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Hating the January 6 “Sedition Hunters”
I hate these people. I hate them for who they are and for what they are doing and most of all I hate them for the larger thing they are a part of.
The people I hate call themselves sedition hunters. They give themselves war names glorified by a liberal press, names like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers. What these people do, as a sort of Orwellian hobby, is identify people who participated in the January 6 Capitol riot. They spend their days slithering around the Internet looking for evidence that can put a name to a press photo and then turn what they find over to the FBI in hopes the Feds will play Sturmtruppen to their Gestapo and kick some doors down. They turn neighbors in to law enforcement as a hobby.
One specific goal they have is to find higher quality images of a suspect that the FBI or their more tech-savvy fellow fascists can run against facial recognition tools. They spend hours on PimEyes, a facial recognition website, copying and pasting photos from CNN freeze frames and Facebook profiles. And unlike the FBI, whose use of facial recognition is at least nominally controlled by law, these amateurs are free to use and misuse the tech on behalf of the FBI without legal or moral fetter.
Here’s how one hagiographic journalist described the sedition hunters: “There are archivists with the encyclopedic knowledge of the timeline, locations and key players. There are hashtaggers who generate catchy, memorable nicknames [example: NaziGrayHat, AuntRageFace, MAGAGuy] to help the community track the actions of suspects still at large. There are the computer whizzes who create slick websites that let you explore evidence in a user-friendly format. There are the diplomats who serve as liaisons between break off groups in the larger sedition hunters network.”
One of those slick websites, January 6 Evidence, offers a minute-by-minute timeline linking photos and videos, overlaid with a geolocator map for suspects. You can filter for AntiAbortionTrumpers and CapitolFireExtinguishers, or chose to target only Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. The Persons of Interest page displays almost 1,800 faces, photos we assume were taken from the press coverage but who knows, of those ID’ed and those pending ID, updated with links for people busted by the Feds. One of the page developers, K2theSky, runs a companion Twitter account all about tracking down the January 6 participants that plays out like a serial killer’s bulletin board. You can almost hear her greasy sounds of self-pleasure in the background as a crusader tags another victim. It goes well beyond the “revenge of the nerds” meme the MSM employs to humanize these people.
The web site is an extraordinary obsession. While you were walking the dog, or volunteering at the food bank, these people did all this work on their own, for free. It takes a lot of hate to inspire thousands of painstaking, detail-oriented hours of free work over a period of months. Imagine that much hate channeled by a charismatic leader. It would be a triumph of will.
Putting the events of January 6 in perspective is important to understanding my hate for these people. January 6 just was not anything significant, despite all the heat and noise. The most perfect way to know that is to look at the convictions resulting out of all this Scooby “sleuthing” and FBI work. To date 702 people have been arrested. Of the completed cases, the majority have been plead guilty to things like trespassing, unlawful entry, and picketing in a Federal building, the kind of things which follow a rowdy Ohio State-Michigan game. There have been no convictions for treason, sedition, incitement or insurrection (though Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder, has been charged with conspiracy related to sedition.) Things are so far from reality that one rioter just skipped prison time because the judge noted she came to the Capitol in a tutu and not tactical gear.
The Capitol riots were goonish, embarrassing, but in the end about as historically meaningful as a floor brawl in the Taiwanese legislature. For it to be a coup, insurrection, etc., it would have needed a path toward accomplishing a change of government. There never was any. Joe Biden was always going to be president just like the election said should happen. All the mob accomplished was a meaningless few hours’ delay in a largely ceremonial christening by the House. Trump’s actions vacillated between bizarre and shameful, but hardly Weimar material. As the fat kid in Jojo Rabbit said, “Not a good time for Nazis.”
We must also dismiss the notion that the sedition hunters are some sort of modern day crime fighting superheroes. They are politically motivated vigilantes. They don’t hunt pedophiles or murders, they hunt Trump supporters over misdemeanor trespassing cases. Their actions are not aimed at justice but rather toward contributing to a propaganda meme that says what happened on January 6 was the most significant events of their meaningless lives. They do not want to solve crimes; they want to ruin the lives of people pictured by the media.
In the aftermath of the Rittenhouse trial it has become common to rhetorically ask “What would have happened if Kyle Rittenhouse was black?” So let us try the same here. Imagine a group of online sleuths dedicating themselves to identifying the young black men who busted windows and burned stores during BLM riots. Imagine people devoting their lives to creating online resources with real-life consequences for Americans not charged with any crime, feeding everything from rumors to facial recognition results to law enforcement so they could kick down some uptown door and drag a 24-year-old black kid to jail.
I hate the sedition hunters because they do not realize they are pawns in a larger game. Democrats and mainstream media are trying to sell the events of January 6 to frightened Americans as a new 9/11. This is in service to two goals: electing a Democrat in 2024, and using the tools of law enforcement against Republican supporters. You, too, should hate that.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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Rich Bauer said...
1If these”patriots” were a bunch of proud boys only guilty of knocking down the doors of a federal building and not a bunch of losers in real life, they should have come forward and proudly admitted who they were and what they did. But no, they crawled back home to their loser lives, hoping the feds wouldn’t come knocking on their doors.
