One of the most enduring—and horrifying—sights of the January 6 insurrection was an actual gallows erected on the west side of the Capitol. People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch has revealed that plans to erect the gallows were underway almost as soon as Donald Trump issued his now-infamous call to arms on Twitter.
According to analysis from the nonprofit research group Advance Democracy, literally within hours of Trump calling for his followers to come to Washington on January 6 and "be wild," posters at TheDonald.win—successor to the r/The_Donald subreddit—took it as an order. One poster, CaptainChrisBacon, posted a picture asking, "Who Is Bringing The Gallows On January 6th, 2021?" The picture depicted the hanging of a Confederate war criminal—ironic given the number of Confederate flags on display at the insurrection.
Another poster, sunlessmage743, started a thread about the details of building a gallows, saying it could easily be done "with the right plan and the right people bringing pre cut materials to the site." Respondents were positively giddy. One claimed that the scene would be "so 1776." When user DJT2020 suggested they should also build a guillotine, user webthing offered to build it. User jc99ta mused that a guillotine could be used to slice watermelons when it wasn't being used to behead people.
Talk about a gallows dominated TheDonald.win for days afterward.
One user swiped Home Depot's logo to show just how easy it was to find the materials for a gallows. Another offered to bring a 500-foot paracord as a rope—and warned that they would be on the hunt for insufficiently loyal Republicans, as well as Black Lives Matter and "antifa." He initially backed off on using a paracord when told it could decapitate the person being hanged, but later mused that it would at least keep the person being hanged from thrashing about on the gallows. Among those on the list of targets were the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, and Mitt Romney.
There's more where these came from. Check out Advance Democracy's archive here.
These insurrectionists were dead serious about killing a lot of people. Consider that many of these sans-culottes were heavily armed, and some of them were carrying zip-ties. Simply put, these were not just "tourists." (I'm looking at you, Rep. Andrew Clyde.)
For the better part of the last three years, the Republicans have called Democrats an angry mob. And yet they believe it's too soon to investigate how an actual mob attacked the Capitol. This is yet more evidence that we need to get to the bottom of how this horror happened—with or without the GOP.
Donald Trump sent shockwaves through the conservative American political landscape following his victory in Indiana, which has all but guaranteed that he will be the Republican Party’s nominee in the 2016 presidential election. The prospect has excited former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, who hailed his victory as a “referendum on political correctness.”
His reaction to Trump’s all but assured nomination victory was picked up by Right Wing Watch, a watchdog group that monitors right wing politics in the U.S. “This is a movement to take America back, and when we say ‘take America back,’ we know exactly what that means,” said Duke on his radio program. He also attacked Jews for fomenting widespread opposition to one of the most racist presidential candidates in living memory.
What “the Jews” are really doing “is exposing their alien, anti-American, anti-American-majority position to all the Republicans and they’re going to push people more into awareness that the neocons are the problem, that these Jewish supremacists who control our country are the real problem and the reason why America is not great,” said Duke.
This, of course, is not the first time Duke has spoken about a Jewish conspiracy to control American media, politics, and culture. He even has a dedicated page on his personal website titled “Jewish Supremacism.”
Trump has treated the support of white supremacists as little more than a minor irritant. “David Duke endorsed me? OK, alright. I disavow, OK?” he said at a news conference shortly he claimed to not know who Duke was.
Duke had called Trump “the best of the lot” running for the Republican nomination. While he has said he never endorsed Trump outright, his enthusiastic support for the businessman forced Trump to finally disavow, belatedly, any support coming from the former leader of the KKK, after an outcry from the media and his Republican opponents. The press have uncovered numerous instances in the past in which Trump showed he not only knew who Duke was, but also rejected his political and social views, calling him “a big racist.”
There is no explanation, outside naked political opportunism, to explain how Trump went from hating Duke to failing initially to disavow his support. Nor is Duke an outlier among white supremacists. There is a long list of white supremacists who support Trump, and it only gets bigger by the day.
Photo: David Duke speaks in Belgium, 2008. Emmanuel d’Aubignosc/ Wikimedia Commons.
It’s that non-denominational, post-Halloween, pre-New Years period again. How are you planning to celebrate the War on Christmas?
Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Raheem Kassam
It’s the week after Halloween, which means we’re already deep into the Winter Holiday season.
I call it the “Winter Holiday season,” and not the “Christmas season,” because I am — as you may have guessed — a foot soldier in the secular army, battling for the soul of the Western World.
Taking the “Christmas” out of Christmas is just one of the many ways me and my Baphomet-worshipping, Feminazi cohorts have worked to dismantle the cultural pylons that sustain this homogeneously white and Christian empire we call the West.
One of our latest and most insidious tactics to de-Christianize the late-autumn period has been to whitewash (or rather redwash) the yuletide imagery from those festive coffee cups Starbucks traditionally switches to every November to coincide with the explosion of aural misery you and your caroling kind call “Jingle Bell Rock.”
Unfortunately for us, Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam has spotted the gambit, and he isn’t having it. In a post entitled “War On Christmas: Starbucks Red Cups Are Emblematic Of The Christian Cultural Cleansing Of The West,” Kassam tracks the descent of these cups’ adorable design from that of a “Christmas-oriented product” to the massacre of Western mores we have before us today.
Over the last six years, Kassam writes, Starbucks has steadily removed the Christmas elements from the cups — scrubbing the Nativity-evoking stars and Christmas pine tree branches, and replacing them with snowmen and snowflakes — which, while not strictly speaking “Christian,” at least “resembles something mildly festive and Western.” And now this year we have before us a “monstrosity” — behold: A Bare. Red. Cup.
Godless joe.
“The only thing that can redeem them from this whitewashing of Christmas is to print Bible verses on their cups next year,” Kassam writes.
“And no,” he contends, “I’m not ‘reading too much into it.'”
As long as we’re on the subject of the erroneous Christian persecution complex, we should acknowledge that there are arenas of more consequence than vessels for eggnog lattes where this fallacy plays out.
To wit: the three presidential candidates who have worked most diligently to position themselves as our nation’s last best hope for a Christian theocracy — Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal — will be attending the National Religious Liberties Conference this weekend, in an apparent effort to shore up their support among far-right evangelical Christians.
As if any of them needed to establish their bonafides with this lot.
In the last debate, Jindal made clear who his base was, advising his supporters that “We believe that the tomb is open,” heralding a new day for the country he wants to lead. Woe to any non-Christian Americans living under President Jindal, who made “religious liberty” one of the early touchstones of his campaign for the White House. (You have the liberty to follow Jindal’s religion, you see.)
[Swanson] wants the government to apply Old Testament law in all matters, thinks birth control turns women’s uteruses into “graveyards for lots and lots of little babies,” spoke up for Uganda’s “kill-the-gays” bill, sees constant threats to recruit his daughter to become a lesbian from Disney movies and Girl Scout cookies, and describes homosexuality as a satanic “disease” that causes natural disasters.
This is the guy the GOP contenders want in their corner — but I guess they need to blame natural disasters on something.
Conservative radio shock jock and Guinness record holder for most violations of Godwin’s Law, Michael Savage, has never been one for subtlety or sanity. And he’s made some remarks recently, which are basically a vintage Savage roundup of his laziest and looniest historical comparisons and lowest possible blows.
He refers to President Obama as “this thing in the White House,” and reiterated his familiar talking points: namely, that we are living in a “dictatorship,” and that “Nazis Nazis Nazis Nazis Nazis Nazis.” (Or something like that.)
His latest rant is in fact only notable because the radio host can now be seen, as well as heard. Joining NewsmaxTV’s Steve Malzberg for a video gab session, Savage promoted his new book Government Zero, which he says is “selling like hotcakes” — despite the fact that “a very big figure in the media” informed Savage that he has been “blacklisted.”
During the interview, Savage called for Americans to stand up against the “radical, insane leftwing agenda,” and declared that we need to convene a Nuremberg-style trial — a “Wichita People’s Trial in America” — to try President “Barry” for his crimes against this country.
Savage even goes off on an extended rant against the… oh, you know what? You can watch it yourself.
