On Wednesday night, Republicans attempted to pretend that their insistence on undermining democracy through continuous calls of election fraud did not contribute to the attempted coup d’etat on our nation’s Capitol earlier that day. Some Republicans clearly reworked their original speeches to temper down some of their more inflammatory rhetoric. But others, like Rep. Matt Gaetz, are too stupid, too lazy, and too dismal as humans to do even that.
Gaetz really doubled down on the day by telling the world that yes, what they saw did actually happen. But even though Donald Trump told those people to come, spoke to those people, and said he would walk them to the Capitol building, it was antifa pretending to be MAGA that actually attempted to coup d’etat. No, I’m not lying to you—that’s what he said. In fact, he said he had proof by way of high-level facial recognition technology! It’s been easily shown that the people Gaetz is claiming were antifa-connected are very much the opposite: They’re well-known white supremacist fascists. But Gaetz’s claims connected to a Washington Times article are being lambasted by the very company said to have made the facial recognition match.
According to The Daily Beast, XRVision says not only did they not identify antifa folks, they identified a bunch of white supremacist assholes. Their attorney sent a statement saying: “We concluded that two of [the] individuals (Jason Tankersley and Matthew Heimbach) were affiliated with the Maryland Skinheads and the National Socialist Movements. These two are known Nazi organizations, they are not Antifa. The third individual identified (Jake Angeli) was an actor with some QAnon promotion history. Again, no Antifa identification was made for him either.” They want a retraction and apology from the Washington Times. While Angeli has definitely been identified, questions remain about whether or not Tankersley and Heimbach are indeed in the photos in question.
Gaetz’s feelings about protests this past summer were a lot different than actual insurrection. In June, Gaetz was calling for the lynching of BLM protesters. Now, not so much. In Gaetz’s short career in office, he has skyrocketed into the stratosphere for being a racist liar whose personality profile seems like something that might scare off the entire psychology community for eons. His infantile subservience to Trump and ultra right-wing personalities is both sad and grotesque.