01/23/22 2:04 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
2The verdict of Jan 6th as an alleged Trump effort at overturning the 2000 election results is quite a ways from being historically documented in infallible form. The forthcoming 2004 POTUS election might give us a useful insight. The 2004 POTUS election -if it occurs – may be so contentious that the USA may float in a period of governing limbo for many decades.
01/23/22 6:54 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
3Peter should have saved his fake hatred for the loser who crawled back to his safe space rather than join these pathetic losers who believed his Big Lie.
01/24/22 7:43 AM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
4Bauer: Agree. Maybe what I call the Blue Light guys only play at being tough guys. Many were guys in their forties and fifties and full of righteous vigor and outrage. Why didn’t America send such guys to Vietnam instead of clueless 19 year olds?
Better yet why weren’t such types drafted to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan?
01/24/22 10:34 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
5JP,
While many of these “patriots” are like Trump, chickenhawks who are a little short in the shorts carrying a big stick AR15 to compensate, many others are just suckers who have been screwed over so many times by con artists like Trump. They were easily fooled by the Big Liar who knows a sucker when he sees one.
01/24/22 12:38 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
6I hate the 20 million+ Republican voter cowards who actually believe the Big Lie that Trump won the election and are sitting on their fat ass on their Lazy Boy instead of marching on the White House…if they really believe the Big Lie. Are all these Big Lie believers cowards or liars? If they identify with Trump, that would be both.
01/24/22 5:05 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
7Save your hate for idiots on FoX News and the other nutworks who have deluded their idiot antivaxxer viewers to their deaths.
Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. have reached the highest level since early last year, eclipsing daily averages from the recent Delta-fueled surge, after the newer Omicron variant spread wildly through the country and caused record-shattering case counts.
The seven-day average for newly reported Covid-19 deaths reached 2,191 a day by Monday, up about 1,000 from daily death counts two months ago, before Omicron was first detected, data from Johns Hopkins University show. While emerging evidence shows Omicron is less likely to kill the people it infects, because the variant spreads with unmatched speed the avalanche of cases can overwhelm any mitigating factors, epidemiologists say.
01/25/22 9:53 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
8Unless all the January 6th “insurrectionists” take a plea bargain there will be trials for sedition. The accused seditionists will say they felt justified and morally obligated as loyal Americans in delaying what they felt was an imposter POTUS from being sworn in and were actually protecting the legitimate POTUS. The trials will certainly fascinate me. I have a scenario of what could or should happen and what the sentencing and pardons should be.
01/26/22 9:23 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
9JP,
There wouldn’t be trials in Russia for anyone who attacked the Russian government, would there? What would be their sentencing?
01/26/22 2:48 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
10Bauer- I’ve never been to Russia. I’m not a Russian citizen. What happens there is a complete unknown to me except for what I read in the MSM. I can only assume I’d have to change my outspoken ways or suffer some pretty unpleasant consequences. Such a fate might be in store for my children right here in the good ole USA.
01/27/22 9:14 AM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
11Stephen Breyer: “Fuck no Biden. I won’t retire if you replace me with some nigger bitch.” I can make such an outlandish speculation because I’m 77. Geezerhood grants me such immunity from cancellation. It is perverse that Biden has to announce such an appointment. For the record. August Wilson is enjoying a good laugh with Eugene O’Neill in the either as equals with Lanford Wilson also chortling at the absurdity of our species.
01/27/22 3:44 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
12I think Bauer would agree. We should be allowed one editing courtesy. I felt I typed ether but maybe auto correct changed it to either. Maybe niggah would have worked better than nigger. Maybe Biden should appoint the judicial clown Clarence Thomas’s accuser to the highest judicial perch? That would be a viable reparations for George Bush the 1st’s clearly poke in the eye to adversaries.
01/28/22 2:19 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
13JP,
Your White Russian slip is showing…again.
Russia has a population of 144 million people but only 70,000 of them are black. Over the years, human rights organisations have reported numerous racist attacks.
01/28/22 7:22 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
14Russia will need to welcome nonwhite immigrants. White Russians ain’t repopulating your shitty country.
While little Russia spent much of 2021 amassing troops on its Ukrainian border, Russian President Vladimir raz Putin was actually threatened by the largest natural population decline since World War II, losing 997,000 people in the yearlong period between October 2020 and September 2021. Although coronavirus casualties in Russia were severe—and highly underreported—this wasn’t a one-time anomaly. Instead, it was the opening shot of a longer-term trend that will manifest in earnest over the next decade. Russia is about to enter a prolonged and painful period of demographic decline at home—complicating its expansionist ambitions abroad.
01/28/22 7:31 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
15Bauer- you have an irrational hatred of the Ruskies. They are no more flawed than us. They’ll muddle along no better nor worse with a declining population. America would be better off at 70 million instead of 340 million inhabitants.
By the way Biden should appoint Anita Hill to the high court to atone for the disaster of Thomas. It might get him to also bail. He can take his coke can and skedaddle.
01/29/22 9:24 AM | Comment Link