Driving The Q'Anon Gonzo GOP Herd To Dallas: "For God & Country Patriot Round-Up"

Not to be missed over the long Memorial Day Weekend was this extravaganza that was staged at The Omni Hotel

Yeehaw!

Here's just one review of that event + a few more to follow . . .Let's go there
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QAnon's cowboy-themed "Patriot Roundup" sure sounds like it was full of horseshit

By Andrew Paul

(Andrew Paul is a contributing writer with work recently featured by NBC Think, GQ, Slate, Rolling Stone, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

He writes the newsletter, (((Echo Chamber))).

"Howdy again, pardners! Say, do y’all remember that “For God & Country Patriots Roundup” weekend? You know, the QAnon conference scheduled to saddle up at the (taxpayer-funded) Omni Hotel in Dallas, Texas, hence the hackneyed cowboy theme? Well, despite a petition garnering well over 20,000 signatures in protest, the death cult convention went off without a hitch over this past weekend, and by golly, was it just plumb full of all the prerequisite ultra-rightwing nihilists, MAGA Country A-Listers, insurrectionist pablum, and constitutional law analysis reflected through gold filagreed funhouse mirrors.

As VICE’s “Roundup” roundup described over the weekend, there was a veritable, steamin’ crock of shit pot full of choice moments, including disgraced Gen. Michael T. Flynn buttering up the crowd with his support of a Myanmar-like military coup, Roger Stone’s “social media advisor” pantomiming hanging from a noose after mentioning Hillary Clinton, and the QAnon-spewing lawyer, Sidney Powell, wearing a leather biker vest emblazoned with MAGA patches struggling to sing the national anthem.

People also paid thousands of dollars at a Q-themed auction for items like a quilt signed by Mike “MyPillowGuy” Lindell, which we feel is painful enough to envision, and doesn’t require any more elaboration.

But now the Chauvinist Stampede is receding into the distance, haloed within the setting sun by a cloud of F-250 diesel plumes, Camel Crush cigarette smoke, and Lone Star farts. Don’t retire your spurs just yet, though, cowpokes. This year’s Patriot Roundup may have ended, but rest assured there will undoubtedly be additional QAnon rodeos, MAGA hootenannies, and 8Chan corrals in the months ahead. Like a wild pony, the Q movement refuses to be broken—no matter how many attempts you might make at reining them in with logic and provable facts.

So saddle up, sycophants, the rodeo’s just starting. Yee-fuckin-haw."

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2 From The Daily Beast

Louie Gohmert Says He Isn’t a QAnon Supporter, Just a Moron

VERY FINE PERSON

opinion

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

This is maybe not the compelling defense that the congressman seems to think that it is.

Molly Jong-Fast

Editor-At-Large

Updated Jun. 01, 2021 8:32PM ET / Published Jun. 01, 2021 8:30PM ET 

More > "Some people spent Memorial Day at parades or BBQing with friends, but not Loonie Louie Gomhert, who was in Dallas speaking at The For God & Country Patriot Roundup hosted by “Q power couple” Amy and John “QAnon John” Sabal.

It was like CPAC meets a flat earther convention, but with more talk of coups and overthrowing the government, including former Trump National Security Adviser Mike “Madman” Flynn calling for a Myanmar-style military coup in America (he later denied saying that, but he said it on camera) and Sidney “Kraken” Powell musing that former President Donald Trump should be “reinstated” and then installed as president with a “new inauguration date.”

Powell, of course, is defending herself from a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, which she said rigged the 2020 election on behalf of Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, by arguing that “no reasonable person” would take seriously the things she says.

So Rep. Gohmert maybe wasn’t the craziest guest at this cavalcade of crazy, but he was the only elected member of Congress there, giving a speech under a banner with a QAnon slogan on it. Gohmert didn’t embrace Q on stage, which I guess is better than the alternative, but he did play down the Jan. 6 attacks and say, “I would submit that weaponizing the FBI and the Department of Justice against one administration was an attack on democracy.” After his speech, he hung out with such Q’minaries as Capitol rioter Zak Paine, better known online as redpill78.

You’d think that a sitting United States congressmen would stay away from a cult that FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress “can lead to violence.” But Louie is no fool or, rather, he’s a fool who can read the writing on the wall, which is that QAnon is very popular with the Republican base, which counts on roughly 100 percent of the votes from the “15 percent of Americans (who) say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.” Maybe he’s not crazy but is just trying to meet the base where they are, which is nowhere good.

