Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.
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Gunman Who Died Attacking FBI To Defend Trump Derided As 'Crisis Actor'
Crime scene outside Cincinnati, Ohio where state police shot FBI attacker Ricky Shiffer
Ricky Shiffer was like a lot of MAGA “patriots,” often proclaiming his willingness to die for Donald Trump. Like seemingly all Trump fans, he was outraged that the FBI served a search warrant on the ex-president’s Florida estate, eager to declare “civil war” on “the Deep State.” Shiffer was such a True Believer that on Thursday, he tried to attack the FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio, and ended up dying next to a cornfield a few miles away.
Shiffer believed he was dying a martyr to the cause. But his only reward was for the community of terminally online Trumpists with whom he spent his time to immediately denounce him as a “crisis actor” who had performed a “false flag” operation with the sole purpose of smearing MAGA people by association.
The 42-year-old from Columbus walked into the FBI’s security station outside its Cincinnati offices Thursday morning carrying a nail gun and an AR-15, and opened fire on the ballistic glass protecting agents inside with the nail gun, apparently out of the YouTube-fostered belief that such guns are capable of breaking bulletproof glass. After firing at the glass several times to no discernible effect other than setting off alarms that sent agents running in his direction, Shiffer fled the building and drove away in his car.
Shiffer was a prolific user of the Trump-sponsored social-media platform Truth Social. Somehow, in the brief time between when he attacked the FBI and when police caught up with him, he was able to file one last post, though it ended in an incomplete sentence as though he had been interrupted. It read:
Well, I thought I had a way through bulletproof glass, and I didn’t. If you don’t hear from me, it is true I tried attacking the F.B.I., and it’ll mean either I was taken off the internet, the F.B.I. got me, or they sent the regular cops while
About 20 minutes after the attack, Ohio Highway Patrol officers found Shiffer parked in his Ford Crown Victoria at an Interstate 71 rest area. When they attempted to confront him, he fled down the freeway, police in pursuit. Police say he fired shots at them. He exited at state Route 73 and stopped shortly afterward near a cornfield. Shiffer emerged from the car with a gun and began firing at officers from behind his car. Police then engaged him in negotiations that went on for nearly two hours. When those talks broke down, police say they attempted to capture him using “less lethal” weapons, but when he fired on officers, they returned the gunfire, and he was shot and killed.
Shiffer was a true MAGA loyalist who had traveled to Washington on January 6, 2021, and participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The night before, he participated in a pro-Trump rally led by the Proud Boys at Washington’s Black Lives Matter Plaza that turned into a violent clash with police, previewing the next day’s historic events. He also turns up in a number of photographs and videos of the mob that attacked the Capitol.
On Twitter, he later urged readers to support the Proud Boys. “Save ammunition, get in touch with the Proud Boys, and learn how they did it in the Revolutionary War, because submitting to tyranny while lawfully protesting was never the American way,” Shiffer wrote.
He also complained to Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on Twitter about the 2020 election. “Congresswoman Greene, they got away with fixing elections in plain sight,” Shiffer wrote. “It’s over. The next step is the one we used in 1775.”
In more recent weeks, his Truth Social posts had become even more militant. “This country has never had a worse enemy,” he posted on Aug 5. 1776 was for far less, even World War II was for less.”
“Save ammunition and be ready and willing to hit the road as soon as you hear it has started,” he wrote the same day in a post liked by 24 readers. “Someone who wanted to be a hero could not have lived in a better time period.”
When the FBI served its warrant on Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Shiffer went completely off the deep end, joining the deluge of MAGA fans who immediately declared the search a case of political persecution by the “Deep State,” and proclaimed their desire to wage “civil war” against Biden administration “tyranny.”
That day, Shiffer posted a declaration of sorts at Truth Social:
People, this is it. I hope a call to arms comes from someone better qualified, but if not, this is your call to arms from me. Leave work tomorrow as soon as the gun shop/Army-Navy store/pawn shop opens, get whatever you need to be ready for combat. We must not tolerate this one. They have been conditioning us to accept tyranny and think we can’t do anything for 2 years. This time we must respond with force. If you know of any protests or attacks, please post here.
An interlocutor asked him: “Are you proposing terrorism?” He answered:
Very important question.
