Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Why yes, Oath Keepers are white supremacist domestic terrorists, and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to stockpile weapons in order to use them to kill politicians on January 6th.

 

Oath Keepers members spent tens of thousands of dollars in January 2021 on firearms, bullets and other equipment, according to prosecutors in Washington, DC, trying to prove members of the far-right extremist group were building an arsenal as it prepared to try to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

In all, prosecutors said Monday in federal court that nearly $200,000 in withdrawals were made from bank accounts connected to the Oath Keepers that month used for a wide variety of purchases, including guns. Prosecutors used evidence of the withdrawals, coupled with shopping receipts and text messages, to show how some members allegedly stockpiled the weapons.

Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes, according to text messages showed to the jury, bought several firearms from online sellers in what prosecutors called “parking lot purchases.”

Prosecutors then showed the jury evidence that Rhodes withdrew money from ATMs by a Bass Pro Shop, a Lowe’s and a gas station near where he made the purchases. They also displayed receipts showing purchases of firearm accessories, including 14 magazines, eight sights and one scope leveling kit, at retail shops around the same time.

Prosecutors have not said what they believe Rhodes did with the weapons he amassed on his way to Washington, DC, or whether they were taken to a Virginia hotel where the group’s so-called quick reaction force amassed.

An FBI agent testified Monday that Rhodes does not appear on the hotel’s security footage and that the weapons were ultimately found in a storage unit belonging to Oath Keeper Joshua James, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy.

The extensive withdrawals are part of prosecutors’ efforts to convince a jury that Rhodes and his organization were preparing for more than just a peaceful rally on January 6, 2021, and that they believed a violent conflict was imminent.

According to prosecutors, Rhodes made the purchases both in his home state of Texas the week before the Capitol attack and on his road trip to the DC region. Rhodes embarked on the trip around January 3, 2021, according to cell phone data, traveling with lawyer Kellye SoRelle. SoRelle faces several charges in connection to January 6 and has pleaded not guilty in a separate case.

Attorneys for the defendants have repeatedly argued that SoRelle was the general counsel for the Oath Keepers organization. But, prosecutors suggested Monday, she was not acting in that capacity around the time of January 6 and was even exchanging sexually explicit messages with Rhodes.

“Speaking of f—ing…If you need some come on over,” Rhodes texted SoRelle on January 2. SoRelle declined, according to another text message. She allegedly later texted Rhodes that “You’re too good at what you do. Whole bad boy thing. I am a damn moth to a [fire emoji]. I really am replaying my teenage years.”

Prosecutors have relied heavily on messages and audio recordings so far to make their case against the five defendants and began to show the jury how those recordings captured the defendants actions on January 6 by calling a journalist to the stand Monday afternoon.

 

Besides the fact that Rhodes was schtupping his legal counsel, the guy bought thousands of dollars worth of firearms himself and the feds literally have the receipts for it. A lot of time in a little box awaits our friend Stewart.

Extreme RINO Hunting, Con't

Alex Henderson at AlterNet notes that even the pretend "Good Republicans" are being driven out of the party, like retiring Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, and the remainder are all soul-selling simps like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, or open fascists like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Although Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska isn’t a full-fledged Never Trumper like the Washington Post’s Max Boot, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, attorney George Conway or former GOP strategist Rick Wilson, the conservative senator has been highly critical of former President Donald Trump at times and voted “guilty” during Trump’s second impeachment trial — a move that has resulted in Sasse being labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by Trump and other far-right MAGA Republicans. Sasse has decided he would rather be in academia than politics, applying for a position as president of the University of Florida.

Sasse is the sole finalist for the position, and his departure from the U.S. Senate is almost certain. GOP strategist and Never Trump conservative Sarah Longwell is sorry to see Sasse leaving politics, although not surprised. In an article published by The Bulwark on October 17, the founder of the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) laments that in the GOP of 2022, there is little or no room for those who are not far-right MAGA extremists and total devotees of Trumpism.

“Ben Sasse is retiring from the Senate at the youthful age of 50,” Longwell writes. “We know why. Politicians who thought they could wait out Trump now see the writing on the wall. The party’s over. For years, we watched the GOP defenestrations: Will Hurd, Jeff Flake, George W. Bush, the memory of John McCain, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and any other Republican who stood up to Donald Trump — or even just opposed Trump’s attempted coup. Some fell on their swords. Some were tossed aside involuntarily. The result was the same.”