When the local CBS affiliate asked Gohmert’s office what he was doing there, a member of his staff insisted that he wasn’t there even though he was on camera.

Later, the station’s David Lippman got a long email from Gohmert that said his staff got its days mixed up and wasn’t lying about him being at the event (which organizers had tried to distance from QAnon amid lots of coverage about how it was a QAnon event) and also claiming that he does not even “know who or what QAnon is.”

But I was too stupid to know what the event I spoke at was about isn’t the defense Louie seems to think it is.

It’s been quite the year of being on the wrong side of history for Rep. Gohmert. . .

But back to this weekend’s fuckery. Gohmert went on about how “it wasn’t just right-wing extremists” rioting in the Capitol (although it was). He’s talked previously about how, in the words of Trump, there were lots of “very fine people” there at the insurrection.

People may be right that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Rothschild space lasers lunatic, is the worst member of Congress, but she has at least been stripped of her committee assignments by Democrats and scolded, for what little that’s worth, by her own party’s leaders after comparing mask mandates to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. Louie Gohmert remains a party member in good standing in his R+25 district.

Texas can do better than this guy. It would be hard to do worse."

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Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer.

Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

the national interest June 1, 2021

 

Texas Republicans Want to Make Trump’s Coup Nice and Legal

Michael Flynn said a coup “should happen”; Republicans prefer to use the legislature.

ByJonathan Chait

Intelligencer |

This past weekend, former national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared at the “For God & and Country Patriot Roundup,” a right-wing conclave in Texas, where he endorsed a military coup. “I want to know why what happened in Minamar [sic]” — QAnon believers have fixated on Myanmar’s military junta as a precursor to a similar event here — “can’t happen here?” an audience member, who identified himself as a Marine, asked Flynn. “No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That’s right,” Flynn replied. (Flynn later denied saying this, but it was captured on video.)

At the same time Flynn casually endorsed the military overturning the election and reinstalling the defeated president, the state’s Republican legislature was rushing through a package of voting restrictions that would advance the same broad agenda as Flynn advocates, but within the color of law.

One of the easy and cheap tools of political rhetoric is to hold up one of the more extreme members of the opposing party and misleadingly depict them as representative. To be clear, Michael Flynn is not representative of the Republican Party. He is an outlier in the full extent of his paranoia and willingness to advance the party’s cause through mass-scale illegal domestic violence.

But Flynn’s beliefs are not isolated, and as the drama in Texas indicates, they relate closely to the agenda of the party’s mainstream. A clear majority of Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen, and nearly a quarter of them support QAnon’s deranged fantasies. (Specifically, they agree that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation,” that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders,” and “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)

The proportion of Republicans who believe Joe Biden legitimately won a majority of votes in a majority of the Electoral College is also about one-quarter. All of this is to say that people like Flynn are no more marginal within the GOP than people who believe Joe Biden won the election. If Flynn is an outlier, so are the Republicans who accept the election results. Within the Republican Party, Michael Flynn is no more of a kook than Mitt Romney. . .

But Republicans can’t afford to completely alienate their pro-coup wing. That is why the consensus party stance is to act on the majority Republican belief that Biden stole the election, by imposing a sweeping regimen of voting restrictions, along with legal provisions that will allow Republicans to more easily challenge and overturn the next Democratic presidential election victory.

In Arizona, Republicans stripped the secretary of State (who is currently a Democrat) from any role in election litigation, while vesting all authority in the state’s attorney general, who is currently a Republican. Tellingly, the provision sunsets in January 2023, when the term ends for both officials.. Why? Because the state’s Republican-controlled legislature wants to be sure that it can hand control over a contested election to a Republican, and don’t know yet which office will be controlled by which party. . .

The thing to grasp about the Republican state-level counteroffensive against voting is that, within the bounds of party opinion, it is a compromise. Stacking the legal deck against voting, and in favor of Trump-style postelection legal challenges, arouses barely any controversy on the right.

> The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has occasionally drawn publicity by criticizing Trump’s communication style and undisciplined personal conduct, gives the Texas bill a fulsome endorsement. (The Journal has been laying the groundwork to fend off another Georgia-style backlash by running column after column warning corporations to stay out of the democracy issue.) Even Liz Cheney refused to condemn voter suppression, or even concede any link between these measures and Trump’s lies about the election.

The Republican Party, like all parties, is trying to hold together a coalition. That coalition includes people like Flynn, who want to simply seize power at gunpoint. The accommodation they have reached between their violent and nonviolent wings is a legal regimen designed to ensure that the next time a Trump rejects the election result, he won’t need a mob to prevail.