No, I am proposing war. Be ready to kill the enemy, not mass shootings where leftists go, not lighting busses on fire with transexuals in them, not finding people with leftist signs in their yards and beating them up. Violence is not (all) terrorism. Kill the F.B.I. on sight, and be ready to take down other active enemies of the people and those who try to prevent you from doing it.
He also began reviewing his options for action and apparently considered heading to Florida in order to defend the ex-president from FBI perfidy:
I’m having trouble getting information, but Viva Frei said patriots are heading to Palm Beach (where Mar a Lago is). I recommend going, and being in Florida, I think the feds won’t break it up. If they do, kill them.
Another Truth Social user named Grizzly Mama was horrified: “Oh dear we can’t resort to that! Not now not here.”
Shiffer replied: “Why not?” He later expanded on the point: “It won’t matter if we don’t get violent. We see the courts are unfair and unconstitutional, all that is left is force.”
The attack was not a surprise to anyone who had monitored the kinds of extremist rhetoric that flooded social media after the FBI served its warrant, much of it from ostensibly mainstream Republican political figures and right-wing media such as Fox News. FBI Director Christopher Wray addressed the rhetoric in discussing the attack with reporters.
"There has been a lot of commentary about the FBI this week questioning our work and motives," Wray said. "Much of it is from critics and pundits on the outside who don't know what we know and don't see what we see. What I know—and what I see—is an organization made up of men and women who are committed to doing their jobs professionally and by the book every day; this week is no exception."
As Laura Clawson has already explored, Shiffer’s actions were almost inevitable after weeks of radicalization among right-wing leaders about federal law enforcement, especially related to investigations of Trump, topped by their immediate declarations that the Mar-a-Lago search was an illegitimate attack not just on Trump but on all Americans.
Naturally, very few of these unhinged “thought” leaders were willing to discuss the attack on the FBI afterward. One of the only right-wing figures to do so, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, naturally continued to blame the FBI, apparently for being attacked:
I am sure this will now be the main focus, even though we have said repeatedly to remain peaceful and stay focused on constructive things that we can do. They're now going to try to play the victim after they occupied Donald Trump's home, a military occupation.
A handful of his fellow MAGA enthusiasts later saluted Shiffer for his martyrdom. But at the forums such as 4chan and the Trumpist site The Donald where much of the same conspiracist fearmongering that fueled Shiffer were generated and amplified, the response was largely unanimous: It was all part of a fake Deep State psyop operation, using a “false flag” to smear Trump supporters.
As NBC reporter Ben Collins noted: “Every top post on TheDonald is claiming the Cincinnati FBI situation is a false flag. They constantly agitate for these kinds of attacks and never, ever take credit for them. It allows them a permanent victimhood.”
The conversations at The Donald varied little in their conspiracist self-assurance that they were able to pierce the media veil:
Only one, and he was apprehended eh?
How convenient. It's either a false flag, or one if the "boohoo- nobody's doing nothing" commenters from this website, playing right into their hands
False flag. To lock it down further. We all know Trump supporters don't do this. Wake up!
Its too bad that it wasn't actual real and just another false flag by these faggot feds. They want so bad for people to react but its not happening so they have to make up these fake false flags.
Fake. They staged an attack on themselves to play the victim. It won't work. No one feels bad for these faggots.
See how they always try to tie the two together? This is why why false flags occur, when they don't get the response they want from their commie raids, lets scape goat a "crazy White guy with a Rifle" for further narrative control. Typical bullshit.
One of The Donald commenters summed up the prevailing attitude—namely, that it no longer mattered whether the attack was real or not, because they all could see the “truth”:
Exactly, I don't give a shit anymore. They fired the first shot yesterday by attacking Trump. The line has been crossed, the game has begun. The tyrannical left is going to stop any nothing to put us into slavery so fuck it all.
The whole point of this rhetoric, as researcher Melissa Ryan told Insider, is to sow as much confusion and misunderstanding about the activities of the multitudes of far-right extremists who operate within Trumpworld. That’s especially the case when the inspiration for right-wing violence like Shiffer’s comes from so many of the same sources now dismissing his actions as a “false flag.”
