important.
Next, Crokin moves to the conspiracy that the stage was supposedly set for: “He then instigates her by fondling her in a theater that just happens to have night vision cameras right on them. Then the whole incident is released to the public in what looks like high-definition video in an attempt to harm her reputation.” Of course, Boebert did not need to be persuaded into bad behavior. Even if you didn’t know who she was, she would stand out in the theater’s security video as the person vaping, waving her arms above her head, and taking flash photos. No one else visible in the video, which shows many rows in the theater, appeared to be behaving that way. (While the video is impressive for night vision, high-definition it is not.) Additionally, Boebert being kicked out of the theater and asking, “Do you know who I am?” had gotten plenty of attention before the video emerged. The vaping and taking pictures and disruptive behavior had already been publicly reported based on what the people around her in the theater were saying.
Crokin concluded: “This is all way too convenient. Whether her date was a part of it or not, this seems like a well-coordinated setup. These types of tactics and traps are used all the time, and I would know.” A well-coordinated setup? It kind of seems like there just happened to be a camera on Boebert being Boebert. If she had sat through the show without vaping and taking photographs and groping, they could have released video showing her in actual high definition through the entire show and it wouldn’t have made a splash. And you’d think a conspiracy theorist like Crokin would be aware of how often we are under surveillance in this day and age.
Boebert herself doesn’t seem to be embracing the conspiracy theory. Though she joked ruefully to TMZ that “I learned to check party affiliation before you go on a date,” she had nothing but positive words about the man in question, calling him “a wonderful man” and a “great man, great friend” although they’ve “peacefully parted.”But Crokin’s “Boebert was set up” theory went viral, with a stream of responses showing how eager some people are to believe the elaborate conspiracy over the idea that a woman with a history of minor arrests who spent the 2022 State of the Union yelling and heckling the president might not be the best-behaved person in a theater, either.
Boebert’s unruliness, her disrespect in political settings, is what her fans like about her. No one should be surprised that it’s not all a political calculation and that she really is that way.
What do you do if you're associated with one of the biggest election fraud scandals in recent memory? If you're Republican Mark Harris, you try running for office again! On this week's episode of "The Downballot," we revisit the absolutely wild story of Harris' 2018 campaign for Congress, when one of his consultants orchestrated a conspiracy to illegally collect blank absentee ballots from voters and then had his team fill them out before "casting" them. Officials wound up tossing the results of this almost-stolen election, but now Harris is back with a new bid for the House—and he won't shut up about his last race, even blaming Democrats for the debacle.
On Tuesday, the FBI served MyPillow Man Mike Lindell with a search warrant and seized his cellphone at a Hardee’s in Minnesota. That move came as the FBI investigates Tina Peters, the Mesa, Colorado, county clerk under indictment for tampering with voting machines after the 2020 election. Lindell is a prominent election denier who has poured money into trying to overturn Donald Trump’s big loss.
The MyPillow guy being arrested at a Hardee’s is a fun enough story, but then Millie Weaver, aka Millennial Millie, went and made it better. Weaver is a former Infowars correspondent and minor-league far-right influencer whose Millennial Millie show has recently been airing on “Lindell TV,” and you cannot make me take the scare quotes off those things. Weaver was feeling a little dramatic about the seizure of Lindell’s cellphone, so she reached for the often-quoted words of German pastor Martin Niemöller, written in 1946 about the rise of the Nazis.
Yes, she is comparing cases of people being subpoenaed and searched for evidence of crimes to the Holocaust. She’s doing that. People receiving due process and their day in court are, to Weaver, akin to people being transported to Nazi death camps and concentration camps. The far-right’s victim complex knows no bounds whatsoever.
It would be understandable to read this and think it was a parody. I’m pretty sure there have been parody tweets along these exact lines about earlier cases of far-right figures being served with subpoenas or investigated for lawbreaking. But friends, this is no parody. Not unless it’s an extremely long con, dating back at least to late 2015. Because that’s how long Weaver has been building her Trump babe (more on that in a bit) influencer persona.
Early on in her time on Instagram, in 2011 and 2012, Weaver was just another young woman posting duck-lipped thirst traps and pictures with friends. Sometimes she wasn’t even wearing makeup. The pictures from this time have almost no comments, and what comments there are are much more recent, from fans who’ve gone back through her feed. “No wonder you have a couple kids bet your husband can't keep his hands off you he's a lucky man,” a 2020 comment on a 2012 picture of Weaver in a bikini reads.
A little more recently, it’s baby pictures. Sprinkled throughout are occasional pictures of animals and organic foods. Then, in January 2016: a “Millennial Millie game face” selfie, followed directly by two brief videos about why she’s not a feminist.
“There’s nothing feminine about being a feminist nowadays. They pretty much throw out everything it is to be a feminine woman as a whole. Can’t be a mom, can’t be pretty, can’t be hot, can’t be sexy, can’t have a husband.”
