Pity upon a hill
What a deepening investigation into Capitol attack reveals about the America Biden will inherit.
WASHINGTON—It’s a conspiracy pandemic.
A fever of the mind, a disease of the soul, that has seized millions of Americans.
There’s no vaccine for the malady. Truth is the only antibody and many, a gobsmacking number, cannot generate their own immunity. The pathogen has burrowed deep in their bones, courses through their bloodstreams.
In a febrile flush, spasms of choler, they ransacked the Capitol a fortnight ago. Because of them there will be no peaceful transfer of power on Wednesday. Joe Biden might take his oath of office on the outdoor inauguration stage without violent disruption, but the city is in a security vice, clamped down by 25,000 National Guard troops, local and regional law enforcement, streets barricaded at the turn of every vehicle and pedestrian.
The Jan. 6 wilding may have been spontaneous, but every passing day reveals further evidence that the perfect storm for insurrection was strategically co-ordinated and tactically mobilized.
On Tuesday, the first conspiracy charge was laid against a 65-year-old man from Virginia, accused of plotting to sabotage the electoral confirmation of Biden. Thomas Edward Caldwell is described in Justice Department documents as an alleged leader of the Oath Keepers, an extremist group in the thick of the Capitol marauding, among the three militia-style outfits — Proud Boys, Three Percenters the others — that have drawn the most intense investigative focus of the FBI.
Caldwell was arrested just before 7 a.m. Conspiracy charges are reserved for offences of interfering with or obstructing the lawful operation of government. In Caldwell’s case: Conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, violent entry or disorderly conduct.
A 15-page charging affidavit obtained by the Star alleges Caldwell organized a group of up to 10 people, including members of a self-styled Ohio militia who’d marched purposefully up the Capitol steps, spearheading a mob move against police lines. Identified from video footage was Jessica Watkins, from Ohio, who “appears to be affiliated with the Oath Keepers” and, according to her page on the social media platform Parler, founder and commanding officer of the “Ohio State Regular Militia,” a dues-paying subset of the Oath Keepers.
Watkins, a 38-year-old U.S. army veteran was arrested on Sunday. She had photos of herself breaching the Capitol and bragged: “We stormed the
Capitol today. Tear-gassed the whole 9. Pushed our way into the Rotunda. Made it into the Senate. The news is lying (even Fox) about the Historical Events we created today.”
The affidavit cites a Jan. 1 Facebook message sent to Watkins by Caldwell, saying he’d scouted lodging for several out-of-town “Stop The Steal” infiltrators about eight miles from the Capitol that “would allow us to go hunting at night if we wanted to.”
According to the document, Caldwell made an apparent reference to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes: “I don’t know if Stewie has even gotten out his call to arms, but it’s a little friggin late. This is one we are doing on our own. We will link up with the north Carolina crew.”
At 7.47 p.m. on Jan. 6, Caldwell allegedly posted a video to Facebook from within the Capitol: “Us storming the castle. Please Share … I am such an instigator! Didn’t even mind the tear gas.”
Added, according to the FBI: “Proud Boys scuffled with cops and drove them inside to hide. Breached the doors. One guy made it all the way to the house floor, another to (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi’s office. A good time.” And further: “We need to do this at the local level. Lets storm the capitol in Ohio. Tell me when!”
An addendum to the affidavit, filed in the late afternoon, quoted another social media communique received by Caldwell, apparently referring to evacuated members of Congress: “All members are in the tunnel, seal them in, turn on the gas.”
Who are Oath Keepers? The charging document provides a profile. A “large but loosely organized collection of militia who believe that the federal government has been co-opted by a shadow conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their rights. Though the Oath Keepers will accept anyone as members, what differentiates them from other anti-government groups is
their explicit focus on recruiting current and former military, law enforcement and first responder personnel.”
The organization’s name alludes to the oath sworn by military members and police to defend the U.S, Constitution “from all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
The radical right encompasses a spectrum of intertwined ideologies that had been isolated on the fringe and siloed until Donald Trump’s toxic presidency lured shards of resistance, often at odds, into a collaborative movement.
As the Washington Post was first to report Monday, FBI investigators are zeroing in on potentially key figures amid the Capitol mayhem who directed the assault, acting in unison, across domestic terrorism realms. Making common and chaotic cause. To support a charge of sedition, which hasn’t yet been laid against anybody, the crime must involve two or more people opposing by force the authority of the U.S. government, or hindering the execution of an American law.
