Here’s what’s next for this particular pro-insurrectionist:
Derrick Evans, a West Virginia state legislator who recorded himself storming the Capitol on Wednesday, faces criminal charges, US officials said.
Evans has been charged in a criminal complaint with entering restricted area and entering the US Capitol, said Ken Kohl, a top official in the US attorney’s office for Washington, DC.
Edited to add: Yes there will be more arrests coming:
“Just because you’ve left the DC region, you can still expect a knock on the door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol,” said Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in Charge Washington field office.
“The FBI is not sparing any resources in this investigation,” he said.
The problem with relying on that “fundamentally strong government” is that Trump and his enablers have evidenced the weaknesses in the system and in particularly the ineffectualness of any legal structure when the people accountable for interpreting and enforcing the law act in abeyance of it. Every federal legislator and senior civil servant has taken an oath to uphold and obey the Constitution, and yet we’ve seen numerous Trump allies and enablers acting specifically to undermine the Constitution directly and the democratic norms behind it. The Constitution and federal laws are ultimately words on paper that are only as effective as the people and systems supporting them, and Trump has shown that he can wipe his ass with the law and a thundering herd of self-proclaimed “American Patriots” are just fine with that.
One can hope that many of them invoke their supposed rights as “sovereign citizens” under their fanciful belief in complete personal autonomy, because the one thing the FBI really loves is a specious legal challenge.
I’ve said it in another thread, but personally, I support charging all of them with espionage. Because that’s what it is, when you break into a government headquarters and look through the papers in the offices of the nation’s leaders. And all the folks who weren’t doing that were still enabling the ones who were.
I don’t think they’ll crawl back under any rocks, and I don’t think they’ll no longer pose a threat once Trump is out. The paradigm is shifting, and they no longer need a single leader. There are cells, if we can call them that, all over the country and millions of QAnon true believers spread from coast-to-coast. A “cell” could be anything from those who started training to fight the mythical Army of Antifa they imagined was coming for their small towns to people who get likkered up after the Fraternal Order of Whatever meeting every week and validate/intensify each other’s views. The incitement may come from any piece of legislation or any rumor that gains traction in the land of Q or the internet at large.
As a sort of reverse example, look at the Women’s Marches in 2017. I attended the one in DC. One woman in Hawaii suggested online that there should be a march, and the whole thing exploded from there. Yes, eventually there were organizers, but there was never one main coordinator, and each city or town participating put things together at their own level.
The arrests may temporarily put a damper on things, as will the fact companies are starting to fire the insurrectionists, but the danger–of federal and state buildings breeched, of bombings of government buildings, of murderous mayhem at political events–will remain undiminished. I wish I believed differently. Please, convince me otherwise.
If anything, the recent events in DC seems to have done more than anything else to unite Republicans and Democrats (at least the ones on my Facebook feed).
Honestly, now that it’s passed, this level of shock (but stopping short of congresspeople as hostages or the EC vote disrupted further) is probably the best uniting outcome of horror that could be hoped for. If the rioters had been kept outside, the Retrumplicans in Congress would have protested 5-6 states, going on for hours while the crowd outside got more and more excited, and finished with greater minorities and greater perceived legitimacy for their protest votes. The rioters outside would have rioted that night throughout DC - from the view of Congress, as long as they’re outside, they might have well have been in Detroit - and now we’d be in a big bothsiderism argument about these riots versus BLM. (they’re still trying to make that case but it’s much, much, much harder right now).
I actually think it’s really good that they shot their wad on such a small scale in the capitol. These people have been fantasizing about the idea when insurrection will come, when they’ll all rise up and violently “take back their country”, and while something is a fantasy, it can be perfect. They can think it’s going to be amazing, it’s going to fix everything, all that.
I was actually afraid that Trump’s incitement to violence was going to be much more widespread. I thought he might call upon his cultists all across the country to burn down government buildings and maybe just start lynching liberals. For him only to have a relatively small group in one place is a much smaller damage than he could’ve incited.
But at the same time, it takes the wind out of the sails of their fantasy. The big, perfect insurrection day they were all hoping for, the one where Hillary Clinton and her satanic child sex cabal would be arrested, where Trump would reveal all his secret 4d chess plans coming to fruition, where everything qanon says will happen happened… well… the capitol insurrection was the closest they’re going to get to any of that. And it was small scale and ultimately kind of pathetic. This was their big day, and it was a total fizzle.
I think it’s going to de-energize this movement, to turn the less hardcore supporters away from it, to give some reality to take away their fantasy. Sort of a pressure release valve. It could’ve been a LOT worse than it was, and it’s probably better that this got out in the open and more or less failed rather than being a festering fantasy that they all are convinced is coming to fruition tomorrow.
All I know is that going forward they had better have a fighter jet cap over the Capital, if not some SAMs set up nearby. I hate writing this, but I wouldn’t put anything past them now.
Read an interesting summary of what the insurrectionist chat boards are talking about today. They feel BETRAYED, is what. Betrayed by Trump. Well, of course he betrayed them, that’s what he does best, but it was fascinating how much they didn’t see it coming. They felt that he specifically invited them to break in and commit as much murder and mayhem as they could, but instead of leading them onward, he 1) immediately disappeared, 2.) repudiated the violence publicly, telling them to calm down and go home, and 3) worst of all, he admitted that Biden was going to be president!
The overall feeling is that they picked the wrong guy to be their heroic leader. Unless of course They ‘got him’ and the person talking is a body double.
Not to mention that most of them are going home to find they have no job, and the FBI, along with anyone in the world who cares to know, already knows where they live, the names of all their family members, their phone numbers, and have access to all the messages and videos they’ve posted. I assume they will all be rounded up.
I think the wind in their sails may be pretty feeble right now.
Truly is amazing just how willfully un-aware they all are.
The cowardly conman leaves them all hanging out to dry in the breeze when their chips are down [/cliche storm], like he has every other human being he has interacted with and betrayed in his life, and they act like it’s the most improbable thing to have ever happened in the history of the universe.
I am not sure about “they all are”. The cannon fodder-yes they were clueless and can be rounded up. But I really doubt the instigators left their cell phones on when the crowds stormed the capital. They will be harder to find. OTOH, the FBI has demonstrated a commendable ability to find people when they really want to.
The local paper in New Orleans interviewed several people who went to Washington to support the President. Of course none of them admitted to storming the capital. The closest they came to that was a report that young strangers were circulating through the crowd asking people to liberate the Capital. The local says he told the kid to fuck off and the person kept on going through the crowd. Obviously there were organizers and hopefully the FBI will focus on them.
Oh, none of the people interviewed blamed the President for anything. It was all the work of a few bad apples. Sigh.
Here in Texas our Legislature starts their session in Tuesday and there’s supposedly going to be a big demonstration and a lot of social media chatter about storming the State Capitol.
In Texas. Home of Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz. Where Republicans own every office and have all but sworn eternal fealty to Trump.