#SeditionHunters - Time's up for #RayBanTerrorist! a long-awaited Proud Boys arrest, one of the first tracked, now up on PACER, information to follow. He walked in with the Proud Boys, fought on the Plaza and in the tunnel, part of the crowd surrounding Officer Fanone. 1/
Former Air Force serviceman AJ Fischer got his tag as #RayBanTerrorist for his cool shades. But the militia movement is complicated - between the Air Force and his time in extremism, the great @rocketman2001
found he spent some time as a male model. 2/
Correction: AJ Fischer aka #RayBanTerrorist's modeling career came first, then the Air Force, then militia. Here he is in 2018 with pals from the 14th Airlift Squadron, Joint Base Charleston, S.C. (He's on the right.) The pathways to extremism are complicated. 3/
By 2020, Fischer aka #RayBanTerrorist is clearly in with the Proud Boys. Here he is at the pre-Jan 6 rehearsal rally, Dec. 12 2020, quite close to Biggs and Nordean, leaders who would play a major role on January 6. Pics from @CassanderGrant 4/
On January 6, Fischer marched with the Proud Boys in the morning, went up the Pennsylvania Walkway with the first wave of attackers, and was up against the police line in the W. Plaza in those first terrifying minutes. He's on the right here. 5/
When the Plaza fight stalled, most Proud Boys retreated back to regroup, along with the Jericho March group who had pulled their giant cross up to the police line. Here's Fischer (#RayBanTerrorist) tending to the wounds of #BaldJerichoMarchGuy. 6/
#RayBanTerrorist was one of the first into the tunnel and is part of the scrum around Officer Fanone as he was dragged. He tumbled out of the tunnel just behind Fanone - here he is in the famous Lev Radin / Pacific Press photo. Annotation by @seditiontrack. 7/
#RayBanTerrorist (Fischer) was clearly associated with fellow Proud Boy #GogglesMan (Johnson) at the tunnel, so it's not surprising they were both arrested in the same week. Here they are just after the dragging - Officer Fanone is out of frame on the right. 8/
Over 200 Proud Boys marched to the Capitol & attacked, but with different roles. While some left by 3:30 PM, #RayBanTerrorist's group stayed late, fighting at the tunnel. We used his exit to time out when Scott Chafian finally departed ca 4:30 PM. 9/
Finding #RayBanTerrorist was a true crowdsourced effort by dozens. He was hashtagged in Jan, FBI list in Feb, identified by July. He links Proud Boys leaders to tunnel violence, raises questions about radicalization. What drove his arc from modeling to military to militia? 15/
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Sean Casten just learned that Mike Johnson was Dean of a planned law school named after pedophile Southern Baptist leader Judge Paul Pressler, who preyed on young boys. Wait til he learns that Ted Cruz was on its board. Pressler also gave Cruz one of his first endorsements. 1/
Johnson's failed Paul Pressler School of Law was a major play by the religious right. Its board, formed in 2010, was full of the biggest luminaries in the fundamentalist Evangelical universe. Then in 2011, the obscure Ted Cruz was added. Ask him why. 2/ web.archive.org/web/2012012200…
The Paul Pressler School of Law was an intensely political project, meant to train lawyers to overturn US law, build a Christian-focused government. That's why its board were key names - and then Cruz. Many of these people have Jan 6 connections. They're still power players. 3/
As Fox revisits Hilary's email server, let's do a comparative politics test. Question: why did the Jan 6 Committee have to subpoena phone records of Trump officials? Answer: because they were ALL using private emails and phones for government business. Yet no media covered it. 1/
Do you want to learn how Trump aide Vince Haley managed the 1776 Commission, worked on the Jan 6 speech, or negotiated Mike Flynn's pardon? It was on his @ newt. org email from when he worked for Newt Gingrich. Not submitted to the National Archives. 2/ govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GP…
Just look at the J6C's material: only a tiny portion is from the National Archives. Most of it is personal devices and personal emails, used by Trump officials for government business. Wildly insecure and also illegal. But sure, talk about Hillary. 3/ govinfo.gov/collection/jan…
People missed the likely explanation for Trump's bizarre ramble yesterday, when he falsely said his uncle taught the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Trump is under huge stress right now about the Jeffrey Epstein files. And it's Epstein who claimed that he studied with the Unabomber. 1/
That detail came out in 2019. After Epstein's address book got released, reporter Leland Nally called the numbers in it, and got a wild interview with Stuart Pivar, who said he was a close friend of Epstein's: "Jeffrey once told me that he studied math with the Unambomber." 2/
Epstein's story is a lie: Kaczynski quit teaching in 1969, when Epstein was in high school. But the interview reminds us again how odd it is that in 1974, after Epstein dropped out of college, he was immediately hired to teach math & physics at Dalton, a prep school. How? 3/
A part of the Epstein nothing-to-see-here fiasco no one's talking about: what happened to the "army of FBI agents" pulled off their cases in March to work on the Epstein files? Pam Bondi made people move to DC, pull all-nighters redacting the files. Did they just.. go home? 1/
Bloomberg: Pam Bondi demanded all the FBI's Epstein files, then ordered "hundreds" of agents to work on them (bizarrely via their personal phones). They were "holed up in offices at the bureau’s sprawling Central Records Complex". Are they still there? 2/ bloomberg.com/news/newslette…
The public should know what happened to Bondi's redaction effort, when and why (and if) the decision was made to send FBI agents home. And if she won't answer maybe one of those hundreds of agents is mad enough to leak. Keep your eye on who is next laid off at the FBI, too. 3/
As Hungary's Viktor Orban sucks up to Putin and accuses Ukraine of "choos[ing] war", a reminder, again, that Orban, Netanyahu, and Trump all owe their careers to the same US political operative - Arthur Finkelstein. Arguably the man most responsible for our dystopian times. 1/
Arthur Finkelstein was the dark master of the negative campaign, orchestrating facts-free and values-free assaults on political opponents. A gay, Jewish man who specialized in electing anti-gay homophobes. 2/
No one's explained yet if Finkelstein had a direct tie to Russia, but Finkelstein created Putin's bootlicker Orban, and Finkelstein is the one who brought Paul Manafort to Trump out of Ukraine where he was busy installing pro-Russia politicians. 3/
Yes, the NYT is shameful for sourcing an anti-Mamdani article from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker. But it's worse. Lasker, who they call an "academic", is a student whose only paper of note is INFAMOUS for unethical data use that got his tenured co-author fired. 1/
Who is the NYT's "academic" source? Lasker is or was a PhD student at Texas Tech, but his only paper of note is earlier, from 2019: "Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability", whose misuse of data triggered a major investigation and got Cleveland State Prof. Bryan Pesta fired. 2/
The Chronicle of Higher Ed wrote about the scandal. It wasn't just that the article was "racist pseudoscience". It was that the authors misused data from the NIH and lied on their data application - filed by Bryan Pesta. A flagrant ethics violation. 3/ archive.is/KwbGy