1. "I'm Scared, So I Trust The Authorities" Is Always A Terrible Heuristic
2. Let's feel the appropriate amount of fear but not go overboard, because we know from recent experience where that leads
3. Jesse Singal
4. 3 hr ago       
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8. I hate the idea that I have to recite my I-am-against-right-wing-terrorism bona fides before saying what I want to say in this newsletter. Maybe I don’t actually have to given the incredibly smart and skeptical and open-minded (not to mention physically attractive) readership I have cultivated, but, just in case: I am obviously quite opposed to right-wing terrorism, and I obviously think what happened earlier this month at the U.S. Capitol was horrific in every way. It left a scar, lives were lost, and I want the investigation to be as thorough as possible. There’s no way to really downplay what a failure it is to have a mob take over what should be one of the most carefully secured public government buildings in the country.
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10. (Okay, here comes the “That said…”)
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12. That said, I’ve been disturbed by some of the dynamics I’ve witnessed since the attack, particularly the way a lot of people are defaulting toward accounts of what happened that are maximally scary, and sometimes a bit credulous. I’m getting the sense that during this moment of understandable fear and uncertainty, people are doing something which is both very human and very ill-advised: they are exhibiting undue deference to authority, and undue sanguinity about the government’s track record during such moments.
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14. My thoughts on all this had been a bit nebulous until I saw one phrase getting excitedly amplified, over and over, on Twitter the other night: “turn on gas.” It turned out to be a useful case study exemplifying what I’m worried about.
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16. According to charging documents prepared by the government and reported on by the Associated Press, this was from a Facebook message one of the Oath Keepers who participated in the breach received on Facebook. The messages, referring to members of Congress, read in full: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in . Turn on gas” (or at least that’s everything the authorities quote in the document) [sic throughout my quotes of the document].
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18. After the AP reported on this document, people with large followings on Twitter quickly responded with what is certainly an understandable initial interpretation of such an utterance: that, among all the other horrors of the Capitol attack, there was a plot to murder members of Congress by gassing them.
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21. Ted Lieu
22. @tedlieu
23. The former President incited an insurrection in a desperate attempt to hold onto power. Some sought to kill lawmakers.
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25. One message read: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in. Turn on gas”
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27. Sure, I support unity. But we can’t pretend Jan 6 didn’t happen.
28. Bianna Golodryga @biannagolodryga
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30. Read this and recall that Trump was watching all of this unfold on TV, ignoring pleas for him to help and call it off. This could have been so much worse.  https://t.co/5pUNNADLCF
31. January 23rd 2021
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33. 3,234 Retweets10,677 Likes
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35. Steven Beschloss
36. @StevenBeschloss
37. I read this a day ago. I’m still trying to process the horror of what could have happened, the likely complicity from within, & the sickness of the perpetrators: “All members are in the tunnels seal them in. Turn on gas.”
38. January 24th 2021
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40. 2,290 Retweets4,390 Likes
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42. Elizabeth C. McLaughlin, Esq.
43. @ECMcLaughlin
44. There were people inside the Capitol telling insurrectionists where our Senators & Congresspeople had been taken during the attack, per WaPo. Giving them instructions on how to find them over FB.
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46. I want to know who each & every one of those people are. And I want them arrested.
47. January 24th 2021
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49. 1,560 Retweets5,897 Likes
50. But this is a severe exaggeration of what happened. And it’s important to point this out.
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52. Here’s the relevant part of the AP story, which is based on a document charging three militia members (two of them Oath Keepers, the third a woman who was part of a militia whose members tend to also be Oath Keepers, though the document doesn’t appear to call her an Oath Keeper per se) with conspiracy, conspiracy to impede or injure a law-enforcement officer, destruction of government property, obstruction of an official proceeding, accessing a restricting building or grounds, and violent entry or disorderly conduct:
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54. The FBI said a Virginia man, Thomas Edward Caldwell, appeared to be a leader of the effort. Caldwell and a man and woman from Ohio were all charged with conspiracy and other federal counts, the first of more than 125 people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 assault to be charged with conspiracy.
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56. The chilling details in the case included communications between the defendants and others.