May 2016: A posed studio shot in front of an array of Infowars supplements with the comment, “This is Millie. Millie uses Infowars Life products and is very healthy. Millie is not a mindless trendy. Millie is Smart. Be like Millie. #Infowars#Infowarsgear”
July 2016: A selfie in a MAGA hat, with the comment, “Make America Great Again! Trump 2016! If you don't like it...Kiss My Ass! #trump#trumpbabes.” (That #trumpbabes hashtag is a whole world of silicone and Trump bikinis and “Let’s Go Brandon” shirts cropped high enough to show ample underboob.)
From there, Weaver’s identity as an Infowars/Trump wannabe influencer mostly takes over her feed. In front of a “Hillary for Prison” sign. Shooting a gun, apparently off the back porch of a home. Promoting her YouTube channel for the first time in August 2016. Pictures with right-wing luminaries like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nigel Farage, Rudy Giuliani, James O’Keefe, Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, next to Roger Stone and Alex Jones at an event, and more. Pictures of two White House visits.
By now, Weaver has 452,000 YouTube subscribers. In that first Instagram promotion of her YouTube channel, she had just over 3,500 subscribers. The oldest video on her channel is an entry for an Infowars "Make fun of Hillary" contest. A few months later, she’s putting a wig and makeup on her brother and sending him into a Target to ask people if they’d be comfortable with him using the women’s restroom with their daughters. For a while, she’s all over the map of Infowars-type obsessions: “SJW’s Ban St. Patrick’s Day.” “Is Wind Energy Actually Clean?” “EXCLUSIVE: Inside The Secret Pedophile Marketplace.” “Consensus: CNN is Fake News.” “Unsolved Mysteries of Liberal Logic.”
Weaver was fired from Infowars in 2020 after she was arrested for robbing her mother (the charges were dropped). But by the time of her arrest, Weaver was already working on Shadow Gate, a “documentary” claiming to have whistleblowers telling how secret contractors “hired by government officials to frame the Trump campaign, set him up for the Russia collusion investigation, provided witnesses for the impeachment hearings and provided administrative support services to the Department of Justice during the Mueller investigation.” On election night 2020, Weaver's livestream had 300,000 viewers as she spread disinformation, claiming a video of a TV cameraman with his equipment was footage of ballot-stuffing in Detroit, and saying to a guest, “It looks like the election is being stolen.” The top video on her channel, the one that autoplays when you visit, is titled “Election Night Coup D’etat Plot Exposed!”
She has built a career, of sorts, around this persona. Pretty, hot, sexy, mom … for Trump, turned hard-hitting “reporter,” where what’s reported is largely conspiracy theory and trolling. Weaver isn’t alone in this. You've heard of Alex Jones and James O’Keefe and Dinesh D’Souza and Diamond and Silk and Candace Owens, but there’s this whole far-right ecosystem of highly specific influencers. Ones who gain their right-wing currency by deploying their Blackness to help insulate Trump and Republicans from charges of racism. Ones who deploy their exaggerated femininity for culture wars leverage and for sheer pervy page views. But they’re tied together by their willingness to embrace conspiracy theories and undermine democracy.
And when they compare Mike Lindell having his cellphone seized in a Hardee’s to the Holocaust, they are not kidding.
According to a Fox Business correspondent’s “scoop” Wednesday afternoon, “Donald Trump and his legal team will likely seek a court order to force the @FBI and @TheJusticeDept to turn over a physical copy of the search warrant, the affidavit, and a complete inventory of what was taken in the Mar-a-Lago raid.” That news, however, came well after one of Trump’s attorneys told Dinesh D’Souza that the FBI had already given her a copy of the warrant, with an attachment detailing what they were looking for. Trump has the warrant. The fact that he hasn’t shown it to the public is his decision, and it’s probably in equal measures to hide what it reveals about him and to feed conspiracy theories.
And those conspiracy theories continue to flourish, fueled in large part by Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle. Trump is aggressively fundraising off the search of his property, which is no surprise since Trump aggressively fundraises off of everything that happens in his general vicinity. In this case, though, it’s not just about the money. It’s about spreading the message that he wants out there: This legal search approved by a federal judge was in fact a nefarious attack on freedom. And as usual, Trump has the entire Republican Party on board with his desired message.
Appearing on CNN, Republican Sen. Tim Scott responded to questions about threats to the federal judge who signed the search warrant by “asking my friends on the other side, wait, don’t rush to judgment. This is, without question, a very daring and dangerous move on the Department of Justice’s side.” When CNN’s Dana Bash pressed him again on the threats coming from Republicans, Scott again blamed the Justice Department, saying, “every single member of our family, the American family, should be very concerned when you feel like there is a weaponization of the Department of Justice against any individual, much less the former president.”
There’s no acknowledgement here that there was a lawful process in which Trump was treated better than most people on whom search warrants are executed.
And Scott is more careful than many Republicans. His use of “weaponization,” though, was definitely use of an approved party talking point. Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, similarly went with “weaponization” in a statement calling the search “a dark day in American history,” and calling for “an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his Administration’s weaponizing this department against their political opponents—the likely 2024 Republican candidate for President of the United States.” As usual, Republicans accuse their opponents of what they’re already doing. Remember that Trump’s first impeachment was for attempting to use the power of the presidency to strong-arm Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden because Trump (correctly) saw him as a formidable challenger in 2020. Turning around and accusing Biden of mimicking Trump is to be expected, even though it was not Biden on a private phone call asking a world leader to “do us a favor” and withholding military aid to get that “favor.”
