Existing comment:
The smiling guy with the "Take Down This Wall" sign was a familiar face. I'd run into him on January 14 in a nearby location waving an "An Appeal to Heaven" flag and a "Demand Justice" sign. He didn't have a mask on then either.
My report from that encounter had included this:
He was yelling that Trump wasn't being properly judged for his actions. I talked to him and he was fairly nice. I asked him if he was a QAnon person and, believe it or not, he said he had never heard of them. What?
He apologized for being incoherent because he had driven up from Florida that day (I was talking to him at 3pm) and he had had very little sleep.
When I talked to him this week, he said he had driven up again from St. Augustine again and had been here for 3 days. He thought he had other friends who were meeting him there but he said no one had showed up other than him. He said this whole place was a ghost town.
He's a nice guy. He doesn't argue much. He claims he's still not familiar with QAnon. This time he was arguing that we live in a democracy, damn it, not a police state and that's what these fences represent.
Now, the logical response to this is that we're living through this because his guy tried to overthrow democracy. He correctly called it an "insurrection" but said it was by patriots. I'll paraphrase this part of the conversation:
Me: Anyone who even thinks of breaking into the Capitol should have known they were in the wrong.
Him: Yes but the break-in wasn't the fault of Trump supporters.
Me: They had the Trump flags and chants.
Him: Yes, but none of them wanted to break in. I talked to a woman in Florida who had been there that day and she said yes, there were the Trump protesters. But it was people wearing white masks who pushed everyone else to break in.
Me: But all of the people arrested have been Trump supporters.
Him: Yes, but that's because they were set up by the liberal media who worked with the FBI to get rid of them.
More than 300 people have been charged with the insurrection. As far as I know, all of them were Trumpsters. But his argument is that even if 999 get arrested, it's that one unarrested person that was actually responsible and that person escaped due to anti-Trumpers conspiring against him. There is really no way you can disprove the world he's living in.
He said that Trump himself had personality failings but the media never gave him a chance and suppressed the news about all of the good he was doing. I said if that was true, then how did he know about the supposed good things Trump had done. He said that he gets his information from "alternative sources." But he also acknowledged that that approach to information risked going down a rabbit hole. |