"Show Strength and Be Strong."

  

WE KNOW that on January 6, with the Washington Monument as patriotic backdrop, the President of the United States told a crowd of tens of thousands, “You’ll never take back your country with weakness.” That claim was greeted with cheers.  

 

“You have to show strength and be strong,” he continued.

 

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“That would require these believers to completely reconfigure their sense of self and their identity.” 

Whitney Phillips, professor of communications and misinformation

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Then his supporters set off, determined to act. To be strong, not weak. HuffPost combined the work of several news outlets, below:

 

“Our president wants us here,” a man live-streaming from inside the Capitol building said, according to a New York Times report. “We wait and take orders from our president.”

 

“The President asked for his supporters to be there to attend, and I felt like it was important, because of how much I love this country, to actually be there,” Larry Brock Jr., an Air Force veteran who was seen on the floor of the Senate in a helmet and fatigued [sic] while holding flex-cuffs, told The New Yorker. (Brock was later arrested.)

 

“He said, ‘Hey, I need my digital soldiers to show up on January 6.’ And we all did,” Doug Sweet, a 58-year old who stormed the Capitol and was later arrested, told The Wall Street Journal.

 

“We were invited here!” one insurrectionist can be seen in a live video yelling into a bullhorn on the Capitol steps. “We were invited by the president of the United States!”

 

At one point, rioters confronted a line of police officers, according to an on-the-ground report in The New Yorker. One man wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat warned the officers to “stand down.”

 

“You’re outnumbered,” the man said. “There’s a fucking million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump – your boss.”

 

Some insurrectionists stated their intent to follow Trump’s orders much earlier. For example, Daniel Goodwyn, a member of the Proud Boys…quoted Trump’s statement to Proud Boys to “Stand back and stand by!” in a tweet on Nov. 7.

 

Goodwyn took that call to action seriously. On January 6, he tweeted from inside the Capitol, “Await orders from our Commander in Chief.” This tweet was included as evidence in the charging documents after Goodwyn was arrested for entering the building during the insurrection.

 

Finally, reporters noted, one of the intruders sat down in the seat where Vice President Pence had been serving as presiding officer of the Senate during the electoral vote count.

 

It must have been a proud moment for an American “patriot” who was there to stand up for the U.S. Constitution. And with that, he declared, “Donald Trump is the emperor of the United States.”

 

* 

MICHAEL SHERMAN, the U.S. District Attorney for the District of Columbia, soon announced that more than 70 individuals involved in the riots had already been charged with a variety of crimes, a total of 170 had been identified, and “hundreds” of other arrests were likely to result.

 

Many, he explained, would be charged, as follows:

 

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

 

   If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

 

Meanwhile, federal, state, and local law enforcement and the U.S. military decided there would be no more messing around. Police and National Guard troops took up positions around all fifty state capitals. The Pentagon deployed 25,000 troops to Washington D.C. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy ruled that those guarding Capitol Hill would be armed and ready.

 

The New York Times explained:

 

About 16 groups – some of them saying they will be armed and most of them made up of hard-line supporters of Mr. Trump – have registered to stage protests in Washington [on or around Inauguration Day], officials said.

 

One Defense Department official said law enforcement agencies are planning for a range of outcomes, including a worse-case scenario in which people with firearms try to attack dignitaries, “suicide-type aircraft” try to fly into the capital’s restricted airspace and even remote-controlled drones that could be used to attack the crowd.

 

While those scenarios are among the more extreme, the officials said they were particularly worried about the possibility of multiple, violent confrontations, including with firearms, simultaneously flaring up around the inaugural dignitaries.

 

(Should we point out here, for the really dumb Trump fans, that none of those 16 groups is Antifa?)

 

In the wake of the shocking assault on democracy and the rule of law, we know conservatives tried as hard as they could to pull up their pants, and pretend that fringe elements of the Trump Party hadn’t taken a shit in America’s lap.

 

Naturally, many Trump supporters were confused by all the lies their leaders were feeding them. And, as noted before, they believed what they had to believe. To admit to themselves that their god-hero, Donald Trump, had stirred the mob, that the Trump base was shot through with haters of all kinds, would be too much to bear. Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of communications and disinformation at Syracuse University, explained the conundrum this way. “The people who already believe that the election was stolen and that Joe Biden isn’t a legitimate President, I don’t know if there’s anything we can say to them.” To convince them they had been fooled, that Trump was no patriot at all, “That would require these believers to completely reconfigure their sense of self and their identity.”

 

It was the classic cult mentality.

 

Yet, the evidence piled up every day. So, let’s check again with law enforcement round the country and see how they’re doing arresting people who took place in the attack. We know, for instance, that Reject-President Trump hinted that all the rioters were members of Antifa and, generally speaking, liberal scum dressed in sheep’s clothing, with MAGA hats on their sheep heads, and Trump flags in their sheep hands.

 

(Fact check: Sheep don’t have hands.)

 

Like a blogger possessed, I kept digging for the kind of truth that had escaped the president’s fans’ grasp. I knew there were still all kinds of voices on the right, insisting that theirs was the “Law & Order” side. Trump supporters, Trump supporters insisted, would never have rioted in the way we saw Trump supporters do. It was sad, really. Some of the same people who believed in every word that emanated from a mysterious internet figure identified only as “Q,” looked at the evidence from January 6, and refused to believe what their two peepers showed.

 

Christopher Ray Grider, 39, from the town of Eddy, Texas turned himself in after allegedly being involved in the riot. He was charged with “willful depredation of federal property, remaining in a restricted area unlawfully, and violent entry.” Grider could be seen in a video, inside the Capitol Building, explaining, “The president asked people to come and show their support. I feel like it’s the least that we can do. It’s kind of why I came from Central Texas all the way to DC.”

 

Grider is allegedly seen in various photos with a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag draped across his shoulders.

 

According to Channel 25, ABC News, “serving Central Texas,” the suspect, helped batter on the doors, and break a window through which Ashli Babbitt tried to climb, before she was shot and killed by police.

 

…video allegedly shows Grider in front of the glass doors which lead to the Speaker’s Lobby. At one point, a man standing next to Grider attempted to break the glass window. Grider allegedly handed a black helmet to this man, then spoke to the man as Grider appeared to knock on the top of the helmet, showing that it is a hard instrument.

 

The man then accepted the helmet and used it to strike the glass doors, breaking the glass that Babbitt eventually attempted to jump through.

 

Grider was allegedly caught on camera attempting to push open the doors and then kick the doors in an attempt to breach the entrance leading to House Chamber where members of Congress were located.

 

So: another Trump fan, breaking the door. And another unlucky Trump fan, Babbitt, shot dead.