His Wonders to Perform

Photo via petguide.com.

 

I don't have a Hardcore email account like Edroso's, but I do get some crazy off Twitter, from nuts there who have followed me at one time or another (I always follow back), for reasons I can't generally reconstruct. One of whom goes by "Question Ray Epps". It's also come to me that outside the depths of the Slough of Paranoia most people don't have a very clear idea of why Ray Epps is a thing, whereas, because of my Twitter connection, I've spent some time trying to figure it out, so I probably have a slightly clearer concept than most of you of who Ray Epps is, and the enjoyable Ray Epps news that has surfaced this week, and I thought I should share that.

Epps was an ex-Marine, the owner with his wife of a wedding-venue business in Arizona, and a pretty high-ranking  Oath Keeper, president of the Arizona chapter, who didn't get charged in the January 6 investigations, although he was captured on video during the rally the night before, telling an interviewer and later a crowd that "We've got to go into the Capitol! That's where our problems are!"—"Peacefully! Peacefully!" he added the second time,  leading the crowd to begin chanting, "Fed! Fed! Fed!" And the next afternoon just at the moment of the breach on the Capitol itself, where he's briefly seen whispering to an unidentified person outside the barriers, who then joins the others knocking the barriers down and punching the cops on the other side, while Epps disappears. There's a pretty good mashup of these glimpses in this story at The Independent.

Then, as Ted Cruz was telling the FBI's representative in a Senate hearing on January 11 2022, a mysterious development:

Cruz then noted that Epps initially appeared on a poster issued by the FBI seeking information about people connected to criminal activity on Jan. 6, but was absent from another FBI “seeking information” poster distributed July 1.

“Magically, Mr. Epps disappeared from the public posting,” he said. “According to public records, Mr. Epps has not been charged with anything. No one’s explained why a person videoed​ urging people to go to the Capito​l​,​ a person whose conduct was so suspect the crowd believed he was a ​fed​,​ would magically disappear from the list of people the FBI was looking at.”

I can tell you something about that one: the FBI wasn't looking for him any more, because when the first poster went up and Epps realized they were looking for him, he immediately called them and gave them whatever evidence he had to give (The New York Times checked his phone records and found he'd spoken to them for an hour), so it's really not all that magical.

But this is a point that the Question Ray Epps crowd has been unable to grasp; that's he's already been questioned, plenty.

What happened next with Epps is easiest to understand, I think, in terms of the January 6 scenario we've been working on here for the last year and a half or so, in which the organizers' favored plan was going to be a pitched battle between Proud Bois and "antifa", for which the Bois had effectively been practicing ever since George Floyd summer, in Portland and Kenosha, NYC and DC, frankly emulating the Hitler Sturmabteilung against the German leftists of the late 1920s, in the hope of giving the defeated Trump an opportunity to declare a national emergency and postpone the Biden inauguration.

But "antifa" had spoiled that by refusing to show up, and the fascist forces ended up trying to intimidate Congress into postponing the inauguration instead, and that had been a rank failure. The Fox News first instinct was to blame it on "antifa":

"Earlier today, the Capitol was under siege by people who can only be described as antithetical to the MAGA movement," Laura Ingraham told her viewers on Fox News that night. "They were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd."

Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson echoed similar sentiments on Fox that night, and in the day following the attack, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., Rep. Paul Gosar, R.-Ariz., and Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., all repeated the conspiracy theory as well. The morning after the riot, so did Rush Limbaugh.

In those 24 hours, the lie that the rioters were actually antifa was mentioned more than 400,000 times online.

But that was just completely unsustainable, as the rioters themselves began to be heard, telling everybody who wanted to hear that they were obeying commands from Trump himself, going back to the "will be wild" tweet of December 19 and given the final signal in the "Mike Pence didn't have the courage" tweet of 2:24 PM.

