Following up from yesterday on Lost Causes, Rex Huppke recounts at the Chicago Tribune statements made to the FBI by one of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 dupes foot soldiers. Daniel “D.J.” Rodriguez joined thousands of self-anointed defenders of antidemocracy. But he broke down in tears when speaking with FBI agents after being apprehended.
“I’m so stupid. I thought I was going to be awesome. I thought I was a good guy,” Rodriguez said:
Now the California man stands charged with, among other things, tasing U.S. Capitol police Officer Michael Fanone, who was beaten and suffered a heart attack during the insurrection. Rodriguez is facing the possibility of decades in prison and nobody should feel sorry for him.
But it’s worth reading the nearly 200-page transcript of Rodriguez’s March 31 interview with FBI agents to see the shameless mental havoc wreaked by people like Trump and every Republican politician and pundit pimping, or even playing footsie with, a profoundly false election narrative.
It’s a con transparent as a freshly cleaned window. And it’s dangerous.
The insurrectionist’s lawyers tried to suppress the transcript of his interview, alleging Rodriguez was not properly Mirandized.
Rodriguez is one of the hundreds charged in the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was arrested after being identified by online “sedition hunters” who pored over videos and photos from the attack.
Rodriguez told the FBI:
“Trump called us,” he said. “Trump called us to D.C.”
He later said: “My story is just that we thought that we were going to save America, and we were wrong.”
Rodriguez revealed he had been told by conspiracy sites such as Inforwars — which he had followed for years — that a civil war was about to happen. Trump and other prominent Facebook conspiracists had fully convinced him the election was stolen.
He told the agents “we felt that they stole the election. We thought they — we felt that they stole this country, that it’s gone, it’s wiped out. America’s over. It’s destroyed now.”
“I thought that Trump was going to stay president and they were going to find all this crooked stuff and … we thought that we did something good,” Rodriguez said. “It was rumored that Nancy Pelosi got her laptop stolen and that they found all this evidence on it and it was a secret plan. … And then we could just bust everything and find the truth and it’ll be all exposed and we’ll see that she’s corrupt or some kind of evidence. And we thought we were being a — we were part of a bigger thing. We thought we were being used as a part of a plan to save the country, to save America, save the Constitution, and the election, the integrity.”
Good intentions are not a “Get out of jail free” card.
Huppke as no sympathy:
You see similar statements in the transcripts of other law enforcement interviews with Jan. 6 attackers and you hear similar words in court hearings. Again, I have no sympathy for these people. They tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power and directly attacked the heart of our democracy. Throw the book at them.
But beyond the crimes of these individuals, it’s important to pay close attention to these cases and see the insidious mental games an entire political party is playing with a huge swath of American voters.
Rodriguez, like most who attacked the U.S. Capitol, was convinced — by Trump, by the things he heard in right-wing media, by the like-minded people he associated with online — that an election was stolen and America was on the brink of a new civil war. He was willing to risk his life to that end and in doing so felt he was part of something bigger than himself.
It’s clear from the interview that it gave him meaning and purpose. You need only scan social media a few moments to see how these lies do the same for so many. And on Fox News and on Infowars and in the Facebook feeds of conspiracy profiteers and in the words and tweets of many gutless elected Republicans, you see those lies still tossed out like chum.
They were played for suckers by Trump and his allies who persist to this day in preying upon others for power and profit.
“The truth is, we need $45 from EACH Patriot … if we are going to have the necessary resources to solve the election fraud of 2020,” read an email sent out by Trump’s Super PAC days after Trump threatened the Republican Party that his supporters would sit out the 2022 and 2024 elections if they did not (somehow) undo the 2020 elections and (somehow) restore him to the Oval Office as emperor (or something).
Why has public education been under attack by the right since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling began school intergation? Because racial discrimination aside, breeding more dupes and dopes is in con men’s interests. The more they can keep people from learning to think critically, the easier the con man’s job.
Trump’s stolen election con was as “transparent as a freshly cleaned window,” yet millions are still his dupes. Now they are too invested to admit to themselves they were hoodwinked by mountebanks and corrupt politicians. The country remains in peril as much from comicbook super villains as their hapless goons.