"What the Trump Documents Might Tell the Jan. 6 Committee/Following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, the House panel has received material that it hopes could flesh out how the attack on the Capitol came about."

This is an article in the NYT, which I'm reading because what I hope is that the material will show that Trump wasn't involved in planning or promoting breaking into the Capitol or committing any illegal acts. And isn't that what everyone should hope? 

So I'm reading this article and setting to the side everything that is about Trump's belief that he really did win the election, his search for a legal path to victory, and his desire for a big, exciting rally showing strong support for this cause. 

So, what does the NYT list? I've copied and pasted the whole text into my compose window, and I will now cut out everything I just said I was setting to the side:

 

 

 

Okay. Now that I've done that... feel free to check my work. Maybe you'll say that the talk of seizing voting machines indicated a willingness to pursue a path that wasn't clearly legal, but it was only considered and then not done. Wasn't it part of brainstorming about what could be done if an election actually were being stolen? 

Let's consider the question hypothetically: What if an American presidential election were stolen? What could be done? What if it looked about like the 2020 election, but it really was a fraud? 

One answer might be: In the event of such a calamity, it would be best to go forward and treat the ostensible winner as the winner in order to maintain confidence in the system and to avoid the trauma of revealing and delving into the chaos beneath the surface. The true winner of the election should see the profound national interest in moving forward with a new President in office and fully in power — free of any cloud of uncertainty. The true winner should do nothing more than to offer strong support to his erstwhile opponent and to celebrate the beauty of democracy.

"My sense is that a law or regulation is at best an opening bid. Is it binding, legally or morally? Maybe..."

"... but the presumption should be neutral at best, or, realistically, highly skeptical. After all, laws and regulations are the products of legislators and bureaucrats, who are presumptively corrupt and dishonest. And everybody know that, really."

Writes Glenn Reynolds, commenting on Ilya Somin's "Martin Luther King on the Ethics of Resistance to State Authority/Georgetown philosopher Jason Brennan offers a valuable summary of King's thought on these issues." 

Somin's piece is at Reason. Excerpt:

The obvious criticism of views like King's is that many people may have poor judgment about which laws are unjust. For example, those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 likely believed that enforcement of the laws against doing so would be unjust, because (in their view) Donald Trump had a right to stay in power. Similarly, both left and right-wing terrorists often believe they are justified in violating laws against murder and assault.

But the risk that individual citizens may be mistaken about matters of justice has to be balanced against the danger that government can be wrong about such things, as well. Even in democratic societies, there is a long and awful history of the latter. Throughout American history, many more people have been killed and oppressed by unjust exercises of government power than by individuals acting on mistaken assumptions about which laws are morally defensible. The toll of slavery and segregation (both imposed by law) alone easily outweighs that of all morally motivated private disobedience to law combined. The extent to which people should defer to the government's judgment on questions of justice depends heavily on how good that judgment is. All too often, the answer is that it is, at best, highly unreliable.

I'm not agreeing with everything I'm quoting. I'm offering it as worthy of contemplation and debate. 

"It has been exciting to watch as more men embrace vulnerability.... But my hope has begun to diminish as I’ve watched male vulnerability curdle into something toxic."

"Let’s call it petulant vulnerability. Think of the boyfriend professing loneliness to ensure his partner never sees their friends. Or the hundreds of texts and anecdotes of so-called softbois collected on the @beam_me_up_softboi Instagram account — men who express their feelings the way avalanches share snow, often as a form of manipulation or passive aggression.... The aftermath of last year’s Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was a festival of petulant vulnerability. While the attack itself was violent and wrathful, many in the mostly male mob, who screamed obscenities or threw heavy objects at police officers that day, later wept as they expressed shame, offered excuses or complained about jobs and friends they lost.... If true vulnerability means accepting change, personal fallibility and the human condition of reliance on others, petulant vulnerability feigns emotional fragility as a means of retaining power.... What if, on Jan. 5, 2021, a man upset by Donald Trump’s electoral defeat had confessed to friends and loved ones that he was afraid and that he felt he was losing control in a world he believed no longer valued him? What if he had sat with those feelings, cried if he wanted to and discussed how to chart his path in a changing landscape? That would have been vulnerable."

