The Intellectual Perspective
By Johnny Anonymous - 2-15-2021
As a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday, January 6 2021, Donald Trump was reportedly unconcerned about the destruction or insurrection taking place but instead how the violent extremists appeared “low-class” (re: Bill Egan)
The president’s ardent loyalists breached security measures and clashed with police, killing a total of 5 individuals – one of them being a police officer -- in the wake of Mr Trump’s fiery speech filled with falsities about the 2020 election.
Just as it is known for Charles Manson to never have expressly ordered for the Helter Skelter murders, Mr Trump’s behavior and speech on the audience clearly called for what they were to do. They gathered in DC from all-across America, to march to the Capitol building as Congress convened to certify the results of his electoral defeat to President-elect Joe Biden.
What followed was a violent and historic scene: QAnon conspiracy theorists dressed in furs, domestic terrorists waving confederate flags, and hundreds of men and women in Trump campaign gear ransacking lawmakers’ offices. Some took the Senate dais and echoed the president’s false claims of voter fraud.
For many of the Capitol rioters and others who believe Trump won, it was not a large leap to “Stop the Steal” from a pathway of conspiratorial steppingstones that included the “Pizzagate” claim of 2016 that Democrats were running a child sex ring in the back of a popular Washington pizza parlor, the debunked allegation that a low-level Democratic National Committee aide was murdered for leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails and many more.
Trump’s false claims of election fraud, which animated the riot on Jan. 6, have reassembled — virtually, anyway — a cast of characters that go way back. Other conspiratorial theorizers that mass shootings were false flag operations by liberals to promote gun control included Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.; Infowars impresario Alex Jones; fired Florida Atlantic University professor James Tracy; and retired University of Minnesota-Duluth professor James Fetzer, all of whom then embraced Trump’s baseless fraud claims.
“If you look at these Sandy Hook folks, it’s not like they slipped on a banana peel and believe in Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. This is an expression of a whole worldview, or an expression of personality traits,” Joe Uscinski, an assistant professor at the University of Miami and an author of the book “American Conspiracy Theories,” said in an interview. “You’re not going to change someone’s mind. And even if you did, it wouldn’t matter because you’re going to end up in a game of Whac-a-Mole.”
“Once people buy into the concept that the government is an evil organization trying at every turn to harm them, it is easy for people to essentially radicalize themselves and find others who agree,” Uscinski added.
Sandy Hook was the first American mass shooting to ignite viral, fantastical claims that it was a phony event staged by the Obama administration as a pretext for confiscating Americans’ firearms. Since then virtually every high-profile mass shooting has generated similar theories.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, elected to Congress in November, has for years circulated bogus theories, including around mass shootings. Recently CNN reported that in 2018 and 2019, Greene indicated support on her Facebook page for commenter’s recommending violence against Democratic leaders. In January 2019, CNN reported, Greene “liked a comment that said ‘a bullet to the head would be quicker’ to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” In response, Greene posted a statement on Twitter attributing the inflammatory content to “teams of people” who “manage my pages.”
During her 2020 campaign, Politico mined her social media accounts, finding Islamophobic conspiracy theories and the false claim that George Soros, a wealthy Democratic donor, is a Nazi. After calling the 2020 presidential vote a “fraudulent, stolen election,” Greene voted on Jan. 6 with 146 other Republicans against certifying the Electoral College count that officially declared Biden the winner. The day before the Capitol riot, she referred to the Stop the Steal protests as “our 1776 moment.”
In 2018 she wrote on Facebook, “The people in power stop the truth and control and stall investigations, then provide cover for the real enemies of our nation.”
When a follower from Jamestown, New York, posted false claims about the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and said Sandy Hook was “staged,” Greene responded, “This is all true.” The post was surfaced last week by Media Matters for America, a liberal group that monitors conservative news and media posts.
Greene’s spokesman, Nick Dyer, did not address her false election claims. He referred to her statement on Twitter last week acknowledging the Parkland shooting and blaming “‘gun-free’ school zones” for the massacre.
“Politicians and Hollywood celebrities are the first to protect themselves with armed security, as you can clearly see by the military fortress around the Capitol,” Greene wrote.
Alex Jones, another purveyor of election disinformation, spread false Sandy Hook conspiracy claims to millions through his Infowars radio and online show. He has falsely labeled most mass shootings “false flags,” and baselessly claims that the Sept. 11 attacks and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City were government inside jobs.
