For a time, it looked like the Justice for J6 rally, in honor of those arrested in the battle on Capitol Hill on January 6th,was shaping up to be another violent insurrectionary riot. But on the day of the planned demonstration, this past Saturday, only a couple of hundred protesters showed up.
The rally had been quiety imploding for some time. As the Washington Post noted,
many influential figures on the far right actually discouraged their followers from showing up, asserting the event was a trap. Baseless rumors have ricocheted through social media to the effect that the federal government was attempting to lure demonstrators to Washington to arrest them, and that left-wing activists disguised themselves as Trump supporters would deliberately cause trouble.
The Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence that includes participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection, discouraged members from traveling to the District on Saturday.
Two days before the rally, Donald Trump himself was calling it a “set-up” — despite the fact that some of the organizers of the event were former Trump campaign staffers.
So what do you do when the big important rally you’ve been promising for months turns out to be a big dud? You pretend that everyone on your side of the political aisle knew already that no one would be going to the event — and you blame the “corporate press” of hyping up the rally in the first place.
The Federalist called it a “Another Corrupt Press Dud,” whatever that is; Townhall lamented that “we saw the media overhyping an allegedly disturbing and dangerous crowd and then seeing the press outnumbering the participants.” The Daily Caller whined that “[t]he media … built the insignificant rally into a headline-grabbing event.”
Those on the right with a conspiratorial bent went much further, claiming that the rally was a “false flag” pushed by none other than the FBI itself. “Anyone with half a brain could see that this was another FBI entrapment scheme,” wrote Brian C. Joondeph on the American Thinker blog, “to justify more arrests and more prisoners in solitary confinement awaiting trial for walking benignly through the U.S. Capitol” The title of his post? “What If the FBI Threw an Insurrection and Nobody Came?”
On Infowars, none other than aging libertarian poster boy Ron Paul wondered if the rally was “A Set-Up or a Psy-Op,” ultimately voting for door number two.
[I]t seems a little too obvious that Biden backers and their allies in the deep state would hold a fake rally just to set-up more “insurrectionists” to be arrested. It’s possible that they believe conservatives and Trump supporters are dumb enough to walk into a trap – or perhaps another trap – but I find it unconvincing.
Instead, perhaps this rally was in reality a kind of psychological operation. After all, such an exercise would be a win-win for the planners.
By “the planners” he means Biden and the Deep State.
On one hand if a massive crowd showed up it would give new life to the now-discredited narrative that an attack on “our democracy” more serious than 9/11 (as President Biden laughably claimed) was operating just below the surface of society. …
On the other hand, if no one showed up, as it turns out happened, the real organizers [i.e. Biden et al] could laugh and crow about how support has evaporated for the hundreds originally arrested after January 6th … .
I admit I laughed and crowed a little, though that doesn’t make me one of “the real organizers.”
On the left-leaning blog Wonkette, Robyn Pennacchia offfered a far more convincing answer than all this right-wing blather: through their own perverse paranoia, the right-wing rally organizers and their original supporters had essentially psyched themselves out.
Think about it. These people are such paranoid conspiracy theorists that they thought that their own event to protest the arrests of their fellow paranoid conspiracy theorists was a “false flag.” If that’s the way they’re going now, how are they ever going to have a public demonstration again? How are they going to trust one another? Because really, any of them could be a member of Antifa trying to make them look bad. How would they even begin to tell the difference between a member of Antifa trying to make them look bad and a QAnon supporter or Proud Boy just being themselves? How would they tell the difference between a truly devoted Trumpist who wants to overthrow the government and a secret agent trying to fit them up for a plot to overthrow the government? …
Eventually, they are all going to be so paranoid that they just leave us all alone forever, and frankly, I’m not that mad at that.
Me neither.
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You know, it’s been 20 years, and I still can’t figure out how 9/11 was “an attack on democracy.” As opposed to, you know, “an attack on this country we don’t like for various reasons mostly to do with how they interfere in our part of the world.” And as opposed in another direction to “attempting to overturn the result of a free and relatively fair election.” (I say “relatively” because the fact that individual states are in charge of deciding who gets to vote within their borders means that US federal elections are, by definition, not fair.)
Or maybe they’re either dead or too sick to attend the rally.
Hello.
Not so out of topic, but did you know that Epik, the Web Host of sites like 8Chan, Gab, Parler, the site of the Proud Boys and all, site to denounce women who abort, and so on, has been hacked yesterday (article in French again, sorry about that) ?
180 Go had been stolen and put online, and – surprise – a lot of informations are not encrypted, including sensible datas (names, physical addresses, credit card numbers…), which had allowed to identify owners of some of those lovely sites… Funnily, there are also the datas of some crooky sites…
And now, for something completely out of topic, do you know the Colorado Tenacious Unicorn Ranch ? Can not put the article here (it is a suscriber only, sorry), but you may find infos about it on the web. It is a ranch where alpagas are raised. Specificiy is that all workers are transpersons, and the ranch gladly welcome queer persons victims of assaults.