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58. “All members are in the tunnels under the capital,” the FBI quoted a message sent to Caldwell during the Capitol attack. “Seal them in turn on gas.”
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60. And here it is straight from the criminal complaint:
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62. On January 6, 2021, while at the Capitol, CALDWELL received the following Facebook message: “All members are in the tunnels under capital seal them in . Turn on gas”. When CALDWELL posted a Facebook message that read, “Inside,” he received the following messages, among others: “Tom take that bitch over”; “Tom all legislators are down in the Tunnels 3floors down”; “Do like we had to do when I was in the core start tearing oit florrs go from top to bottom”; and “Go through back house chamber doors facing N left down hallway down steps.”
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64. This is all the detail the authorities provide. Nowhere else in the complaint does the word ‘gas’ appear, except in reference to tear gas. If you know a little bit about how the internet works, a less threatening possibility quickly reveals itself: Caldwell had an audience on Facebook as he breached the Capitol and posted about his adventure on social media, and that audience got very excited and starting doing some role-playing. That is, these were simply random people (‘randos,’ in internet parlance) egging him on and pretending to be taking a part in what was happening, rather than fellow conspirators or individuals with any genuine capacity to act on their sick fantasies.
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66. But some people with large platforms misinterpreted this in light of the AP article. Online, they began spreading the rumor that according to the complaint, Caldwell and his colleagues had help “on the inside,” as though they were being directed by traitors to the U.S. government elsewhere in the Capitol (blending in with cowering members of Congress, perhaps). But there’s no evidence any of the armchair quarterbacks who sent messages to Caldwell had any idea what they were talking about.
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68. For what it’s worth, here’s part of an email I received from a Congressional staffer who was in-office the day of the attacks, and who saw me tweeting about all this. (I’m adding links to two terms some readers might not be familiar with.)
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70. []I see you’re tweeting about the gassing comment so here are my two cents after reading the quotes a few times. I think it’s some larper dude acting out his Centcom fantasy from his mom’s basement. I’m looking at the directions he gave and they’re...bad. (Granted we don’t know when exactly the messages were sent). But unless the guy in question was in the House gallery, the tunnels are not 3 floors down. There’s the basement (tunnels), floor 1 (ground level), floor 2 (House Floor), floor 3 (House Gallery). Technically there’s a sub-basement that gets you to the subway to Rayburn but it’s accessible by one elevator bank and a staircase that is hard to find, even for someone who knows where they’re going. Additionally there’s no straight shot staircase to get to the tunnels off the House Floor that I can think of. The down staircases directly adjacent to the House floor only really go from the 2nd to the 1st floor. They don’t continue down to the basement. Staircases to the basement are close but not obvious. The tunnels themselves are a literal maze and, as far as I’m aware, don’t seal. Like yeah you can corner people in a hallway but if you gas them then you’re also gassing yourself because you’re not “sealing” anyone anywhere.
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72. That’s why I land on some guy thinking he’s in Centcom, looking at maps of the Capitol on his computer, thinking he’s directing his troops or some stupid bullshit like that. Maybe the guy thought all that was possible, but in reality...no.
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74. Is this dispositive? No. But do the authorities provide any evidence that counters this theory, or even that any of the scariest messages weren’t written by randos? Also no. And you’d think that if there were such a connection, the government would be eager to point it out. Instead, both the charging document and the AP writeup are phrased in a manner compatible with my rando theory.
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76. The rest of the charging document is — I know this is a weird thing to say — strangely entertaining, at least in places. The individuals involved certainly come across as scary, at times. After all, they are members of a far-right militia who believe an election was stolen, and they are acting on that belief. One of them apparently had directions for making explosives in his home.
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78. Elsewhere in the document, though, they show some signs that they are not exactly the alpha-squad of far-right insurrectionists. For example, they weren’t exactly pros at opsec:
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80. I have identified this individual to be JESSICA WATKINS by comparing the footage in the video above to WATKINS’ DMV photograph and other photographs of WATKINS. In addition, in various social media posts, WATKINS has confirmed that on January 6, 2021, she entered the U.S. Capitol by force. For instance, on January 6, 2021, Watkins posted to Parler a photograph of herself in the same Oath Keepers uniform in which she appears in Picture 3, alongside the statement: “Me before forcing entry into the Capitol Building. #stopthesteal2 #stormthecapitol #oathkeepers #ohiomilitia.” [paragraph and footnote numbering deleted here and elsewhere I quote from the document]
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82. In other words: “HERE I AM WITH MY OTHER MILITIA FRIENDS DOING CRIMES. WE WANTED TO MAKE SURE OUR FACES WOULD BE AS VISIBLE AS POSSIBLE. AND YES, WE DID *FORCE* OUR WAY IN. IT WASN’T LEGAL AT ALL!”
