Jacob Anthony Chansley, the 33-year-old self-proclaimed “QAnon Shaman” seen in face paint and animal pelts during the violent pro-Trump insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, hasn’t eaten a bite since he turned himself into the FBI on Saturday.
That’s because, according to his mother Martha, Jacob the chest-thumping revolutionary gets “very sick” if he doesn’t maintain an all-organic diet. Martha is proud of her sweet boy, telling reporters that it takes courage to be a “patriot.” Maybe not as much courage as it takes a person to eat the same prison food they serve everybody else, but still!
Thirty-year-old Eric Gavelek Munchel, a bartender from Nashville, Tennessee, was photographed during the riot inside the capitol carrying zip ties and a gun, in full tactical gear. Also with Eric was Lisa Eisenhart, his 57-year-old mommy, who drove with him from Tennessee. Now that her sweet little guy is in federal custody and charged with multiple crimes, Eisenhart claims that the pair didn’t have any “nefarious” intent. The riot was just like a Mother-Son dance, except the men are in their thirties and they’re carrying guns.
Something about these rioters feels familiar. They’re mostly white. They’re mostly men. They’re incoherently, destructively angry over perceived slights that none of them can effectively articulate. Judging by the photos of the event, they’re more likely to be targeted by the Fashion Police than by actual police officers. The world has handed them almost everything and yet it still hasn’t bent enough to their preferred version of reality, and this has whipped them into a crazed frenzy.
When they broke into the Capitol and forced it into lockdown, they threatened the lives of the lawmakers who were there to perform their constitutional duty and, for good measure, left piss and shit in the hallways. It didn’t matter whether they were Dallas-area realtors who arrived by private jet or unemployed Appalachians living in a van that smells like the inside of a dirty baseball cap; it took them a matter of hours to go completely feral, like the little boys in Lord of the Flies.
And speaking of boys… while the riot was a white rainbow of entitled grievance, an awful lot of the rioters conducted themselves like emotionally and intellectually stunted manchildren who have never faced real consequences. Momma’s boys.
There’s no age limit to acting like a momma’s boy; plenty of men make it through their entire lives without having to know how to iron their own clothes or cook food for themselves or treat anybody outside their demographic as more than a person who exists to address their immediate needs. Their emotional outbursts have always been the gravity their universe orbits around. For their entire lives, somebody has been there to take care of them and bail them out.
Take Kyle Rittenhouse. This summer, the 17-year-old traveled from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he killed two anti-police violence protesters and seriously injured a third with an illegal AR-15. He made the trip as a sort of broken-brained gesture of solidarity with violent police officers and white supremacists, and his bail was paid for by crowdfunding. (Forget fools—an apoplectic racist and his money are parted soonest.) Rittenhouse’s grimy countenance has become a cause célèbre for many on the right, but nobody’s a bigger fan of what Rittenhouse did than his mommy. “He's with me, he's not leaving my side," his mother Wendy told a local news outlet last month. "Kyle is a strong young man, I couldn't be prouder of him.”
On the afternoon of his arraignment last week for charges including first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide, the now 18-year-old was spotted on social media drinking in a bar while wearing a "Free as Fuck" T-shirt. That didn't violate his release terms, police said, since state law allows teens to drink in a bar so long as they're with a parent and, you guessed it, he was there with his mom.
These are men who have always been free to act with impunity, never facing punishment. Maybe their parents were the ones who were driving them to riots like it was soccer practice. Maybe they babied themselves, rejecting reality and in its place fashioning a comfortable little informational cocoon of OANN and Newsmax. Maybe they fall asleep every night in their Ben Shapiro jammies on a mattress that sits directly on the floor after jerking off to a hacky meme about AOC posted to a private Facebook account for PATROITS ONLY. Like their intellectual leader Trump, they expect the world to be built around their immediate needs and desires and anything that puts a crack in that reality has earned violence in response.
Some in the media have internalized this, like Fox’s Brian Kilmeade, who said that impeaching the president would be “the last thing” that Democrats should want to do, since it might lead to violence and it won’t encourage national unity. Remember when the talking haircuts on right-wing cable news used to lambast college students who demanded “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”? Now prominent voices on the right are all but demanding insurrectionist politicians escape punishment, so that nobody hurts the feelings of the treasonous McMansion hillbillies who think there’s an underground lair where celebrities drink the blood of raped babies. Give me a fucking break.
The Trumpist foot soldier is a man who believes he is entitled to a supremacy he hasn’t earned, and has been convinced by bad-faith actors that this is everybody else’s fault. But ironically, the inciters also project strong momma’s boy energy, because momma’s boys are also often what’s known as “chickenshit.”