“These folks have been calling for civil war, violent terrorism, harassment of the judge who issued the warrant, doxxing FBI agents,” Ryan said. “And then the minute violence against the FBI happens, they're like, 'Oh, not it, obviously it was a false flag, they're trying to make us look bad.'"
As Columbus resident @almostdomi observed on Twitter: “Imagine literally dying for Trump, but then the entire MAGA movement just calls it a false flag.”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
Former President Donald Trump
Most Americans have long believed former President Donald Trump perpetrated multiple felony offenses both before and after entering the White House, according to opinion surveys — and yet those same citizens have also assumed that Trump would never be held accountable. But just at the moment that his escape from the law no longer seems quite so certain, the Republicans have almost all fallen into line behind him like lemmings.
There can be little doubt that the former president is in deep legal trouble. To evade the law, he is employing his usual tactics, from slick spin to torrential lying to feigned outrage to threats of mob violence, but mostly delay.
Let us leave aside for a moment the various crimes that Trump clearly appears to have committed in his attempts to overthrow the U.S. government and Constitution leading to the insurrection of Jan. 6, as well as his schemes to defraud tax authorities. Currently under investigation by grand juries in New York, Washington and Georgia, and being prepared for referral by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection to the Justice Department, these crimes will be addressed in due course.
What we have before us now are a whole new set of specific potential crimes enumerated in the federal warrant that enabled FBI agents to search Trump's offices and home at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Revealed on Aug. 12 pursuant to an unusual request "in the public interest" from Attorney General Merrick Garland, the warrant and accompanying receipt for items seized during the search confirm that Justice Department prosecutors had "probable cause" to believe that Trump violated three federal statutes.
By taking hundreds of pages of top secret, secret and classified documents to his private home, they believe he violated the Espionage Act, 18 U.S. Code 793, which prohibits the removal of national defense materials from government facilities without authorization; they also believe he obstructed repeated attempts over the past 18 months to retrieve those documents, in violation of 18 U.S. Code 1519, and concealed, altered or defaced them in violation of 18 U.S. Code 2701.
All are serious crimes subject to punishment by long prison terms and heavy fines.
The list of items removed from the Mar-a-Lago premises last Monday includes 11 boxes of classified documents. At least three boxes held "miscellaneous documents" at the very highest level of secrecy that requires them to be examined only in a "secure compartmented information facility" or SCIF — a heavily fortified space that doesn't exist at the porous country club and Trump abode at Mar-a-Lago. Among those are nuclear secrets that the Washington Post reported have caused grave concern to Justice Department officials.
Ever since the search and seizure occurred, Trump and his apologists have aimed to provoke rage against federal law enforcement by concocting lies about what was happening and why. The Republican yes-men offer a rotating set of excuses and distractions to cover up Trump's transgressions.
Following Trump's brazen lie, his echo chamber in right-wing media blasts that FBI agents "planted" the many boxes of documents on Trump's property, an outlandish accusation to match their absurd claims of "voter fraud." Trump and Co. have also ludicrously pointed to former President Barack Obama, claiming that he took millions of documents with him, including "lots" of nuclear data, all debunked by the National Archives and Records Administration, which oversees all of the Obama records.
They have claimed — and this one is calculated obviously as a possible criminal defense — that Trump had the authority to declassify all the documents he stole. But that argument suffers from at least two major flaws. Trump didn't possess the lawful power unilaterally to declassify top secret materials, which must undergo a process that never occurred here; and Trump's absconding with these documents and failure to return them finally on the demand of a grand jury subpoena in June violated the law whether they were classified or not.
In short, the rhetorical confetti spewing from the Trump clown cars just gets swept away when the elephants leave the ring. It's just another act to distract his endlessly gulled marks, who are constantly dunned to hand over their money to defend him.
Since his first trip to Moscow in 1986, we have known that Trump, despite his "America First" blather and his flag-kissing antics, always has had self-aggrandizing motives at the heart of everything he has done. For the moment, we can see only the bare outline of these grave misdeeds. How far he went — whether he tried to monetize national security information or destroyed incriminating documents — we may only find out when he is prosecuted.
What we have learned from Merrick Garland is that he means business when he talks about the rule of law. Trump is only at the beginning of a long process of unraveling his nefarious plots.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
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