How many pardoned Jan. 6 criminals did ICE hire? I want an answer to this question! NOW.
J.D. Vance dog-whistled the Manosphere in the run-up to the election. In prison, they all knew they'd be pardoned if Trump won. Racist and misogynist, the Proud Boys et al. may have found a new home.
The first thing we need to do is revisit Memory Lane. And here it is, the ultimate chart of the groups involve in the January 6th insurrection. There were five major nexuses, and every one of them was and is racist.
Three of them were also overtly misogynist, though how deeply varied from the Proud Boys, a group founded on woman-hatred, to the Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers. Qanon, founded on the utterly spurious Pizzagate conspiracy theory targeted women in power, particularly Hilary Clinton, claiming they were part of a worldwide cannabalistic child abuse and murder cabal.
Each of these groups advocated the disenfranchisement of women in a range of suggestions from male rule in the marriage to complete withdrawal of financial and work rights to loss of the right to vote to total banishment from the public sphere.
To view a larger (actually readable!) interactive version of this map, compiled by the University of Maryland, go to this link for START on the Homeland Security website. Do that right now. Trump will take this down. Go to the site, print it out. Permalink the URL. It’s here:
https://www.start.umd.edu/january-6th-capitol-extremists-network
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” — Donald J. Trump, Sept. 29, 2020
It was a signal to all these groups that their time to attack the country that gave women and people of color their due rights would come. If he didn’t win the election, he would help them overthrow the country. Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress and the world pinned the responsibility for January 6th squarely on the lapel of Donald Trump. PBS:
The Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol "does not happen" without Donald Trump, former special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers earlier this month in characterizing the Republican president as the "most culpable and most responsible person" in the criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Notably, most of the 1,400 people tried and convicted—and pardoned by Donald Trump— came from the nexus of groups in the chart above.
Many of these people went to jail, but none squealed on the President. Amazing, no? That’s because they knew they’d be pardoned. Trump may have lost the 2020 election, but their best hope was still to help him win again and gain that pardon.
When some started to waver, Trump visited them in prison and sang revolutionary songs with them.
At the last moment, when it looked as if Harris would win—and she may have—J.D. Vance dog-whistled the Manosphere these groups largely created to get out the vote. They certainly did, though whether it was really enough is something we’ll uncover only when there is a liberal majority in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court.
The truth is, the overlap between the Manosphere and the January 6th Insurrections is virtually 100%.
And when ICE needs more thugs, whom do they call? Well, it’s not the Ghostbusters.
ICE: $55,000 in cash up front, a trust mask, and the right to be violent with impunity. There’s a pardon in it for you if you screw up.
‘Nancy, Bigo was here you bitch’
This is Richard Barnett (aka Bigo), co-founder of the group 2A NWA STAND, who took over Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6th. And that sweet little quote is what he had to say for the cameras. And this is what The Conversation had to say in response:
While partisan differences often drive political violence, misogyny can play an underappreciated role, especially when directed at women in prominent leadership positions. Misogyny punishes women who fail to live up to patriarchal standards, like those who dare to participate in the supposedly “male world” of politics.
We note this man and his “message” in a previous post that we restacked this morning.
These are the kinds of guys Trump called to the Capitol, supported in prison, and then pardoned after they tore up the people’s house of government, defacated in the hallways, tore up offices, killed police, and tried to take the Vice President into custody and lynch him for refusing to obey an illegal order from Trump to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election.
Now, with face recognition software operating on virtually every street corner, only masked people can escape detection.
The reason I think these people are driving ICE lethal brutality is …
I am now 77 years old and have been politically active for 63 years, beginning on the day when I was 14 that Martin Luther King, Jr. saved my at-risk Southern soul. But that’s another story. It’s a good one, too. But later …
With facial recognition popping up virtually at every corner, it would have been too apparent without masks that the ICE jackboots on the ground had come from the groups responsible for the attack on the Capitol, those who are “forgiven felons” and the thousands more who stoked conspiracy lies, inflamed racism, and threatened women’s rights, freedoms and safety.
Part of premise of the Insurrectionists—that the United States should be overthrown or at least transformed into a predominantly white and overwhelmingly male-dominated culture—is that they must be armed and must be organized and must be willing to do violence in the name of preserving white male privilege.
Given that—and given the fact a notable number of those pardoned by Trump have gone on to commit crimes—maintaining anonymity was crucial. So they got a right NO police force should ever have: identity camouflage.
We are supposed to have no secret police in America—no Stasi, no KGB, no GRU, no SIS, no DINA, no SAVAK—NO GESTAPO. No enforcement agency of any kind that is anonymous and therefore cannot be traced to their crimes and held accountable for them.
And oh, what fun they’ve had with that (she said acidly). The beatings. The round-ups. Since Trump turned ICE into his own personal army—and since Miller instituted Gestapo tactics—there’s been little the jackboots wouldn’t do to brown people, black people, anybody with a Spanish accent. And there is nothing they wouldn’t do:
Nothing says “Stay Out of America” like ICE Child Abuse. They’ve detained 3,800 kids.
This abusive treatment of children is sometimes traced to the vicious Stephen Miller and as often to Kristi Noem, whose greatest qualification for nabbing her DHS job from Trump is the fact she killed her own dog.
Crossing the Color Line
Clearly, ICE is not in Minneapolis because of its welfare fraud, though it does have it. But Texas, Alabama, New York, Maryland, California and Florida all have much higher per capita rates of welfare fraud, and ICE is not kicking people around in Texas. They’re in Minneapolis because there are Somali migrants there—and there—BLACK. And also there are MUSLIMS there, and they are represented by Ilhan Omar. AND there’s that woke governor of theirs, Tim Walz. And welfare fraud there is decades old and no administration has adequately dealt with it, but that’s not the reason the Trump Troopers are there.
And suddenly, the massive ego of these troops became apparent when they started shooting white people.
They did that then they became furious at having their authority to act with impunity challenged at all.
ICE now thinks they can do anything. Why? Because they’ve been told on the QT that they have absolute immunity.
And if many of these men, as I believe, come from the ranks of the January 6 Insurrection group matrix, it fits. They think they can do anything to anybody. They stormed the U.S. Capitol to overthrow the government and hang the vice president on orders from Donald Trump.
Just protesting what ICE is doing now places people, all people, in the position of PERSON WHO HAS NO RIGHTS, NOT EVEN THE RIGHT TO LIFE, BECAUSE THE JACKBOOTS HAVE SAID SO.
They’re not law enforcement. They are the SS.
How To Stop ICE: No Bucks. No Buck Rogers
Now, here’s a little advice from Robert Reich, who I encourage everyone to follow, which he wrote this morning.
Apologies for intruding on your inbox again, but the Senate will vote on ICE funding TOMORROW. Please call your senators now at 202-224-3121 and say NO more funding for ICE.
Stay engaged. … And stay safe. I am hoping those two things are not mutually exclusive.
I want to know, TOO! Can you think of a way we can find out? It seems like this would be something relatively easy for a large organization to determine. (How is your shoulder?)
All of them