Monty Python lampooned them as “upper class twits,” people for whom higher education is more a fashion accessory to be displayed than personal betterment to be internalized.
By most accounts the MAGA rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol may not have been the elite, but by and large were not plebians either. Eighty-five percent were employed. They included doctors, attorneys, architects, and business owners.
They included Douglas Austin Jensen of Des Moines whose Jan. 6 selfie video helped get him arrested. “This is me, touching the f—— White House,” he said, touching the wall of the U.S. Capitol.
They included Nathan Wayne Entrekin of Cottonwood, Arizona who came dressed as a Roman gladiator. Dubbed “Caesar No Salad,” by Sedition Hunters. He believed himself portraying Captain Moroni, a character from the Book of Mormon. “Wow, Mom. I wish you were here with me,” he said in one video. “Here comes the riot police, Mom.” On Friday Entrekin pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor.
They included disbarred, Yale-educated attorney, Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Proud Boys militia group. Federal authorities charged Rhodes and multiple others in his merry band this week with seditious conspiracy.
What is remarkable is not that they are abnormal but how sadly normal they are.
In my working life, I was a professional engineer, a PE. Titles and credentials do not impress. I’ve worked with PEs who were useless and PhDs who were clueless. The beliefs and behaviors of the rioters reconfirm that maxim.
But not just the rioters. Their representatives inside the Capitol they attacked do indeed represent them.
In testifying before a Senate committee this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, probably the nation’s most foremost authority on infectious diseases, faced questions about his finances from Senator Roger Marshall, Republican of Kansas:
Marshall said that according to Forbes, Fauci had an annual salary of $434,000 in 2020. He asked if Fauci would make his finances public — but as a government employee, Fauci’s financial information is already publicly available.
Marshall, a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology, seemed not to understand that “The Ethics in Government Act also requires public financial disclosure by senior U.S. government officials.”
“What a moron,” Fauci muttered into a still-hot mic as the senator’s time expired. “Jesus Christ.”
The Washington Post reports:
Of all the paragraphs in a bill to ban “divisive concepts” from being taught in Virginia public schools, Section B3 may seem the most innocuous. After all, it is in the part of the proposal that defined what could actually be taught in history classes, not the myriad things that would be banned or the consequences teachers could face for teaching them, including prosecution and being fired.
Section B3 of the bill, sponsored by Republican freshman Del. Wren Williams, defines what can be taught as “the founding documents,” like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, excerpts from the Federalist Papers, the writings of the Founding Fathers and Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic “Democracy in America.” Oh, and one more thing: “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.”
Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas, not the Black abolitionist icon Douglass.
From The Guardian:
“New rule,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. “If you don’t know the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas, you don’t get to tell anyone else what to teach.”
Like Rhodes, Wren Williams is an attorney. But neither is President of the United States.
“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice,” said Donald J. Trump, graduate of the Wharton School of Business, dubbed “the dumbest goddam student I ever had,” by one of his professors and a moron by his own secretary of state.
But a man of the people.