So the next step was to begin treating it as a Deep State provocateur operation, run by FBI agents disguised as Trump supporters, quickly adopted by Tucker Carlson

Carlson cited an article from the right-wing outlet Revolver News to allege that the January 6 attack on the Capitol may have been orchestrated, at least in part, by FBI operatives. (Revolver News’ Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter who was fired from his White House position for speaking at a white nationalist conference, appeared on Carlson’s show later in the segment.) While claiming that the government is “hiding the identity of many law enforcement officers who were present at the Capitol on January 6,” Carlson added, “We know that because, without fail, the government has thrown the book at most of the people who were present in the Capitol on January 6. There was a nationwide dragnet to find them. Many of them are still in solitary confinement tonight.” He continued: “But strangely, some of the key people who participated on January 6 have not been charged. Look at the documents, the government calls those people unindicted coconspirators. What does that mean? Well, it means that in potentially every single case they were FBI operatives. Really? In the Capitol on January 6?” 

Matt Gaetz

During an appearance on Newsmax show Cortes & Pellegrino on Thursday, the Florida Republican said he believed that the FBI might have had a role in "organizing and participating" in the attack and had written a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray to demand answers.... And what I can say today is there was FBI infiltration of these groups and what we've got to decide is whether that infiltration led to more acute criminal conduct than would have otherwise occurred."

And of course Senator Cruz. Whence, Ray Epps. The one who had said "We've got to go into the Capitol" and was denounced by his comrades as a "Fed! Fed! Fed!"

Ray Epps, in the official Fox fever dream, masterminded by Carlson, must have been the Deep State organizer of the whole thing. The "unindicted coconspirator", which means "potentially" an "FBI operative". Like Richard Nixon was "potentially" an FBI operative in the Watergate conspiracies, or Trump in the Stormy Daniels payoff. No, that is not what unindicted coconspirator means, Tucker.

There was, in fact, an explanation backed by witnesses for each of his suspicious behaviors, backed by evidence including transcripts of an interview with the feds seen by The Times:

The interview transcripts show that Mr. Epps told agents that he had spent much of his time at the Capitol seeking to calm down other rioters, an assertion supported by multiple video clips....

He can be seen in videos from around 1 p.m. that day accosting a rioter named Ryan Samsel, who had already started to confront officers behind a metal barricade on the west side of the Capitol. Mr. Epps said he intervened in the conflict to keep Mr. Samsel from attacking the police and tried to tell Mr. Samsel that the officers were merely doing their jobs. Mr. Samsel gave an identical account to the F.B.I. when he was arrested weeks later.

But Tucker doesn't care, and he's literally ruined Epps's life. Death threats have driven him out of his business and his home, and he and his wife are living as fugitives in an RV with their two shih tzus somewhere in Utah. It was in protest against this that Jonah Goldberg quit working on Fox! (Faa-ahrt!) That's how bad it was.

The enjoyable news is, emboldened by the Dominion Voting Systems victory over Fox News, Epps is now suing their asses for as yet unspecified punitive and compensatory damages. I hope they clean up really big. Epps may be an idiot but he did not deserve what was done to him. 

The thing I'd like to emphasize, I guess, is how technically insane these stories are, especially the ones about the radical leftist FBI, from its effort in 2016 to prevent Trump's victory by setting up the surveillance of Carter Page (but somehow forgetting to publish their salacious dossier on Trump before the election, so it never had a chance to do its evil work) to this picture of the wedding venue entrepreneur secretly running a paramilitary operation with an army that thinks it's on the other side, for I don't know what purpose Tucker, or Gaetz or Cruz, might have imagined.

Of course Tucker never does imagine a purpose. That would spoil the project, I think, by drawing too much implausibility into the story. He's just asking questions. But what on earth is the audience doing? Is it central to the paranoia that the Devil, like the Lord, works in mysterious ways and you just can't tell what they're trying to accomplish? If you know it's simply evil then you're not surprised that it's incomprehensible?