My inclination is to look for small bits among the whole, which to me are emblematic of the larger picture. So Guy Reffitt writes his own letter from jail. Not surprisingly, there are no references to St. Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr in it. And he doesn't even understand why he's in jail:The reporters also met with the Reffitts’ son, Jackson Reffitt, who had reported concerns about his father’s activities to the FBI. Jackson Reffitt said the bureau did not follow up until the Capitol was under siege. https://t.co/JCnMTMdPh2
— Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) May 16, 2021
“January 6th was nothing short of a satirical way to overthrow a government,” said the letter, written by hand on yellow lined paper. “If overthrow was the quest, it would have no doubt been overthrown.”
Yeah, that's not the defense he thinks it is:
Reffitt faces a variety of charges, including obstructing an official proceeding, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. He is awaiting trial and has pleaded not guilty. In text messages he sent last month to his wife, Reffitt said he was resigning from the Texas Three Percenters.
That's nice, dear.
So how did he get here? Three guesses, first two don't count (but the reason is also the one most often overlooked on Twitter and among the punderati who are still surprised to find there are crazy people out there in flyover land):
Reffitt, 48, worked most of his adult life on oil rigs, an occupation that took him and sometimes his family around the world, including three years in Malaysia. But when the coronavirus hit in 2020, work dried up and he intensified his political activity, focusing on the Black Lives Matter movement, which he viewed as destructive.
Nicole Reffitt said she helped her husband write the letter and solicit support through phone calls and a jailhouse messaging app inmates are allowed to use periodically to communicate with the outside world. The D.C. Jail has held dozens of defendants in connection with the riot, on charges ranging from obstructing an official proceeding to assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon.The letter counters the notion that there was a “plan” or “conspiracy” to take down Congress on Jan. 6, blaming much of the violence on “isolated overly emotional individuals.” It suggests that their actions were meant to put the country on notice: “The people clearly are not happy,” Guy Reffitt said in response to questions sent through his wife.“Ask the Capitol Police for [their] opinion of how it could have been,” the letter says. “They are grateful it wasn’t a real insurrection complete with mind, body and soul.”
Yeah, this guy may be surprised to find out he doesn't speak for as many people as he assumes he does (I'm guessing there are only a few hundred, if even 100, of his 'fellow patriots' in the prison he's in. My guess is they are spread out a bit, and besides, the FBI only has 300-500 people under arrest/investigation, again as I understand. That's a lot of people to incarcerate from one event, but I've attended graduation ceremonies with more students involved. This isn't a representative of the country group at all.). As for the Capitol Police, the ones who died and the ones who were injured wouldn't appreciate, I suspect, being labeled as "grateful" for anything that happened on January 6, 2021.
But back to the year of covid for a minute. Jumping in without a full explanation of how he found himself there, here's what Our Hero did when he was a member of the "Three Percenters" (which would be about 900,000 people, if they lived up to their label. Over 7 million provided the margin of victory for President Biden. 900,000 is a subdivision in the town I live in.):
Guy Reffitt was enthralled. Afterwards, he began doing what he called “intel," doing background checks on new recruits. His wife was relieved he seemed to have a sense of purpose.
In August, Reffitt drove to a BLM demonstration in Mississippi, hoping to surveil a particular activist. The family said that Reffitt intended to place a GPS tracking device on the man’s car. He abandoned the plan when he wasn’t sure he had the right vehicle.
Nicole Reffitt said she was alarmed when she found multiple license plates in the bed of her husband’s pickup truck. She said her husband told her he used them to make sure he wasn’t being tracked. “I was like, ‘What the fuck? What are we doing?’” she said. “He told me to go to work and keep my business to myself.”
After then-President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, Guy Reffitt began to sequester himself in the front room of his suburban brick home, glued to Newsmax as it reported theories of how the vote was rigged.
On Dec. 19, Reffitt found a new obsession, his family said, when Trump tweeted: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
From then on, Reffitt’s texts bounced between plans for shopping and cooking prime rib for Christmas and talk of going to D.C. to “shock the world.”
“It’s the government that is going to be destroyed in this fight,” Reffitt texted his family on Dec. 21. “Congress has made fatal mistakes this time.”