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84. It’s so hilariously bush-league that I couldn’t resist making a reference to one of the most famous lines from The Wire, when Stringer Bell says to a young co-conspirator scrawling on a notepad during a meeting of drug dealers, “is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy!?”:
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87. Jesse Singal
88. @jessesingal
89. this criminal complaint is awesome
90. January 25th 2021
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92. 41 Retweets296 Likes
93. Elsewhere in the document, Caldwell comes across as slightly confused and conspiracy-addled and overly optimistic about his movement’s prospects and numbers:
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95. On December 30, 2021, CALDWELL wrote: “THIS IS OUR CALL TO ACTION, FREINDS! SEE YOU ON THE 6TH IN WASHINGTON, D.C. ALONG WITH 2 MILLION OTHER LIKE-MINDED PATRIOTS.”
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97. On December 31, 2021, CALDWELL replied to a Facebook comment, writing, “It begins for real Jan 5 and 6 on Washington D.C. when we mobilize in the streets. Let them try to certify some crud on capitol hill with a million or more patriots in the streets. This kettle is set to boil…”
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99. Donovan Ray Crowl, the third conspirator, also comes across as both a bit scary and a bit of a hapless goof:
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101. On January 5, 2021, an individual wrote CROWL a Facebook message that stated: “One more thing. Keep eyes on people with Red MAGA hats worn backwards. Saw a report that they were going to infiltrate crowd tomorrow.” CROWL replied: “Thanks Brother, but we are WAY ahead on that. We have infiltrators in Their ranks. We are doing the W.H. in the am and early afternoon, rest up at the Hotel, then headed back out tomorrow night ‘tifa’ hunt’in. We expect good hunting.”  
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103. The problem is, despite far-right hyperventilating, there appears to have been almost no antifa or far-left presence anywhere in DC that day. And the idea that such infiltrators would have identified themselves by wearing their hats backward… doesn’t exactly make sense, does it? “Okay, so let’s make sure that we stand out from the group we’re attempting to infiltrate in a super obvious way!”
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105. Again: I’m not saying these guys aren’t scary. They are. But they also aren’t pros, and there’s no sign they even had the capacity, once inside the Capitol, to really do all that much. We can calibrate our fear and anger (and ridicule) appropriately and realistically — we don’t need to pretend that we were on the verge of an all-out civil war or genuine threat to the certification of the election, even if there were some terrible lockdown moments, and even if this day will live on in history as a result of the chaos and violence that occurred at the Capitol.
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107. We have a pretty solid recent analogy which shows us, in a rather grim and enraging way, why we should exhibit some skepticism of authority and try to keep our fears in check at a time like this: the post-911 War on Terror.
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109. After the destruction of the Twin Towers and a chunk of the Pentagon, after all, the government embarked on a big, expensive, oftentimes unconstitutional attempt to root out any potential homegrown Islamic militants. But there didn’t turn out to be that many American Muslims who were all that interested in attacking their countrymen. So as a pile of heroic reporting subsequently showed, the government would do everything it could to overhype the threat, to convince we the public that we were in need of a particularly aggressive style of protection.
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111. This included some pretty ridiculous incidents of overcharging on the part of law enforcement. Often, initial charging documents would portray defendants as borderline supervillains with an almost limitless capacity for perpetrating evil, only for the fuller story to emerge and to show that 1) there was little evidence the defendants would have had much interest in committing crimes were it not for their new ‘friend’ — an undercover FBI agent — spending months and months egging them on and in some cases providing them with material support; 2) the defendants were genuinely in thrall to a dangerous ideology but were also complete schmucks who would have had a tough time blowing up an air mattress, let alone a bridge; or 3) some combination of both, as in the case of socially disconnected defendants only getting radicalized because of prolonged contact with an FBI agent. (It goes without saying that all of this cost taxpayers endless millions of dollars. Think about the resources required to develop a single case in this manner, let alone many.)