Trump continues, “Simultaneously, we watched the progress on the other side of the spectrum as normie Republican moderates such as Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and J.D. Vance became unquestioning Trump maximalists. What these two dynamics proved was a simple fact: In the Republican Party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump…. The end result of this truth is that it has driven the Good Republican — that rare animal who was supposed to be the post-Trump future of the GOP — to near extinction.”

 

I'd argue that the last Good Republican was Eisenhower. The rest of them have been playing various levels of race and fear cards to get a Christian white supremacist nation all my life, and I'm only a few years younger than Ben Sasse, who will now go on to do Ron DeSantis's bidding in ridding the University of Florida system of anyone who is "woke", student and instructor alike. 

 

Not such a good guy, Ben Sasse.

 

Like I've said for years now, anyone who's still a Republican past this point is a fascist white supremacist asshole, or is at the very least OK with the country being run by them.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Weeks of relentlessly horrible, racist, brutal attack ads from GOP dark money groups have been flooding the airwaves in sewage. Will Bunch:

 

If you live in Philadelphia or thereabouts, the October baseball playoffs have brought almost unbridled joy from a Phillies hot streak, punctuated by an epic bat flip and an inside-the-park home run — and marred only by jarring interruptions from the most shockingly crude and, arguably, racist political ads since Willie Horton hit the small screen in 1988.

Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.

You won’t be shocked to learn that the ads are deliberately dishonest, conflating Democratic immigration policies, for example, with the horrific case of one undocumented immigrant named Christopher Puente accused of raping a toddler at a fast-food restaurant in Chicago (”She was 3 ... years ... old,” the narrator intones, milking the pathos). What’s not said is that the alleged assault occurred in February 2020, more than three years into the presidency of Republican Donald Trump, well before Biden took office.

That’s appalling, but that’s not what’s most upsetting about these ads, which, according to social media, have been broadcast nationally during the baseball telecasts on Fox Sports 1. There is absolutely no filter of jarring and often violent imagery, the racist overtones and the xenophobic innuendo, and the unrelenting darkness of the “American carnage” vibe. No one cares that this is afternoon baseball and little girls and boys are watching. This is America now.

In fact, the comparison to that infamous “Willie” (really William) Horton ad isn’t even fair. That spot — which attempted to stir up racial panic by (misleadingly, of course) linking Democrat Michael Dukakis to a Black inmate who committed a rape and murder after a weekend pass — only aired on TV one time, because just 34 years ago even most Republicans found it too crude, and over the edge. Listen to that 1980s spot and the tone that offended many folks back then seems calm and measured compared to the Natural-Born-Killers-on-acid vibe of the 2022 attack ads. Today, any and all guardrails have been taken down.

One other thing that won’t surprise you about the new attack ads is that the people behind them aren’t eager for you to know exactly who they are.

The required tagline lists the sponsor as a new group calling itself Citizens for Sanity. On one level, thanks to some excellent research by the campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets, we know a lot about who these Citizens for Sanity are: the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump, offering America not just a new low for the 2022 midterms but a sneak preview of the nightmare that the 45th president’s 2024 comeback crusade is likely to be.

 

The polls are all showing that these ads are working spectacularly well, as in this latest NY Times/Siena College Upshot poll.

Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinctive advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.

The poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on Nov. 8, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat. The result represents an improvement for Republicans since September, when Democrats held a one-point edge among likely voters in the last Times/Siena poll. (The October poll’s unrounded margin is closer to three points, not the four points that the rounded figures imply.)

With inflation unrelenting and the stock market steadily on the decline, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America has leaped since July, to 44 percent from 36 percent — far higher than any other issue. And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.

 

Needless to say, going from D+1 to R+4 now is the difference between Dems barely holding on to the House and the GOP picking up 30-40 seats. The crosstabs of tht NYT/Siena College poll are not promising, either. Republicans have a 2-1 advantage: 63-31, among non-college white voters. In a state like Wisconsin, that's a death knell for Team Blue. Republicans are up by 10% points among Independents, 51-41%. The Democratic lead in the suburbs is down to 1 point, where it was double digits in 2018 and 2020.

Overall, Republicans have a 21-point lead among voters 45-64.

If this holds up, Dems will lose the House AND the Senate.

Folks if there's early voting in your state, do it now. We have 3 weeks.

We're going to give the country to the fascists because gas is $4 again.