"Doing intel" meant he had something to do, something he needed when he found himself involuntarily unemployed. So how surprising is it he followed Trump's "invitation"? And while he says the event on Jan. 6 was "satirical," I think the full weight of what he got involved in is starting to sink in; because on Dec. 21, he was quite defiant, and also quite sure it was up to him and his buddies to play hero like they do in the movies.
Ye gods and little fishes, this was a very American insurrection.
And lest you miss this detail in the rush to declare the country at war and the cities aflame with right-wing militants and nothing stands between us and anarchy but our ratios on Twitter (or something: I'm not on Twitter, I just browse there), remember this:
Finally acting on Jackson Reffitt’s earlier tip, an FBI agent called him to set up a meeting.
Two days later, Guy Reffitt came home, eager to boast. His son decided to record him. Jackson Reffitt met with the FBI agent the following week.
In the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 16, a squad of more than a dozen officers rolled up to the Reffitt home, armed for a SWAT raid, according to his family and footage from their neighbor’s security camera. A mobile battering ram idled in front of their house as the officers tossed flash-bang grenades. The family clambered out, some still in their underwear.
Jackson Reffitt is Guy's son.
The show of force may seem excessive, but consider what a braggart (mostly emptily, per his wife and son) Our Hero is:
But according to court records, on Dec. 28, Guy messaged an unnamed individual. “I don’t think unarmed will be the case this time,” he said. “I will be in full battle rattle. If that’s a law I break, so be it, but I won’t do it alone.”
When he left to drive to Washington, he told his family, “If everything works out, I’ll see you again,” in what Nicole said was a typically melodramatic goodbye.
“I love ALL of you with ALL of my heart and soul,” he texted on the morning of Jan. 6. “This is for our country and for ALL OF YOU and your kids.”
One interesting upshot of this event is the “not breaking the law alone” dodge. Yeah, that’s not a legal defense, either. It’s also clear Reffitt is a legend in his own mind. But his bark is far worse than his bite:
Guy Reffitt went without resistance, assuring the kids that the federal agents were only doing their jobs. He was expecting to be arrested by then, his family said, and even laughed with an officer who accompanied him to the bathroom after he’d been handcuffed.
As he was being carted off in the back of a police vehicle, he yelled out the window: “I didn’t ask for this!”
He has been behind bars since.
I don't know what the sentencing guideliness will require. But I suspect he's going to be a guest of the government for some time. He certainly thinks he's a jailhouse martyr:
On April 22, Reffitt messaged his wife a note of encouragement.
“You are superstars to more than half the country,” he wrote. “There’s no going back now.”
Because of course he does.
Rather like the decline and soon-to-be collapse of the "audit" in Arizona, I think we're going to find out that too many people with too much time on their hands and more than a little paranoia tied to America's oldest and best hidden wound (racism, if that reference is not clear enough) did some very stupid things that they didn't realize were as stupid or significant as they thought it was. One the one hand, they wanted their actions to be imbued with terrible purpose; on the other, they don't want to be criminally responsible for their actions, so they try to claim there were no consequences, little damage, and no real fault. It was satirical; if they'd meant it, really meant it, the outcome would have been a lot different. But claiming the U.S. Capitol is "public property" (it is, but it's also highly controlled property, not all of it open to the public) is not a defense to the crime of interfering with government operations. That such a crime carries a hefty sentence is meant to indicate how seriously such acts are taken, and to dissuade people from committing them.
There are going to be a lot of people surprised that their day in court is not the day of their vindication, or even of their liberation. Honestly, I feel sorry for them. I think Trump drove them to this act of madness and criminality (it was hardly civil disobedience). But so did covid, and the closing of the country, and the first major public health crisis in a century. The sad part is we'll learn as little this time as we all now know about the "Spanish flu" (including the fact that pandemic started in Kansas, not on the rainy plains of Spain. Who knew?). We'll attribute Jan. 6 to one fool who never should have been POTUS, and to cable news channels and the intertoobs and to conspiracy theories and demented people, and take no consideration for the social history of this pandemic.
Just as we have buried the social history of the early 20th century pandemic, about which almost no schoolchild can tell you anything because it wasn't a war and it wasn't a Presidential decision and it didn't involve "great men" or a famous speech.
Or even a letter from jail.
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