From "This Isn’t Your Old Toxic Masculinity. It Has Taken an Insidious New Form" by Alex McElroy (NYT). We're told "Mx. McElroy is the author of the novel 'The Atmospherians,' about two friends who start a cult to reform problematic men." 

"Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was arrested on Thursday and charged with seditious conspiracy for organizing a wide-ranging plot to storm the Capitol..."

"... last Jan. 6 and disrupt the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory, federal law enforcement officials said.... Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper who went on to earn a law degree at Yale, has been under investigation for his role in the riot since at least last spring when, against the advice of his lawyer, he sat down with F.B.I. agents for an interview in Texas. He was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, communicating by cellphone and a chat app with members of his team, many of whom went into the building. But there is no evidence that he entered the Capitol.... In an interview with The New York Times this summer, Mr. Rhodes expressed frustration that several members of his group had 'gone off mission' by entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, quickly adding, 'There were zero instructions from me or leadership to do so.' But at least four Oath Keepers who were at the Capitol that day and are cooperating with the government have sworn in court papers that the group intended to breach the building with the goal of obstructing the final certification of the Electoral College vote...."

The NYT reports.

Full text here. It begins on the subject of covid: 

The vaccines, I recommend taking them, but I think that has to be an individual choice. I mean, it's got to be individual, but I recommend taking them. Many people recommend them. And if some people don't want, they shouldn't have to take them. They can't be mandated, as the expression goes. And I think that's very important. Personally, I feel very comfortable having taken them. I've had absolutely no reverberation....

But then it's all about the 2020 election results, with Trump sticking to his attack on the election and the interviewer, Steve Inskeep, pressuring him until  Trump cuts it off. A few highlights:

Why did Republican officials in Arizona accept the results then?

Because they're RINOs, and frankly, a lot of people are questioning that....
It is not true that there were far more votes than voters [in Philadelphia]. There was an early count. I've noticed you've talked about this in rallies and you've said, reportedly, this is true. I think even you know that that was an early report that was corrected later.

Well, you take a look at it. You take a look at Detroit. In fact, they even had a hard time getting people to sign off on it because it was so out of balance. They called it out of balance. So you take a look at it. You know the real truth, Steve, and this election was a rigged election.

Why is it that you think that the vast majority of your allies in the United States Senate are not standing behind you?...

Because Mitch McConnell is a loser. And frankly, Mitch McConnell, if he were on the other side and if Schumer were put in his position, he would have been fighting this like you've never seen before. He would have been fighting this, because when you look at it, and this is long — is a long way from over.... 

Let me ask you this question. How come Biden couldn't attract 20 people for a crowd? How come when he went to speak in different locations, nobody came to watch, but all of a sudden he got 80 million votes? Nobody believes that, Steve. Nobody believes that.

If you'll forgive me, maybe because the election was about you.... 

The Ray Epps conspiracy theory story is powerfully viral — so let's see how it's handled by The New York Times.

I saw this, linked at Instapundit, here. My instinct is to compare what the NYT says about it, and there's a substantial discussion in a piece published yesterday: "The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot/How revisionist histories of Jan. 6 picked up where the 'stop the steal' campaign left off, warping beliefs about what transpired at the Capitol." 

I'm reading this for the first time, so I'll excerpt and react as I go. There's a heading, "The Case of Ray Epps," but the first 2 paragraphs are general material about who is inclined to believe conspiracy theories about January 6th, so it's not as substantial as it looked at first glance. 

Next:

Adherents have built up characters to support their claims that antifa infiltrators or federal agents were the ones who whipped up the mob, in some instances doing so as events were unfolding in Washington. One is a man named Ray Epps, a Trump supporter who was captured on video the night of Jan. 5 urging his compatriots to “go into the Capitol” the next day.