Like Stefanik, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is threatening an investigation—threats that Attorney General Merrick Garland, the entire Justice Department and FBI, and the judge who signed off on the warrant would absolutely have known were coming.
Other Republicans have gone further.
“I’m concerned that they may have planted something,” Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys, said on Fox News on Tuesday. “At this point, who knows? I don’t trust the government, and that’s a very frightening thing as an American. This is third world stuff. This is Cuba. This is not our country.”
No, this is you thinking the Biden administration operates the way Trump would like to.
Then there are the conspiracy theories about the date of the search—Aug. 8, the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation. “There are no coincidences when it comes to the Deep State. They could have done this raid a couple of days before or tomorrow, but they chose August 8 for a reason,” former Trump Treasury Department official Monica Crowley said on the War Room podcast.
Trump could clear some of this up by releasing the warrant, which he has. (The affidavit, which would have more detail, is under seal and, according to former federal prosecutor Elie Honig, Trump wouldn’t get it “unless and until there's a charge.”) But Trump does not want to clear this up. He wants his party once again united around defending him, and his supporters buzzing with conspiracy theories and rage. It’s better for him that way, and it doesn’t matter to him that it’s worse for the concept of equal justice under the law.
Not that we’re surprised, but isn’t failed President Trump even a little sick of himself constantly whining about losing the 2020 presidential election? Okay, I know: He didn’t lose it, it was stolen. He could have been a contender. Blah, blah, blah.
But his recent appearance on Real America’s Voice show, Just the News, with hosts John Solomon and Amanda Head was mindboggling even for the twice-impeached ex-president.
Trump didn’t waste time, talking about how the president of Russia, the man who has illegally invaded a free and Democratic-run country, leaving untold Ukrainians dead or refugees, should dig up dirt on his (Trump’s opponent) and now the sitting head of the U.S.
Last time I checked, Putin is not an ally to the U.S. Will the idiocy never end?
“As long as Putin is not exactly a fan of our country, let him explain… why did the [former] Mayor [Yuri Luzhkov] of Moscow’s wife [Elena Baturina] give the Bidens (both of them) $3.5 million,” Trump asks.
“I would think Putin would know that answer to that. I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer,” he continued.
Extended clip is worth watching: "As long as Putin is not exactly a fan of our country... I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it... you won't get the answer from Ukraine... I think Putin now would be willing to probably give that answer." pic.twitter.com/JFGcBk4Kxd
This is just more of the same rhetoric Trump has been ranting about since his loss in 2020.
In response to Trump’s latest blathering, Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted: “Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and a butcher. Here are two responses—President Biden: This man cannot remain in power. Trump: Please help me, Vladimir. I am damn proud of our current President. And nauseated by the former President.”
Vladimir Putin is a war criminal and a butcher. Here are two responses— President Biden: This man cannot remain in power. Trump: Please help me Vladimir. I am damn proud of our current President. And nauseated by the former President. https://t.co/lO3CEnJ54d
According to Newsweek, author, journalist, and attorney Seth Abramson wrote, "President Biden is America's commander-in-chief; we're at the brink of open war with Russia; Putin is unambiguously an enemy of America.
"So one would expect any info Putin releases about our commander-in-chief to be a lie—and yet Trump now begs for Putin's aid. Open treachery.”
DNC Chair, Jamie Harrison tweeted: “Trump, the leader of the GOP, loves Putin more than he loves America. It has been evident for a while that the man seriously needs some professional help.”
Trump, the leader of the GOP, loves Putin more than he loves America. It has been evident for awhile that the man seriously needs some professional help. #GOPSoftOnRussiahttps://t.co/EqcMVn1SwT
— Jaime Harrison, DNC Chair (@harrisonjaime) March 30, 2022
Solomon, a former Fox News contributor, and formerly the editor-in-chief at the conservative newspaper The Washington Times, is also a big proponent of pro-Trump content, with multiple citings of his columns used as evidence by the GOP against impeaching Trump on allegations of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden.
According to the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, while writing for The Hill, Solomon pushed the false Uranium Oneconspiracy, alleging that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold a share of America’s uranium to Russia in exchange for a huge donation to the Clinton Foundation.
And Solomon played a key role in helping Giuliani launch the investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden
"I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon," Giuliani toldThe New York Times.
Co-host, Amanda Head, a notorious anti-masker, began her career as a model, actress, and singer, and was the first freshman to win the Miss Auburn University beauty pageant. She is best known for her turn as a vlogger for The Hollywood Conservative, launched in 2016.
What has yet to remain clear is why the Republican party refuses to call a traitor a traitor. Perhaps they’re afraid of a poison Russian pill, or of simply losing a midterm seat to a more qualified and ethical opponent, but either way, someday, (I hope) the GOP will realize that as the party once known for its “values,” lost them long ago.
