Fund-Me Fascism
Today, your Freakshow heads down behind the big teddy bear shooting gallery to one of the greasier “J6 Patriot” tents. Here - hang onto your wallet! - nice ladies in Washington and New Jersey will try to talk you into donating money for felonious martyred fascists.
As I’ve written before [Invasion of the Body Snatchers ] every sentient American - every human with access to American media on the planet - has seen evidence of the fascist insurrection. The hangman’s noose on the Capitol lawn waiting for Pence will forever be burned into our cortexes. So too, Louisiana Richard Barnett smirking with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. We didn’t really need the legal proceedings to tell us what happened. Unless you live exclusively in a Fox news or Infowars silo, you saw police body cam up-close footage of the blood-shot eyes and spittle- and hate-spewing mouths of our fellow Americans, smashing windows, shrieking, growling, bear spraying and slamming cops with shields, guardrails and flagpoles, all under cover of the stars and stripes and for the democracy-destroying Trump 2020 Big Lie.
But the whitewashing and martyr-ization of the insurrectionists has been so effective that most conservatives will now tell you they are heroes. From being initially appalled and terrified (talking to you, Josh Hawley) during the action, American righties have come around to what might be called The Big Little Lie, that J6 was barely even a white riot, hardly on scale with the BLM protests, just some nice middle class Americans, fed up with regulations, taxes and woke culture. Or, if you really want to know, undercover feds and antifa did the fighting and feces-smearing and pinned it on well-bred conservative boys.
The law says otherwise, though, and many are officially felons now. As of August, 1,100 people have been charged, 629 defendants had pleaded guilty, and 129 others went to trial. Of those that went to trial, 87 defendants have been convicted of all charges, 40 defendants received mixed verdicts (convicted of at least one charge, and acquitted or hung jury on at least one charge), and two were acquitted of all charges.
A website called the Patriot Freedom Project is one of the many nodes working to whitewash these criminal into heroes. There’s money in it. On the project’s slick website, families and friends of men (mostly) in what they call the DC gulag, are posting personal pages and pleas for cash. One click and you’ve funded your favorite Proud Boy. As of last year, the fund had raised nearly a million dollars.
The site’s individual donation pages where you can “Connect with a 1/6er That [sic] is Incarcerated,” (with click options to “give” “share” and “pray”) are mostly written by mom or the wife. They are heavily decorated with images of sunset snuggles honeymoon shots, puppies, dog-walking in glorious American nature. A few cute babies.
One thing the pages do not make any mention of is what most of these men did acknowledge - often weeping in court. Contrition and guilt. Proud Boy Tarrio, for example, sobbed before he was sentenced to 18 years in August. "Please show me mercy," Tarrio asked the judge. "I ask you that you not take my 40s from me." As the BBC reported, “an emotional Tarrio” apologized to police and residents of Washington DC for his role in the riot. "I am extremely ashamed and disappointed that they were caused grief and suffering," he said. "I will have to live with that shame for the rest of my life. … I was my own worst enemy. My hubris convinced me that I was a victim and targeted unfairly."
You will not find that on his donor page, posted by his mom. He’s just a wronged patriot. As of last night, small donations were still rolling in from the credulous and terminally Big Lie outraged. One man just gave Tarrio $42 with the comment: “Don't give up. We are being governed by the devil.”
Another Proud Boy, Zach Rehl, has racked up $106,000 in donations on the site. Rehl was a Philadelphia Proud Boys chapter leader recently sentenced to 15 years in prison. His page, posted by a family member, reads “He is nonviolent, he did not push through any barricades, brought no weapons, and he did not damage any property. Yet he has been convicted of seditious conspiracy and more. Regardless of the verdict from a DC jury, his fight is far from over. Him [sic] and his lawyer will be taking this to the court of appeals.”
The prosecution presented evidence that Rehl was hardly “nonviolent.” A former Marine and Proud Boy leader who put his military training to use in a televised fascist putsch, Rehl allegedly bear-sprayed cops in the face. Nowhere does the page mention that at his sentencing Rehl sobbed and admitted he was in the wrong. “I’m done with politics, done with peddling lies for other people who don’t care about me,” Rehl said, taking breaks from speaking to wipe his tears and catch his breath. Politics, he said, had caused him to “lose track of who and what mattered most.” And he called January 6, a “despicable day.”
Soon after his sentencing, Rehl’s spine stiffened up. He called into Alex Jones’ Infowars, which posts images from the site’s go-fund-me pages on air when any of the “patriots” phones in from what they call “the DC gulag.” On the same show, Proud Boy Ethan Nordean told Jones: “All the boys here in the gulag we support you, we salute you.”
Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, sentenced ten years, has racked up $80,000 in donations in the Patriot Freedom project. His girlfriend Lia Magee created and updates the fundraising page. But in court, Magee had called him, on the witness stand, “a f-ing idiot” and said her daughters have had to suffer, and have been bullied at home due to their father’s actions.
After sentencing, Pezzola, who sobbed asking for mercy, shouted “Trump won!” on his way out of the courtroom. And he is not contrite on the site. “I do not blame President Trump, never have and never will for what happened on that day. I blame all the corrupt politicians who swore the same oath as me, but don’t follow it. I blame all the elected officials who have decided to serve themselves other than the people who gave them the power, that have sold out the COUNTRY to enrich and benefit ONLY THEMSELVES. Trump is the warrior President fighting for US and I stand with him.”
Tarrio, Rehl and Pezzola were all high profile capos. The site contains dozens of pages posted by pathetic associates of lesser “patriots” who, on a single day, ruined their own and their family’s lives. Jose Padilla - not the convicted murderer by the same name but a young Tennessee veteran - who was convicted of smashing a cop with a flagpole and sentenced to six and half years in prison. His wife Rebekah, evicted from their rented home, is posting pleas on the site for help to buy food for her and the kids. “Well, my oldest and I made it up to DC. We also made it to Jose sentencing, where we listened to the prosecution make it sound as if my husband was the only one there doing everything on January 6th.... kinda like a super human.... alone.... ramming barricades and yelling at people..... alone... “ she posted recently. “The judge was fair, I have to admit.... 6.5 years, 2 years probation, and 2,000 fines to DC.... I am now fighting a battle for my family.... and I can't stop for fear of failing them.”
Do their or their families deserve our pity? Yes.
Do they deserve our money? Perhaps if they evidenced true contrition.
But why should they apologize when they’re patriots?
In front of a judge, these people will cry and admit anything, even occasionally spilling some truths, including that they were transmogrified into right wing shock troops as low-information consumers of political propaganda. When Jessica Watkins, a transwoman insurrectionist and member of the fascist Oath Keepers, apologized at her sentencing hearing, she explicitly blamed misinformation. She said she was “watching Infowars" and Alex Jones and was "hearing that Dominion servers were being invaded by the Chinese" prior to the attack. But, evidence of the power of propaganda on the neural network: she told the court she still believes that the country needs to “take a closer look” at the 2020 election.
The Project has a page devoted to helping J6 participants get jobs, asking readers to report employers who “discriminate” against them. “If you or a loved one is suffering from discrimination in the workforce due to your affiliation with the events of January 6th, please fill out the form below and we will try to connect you with an employer.”
Some of the insurrectionists have taken so much heart from the martyrization op, they are seeking to retract guilty pleas (a legally perilous game) or, if out of prison, plan to run for office on their J6 bonafides.
The Patriot Freedom Project was founded by a New Jersey woman named Cynthia Hughes, whose linked in page advertises over 15 years experience as an automotive e-commerce specialist, with skills “including project and sales management. Excellence in Customer Service Satisfaction. Excellence in planning, coordinating, focusing on details, taking initiative.” The Project’s board is Rachel Semmel, whose day job in DC is Director Of Communications & Fellow at The Center for Renewing America, a “think tank” founded by former Trump Office of Management and BudgetDirector Russell Vought.
Conservatives like Hughes and Semmel didn’t (as far as I know) participate personally on January 6. They have jobs, and are entitled to their political opinions. We can differ with them about regulatory systems, the role of government, how children should be publicly educated, abortion. But the whitewashing of violent anti-democratic felons into American “patriots” and heroes is just another alarming example of how far the American right is willing to go into brownshirt politics. For more on how this works, I recommend today’s issue of John Ganz’s Unpopular Front, from which I quote:
What I can say with a lot of confidence, is just about everybody in the vanguard of the right-wing, among its intellectuals, its staffer class, its journalists, etc. is in close daily proximity to some form or another of fascist or white supremacist propaganda. And I don’t mean this in the “woke,” everything-is-kinda-white-supremacy way, I mean this in it literally bubbled up from Nazi message boards and the like. At the very least, they do not react in horror at coming into close contact with someone or something from the real extreme. It’s titillating for them. Perhaps it might be worrisome for their career prospects, but not for their sense of themselves. They barely bother to really hide it anymore! It’s in their feeds. It’s in their DMs. It’s their real life social networks. It’s just the air they breathe. Even if they are afraid to hold or evince extreme views, they will admire those who do as the cooler ones and heroes.
RESEARCHER: Grey Puett
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