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113. Here are some great quotes from the top of a journal article I haven’t read expressing outrage at some of the most egregious examples of such cases:
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115. [T]he essence of what occurred here is that a government . . . came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own, created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and made those fantasies come true. . . . [R]eal terrorists would not have bothered themselves with a person who was so utterly inept. . . . [O]nly the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, a man whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearian in its scope.
116. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon, United States v. Cromitie
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118. Prior to September 11, 2001, if an agent had suggested opening a terrorism case against someone who was not a member of a terrorist group, who had not attempted to acquire weapons, and who didn’t have the means to obtain them, he would have been gently encouraged to look for a more serious threat. An agent who suggested giving such a person a stinger missile or a car full of military-grade plastic explosives would have been sent to counseling. Yet . . . such techniques are now becoming commonplace.
119. Michael German, former FBI agent
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121. Hamid [Hayat] is a hapless character, but, my God, he isn’t a terrorist. The government counted on hysteria, the 1,000-pound gorilla, to be in the room. And it worked.
122. James J. Wedick, thirty-five-year veteran of the FBI [footnotes removed, emphasis in the original]
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124. That second quote is from a book review in Reason by German whose opening paragraph sums up the nadir of post-9/11 government excess quite colorfully:
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126. Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terrorist plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country's government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and ever-increasing funding. According to journalist Trevor Aaronson's The Terror Factory, this isn't the premise for a Kafka novel; it's reality in the post-9/11 United States.
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128. This stuff actually happened. Not that long ago! It happened, at least in part, because when you stop being skeptical because you are scared, and because you want big, powerful men armed with guns and subpoenas to frictionlessly protect you from those evil forces out there, it is almost inevitable that they will abuse the leeway you are granting them.
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130. Of course we can’t directly compare these sorts of entrapment cases to the aforementioned three schmucks who posted their crimes to Parler and Facebook — it’s simply apples to oranges. But there are some parallels. A charging document in a case like this is intended, in part, for public consumption. Why was the mention of a gas attack included despite a lack of any evidence of a planned gas attack, or even that there’s any realistic sense in which members of Congress can be herded into one ‘tunnel’ and gassed to death? To scare people and to nudge anyone reading the document to view the defendants in more scary light than they would have otherwise. No matter that the messages they received from randos don’t really bear on their own desires and capabilities. The point is to paint a very particular picture, and it worked if the oft-confused public response is any indication.
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132. None of this is to say terrorism isn’t a real concern, or that I don’t, despite having a bleeding heart on issues of incarceration, want the perpetrators of the Capitol breach to spend a little bit of time in prison (I’d give the nonviolent subset of those who actually entered the Capitol as part of the herd a few weeks each, were I appointed Emperor of the U.S., and of course those who committed acts of vandalism and violence significantly more, all based on the specifics of what they did). My only point here is that we can’t suddenly turn off our brains and ignore the nature of law-enforcement bureaucracies which benefit directly from fear just because they are targeting a group whose beliefs disgust us, and because we are particularly scared of that group at present. That’s a very dangerous road to go down — and a well-traveled one.
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134. We should be mindful of the fact that during the worst War on Terror years, skeptics were tarred with the charge of being either ignorant of the true risk posed by Islamic extremists, or, worse, sympathetic to their movement — in fact, many people were slandered in that latter manner simply for suggesting American Muslims accused of terrorism deserved the same civil rights which should, in theory, under the Constitution, be granted to anyone accused of any crime.
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136. Of course we already see a parallel emerging: What, you don’t want the government to protect us from white supremacist MAGA thugs? Are you crazy? “White supremacist” is often tossed in, even in the absence of evidence for that claim in a given instance, simply to make it rhetorically harder to ‘defend’ the thugs in question.
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138. We should resist this because, again, we know exactly where it leads. Nothing’s wrong with vigilance, but vigilance all too often morphs into hysteria and authoritarianism during periods of heightened fear and uncertainty.
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