Some GOP officials never seem to know when to give up. Despite having absolutely no proof, cries that the election was stolen still seem to ring in the ears of Republicans. Despite legal experts noting that it was impossible, a Wisconsin judge has claimed that there are grounds for the state legislature to “decertify” the results of the 2020 election. The claim follows a review of the election demanded by Republicans, in which individuals in the state assembly hired Michael Gableman, a former state supreme court justice to investigate the election.
The 136-page interim report released Tuesday has received widespread bipartisan criticism and has been labeled unnecessary because not only was it poorly done but used $676,000 in public funds. During a presentation of the report Tuesday, Gableman said the state Legislature should “take a very hard look at the option of decertification of the 2020” presidential election. Moments before Gableman presented, Donald Trump encouraged supporters to listen in, BuzzFeed News reported.
Both Democrats and Republicans alike rejected the idea and called the move illegal.
“Still not legal under Wisconsin law,” Republican Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke tweeted. “Beyond that, it would have no practical impact b/c there is no Constitutional way to remove a sitting president other than through impeachment or incapacity. Fools errand. Focus on the future.”
I have ten months remaining in my last term. In my remaining time, I can guarantee that I will not be part of any effort, and will do everything possible to stop any effort, to put politicians in charge of deciding who wins or loses elections. 1/
Not sure what kind of attorney Gableman was, because the report not only falsely claimed Biden’s win could be decertified, but also said that decertifying the election would not have any legal consequence.
“It would not, for example, change who the current president is,” the report said.
Of course, like other conservatives, Gableman also attempted to backtrack what he said and issued confusing contradictory statements.
When Democratic state Representative Jodi Emerson, asked him, "Are you saying we should decertify Wisconsin's votes from 2020?"
Gableman responded:
"I'm not saying it and I did not say it because it's not my place to say it. What is my place to say, and what I do believe, and what I do say, is there appears to me—without having the benefit of input from any substantive witness—there appears to me to be very significant grounds for such an action."
Others also dismissed the report, noting that a recount and investigations were conducted multiple times. According to the Associated Press, despite the recounts, multiple state and federal lawsuits, an audit by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, and a report by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, it was found that Biden defeated Trump by a little under 21,000 votes in Wisconsin.
“There does not appear to be anything new in this report, although it is apparent that Michael Gableman is adopting the most fringe and extreme arguments presented by election deniers,” Attorney Jeffrey Mandell, who is representing the mayor of Green Bay in a lawsuit opposing a subpoena from Gableman, said. “This report, and Mr. Gableman’s presentation, is an embarrassment. This process needs to come to a quick end.”
An Associated Press review of Wisconsin and other battleground states also found far too little fraud to have tipped the election for Trump.
Of course, there are other controversies found in connection with the report. A review conducted by the Associated Press found that the report was paid for with $676,000 in taxpayer money. Additionally, it was due at the end of last year but delayed after mayors and state and local election officials filed multiple lawsuits to block subpoenas issued to them. During his presentation, Gableman said he had spent about $360,000 so far on the investigation and issued 90 subpoenas, but no one with information about how elections are run has spoken with him.
During the presentation, Gableman not only criticized the process of voting in nursing homes but attacked the use of drop boxes. He recommended changes in voting procedures including shortening the early voting period and dismantling the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Overall Gableman said he hoped the report’s recommendations would be used by lawmakers to enact changes before the session ends next month.
Despite the lack of support for his findings, he even went as far as to suggest that his work continue, as he still has funds remaining in his budget. "I'm not in this for anything other than the truth,” he claimed.
According to CBS News, Gableman was appointed by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in June 2021. Gableman's appointment came a day after Trump issued a statement saying that Vos and other Wisconsin Republican leaders were "working hard to cover up election corruption."
"I'd like to thank the Office of Special Counsel for their tireless efforts in finding the truth," Vos said in a statement. "They've done a good job at showing there were issues in 2020, and the report is intended to help correct these processes for future elections."
It should be noted, yet again, that being an actual, bonafide judge in the United States of America requires no qualifications whatsoever. You either are appointed as a judge or win an election to become one, and the rest is filler to be worked out by whoever's been tasked with updating the webpages. They say anybody in America can grow up to be president, but that is obviously a lie. But anyone can grow up to be a judge in America. Louie Gohmert was a judge.
Being a judge is in fact one of the few occupations in America that does not require you to even have a head. Unfortunate roller coaster accident? Got too close to Dick Cheney during a hunting trip? No problem. You can still write opinions. Years before his untimely death, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia outsourced all his important opinions to a family of grumpy squirrels that had taken up residence in his attic and nobody noticed or said a damn thing about it.
In a Friday night news dump, a California judge issued a ruling announcing that the state's assault weapon ban, in place since 1989, was unconstitutional because reasons. It caused a stir primarily for using language that sounded conspicuously like what the National Rifle Association and American militia groups have long been spouting in their newsletters and pamphlets, and mostly for Judge Roger Benitez's comparison of weapons designed explicitly for mass murder to a "Swiss Army Knife." An AR-15 rifle "is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment," Benitez said in his ruling. Whether he had his pants on while writing that sentence is unknown; whether he cribbed it exactly from a gun manufacturer's ad is ... probably worth exploring.
That is not, however, the only bit of bizarre editorializing in the ruling. Judge HasAHead also took it upon himself to opine that assault weapons actually are far less dangerous than ... the COVID-19 vaccine. "The evidence described so far proves that the 'harm' of an assault rifle being used in a mass shooting is an infinitesimally rare event. More people have died from the Covid-19 vaccine than mass shootings in California."
If I were head dictator of judgeships this one would be off the bench in five seconds flat for putting the "harm" of assault-rifle-assisted mass shootings in scare quotes, but I ain't and he's not. The part that's getting more heat is that U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez appears to be flat-out lying in that second sentence, and that’s us saying it nicely.
The Washington Post fact-checks Benitez on this one, but to anyone who does not live entirely inside Tucker Carlson's inflamed colon the problem here should be obvious. The number of people who are believed to have died from the COVID-19 vaccine is, at this time, approximately zero. There has been some very public speculation as to whether some of the vaccines might cause an extremely rare form of blood clot, one that may have killed three people in this country after millions and millions of doses, but the data is not conclusive and the clots seem to appear in the unvaccinated general population at roughly similar rates.
Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to be a regular occurrence in California, just as they are elsewhere. Even if you presume all three deaths suspected of being vaccine linked were indeed caused by a vaccine, it's not even close.
All we can assume here is that this particular judge is referring to far-right conspiracy theories about the vaccine from the dark nether regions of the American political psyche. It's possible we can attribute the blatant factual error to Fox News and to Tucker Carlson's white nationalist conspiracy show, but the suggestion that lifesaving, normality-saving vaccines are killing people in greater numbers than AR-15s does feels more like something plucked more directly from the Q crowd, from frothing far-right militias, or both.
Unfortunately, there's no particular recourse for this sort of judicial conspiracy peddling. For particularly grotesque behavior on the bench, the House and Senate can remove a federal judge via impeachment, but that is reserved for only the most egregious of cases and "is factually wrong when issuing weirdly premised opinions" isn't it. This is why, in fact, the Republican-held Senate was so obsessive in filling as many judicial vacancies as possible with hard-right ideologues while blocking nominees from a Democratic administration: stuff the benches with hard-right conspiracy theorists, hard-right conspiracy theories become the stuff that governs us. The judge's ruling is absolutely certain to be appealed, but the Supreme Court is itching to undo a century of laws itself and will probably not let the unending goofiness of this written opinion stop it from writing a more dignified goofy version that scrubs out the most embarrassing parts.
So far, though, there's been no ruling from hard-right judges declaring that making fun of bad judicial opinions kills more people each year than AR-15 "freedom bringers" do, so we can at least point and shake our heads here. Maybe it's cathartic. Maybe it's whistling past the graveyard.
It’s becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection. If the Republicans dare admit any of it is real, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.
That’s become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the Jan. 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is now finding that out.
Whenever Republicans have made any gestures toward acknowledging either Biden’s win or Trump’s seditionist behavior, asTheGuardianrecently reported, voters at the state and local level have responded with outrage and threats.
“The evidence is overwhelming that local parties across the country, in blue states and red states, are radicalized and support extremely far outside the mainstream positions like, for example, ending our democratic experiment to install Donald Trump as president over the will of the people,” Tim Miller, former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told The Guardian.
“They believe in insane COVID denialism and QAnon and all these other conspiracies. It’s endemic, not just a couple of state parties. It’s the vast majority of state parties throughout the country.”
The list is long and worrisome:
Arizona: The state Republican Party reelected Kelli Ward last weekend. She’s a conspiracy-theory-promoting “Trump Republican” who unabashedly promoted the “election fraud” disinformation. Party officials also voted to censure Gov. Doug Ducey for certifying Trump’s loss in Arizona, along with Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain, and former Sen. Jeff Flake, both for having supported Biden in the election.
Texas: The state Republican Party encouraged its members to follow them on Gab, the favorite social media platform of white nationalists, with a pro-QAnon conspiracy trope: “We Are the Storm.” Even after Biden’s inauguration, the party insisted that he had won fraudulently: “It took a global pandemic, a thoroughly corrupt media, and massive election irregularities for President Trump to be removed from office," the GOP said in a statement on its website.
Hawaii: The Hawaii Republican Party’s official account published a thread of tweets sympathizing with supporters of QAnon—dismissing the cult’s conspiracy theories that Democrats and media figures are secretly operating as global pedophilia ring, but arguing that adherents nonetheless were engaged in a form of patriotism. The same account also praised the “generally high quality” work of a Holocaust-denying YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, saying: “It is good to periodically step outside the ‘bubble’ of corporate commentators for additional perspective.” The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who posted them has resigned.
Oregon: The state’s Republican Party issued a lengthy statement stuffed full of conspiracy theories and disinformation condemning the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection. It claimed “there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump and his supporters.” Some 23 Republican members of the state House repudiated the statement, noting that “there is no credible evidence to support false flag claims,” adding that such rumormongering had become a distraction.
Wyoming: State activists opened a campaign to “recall” Congressman Liz Cheney after she joined the Republicans voting to impeach Trump, and they have collected over 55,000 signatures. Ten county-level parties in the state voted to censure Cheney. A state senator named Anthony Bouchard announced a 2022 campaign against the congresswoman. The Wyoming Republican state party said "there has not been a time during our tenure when we have seen this type of an outcry from our fellow Republicans, with the anger and frustration being palpable in the comments we have received."
Matt Gaetz of Florida campaigns against his fellow Republican Congressman Liz Cheney in Wyoming.
Pro-Trump Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida even traveled to Wyoming to lead a rally attacking Cheney. "We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican party, and I intend to win it,” Gaetz told the rally.
The sentiments in Wyoming were deep and widespread. A Gillette woman named Shelley Horn started the Cheney recall petition, and told CNN: “You just can't go, 'Oh well, I need to vote with my conscience.' No! Vote for what your people put you in there to do. You're a Republican, you're supposed to back your party regardless.”
Trump supporter Taylor Haynes told CNN, "In my view, she's done in Wyoming." A poll commissioned by the Trump political operation purportedly showed the impeachment vote had hurt her popularity. “Liz Cheney's favorables there are only slightly worse than her father's shooting skills,” quipped Donald Trump Jr.
Other polls, however, supported the claim. A Jan. 27 McLaughlin poll that showed 70% of Wyoming voters believe the impeachment trial was unconstitutional; more than two-thirds disapprove of Cheney’s vote, and 63% say they are unlikely to vote for Cheney again.
Some longtime GOP figures defended her. Gale Geringer, a veteran Republican strategist, told CNN that Cheney showed "courage" in casting the Trump impeachment vote: "I don't underestimate the anger people are feeling right now. It's huge. And Liz Cheney has become the target of that anger, but I don't think she's really the cause of it. I think it's fear of what the Biden administration is going to do to Wyoming. We're petrified. Our entire economy, all of our jobs, our tax base has been threatened. And there's nothing we can do about Joe Biden for four years. But we can take that fear and anger out on Liz Cheney."
But Politico reporter Tara Palmieri tagged along with the CNN crew, and found it nearly impossible to find anyone in the state who wasn’t angry with their congresswoman. Her impression was that Cheney is in serious political trouble.
Honestly, it was hard to find anyone who would defend Cheney — and I really tried to talk to as many people as I could not at the rally. I stopped at a biker bar, a gun shop, a vape shop, a hardware store, a steakhouse, a diner, a dentist’s office and a pawn shop …
— At Harbor Freight Tools, when I uttered the name “Liz Cheney,” an employee behind the cash register hurled a threatening epithet. Then a beefy and tattooed supervisor, Torrey Price, 48, came over mad as hell. His mask hung below his nose when he told me, “I don’t think she spoke for Wyoming.”
Price never votes in primaries but said he will in August 2022 — to oust Cheney. He shared more of his thoughts: the election was stolen, the U.S. Capitol raid was staged, and the number of Covid deaths were grossly inflated. He and his colleague Joe agreed on all of these points, adding that they would not be getting the vaccine.
— At the Outlaw Saloon, I envied the way a recently vaccinated NYT reporter sauntered into the biker bar maskless, when earlier, a middle-aged DJ in a cowboy hat asked me for my credentials. Likely because there were only two masks in the bar — the one on my face and another on a table, with the words “political prisoner” printed in red. The guy who threw down that mask predicted the size of the rally against Cheney, telling me the night before, “I guarantee you there will be 600 people there.” I didn’t believe him.
— At the steakhouse, our comely waitress said “a lot of people are fired up” about Cheney. As a lifelong native of Wyoming, she said Cheney made a grave mistake by not representing the people of her state.
Palmieri concluded: “If there was any doubt this is still Trump’s Republican Party, my time in Cheyenne dispelled it.”
The push to embrace Trumpism is roiling other state Republican parties as well. In Wisconsin, where 15 Republican lawmakers signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence the day before the Washington, D.C. riot urging him to postpone the certification, and two Republican congressmen from the state, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany, objected to the electoral votes, the party is divided into two camps.
“The Republican Party right now is relatively divided, but it's not the traditional ideological divisions that used to be in place, as much as it’s between the sane and insane wings of the party,” RightWisconsin Editor James Wigderson told the Madison Capital Times. “I think that there’s a chance of a real fracture coming.”
Establishment Republicans such as former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, however, defended the Trumpists for their paranoia and embrace of partisan disinformation: “That is the perspective they have, that is the view that they have and it’s valid; you can’t say someone’s opinion of a subjective matter is invalid,” she said. “I mean, what gives us the right to judge someone’s opinion like that?”