Last week, the Texas Supreme Court allowed three defamation cases filed by Sandy Hook survivors against Jones to move forward. The lawsuits say Jones spreads false claims in part to sell merchandise geared toward a conspiracy-minded audience preparing for the end of times.
Those suits did not stop Infowars from staging a rally in Washington the night before the Capitol riot. Then on Jan. 6, Jones broadcast live near the Capitol while an Infowars cameraman filmed the rioters from inside the building — even capturing the moment when Ashli Babbitt was shot dead by a Capitol Police officer.
“Our own cameraman followed the crowds into the Senate, and I watched them execute an unarmed woman,” Jones would later say.
Jones’ ex-wife, Kelly Morales, said she sent video of Jones’ broadcasts during the riot, most of which she said had since been removed from his website, to the FBI She has been posting excerpts on her Twitter account.
“Just like Sandy Hook and Pizzagate, Alex knows his actions culminate in violence and harassment,” Morales said in an interview. She and Jones are engaged in a bitter court battle stemming from their 2015 divorce.
Now federal law enforcement is investigating the Infowars group as central to the Capitol attack. Visitors whom had appeared on Infowars just before the November election have vowed they would “stand up and protect people on Election Day” against Democrats who Jones claimed would be “stealing the election.”
Infowars and Jones did not immediately respond to emails and text messages requesting comment.
Professor James Tracy, a former journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University, also questioned Sandy Hook, leading to his firing in 2015. He did not protest in Washington on Jan. 6, but he has latched onto 2020 election falsehoods.
“The fake news media that have been complicit in U.S. ‘regime change’ over the past four years are now acting as the ideological agency to enforce the unfounded legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election,” he wrote on his blog.
In an interview, Tracy said he also thought the Democratic nomination was stolen from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and insisted that “the truth movement” is “becoming much more mainstream.” On his blog, Tracy posts wild theories about the health risks of 5G networks, communist revolution in America and the COVID Tracking Project.
Tracy contributed to the book “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook,” co-edited by Fetzer, the retired Duluth professor. Fetzer moved from Sandy Hook in 2012 to the Boston Marathon bombing a year later, helping to write another book titled “And Nobody Died in Boston, Either.” Fetzer helped found an outfit called Moon Rock Books, which published false conspiracy theories related to Sept. 11 and the John F. Kennedy assassination — longtime obsessions of Fetzer’s — as well as mass shootings in Parkland, Las Vegas and Orlando, Florida.
In late 2019, Pozner won a $450,000 defamation judgment against Fetzer. But he has continued to pursue other conspiracy theories, including around the 2020 election.
“There actually is a deep state, and they really do not honor the election results nor the will of the people,” Fetzer wrote on his blog last week. He also posted his approval of Greene’s Parkland conspiracy theories, saying, “No member of Congress has been willing to speak the truth about it.”
Afterwards, it was heard that Mr Trump was apparently turned off by the chaotic scene, although NOT due to the assault on the US government but according to New York Magazine, because his supporters looked “low-class.” Another close adviser said Mr Trump was “bemused” by the attacks.
“He doesn’t like low class things,” an anonymous White House source told the magazine.
Other reports indicated the president’s disapproval of his supporters’ appearances while attacking the Capitol, rather than focusing on how to end the chaotic disorder.
Mr Trump was also reportedly furious that Vice President Mike Pence declined to intervene in the certification of the national vote. However the vice president serves in a mostly-symbolic role throughout the typically mundane procedures and could not have stepped in to override.
But that’s exactly what the president wanted him to do: In a tweet on the morning of the riots, Mr. Trump wrote: “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. He has the absolute right to do it.”
The vice president did not have the “absolute right” to override the will of the American people. Mr. Trump went on to release a video during the Capitol mob attacks in which he continued to promote outright falsities surrounding the election. Twitter eventually blocked the president’s account on the day of the attack before issuing a permanent ban two days later. This was followed by a wave of social media platforms all suspending the president from posting, with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying the president would not be given back control of his account until an orderly transition of power could be conducted.
Several of those social media platforms cited specific threats that had been made for follow-up attacks, as well as the president’s encouragement of the mob that stormed the Capitol, for their blocks on his accounts.