It’s been some time since Tony Perkins graced this page. Perkins, you might recall, is the president of the Family Research Council (FRC), a lobbying group which “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The fact that the FRC has argued that gay people are sexual predators, while also employing degenerate reality star Josh Duggar as their executive director, ought to give them an occasion for a little introspection — but their campaign continues unabated.
supporters to help them stop “sexual brainwashing of our children by our government” and thwart Obama’s plan “to get as many American children into the funnel of the sexual revolution as possible and make sure there’s no possible escape.”
“We cannot stand by and allow the President to force his radical sexual agenda on our children,” Perkins says in the letter, which also includes a glossary of definitions LGBTQ terms packaged as “offensive material.”
You can read more of excerpts from the letter here.
Hungry for a victory in a year that marked the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide, right-wing commentators, conservative Christians, and Republican opponents of the proposition (including Texas governor Greg Abbot and his lieutenant governor Dan Patrick) proceeded to giddily jump on HERO’s corpse.
Patrick told reporters that the measure’s 61-to-39-percent loss showed that “liberal, leftist ideas of the Democrats — led by this mayor and led by Hillary Clinton are going to be rejected,” and that the vote “had nothing to do with equal rights.”
Sean Hannity repeated the myth of the “bathroom bill” propagated by the proposition’s opponents on his Wednesday radio show, saying that had it passed, it would have “forced” girls “to share bathrooms and showers with biological males who identify themselves as female.” Audio below courtesy of Media Matters:
And American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer, presumably frothing with glee, declared that the defeat of the “gender-twisting ordinance” (as he characterized it) was a signal that “America isn’t dead yet,” but cautioned that efforts like HERO, which “are falsely advertised as ‘equality’ bills… when they are the exact opposite” should be “a reminder that America must choose between the homosexual agenda and religious liberty because we cannot have both.”
A New York Times editorial, criticizing the hateful rhetoric of HERO’s opponents, offers a succinct reply: “In time, the bigots are destined to lose.”
Dear conservatives: Imagine a jackboot stomping on the face of your overwrought metaphor.
Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz watched Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, and either a.) what he saw scared the living hell out of him, reducing him to a mewling puddle of his own making, raving Chicken Little-like through the streets, begging everyone to listen that apocalypse is a’brewing, or b.) he is campaigning in Iowa and continues his craven and cynical bid for conservative support by playing to people’s worst instincts, suspicions, and fears.
Far from me to speculate on Cruz’s state of mind, but we can report that he was indeed in Iowa during the debate, and that he claimed he was not at all encouraged by what he saw. The debate, he said, “was a recipe to destroy a country.”
“It was more socialism, more pacifism, more weakness, and less Constitution,” he told an assembled crowd of Iowans, according to The Dallas Morning News, which also reports that Cruz “acknowledged that he hadn’t actually watched the debate. During much of it, he was stumping at a Pizza Hut.”
That may explain why his summation of the event bears very little resemblance to what anyone watching the debate actually saw.
The debate, he said, “was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously” — jackboot, of course, long being a symbol for fascism. During the debate, the Democrats were simply auditioning “for who would embrace government power for who would strip your and my individual liberties.”
“It was interesting for America to see each and every Democratic candidate explain how what we need is an even weaker America, how we should withdraw even more from America” – he probably meant to say the world – “[and] avoid any conflict whatsoever with Iran, with Russia, with ISIS, with the lunatics who want to kill us.”
Either the sky is falling or the caucus is coming. Who can say?
Rush Limbaugh phoned in his daily aria Wednesday to let Americans know that we were a stronger, better nation when we endured the endemic poverty and misery of the Great Depression.
Currently, we’re living in Handout Nation, which is actually much worse than the United States of the Great Depression in the 1930s, although the “propaganda-believing, willfully ignorant, mainstream media-watching, math-challenged consumer” doesn’t want to hear it.
In 1933, if you were out of work, you didn’t eat. You had to stand in a soup line and depend on charity. In 2015, you can be among the 94 million not working and have a roof over your head, have a cell phone, a car, your air conditioned home probably– or your home is probably air conditioned and, you’re eating as much as you want.
[…] If you can eat, and have a house, and a big screen, and a cell phone without working, who in the world is paying for it? Back during the Great Depression, if you couldn’t pay for it, you didn’t have it.