In Michigan, where Republicans also embraced the “Stop the Steal” campaign prior to the insurrection, the impulse to maintain their embrace of Trumpism remains largely undiminished. The Allegan County Republican Party censured Congressman Fred Upton because he voted to impeach Trump.
“Not a lot appears to be changing. We have former Ambassador Ron Weiser (expected to be the new Michigan GOP chair) and Meshawn Maddock (expected to be Weiser’s co-chair),” WKAR politics reporter Abigail Censky observed. “(Maddock) led ‘Stop the Steal’ efforts in the state and was a key part of the kind of infrastructure to overturn the state’s election results, which we know from bipartisan clerks and expert testimony was a fair and safe and secure election. It’s interesting to see that that’s kind of beyond reproach still, and that, that leadership is still going to go into place.”
And in Georgia, Republican Party officials are grimacing at the wounds being inflicted on their voter-appeal operations by the presence of QAnon-loving Congressman Majorie Taylor Greene in the state’s delegation, as well as in the media as her multiple conspiracist pronouncements—such as her approval of lynching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—have come increasingly to light.
“If you have any common sense, you know she's an anchor on the party. She is weighing us down,” said Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia Republican election administrator who criticized the baseless election conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and his supporters.
“Some people are saying maybe Nancy Pelosi will throw her out” of Congress, Sterling said. “The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They’re gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy — like what came out Wednesday, the Jewish space laser to start fires. I mean, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole you go.”
The unhinged behavior and conspiracism is widespread. The Oregon GOP’s statement was rife with conspiracy theories, including a passage explaining why they viewed the Jan. 6 insurrection as a false flag operation:
Whereas this false flag will support Joe Biden plans to introducing new domestic terrorism legislation likely placing more emphasis on themes from post-9/11 Patriot Act such as allowing those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawing donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowing electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, letting the government use secret sources in those trials, and perhaps new provisions such as codifying putting conservatives on a secret no-fly list without recourse to due process and restricting free speech, similar to the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized making “false statements” critical of the Federal government.
The peculiar combination of self-righteousness, persecution complex, and projection endemic to extremist conspiracism was omnipresent. Shelley Horn, the Wyoming petitioner, blamed Cheney’s impeachment vote for dividing the nation: “It’s just sows more hate and division,” Horn told the Cowboy State Daily, “and people are tired of it. Our country can’t stand much more.”
It’s obvious that some of the party’s national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, don’t actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it’s politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.
This makes the GOP’s post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.
This is what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America’s “epistemological crisis.” It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time to using those lies to coach half of the nation on how and why to hate the other half—and politicians gleefully profiting from it as well.
The bizarre and otherworldly QAnon cult—the conspiracist Donald Trump fanatics who believe that liberal Democrats and their allies have been secretly operating a global pedophilia ring that is going to end in mass arrests called “The Storm”—has not only been spreading farther and deeper into mainstream conservative politics, but the entire Republican Party appears on the verge of being completely consumed by it.
Trump himself retweets QAnoners’ authoritarian paeans to his presidency and its attacks on his critics. His former national security adviser posted video of himself and a group of friends taking the “QAnon Oath.” Trump’s son Eric tweets out open support of the “Q” conspiracy theories. Trump’s favorite cable-news channel features reporters who openly embrace the theories. Dozens of Republican candidates openly spout QAnon claims and rhetoric, and GOP organizations have used their Facebook accounts to promote QAnon theories.
The fantastic aspects of this conspiracism—particularly the obdurate insistence by the growing hordes of True Believers that “Q has always been right” in the face of the mounting reality that not one of the theories’ predictions or claims has yet proven accurate—make it difficult in many ways to take it seriously. In an ordinary world, it would be dismissed as a joke.
But the up-is-down belief system inherent in conspiracist worldviews like QAnon has spread so far that it not only has infected democratic discourse with garbage disinformation, but its underlying nature is profoundly violent—which presents the very real threat (one we’ve already seen playing out) of unhinged QAnon believers acting out and wreaking potentially significant levels of harm.
After all, there is a reason the FBI warned last year that QAnon was a likely vector for fueling domestic terrorism: “The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.”
Yet it continues to seep into mainstream Republican politics with almost nary a raised eyebrow. Oregon’s QAnon-loving GOP Senate nominee, Jo Rae Perkins, can even call for the imposition of martial law in her home state (to battle “antifa”) without any notable pushback. The Republican Party has resolutely—and silently—refused to withdraw its support for a single one of the 64 GOP candidates with QAnon connections.
Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan compiled a complete list of QAnon candidates:
Thirteen candidates have secured a spot on the ballot in November by competing in primary elections.
Of those 13 candidates, five are from California, two are from Illinois, and there is one each from Colorado, New Jersey, Oregon, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas.
One candidate in Florida is running as an independent, who is also on the ballot in November.
One candidate, in Georgia, is heading to an upcoming primary runoff.
One candidate in New York is running as a Republican write-in.
In total, 59 of the candidates are Republicans, two are Democrats, one is a Libertarian, and two are independents.