Some in the crowd responded approvingly: “Let’s go!” rings out one reply.

“Peacefully,” Mr. Epps said, just before others began chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!” at the man, who at age 60 stood out in the far-younger crowd.

There's no link to the video, so readers can't see how much "urging" there was or why there was enough to provoke some people — "others" — to call him out as a federal agent and to do it by chanting — as opposed to confronting him and arguing with him. The only reason I'm not linking to the video myself is that I didn't easily find something that wasn't either cut down or edited into commentary.

Mr. Epps, who lives in Queen Creek, Ariz., where he owns Rocking R Farms and the Knotty Barn, a wedding and event venue, according to PolitiFact, appears in another video taken the next day. He is seen yelling to a crowd: “OK, folks, spread the word! As soon as the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol. The Capitol is this direction.”

No link for that video either.  

Both moments went largely unnoticed until June 17, when a poster on the online message board 4chan put up the video of Mr. Epps from Jan. 5, writing, “This Fed was caught on camera encouraging the crowd to raid the Capitol on the next day.”

Ah! Video this time. I watched the video (which I've seen before), and I get the sense that the man speaking, whoever he is, is insincere. By the way, the reaction of the people around him indicates that people did not come to the event with a plan to enter the Capitol. They seem as though they'd never even thought of the idea and consider it obviously stupid.

The anonymous poster added, “Who is this man?”

Another person then identified him as Mr. Epps. Soon after, the video and Mr. Epps’s name were posted in a Twitter thread, and a new conspiracy theory began its journey into the Republican mainstream.

The NYT has independently verified that the man is Ray Epps, right? I myself do not know.

Four months later, on Oct. 21, the video was being shown during a congressional hearing. There, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, used it to question Attorney General Merrick B. Garland about whether federal agents had acted as agitators on Jan. 6.

Within days, stories about Mr. Epps began appearing on websites like Revolver News... The Epps story gained further promotion on the far-right cable network One America News... and, far more widely, in [Tucker] Carlson’s “Patriot Purge.”

The NYT doesn't link to those places. I presume it has a policy about which sites get links and which don't. Readers can easily find those places if they want. Question whether it's good journalism to link to some but not others — to have, apparently, a black list (or a white list).

To date, no evidence has emerged linking Mr. Epps to the F.B.I. or any other government agency.

The absence of evidence is never going to convince people that there's no connection because one can easily make inferences from the lack of evidence. The connection, if any, would have been hidden. Perhaps it was hidden competently. Perhaps those who should have looked are in on the conspiracy.  

In fact, his known connections are decidedly anti-government: In 2011, Mr. Epps served as the president of the Arizona Oath Keepers, the largest chapter of the militia group whose members were among the mob that attacked the Capitol, though it is not clear if he remains a member of the group.

It's not clear? Find out! Let's hear more about that. How do we know he didn't infiltrate the group? The NYT set out to demonstrate that the Ray Epps story is a conspiracy theory, but it isn't doing what it needs to do to convince a close reader that there's nothing here. I realize it's hard to prove a negative, but if you want to squelch an actively spreading conspiracy theory you have to do much more than assure complacent readers that there's nothing to see here. You have to provide suspicious minds with reason to believe that you investigated to the point that if he were a government agent, you'd have figured it out.

Yet in the days leading up to Thursday’s anniversary, and on the anniversary itself, the speculation around Mr. Epps only seemed to snowball, amplified on countless social media posts, on Mr. Bannon’s podcast — part of a possibly “massive false flag operation,” as his website put it — and on Mr. Carlson’s prime-time show on Fox News on Wednesday and again on Thursday. “Is this guy going to be charged? Where is he?” Mr. Carlson asked. “It’s a legitimate question, why won’t they answer it?”

The section of the article on Ray Epps ends right there, with Carlson's questions, and no answer to them. I'd say at this point that I don't like referring to the story as a "conspiracy theory." I'm rewriting my post title. It's only a conspiracy theory if it's augmented with assertions of fact that are not backed up with evidence.