Conservatives often use the not-in-the-labor-force number to hand-wring over how we’ve become a runaway welfare state, but as PolitiFact notes, it’s misleading since it includes people we wouldn’t necessarily expect to be working. The drop in labor force participation can be partially attributed to Boomers retiring and young people staying in school. Suffice it to say, they don’t all enjoy lobster dinners on the government’s dime — and suffice it to say, we don’t need to induce another Great Depression to improve our labor stats.
On his show Wednesday night, Bill O’Reilly likened Black Lives Matter to the Ku Klux Klan. Recall that BLM emerged two years ago as a response to systemic police brutality and citizen vigilantism that targets African-Americans, and that the KKK emerged some 150 years ago to perpetrate systemic brutality and citizen vigilantism that targets African-Americans. (You can see how one might accidentally conflate the two.)
Turns out the two camps have more in common than anyone would have guessed. O’Reilly complained that “the leadership of Black Lives Matter could have repudiated” inflammatory rhetoric inciting violence against police officers, and because they didn’t, the entire movement must be held to account, in the same way that all Klansman are likely to be criticized, even though the KKK really only has a few bad apples.
If the movement doesn’t repudiate, it’s like the Ku Klux Klan, alright? You know, are all Klansman going to hang blacks? No. But they’re all in the same soup bowl, alright? Because they don’t divorce themselves from the group who did do those things.
Ah, Fox News’ old “soup bowl” argument — which holds that it is the perennial responsibility of moderate Muslims to repudiate Islamic extremists — that rests on the careless assumption that you can lump disparate groups into an all-inclusive antagonistic “They.”
For the record, the day I stop actively repudiating conservative blowhards on this page, it will not be because I chose to go swimming in the same sour chowder as them. It will be because I got sick of listening to them.
When Donald Trump realized that he wasn’t going to be invited to the Democratic debate, the tycoon decided to steal as much thunder as he could via social media, announcing that he would be live-tweeting the event as a one-man Statler and Waldorf (albeit with a more limited vocabulary and wit than those muppet curmudgeons).
At one point, The Donald asked his followers who they thought was winning the debate (other than Trump, of course).
Leave it to former professional baseballer and would-be video game magnate Curt Schilling to tweet the retort that launched a thousand spit-takes.
This is part of a pattern of intemperate tweeting, which has gotten Schilling in trouble before. Per Huffington Post:
In August, ESPN suspended Schilling from his role as an analyst at the Little League World Series after he tweeted a meme that compared Muslims with Nazis. ESPN called the tweet “completely unacceptable,” and later announced that Schilling’s suspension would apply to Sunday Night Baseball and run through the end of the MLB season, too.
Of course, Breitbart found some way to defend Schilling’s remarks, saying his tweet was a reflection of ISIS’ relative absence from the Democratic debate: “Whereas the Republican event broadcast on CNN witnessed ISIS namedropped 27 times, CNN’s Democratic debate heard five mentions of ISIS or ISIL,” they wrote.
To Schilling’s credit, his tweet did leave Trump without a comeback.
They kicked off their screed-for-two-voices by condemning the president for inspiring the murderer in the the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College. Responding to reports that the killer specifically targeted Christians, the pair located the rampage squarely within the ongoing conservative Christian paranoid fantasia of persecution by vindictive secular forces — what Boykin described as “the fight of the future.” He continued:
Right here in America, the church, the Christian church, has been so demonized and denigrated by the current administration and those that support this administration that I think that you have to expect this because there are enough crazies out there that when you constantly hammer the U.S. Christian church, you have to expect that there is going to be some reaction and that’s what we’re seeing.
[…] It’s not just about having to bake a cake or take photographs for a gay wedding, this is about literally about life and death for Christians in the future. It’s coming.
Even though the shooter described himself as a ”conservative, Republican,” Boykin and Wiles conclude that he must have been a devoted follower of “ultraliberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American organizations” like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups (such as the Family Research Council, of which Boykin is Executive V.P.), and the indispensable website Right Wing Watch.
Audio of these nits’ conversation is below, courtesy of (who else?) Right Wing Watch:
