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Greene Told Trump That Her QAnon Cultists Would Join January 6 Protest

Greene Told Trump That Her QAnon Cultists Would Join January 6 Protest

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who pushed the debunked conspiracy theory that “Antifa,” not a pro-Trump mob, was behind the Capitol attack, informed former President Donald Trump that her supporters, including some QAnon cultists, would attend the January 6, 2021, rally that preceded the Capitol attack, ex-White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the House Select Committee.

The House panel’s latest release of full transcripts cache featured two more interviews with Hutchinson, its star witness, conducted last May and June that mentioned prominent Trumpworld figures including Greene, Trump himself, and his administration’s fourth and final chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

As Hutchinson recalled in the June closed-door deposition, Greene had brought up QAnon in several conversations with then-President Trump and in private communications with Meadows, the Independent reported.

“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene bringing QAnon up several times...in the presence of the president, privately with Mark,” Hutchinson testified.

“I remember Mark having a few conversations, too, about — more specific to QAnon stuff and more about the idea that they had with the election and, you know, not as much pertaining to the planning of the January 6 rally,” she added.

Hutchinson also testified that Greene broached the outlandish conspiracy theory on January 4, 2021, during a campaign rally in Georgia that Trump attended to stump for then-Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans.

“... We were on the ground in Georgia… Mr. Meadows and I were having a conversation,” Hutchinson said, “Ms Greene came up and began talking to us about QAnon and QAnon going to the rally, and she had a lot of constituents that are QAnon, and they’ll all be there.”

“And she was showing him pictures of them traveling up to Washington, DC, for the rally on the 6th,” she added.

When the select committee’s vice chair, outgoing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) asked Hutchinson if she recalled Trump talking about QAnon, the former aide disclosed that Greene had lauded her QAnon-supporting constituents in a chat with the lame-duck president.

“I heard him talk on the plane that night because Ms. Taylor Greene gave him a very similar spiel: These are my constituents. Look, one of them had a Q shirt on. They are on the plane,” Hutchinson said. “And she showed him a picture of them, saying: Those are all my people.”

In the days preceding January 6, Greene falsely accused “Joe Biden and the Democrats” of stealing the election, claimed without evidence that “President Trump won by a landslide,” and urged supporters to “flood the Capitol building.”

Yet, Greene told Lindell-TV, a disinformation platform owned by pro-Trump conspiracist and MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell, that anti-fascists were behind the Capitol attack and “no one can convince me it was so-called Trump supporters.”

Hutchinson also told congressional investigators that she recalled other right-wing luminaries discussing QAnon and far-right militias — the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys — including “several other members of Congress.”

Greene participated in these discussions with Trump and Meadows, said Hutchinson, and so far-right Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Mo Brooks (R-AL), and former Trump White House adviser Peter K. Navarro.

“I remember Mr. Meadows and Mr. Perry talking about all of the groups [the Oath Keepers, QAnon, and the Proud Boys] and with several other members of Congress,” Hutchinson informed panel investigators.

“I remember Mr. Brooks mentioning some of the groups. Mr. Biggs, Ms. Marjorie Taylor Greene… Mr. Navarro had talked about them a couple of times,” she added.

Melodrama And Meltdown Among Trump's Conspiracy-Peddling, FBI-Hating Cult

Melodrama And Meltdown Among Trump's Conspiracy-Peddling, FBI-Hating Cult

I used to think self-styled “progressives” and Black Lives Matter activists had coined the dumbest political slogan of the twenty-first century: “Defund the Police.” Democratic strategist James Carville called it “the three worst words ever in the English language.” Not for nothing has President Biden gone out of his way to declare, as reported by the New York Times’ Charles Blow, that “when it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not ‘defund the police.’ It’s ‘fund the police.’”

Ordinary citizens may have mixed feelings about cops, but everybody wants help fast when they dial 911—a point so elementary only the smuggest kind of intellectual could fail to understand it.

So, naturally, MAGA Republicans have gone them one better. “Defund the FBI,” chants Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Georgia Republican insists that “Joe Biden has weaponized the FBI and DOJ against President Trump and his supporters.”

She’s selling T-shirts and ball caps with the motto for $30 each on her campaign website. Amazon has a page offering anti-FBI gear for half that price. Be the first on your block to offer support for bank robbers, kidnappers, Russian spies, and your friendly neighborhood terrorist cell.

Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Co), Paul Gosar (R-TX) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and other members of the Mighty Trump Art Players have endorsed similar notions. There’s even a guy running for the Florida legislature who posted a notice on Twitter to the effect that “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight!”

Remember when Texas led the nation in deluded right-wing cranks? The Sunshine State’s definitely catching up.

Maybe that’s why God sent this hurricane to wet them down.

See, anybody can play at being a prophet, ascribing divine intent to random, unconnected events. All that’s necessary is absolute shamelessness. There’s an irreducible number of superstitious fools who need End Times melodrama to keep them stimulated.

Me, I prefer baseball.

But speaking of melodrama, there’s Donald J. Trump, the former president who can’t seem to make up his mind. One minute he says he’s being persecuted by FBI agents who planted classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and the next he tells Fox News’s Sean Hannity that “If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying, it’s declassified. Even by thinking about it, because you’re sending it to Mar-a-Lago or to wherever you’re sending it.”

Never mind that, historically speaking, the FBI has long been by far the most politically conservative agency of the U.S. government. Even if you buy the mental telepathy angle, these things cannot both be true.

A rational observer would see Trump’s alibi as a de facto confession.

So naturally Trump has turned away from rational observers and toward QAnon, the religio-political millenarian cult that claims, among other things, that the Democratic Party and the “Deep State” are controlled by a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles led by Hillary Clinton, and that Trump (along with long-deceased John F. Kennedy, Jr.) is leading a heroic, clandestine war against it.

Things were supposed to have come to a head on Inauguration Day, 2021—the “Great Awakening” adepts called it—when Trump would be re-instated, JFK Jr. would emerge from hiding and Hillary’s monstrous allies would be arrested and publicly executed.

Needless to say, the failure of this prophecy occasioned a certain amount of re-calculating, but True Believers throughout history have risen to the challenge. Cults tend to fade out gradually; rarely all at once. Over time, ridicule has greater force than reason.

With Citizen Trump leading the parade, QAnon is currently riding high. No doubt partly due to his growing legal peril—the Jan. 6 grand jury investigation, the New York lawsuit aimed at putting the Trump Organization out of business, and the DOJ’s criminal probe into stolen Top Secret documents—the former president’s political rallies have grown increasingly other-worldly.

He, his family and his supporters, Trump told an impassioned crowd last week in Wilmington, N.C., all face “torment, persecution and oppression.” Recorded music similar what some called “the QAnon theme song,” induced hundreds to raise their arms in a one-finger salute signifying unity.

“Where we go one, we go all,” cultists assure each other.

Absent clinical paranoia, it’s not clear how Trump’s impassioned followers imagine themselves personally threatened. Nevertheless, millions do imagine exactly that. But are they prepared to go to war for him? To threaten large-scale civic violence to rescue his mangy orange hide from criminal prosecution? That’s the implied threat.

I, for one, seriously doubt it. QAnon is essentially an online phenomenon, an aggregation of cranks sitting at home alone getting all worked up over silly fantasies. Political pornography. Nobody with anything to lose is going to risk it to save Trump from himself.

Soon enough, he’ll be history, and QAnon with him.

#Endorse This: Kimmel Torches Crazy Trump And His QAnon Cult

#Endorse This: Kimmel Torches Crazy Trump And His QAnon Cult

Last night Jimmy Kimmel tore into Donald Trump’s open embrace of the QAnon conspiracy loons at his latest rally, which featured the music associated with the movement. And no, it's not Patsy Cline's "Crazy."

As the Qanon song played, Trump fans held up a single finger.

“That means one, which is their average IQ, I think,” Kimmel joked. “It would seem that Trump has now fully embraced the lunacy because these are the only people who still believe there’s a conspiracy against him,” he said. “Things are getting very crazy out there.”

Nothing but Qanonsense!

Watch the entire segment below:

Who Are The Real Sexual Predators? There's A List

Who Are The Real Sexual Predators? There's A List

Of all the big lies that Republican officials and media personalities have deployed for partisan advantage over the past several years, the most sickening by far is their current campaign to depict Democrats as “groomers” – meaning that they are sexual predators who recruit underage victims.

For years this sort of smear was weaponized against gays and lesbians. These dark insinuations have surfaced again and again in right-wing propaganda ever since the 2016 “Pizzagate” fabrication, accusing the most prominent Democrats of imprisoning children in the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor to be kept as sex slaves. (There was, by the way, no basement.)

Most recently the perverse accusation has been raised to defame Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her successful Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when Republican Senators claimed that she is “sympathetic to pedophiles.” Ironically, it was Judge Jackson who sentenced a man who opened fire in the pizza parlor with an automatic rifle duped into believing that he was rescuing the non-existent child prisoners.

From this conspiracy sprouted the QAnon cult, founded online by a dubious figure with ties to child porn, now running for Congress in Arizona. In fact, more than 70 QAnon proponents are running as Republicans in this year’s midterm election.

The worst of the latest round of bizarre pedophilia slurs have been, promoted by Fox News and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. This nonsense originated from an outfit known as “Libs of TikTok,” whose author was anonymous until the Washington Post exposed her identity and outraged her right-wing fans. Chaya Raichik, the disinformation spreader, is a Brooklyn real estate salesperson.

The “groomer” charges are of course lies, but they are not just ordinary falsehoods. When Republicans, from Internet crazies to Rupert Murdoch’s cable sewer to U.S. senators, claim that Democrats are guilty of sexual predation, they are engaging in a frame-up designed to deflect from a disturbing truth: the perverse and criminal conduct of literally scores of Republican officials, activists, and clergy -- factual, indisputable, and appalling.

Republican sexual hypocrisy is a longstanding cliché in American politics, from the hordes of closeted anti-gay gays and moralizing adulterers like Ken Starr to the former president whose debauched lifestyle has never troubled his evangelical worshippers. Yet now the Republicans’ “groomer” accusations have raised the ante – and inadvertently opened a Pandora’s box of newspaper and TV clips describing the criminal sexual misconduct of a long roster of Republicans.

An astonishingly comprehensive Google document of these offenders, complete with more than 800 citations and links, can be found here under the rubric of #RepublicanSexualPredators. It has apparently been maintained and updated scrupulously for years—and undoubtedly will be added to for years to come.

This list includes more than a few already familiar names, from serial killers such as Dennis Rader and Ted Bundy (who—did you know?-- attended the 1968 GOP national convention) to serial child molester Dennis “Coach” Hastert, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker, sent to prison six years ago. It includes Kenneth Starr, the Clinton-era inquisitor booted out of Baylor University as chancellor for protecting rapists; Roger Ailes, the late Fox News chief and manic sexual harasser; several conservative bishops who notoriously covered up for pedophile priests; and many, others guilty of harassment and other offenses that fall well short of felonies.

Anyone who peruses the #RepublicanSexualPredators list will, however, also find an extensive and shocking aggregation of convicted pedophiles, child rapists, and child pornographers. Among the notables are a former staff researcher for Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, whose 2017 arrest sparked a brief scandal, and a couple of well-known Republican fundraisers from the nation’s capital. Others were county commissioners, party chairmen, city council members, state legislators, and so on down the list, covering almost every level of officialdom.

There was, for example, the former Cobb County, Georgia party chair, convicted of child molestation in 2016. There was the “Republican of the Year,” so named by the National Republican Congressional Committee, who died in prison while serving a 26-year sentence for sexually assaulting children. There was the “Faith and Family Alliance” leader who solicited sex from minors on the Internet. There was the Kentucky Republican leader arrested for having sex with a five year-old boy. There were the Republican fundraiser, the downstate Virginia mayor, and the upstate New York mayor, all convicted of child pornography charges, as were the Republican staffers, from Brooklyn to Minnesota to Florida, guilty of the same offenses.

Indeed, the list goes on and on with infuriating detail. (Not every single link is still fresh, although even on the dead links, names and locations will reveal the offenders if searched on Google.)

What does this troubling record of Republican predation mean? Obviously, it does not mean that no Democrat has ever committed a sexual offense, against an adult or a child, nor that all Republicans are somehow implicated in such offenses. What it clearly does mean, at the very least, is that Republican propagandists misusing such accusations for partisan gain need to look in the mirror. Like the violent insurrectionist creeps behind QAnon, they are not “protecting children” – and that was never their purpose. They are engaged in a slander campaign that has accused innocent people and served only to conceal real predators.

Meet your Republican Party today.