Have a nice day.
@occasional reader
I know about the ranch, and have been following their adventures and escapades with complete and utter horror. They know as much about ranching and livestock as I do about the inside of a black hole and aren’t willing to learn.
The animals are in terrible condition, they sheared them FAR too late so they’re going to lose dozens in the winter, the alpacas are mixed and breeding at will which is really not something you want since you PLAN births so they happen in the right damned season for the lambs/crias to survive, and they’ve self reportedly got nigh on 200 animals on grazing land fit for 7 (yes, that is seven, not seventy) so their entire property has been nibbled down to a literal dust bowl dotted with the odd toxic plant. They haven’t even built feed racks to keep the hay off the ground, untrampled, and away from the communal shitpile alpacas use. I’m not even going to start on getting into the water situation.
Look, I get that everyone has to learn, but for god’s sake this is farming 101 shit. Crack any book on livestock and it’ll be in the first couple of chapters.
You may have noticed I have a strong opinion about their skills. 🙂 My family has been raising sheep in a different sort of inhospitable terrain for the last 700 odd years, so it’s rather in my blood.
Conspiracy theorists turning against themselves? Here for it.
I don’t want to be too harsh, but I find it frustrating to reason with people who keep seeing conspiracies, because they ignore the actual problems. Been arguing with someone over vaccines and it’s annoying.
@rabid rabbit – That’s fair. 9/11 was worse overall, but the insurrection last year was about overthrowing election results, so it was more of an attack on democracy specifically.
@ epitome
As the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves in to.
None of the righties I am acquainted with had even heard of it before it was supposed to happen.
@occasional reader, I hope you’re following the EpikFail hashtag on twitter. Interesting stuff continues to come out about the Epik hack. Epik appear to have been comprehensively incompetent. That’s a bit of a theme with the far right, isn’t it?
Another day, another round of rightwingers insisting that they’re only TEMPORARILY disempowered, just you wait and see.
? Paranoia strikes deeep. ?
I think the Wonkette writer summed it up perfectly. They’re splitting into so many mutually-distrustful groups and throwing out those who are insufficiently pure.
Tr*mp doesn’t give a crap as long as they keep sending him money to pay off his loans and show up at his Triumph of the Shrill rallies.
> Threp
Thanks for the information.
I know nothing about animal husbandry, so i can not say. The article was mainly focusing on the fact that the ranch was in a 70% Trumpist state, that they receive lots of threats, and that they have to have regular shooting training sessions, to wear bulletproof vests and all. So, maybe they have least time to learn husbandry ?
If they have a way to be reach, maybe you could provide them some advice about animal husbandry ?
> Moggie
Sorry, i am not on social networks.
But from what i have read, indeed, the CEO of Epik, the self-called “Internet Lex Luthor”, Rob Monster have no knowledge of encryption and domain name transfer (and quite a lot of other computer science fields). I do not know about the team who works under his direction, but for a company fancying itself as the “Swiss Bank of Domains”, that sure is not really probative…
This sounds like a way to admit that Jan 6 was a mistake without admitting they made a mistake with Jan 6. It was too obvious that Jan 6 was an attack on democracy, so instead they tried to blame others via conspiracy theories. Now when they realize that a certain rally might go down the same way they pre-emptively blame Antifa.
IIRC the Jan 6 insurrection was instantly blamed on “antifa” as soon as it happened, and increasingly once the public started to fully understand what had just happened. I think this antifa narrative was promoted as damage control by various rightwingers, who didn’t personally participate in and perhaps didn’t approve the coup attempt and/or physical trashing of Capitol and/or violence against police officers. Some of them perhaps honestly believed it was mostly about antifa provocation.
The “police trap” narrative seems to have emerged more recently among the more serious insurrectionists, who are mainly pissed that their comrades/friends/family members (who definitely aren’t antifa) have been slapped with legal consequences. Now, these people probably claim (and perhaps honestly believe) it was “obviously” just a half-assed riot, and one with justified sentiment behind it, rather than a serious coup attempt. It was clearly a miscalculation on the part of those who got themselves in trouble, which obviously wouldn’t have happened without entrapment, they say.
Or … their post-January-6 spin-doctoring is a mad scramble to perform damage control that they didn’t think would be necessary, because they expected the coup to succeed.
Remember, it came this close to large numbers of House and Senate members being massacred. If they’d been seconds slower in moving them to their safety bunkers the coup might have succeeded. And they had inside support: the Prez (obviously), some people at the Pentagon and in the Capitol Police, and Boebert and probably some others among the Sedition Caucus.