Among more than 100 people who had been charged as of Monday is Robert Gieswein, a 24-year-old from Colorado who may have links to all three extremist clots — the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys (founded by a Canadian), and the Three Percenters (who take their name from the inaccurate statistic that only three per cent of Americans actually took up arms in the Revolutionary War against colonial British rule).
Court papers allege that Gieswein, who runs a private paramilitary training group affiliated with the Three Percenters, was easily identifiable among the Capitol horde, decked out in military garb with two distinctive markings — a patch for his paramilitary group, the Woodland Wild Dogs, and a black pouch on his chest that read: “MY MOM THINKS I’M SPECIAL,” evocative of the Proud Boys anthem, “Proud of Your Boy.”
Also among the arrested: a fireman, a former West Virginia legislator, a retired Air Force lieutenant-colonel, a son of a judge, a son of a cop, a former Texas mayoral candidate, a lawyer, an Olympic gold medal swimmer.
Most worrisome, however, is the apparent infiltration of military and paramilitary institutions — protectors of Americans at home and American interests abroad — by insidious, racist, white supremacist beliefs. Not only have there been suspensions and terminations of officers who tacitly allied themselves with the frenzied throng on Jan. 6 — standing back, posing for selfies — but the FBI is now vetting all of the 25,000 National Guard troops summoned to D.C. for any hint of extremist sympathies. Between Tuesday morning and Tuesday evening, the number of Guardsmen plucked off the assignment had risen from two to a dozen. Among those arrested on Sunday was Timothy HaleCusanelli, an Army reservist with a “secret level” security clearance and a long history of posting extremist content online.
The National Guard, which actually predates American Independence, is made of up citizen-soldiers under state command (except for D.C., whose troops are under federal authority), originally conceived as a civilian force to protect families and towns from hostile attacks, more recently for disaster-relief operations. They haven’t usually been deployed in the modern era with weapons, but they are armed for the D.C. mobilization. The Pentagon has been historically averse to deploying Guardsmen to help patrol American streets, where they might potentially have to confront fellow Americans. (It was the Ohio National Guard that fired on protesters at Kent State University during a 1970 antiwar demonstration, killing four students.)
Yet that’s their obligation now, to forcibly disrupt any attack aimed at the inauguration, with a lone shooter, potentially one of their own, the gravest worry among security authorities.
It can’t be soft-coated that this crisis coalesced around and was incited by Trump, conspiracist-in-chief, renegade in command and provocateur nonpareil, who has done everything but lay siege to the White House since the Nov. 3 election, the results of which he continues to reject on baseless declarations of voter fraud while never actually disavowing the roiling legions of insurrectionists, a confederacy of dunces.
There’s something in the American character that clearly quickens to conspiracy intrigue: Elvis is alive and working as a secret agent for the FBI; Neil Armstrong took that first step for mankind on a movie sound stage; Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t a lone shooter in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; remains of crashed alien aircraft are kept at Area 51 in Nevada; the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab … or was unleashed by Big Pharma … or Bill Gates had foreknowledge of the pandemic and was part of a dastardly plot to vaccinate the world’s population … the vaccination contains a tracking device that can be activated by 5G.
The election was stolen from Trump.
All of it promoted and amplified to a stunning extent by the Big Daddy of conspiracy acceleration — morphing from a kook niche absurdly alleging the existence of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles and cannibals (Hillary Clinton included) running a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria to an election theft plot against Trump gone gaga. QAnon’s messaging in dark corners of the internet migrated to mainline platforms such as Facebook and Twitter so that upwards of three million users have directly accessed the twaddle, served inside a slop of paranoia.
“The paranoia has been there forever, essentially,” says Ronald Pruessen, history professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, former director with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Civil War scholar and native of Brooklyn, N.Y. “You can dig down layer by layer. It’s a deep tradition. And paranoia lends itself intensely to thinking about conspiracies.”
Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and authority on 20th century social protests, adds: “It’s a social pathology that can run rampant because people want to blame somebody. There are a lot of people who think the country has been taken away from them. It’s a lot simpler to blame a conspiracy than to have an explanation that academics like me will give them.”
They’ll take their cue from QAnon instead.