Some people spent Memorial Day at parades or BBQing with friends, but not Loonie Louie Gomhert, who was in Dallas speaking at The For God & Country Patriot Roundup hosted by “Q power couple” Amy and John “QAnon John” Sabal.
It was like CPAC meets a flat earther convention, but with more talk of coups and overthrowing the government, including former Trump National Security Adviser Mike “Madman” Flynn calling for a Myanmar-style military coup in America (he later denied saying that, but he said it on camera) and Sidney “Kraken” Powell musing that former President Donald Trump should be “reinstated” and then installed as president with a “new inauguration date.” Powell, of course, is defending herself from a defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, which she said rigged the 2020 election on behalf of Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, by arguing that “no reasonable person” would take seriously the things she says.
So Rep. Gohmert maybe wasn’t the craziest guest at this cavalcade of crazy, but he was the only elected member of Congress there, giving a speech under a banner with a QAnon slogan on it. Gohmert didn’t embrace Q on stage, which I guess is better than the alternative, but he did play down the Jan. 6 attacks and say, “I would submit that weaponizing the FBI and the Department of Justice against one administration was an attack on democracy.” After his speech, he hung out with such Q’minaries as Capitol rioter Zak Paine, better known online as redpill78.
You’d think that a sitting United States congressmen would stay away from a cult that FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress “can lead to violence.” But Louie is no fool or, rather, he’s a fool who can read the writing on the wall, which is that QAnon is very popular with the Republican base, which counts on roughly 100 percent of the votes from the “15 percent of Americans (who) say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.” Maybe he’s not crazy but is just trying to meet the base where they are, which is nowhere good.
When the local CBS affiliate asked Gohmert’s office what he was doing there, a member of his staff insisted that he wasn’t there even though he was on camera.
Later, the station’s David Lippman got a long email from Gohmert that said his staff got its days mixed up and wasn’t lying about him being at the event (which organizers had tried to distance from QAnon amid lots of coverage about how it was a QAnon event) and also claiming that he does not even “know who or what QAnon is.”
But I was too stupid to know what the event I spoke at was about isn’t the defense Louie seems to think it is.
It’s been quite the year of being on the wrong side of history for Rep. Gohmert. First there was COVID, which he came down with after months of refusing to wear a mask, and reportedly berating staffers who did.
Then there was the lawsuit he filed to try and overturn the election results after Trump lost to overturn the Constitution and grant VP Pence “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to decide which electors to count in each state. After the suit was dismissed, Louie was big mad, going on Newsmax to declare that the “bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not going to touch this. You have no remedy’—basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM.” During that same interview, he said that if the 2020 election isn’t overturned, “it will mean the end of our republic, the end of the experiment in self-government.”
That’s terrifying talk from a member of Congress, though at least he said it on Newsmax, a “news” channel no one actually watches.
But back to this weekend’s fuckery. Gohmert went on about how “it wasn’t just right-wing extremists” rioting in the Capitol (although it was). He’s talked previously about how, in the words of Trump, there were lots of “very fine people” there at the insurrection.
People may be right that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Rothschild space lasers lunatic, is the worst member of Congress, but she has at least been stripped of her committee assignments by Democrats and scolded, for what little that’s worth, by her own party’s leaders after comparing mask mandates to what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany. Louie Gohmert remains a party member in good standing in his R+25 district.
Texas can do better than this guy. It would be hard to do worse.
