Pro-Trump rally-goers blame mysterious bogeymen for latest event flop
WASHINGTON, DC — Right-wing activists gathered on the Capitol grounds Friday afternoon for another pro-Trump demonstration after a similar event epic failure less than two weeks ago, but again struggled to explain the pathetically low turnout.
Fiery supporters of the Jan. 6 Defendants, a MAGA-loving fashion designer, and a shaggy gentleman dressed in early colonial attire were just a few of the characters outside the Capitol, equally angry at President Joe Biden and at the Capitol rioters behind bars. stay.
Despite their efforts to bring in the MAGA believers by playing Donald Trump’s speeches for their first speaker, the “Stop the Tyrants & Unite for Freedom” meeting flopped. Even with frequent Steve Bannon podcast guest Matt Braynard in attendance, only 27 people — including two hired private security guards — showed up.
Braynard, a leading Jan. 6 advocate and director of the right-wing organization “Look Ahead America,” took the miniature stage and almost immediately wept angrily over five liberal activists who had shown up to protest the event.
Zachary Petrizzo/The Daily Beast
But these were not activists. Instead, these activists, whom event organizer John Paul Moran called “paid agitators” and members of Antifa, brought with them particularly disturbing and nuisance trinkets to derail the pro-Trump rally: whistles.
“I want you to recognize something,” Braynard said. “They try to interrupt. That’s why they blow the clock. To make it hard to hear us!”
Further, the irony of defending Capitol police officers had apparently escaped him.
“You’ve got a purple-haired freak, two inches from your face, who’s blowing a whistle, making you… [police officers] hearing loss,” Braynard continued, trying to be a white knight on behalf of the same Capitol Police Force that would be attacked by defendants on Jan. 6.
Elsewhere at the event, theories abounded as to why the event failed to materialize and drew the crowd.
Zachary Petrizzo/The Daily Beast
Right-wing speaker and attorney Deborah Weiss blamed the organizers for hosting the event on a sunny Friday afternoon.
“First, it’s a weekday during the day, [and] a lot of people work,” she told The Daily Beast. “Second, it’s very, very difficult for conservative groups to get their message out right before the election,” she said before claiming email invitations to the event were censored by suspected left-wing forces.
She then refined that theory to claim that email invitations ended up in spam folders — somehow routed there by unspecified sinister figures.
“They didn’t reach my inbox. They have completely disappeared,” she said. “Hard to get the message across!”
Likewise, self-proclaimed “Capitan” Matthew Woods, dressed in colonial attire (save for his run-of-the-mill “khakis”), echoed the claim that potential right-wing attendees would be “fear.”[ful]Back in Washington, DC Woods also expressed frustration at the lack of notice to potential attendees of the event.
Zachary Petrizzo/The Daily Beast
MAGA fashion designer Andre Soriano also spoke, flanked by a female model in a Trump-inspired dark red dress that reads “Keep America Great.” Wearing a black top hat and long pea coat (a look he called “Abraham Lincoln-esque”), Soriano scolded Biden while disagreeing with stimulus checks. At the end of his short speech he was in tears. Literal. He fell into the hands of a nearby organizer after walking off the stage.
As for the lackluster crowd, he said, “it doesn’t matter how big a crowd is.”
Joseph McBride, a prominent Jan. 6 attorney, made a cameo at the event. “You’ve got members of Antifa there,” he told The Daily Beast before being called on stage by failed Republican Senate candidate Ivan Raiklin to address the crowd.
One of the few residents of Washington, DC, speaker and “patriot activist” Suzanne Monk, claimed that the January 6 riots caused subsequent events in DC to fail miserably.
“Or even the government itself,” she said. “Obviously people are a little nervous that this could happen again.”
Nevertheless, John Paul Moran, founder of the organizing group “GOUSA”, said “We literally got the word out about a week ago. We would have liked more people, but I would consider it a success.”
Moran concluded by asking attendees to join him at Harry’s Bar, a far-right Proud Boy hotspot in town, for happy hour.
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