Lost The Plot

Whatever else they may be, Trump supporters aren't dumb, and in some cases, they're quite a bit smarter than Trump himself. I noted in Thursday's post that hardly anyone believed the characters shown in a viral video from the "protest" at the Manhattan courthouse were actual Trump supporters, certainly in large part because actual Trump supporters knew well enough to stay home. But that leaves aside the fact that the stars of the vignette looked like, one, an Antifa, and two, a Jacob Chansley wannabe, neither of whom struck anyone as a solid-citizen Republican type.

It turns out the skeptics were right:

During Tuesday’s protest in support of President Trump against his impending arrest by the radical Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Antifa members disguised as Trump supporters had apparently already infiltrated the demonstration.

Independent reporter Rebecca Brannon uncovered these fake “Trump supporters” in Manhattan, who appeared to stand out like a sore thumb.

One such protestor was dressed like the well known “Q-Anon Shaman,” who was recently sentenced to four years in prison for walking around the Capitol with police as his tour guides.

. . . Brannon also tweeted about the Anarchist tattoo she noticed on the neck of the “Trump supporter” who demmanded the “Q-Anon Shaman” prove he wasn’t wearing a wire.

. . . “I noticed his circle-A tattoo—the classic symbol prominently associated with Antifa and anarchists,” she tweeted.

“He knew I noticed, then put his hoodie up,” she wrote.

The reporter also found that the guy dressed as “Q-Anon Shaman,” is actually an actor who appeared “America’s Got Talent,” whose real name is Danny Wolverton, aka “Specialhead” of Brooklyn, NY.

This simply confirms the suspicions among Republicans, whose good sense made the event disappointing for the media, which wanted a show.

Over the weekend Donald Trump called on supporters to protest his expected indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. On Monday, few in the city heeded the call.

“We threw it together at the last minute, the last 24 hours,” said Gavin Wax. The president of the New York Young Republican Club organized the demonstration outside of the Manhattan Criminal Court where Trump could be arraigned in the coming days.

“We weren’t sure we even wanted to come out because some people don’t like us, but we are here to show that there is support for President Trump in the bluest area in the country, here in Manhattan,” said Wax, trying to account for the small gathering of some 50 people when he’d predicted a crowd of at least three times the size earlier in the day.

So Politico estimated 50 people turned up, and some large percentage of those were presumably FBI informants, Antifa provocateurs, and wannabe actors who wound up with nothing better to do than denounce each other for not looking like Republicans, who were staying home out of good sense. This says quite a lot about January 6 as well, but at least the Antifa provocateurs at that event changed into MAGA outfits.

So with the courthouse protest a big fizzle, the media fell back on a last-resort tactic of desperation:

Emergency personnel have responded after a package with suspicious white powder was delivered to the mail room for the New York City building housing the Manhattan District Attorney's office, according to police.

A law enforcement source confirmed there was a note saying "Alvin – I’ll kill you" in the envelope. District Attorney Alvin Bragg is currently weighing whether to proceed with an indictment against former President Donald Trump for alleged hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.

The envelope delivered by the U.S. Postal Service Friday has been "deemed non-hazardous" at the scene, the mail room to the DA's office, officials told Fox News.

Police responded to the scene shortly after 12 p.m., and as yet, no one has been ordered to evacuate.

For decades, episodes of white powder, racist graffiti, vandalism, burned churches, nooses, and death threats have turned out to have been perpetrated by members of the same groups against which the putative threats were made, largely as ploys for sympathy or attempts to divert attention from legitimate personnel-type concerns. This instance, coming as a Trump indictment from Bragg's grand jury seems less and less likely, looks like a similar attempt at distraction from a narrative that's going south in a hurry.

The problem is that this stuff is no longer working. Michael Barone just yesterday made a point I've been making since I started this blog:

Ironically, after the 1964-68 civil rights acts changed America for the better, there were cries that racist treatment of blacks was as bad as ever. America was going crazy again, on schedule.

And so it has in the last few years. After the election and reelection of the first black president, we heard Black Lives Matter, like the Black Panthers 50 years before, proclaim that America was even more racist than it ever had been. Since the "mostly peaceful" riots of summer 2020, there have been sharp increases in violent crime and moves to defund and delegitimize police departments, which are, in fact, far less racist than in the 1960s.

America went crazy too over COVID, in my view, by treating a virus fatal to just a small segment of the population as if, like Ebola, it had an infection fatality rate of around 50%. Authorities imposed lockdowns and mandates while ignoring economic costs and lasting collateral damage, like adults missing cancer screenings and children missing first and second grade.

But moral panics have a "morning after" phase, which we're currently going through. The moral entrepreneurs have finally lost the plot.