“They've done absolutely nothing to discourage QAnon followers from believing as they do,” QAnon researcher Travis View told Politico,adding that this only stokes the community’s fervor. “I mean, QAnon is premised on the idea that there is a secret plan to save the world, so they take the silence more as part of that secrecy.”
The White House and its allies have offered disingenuous retorts that verge on ballsy dishonesty when asked about the friendliness of Trump and his allies. When Flynn posted his 53-second clip to Twitter on the Fourth of July, he was participating in a ritual already being shared widely that week as video posts by the QAnon community (Perkins among them) under the hashtag #TakeTheOath (which in fact is the same loyalty oath taken by members of Congress). The trend was in fact inspired by a person using the Q identity on the message board 8kun to “symbolically take the oath on social media platforms.” At the video’s end, Flynn recited the QAnon slogan: “Where we go one, we go all!”
Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell told the Washington Examiner that there was no intent on Flynn’s part to embrace QAnon conspiracy theories—rather, he claimed, Flynn only “wanted to encourage people to think about being a citizen." He claimed the phrase "Where we go one, we go all" was first engraved on a bell on one of President John F. Kennedy's sailboats—which in fact is a falsehood first propagated by the Q persona in a message-board post. Powell also told CNN that “implying anything wrong with words long ago inscribed on a bell to encourage the unity of the human race is malevolent and just plain wrong. There is nothing more to the story."
Experts laughed at Flynn’s denial. “This is absolutely pro-QAnon," researcher/author Mike Rothschild told CNN. Moreover, Flynn’s public embrace was a major validation for the cult’s True Believers, he explained.
"The Q community is really excited by all of this. Flynn is a hugely important figure to them, seen as a warrior who infiltrated the deep state by pretending to plead guilty," Rothschild said. "The video of Flynn actually taking the oath is, to them, total validation that they were right, that Flynn is a warrior who fights for them, and that they can be digital soldiers on his level."
This underlying vision—of being a heroic warrior for truth battling against the vilest of evils—is what attracts so many followers to QAnon, and simultaneously creates permission in their minds for committing the most atrocious acts of violence one can imagine. We’ve already seen this playing out in domestic-terrorism incidents that, fortunately, did not reach fruition:
A QAnon fanatic armed with an AR-15 and an armored truck blocked traffic on the Hoover Dam and demanded the inspector general’s report on the government investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices in June 2018.
A California man arrested in December 2018 with bomb-making materials in his car told investigators he intended to use them to "blow up a satanic temple monument" in the Springfield, Illinois Capitol rotunda. His larger intentions, he said, were "make Americans aware of Pizzagate and the New World Order, who were dismantling society."
An Illinois woman who became a fanatical QAnon devotee livestreamed herself on a cross-country trip, armed with a collection of illegal knives, to New York City, where she hoped to “take out” Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. NYPD officers arrested her there.
The young man who murdered Gambino mob boss Frank Cali, who gorged himself on QAnon theories online, told investigators he committed the crime because he believed that Cali was part of the “Deep State” operation to sabotage Trump’s presidency.
The Los Angeles locomotive engineer, also a QAnon fan, who drove his engine at high speed off the tracks near the docks where the US Naval Ship Mercy was stationed as part of the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic—it halted about 800 yards away from the ship—told arresting officers he was hoping to ram the ship because he believed the claims (primarily from QAnon theorists) that the patients were going to be secretly carted off to Guantanamo: “You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. … I had to. People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”
The QAnon cult has always had this violent idea of heroism at its dark heart, even among the once-respectable Republicans who have been consumed by it. One of the most prominent of these is Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst, college lecturer, and onetime Fox News regular whose career as a pundit metastasized from virulent Islamophobia to unapologetic anti-Obama “Birtherism.”
Nowadays, Scheuer can be found penning lengthy defenses of QAnon and its nonsense, claiming that dire consequences lay just around the corner for the usual laundry list of Trump critics and journalists who dared question the regime: “Maybe all of the following, gallows-headed traitors will write a Q on their palm and claim innocence by insanity?” he mused last December after Trump’s impeachment.
The supposed “Storm” arrests are only the beginnings of Scheuer’s fantasies, however. Another essay, penned a year before the QAnon screed, laid out his vision of a citizens’ uprising—replete with lynchings and domestic terrorism—in response to the “treason” of attacking Donald Trump:
American patriots have so far, praise God, been remarkably disciplined in not responding to tyranny and violence with violence. For now they must remain so, armed but steady. But the time for such patience is fast slipping away; indeed, that patience is quickly becoming an obviously rank and self-destructive foolishness. If Trump does not act soon to erase the above noted tyranny and tyrants, the armed citizenry must step in and eliminate them.
It is, of course, far better if Trump does so, and I pray and believe he will. That said, the sheer, nay, utter joy and satisfaction to be derived from beholding great piles of dead U.S.-citizen tyrants is not one that will be missed if Trump does not soon do the necessary to save the republic.
The QAnoners’ fantasies, like everything dreamed up on the far right, are certain to remain unrealized. But the likelihood that many, many people are going to be hurt in their looming attempt to make them manifest is also just as certain.