One of those bad-faith chickenshits is Madison Cawthorn, the newly-sworn-in 25-year-old congressman from North Carolina who spoke at the rally that immediately preceded the riot at the capitol. “This crowd has some fight in it,” he said into a microphone, in front of a charged-up crowd of thousands. “The Republicans hiding and not fighting, they are trying to silence your voice.” But now that he’s facing backlash and condemnation for, well, helping incite a riot, Cawthorn is calling the rioters “disgusting.” Who could have predicted that a member of Congress telling people to go fight may have resulted in some people going and fighting? I wonder if, when Madison Cawthorn gets into an elevator and hits a button, he’s shocked when the doors open on a different floor. Madison Cawthorn is a true chickenshit for a new generation.
Alabama congressman Mo Brooks was one of the most noteworthy chickenshit speakers at the rally that incited the riot at the Capitol, dressed in a camouflage baseball cap to convey that he’s a man of the people and a brand new, spotlessly clean sailing parka that conveyed that he’s absolutely not. His several minutes of shouting culminated in his demand that rally attendees get out there and start “kicking ass” before he asked the crowd if they’d be willing to sacrifice their lives to save their country. Hours later, he was forced to walk that back a bit, clarifying that he must have just meant figuratively kicking ass and metaphorically fighting to the death, or whatever. He was not personally involved in the fight, either.
Outgoing nine-term Iowa congressman Steve King has spent the last several days whining (on Twitter) about losing followers on Twitter and comparing social media companies’ crackdown on pro-insurgency accounts to “KristallNacht 2.0” [sic]. On Monday, King tweeted “ The CyberGods have shut down every effective platform hosting speech contrary to their Leftist ideology. Last night was KristallNacht 2.0. Today began Impeach Trump 2.0. I can’t think of a better way to incite March on Capitol 2.0.” King is a 71-year-old adult man who thinks that not being able to be online as hard as he wants somehow calls for armed insurrection. It’s childish nonsense that’d be unbecoming from a college freshman much less a guy old enough to enjoy the Denny’s senior citizen discount.
If the insurrectionist wing of the GOP had formed a cheerleading squad, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley would be at the top of the pyramid, fist pathetically aloft. Although five people died in violence he helped incite, the 41-year-old brat has not taken responsibility. Instead, he’s been hitting the punditry circuit to whine about Simon & Schuster canceling the publication of his forthcoming book, calling the publisher a “woke mob.” Hawley’s Poor Me missive was issued before the damage that an actual mob had done to the Capitol—his workplace—had been cleaned up. A complete lack of self-awareness is one of the most important chickenshit qualities, and nobody’s got more of it than Josh Hawley.
But let’s not forget the chickenshit-in-chief. On Sunday, White House press staffer and haunted ventriloquist doll Hogan Gidley assured Fox News’ Bill Hemmer that President Trump does not feel emasculated by being banned from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In fact, Trump is the “most masculine person to ever hold the White House.”
Trump, the king of chickenshit masculinity, told marchers on Jan. 6 that he’d be with them. “We fight like hell,” he said. By “we,” the president apparently meant “you,” as he didn’t join the marchers as promised. Instead, he went back to his taxpayer-funded home and watched it all on TV, like a real man. He’s still refused to take any responsibility for what he incited. Banned from all forms of communication he can do from the toilet, a defeated Trump has appeared in public all of four times since the riot: once to tell the rioters that he loves them (on his son Eric’s birthday, he told a bunch of rioting strangers that he loves them. That’s kind of funny, right?); once to sullenly deliver a hostage-style message that, for the first time, implied that Joe Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20; a third time to threaten members of Congress who vote to impeach him a second time; and a fourth time to brag about the border wall in front of the border wall. Appropriately, the last tweet Trump sent before being banned from the platform permanently was a flounce; he just wanted his followers to know that he wouldn’t be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration.
I was at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., almost exactly four years ago, and I’ve been thinking about that day a lot in this small span of time between the dread and horror of last week’s events and the dread and pre-emptive horror I worry will characterize next week’s inauguration. Despite the multi-city march—at the time, the largest global demonstration of all time—there was nothing close to the grotesque entitlement displayed by the rioters of Jan. 6. The people who came out for the Women’s March were much larger in number and stood to lose a lot more than the parade of numbskulls that broke into the Capitol, and yet there was no shit-smearing, nobody beat any police officers to death with fire extinguishers, nobody was stalking through office buildings armed with guns and zip ties. The restraint displayed by the women and men who marched in January 2017 was startlingly different than the completely shameful conduct of Trump’s “army” of losers, momma’s boys and chickenshits.
Now, it seems some of these men will face consequences for the first time in their lives. The FBI has announced a sweeping investigation into the events of Jan. 6. By the end of all this, hundreds will have been arrested and charged with breaking the law. People who broke into the Capitol are facing professional repercussions, and lawmakers who pounded podiums screaming about stolen elections will no longer be receiving campaign contributions from many corporate donors. Some will be censured. Some may lose re-election. Some may resign. Hell, some may go to jail, some will be ostracized by their friends and family, or booed when they attempt to go out in public.
Maybe they should start stockpiling organic food now, just in case.
