Richard C. Patterson needs every shred of that authority for this occasion. He has come to speak on behalf of an urgent cause. Pelosis political prisoners, he tells me, have been unjustly jailed.
Patterson is talking about the men and women held on criminal charges after invading the Capitol on January 6. He does not at all approve of the word insurrection.
It wasnt an insurrection, he says at a September 18 rally called Justice for January 6. None of our countrymen and -women who are currently being held are charged with insurrection. Theyre charged with misdemeanor charges.
Patterson is misinformed on that latter point. Of the more than 600 defendants, 78 are in custody when we speak. Most of those awaiting trial in jail are charged with serious crimes such as assault on a police officer, violence with a deadly weapon, conspiracy, or unlawful possession of firearms or explosives. Jeffrey McKellop of Virginia, for instance, is alleged to have hurled a flagpole like a spear into an officers face. (McKellop has pleaded not guilty.)
Patterson was not in Washington on January 6, but he is fluent in the revisionist narratives spread by fabulists and trolls on social media. He knows those stories verse by verse, the ones about January 6 and the ones about the election rigged against Trump. His convictions are worth examining because he and the millions of Americans who think as he does are the primary source of Trumps power to corrupt the next election. With a sufficient dose of truth serum, most Republican politicians would likely confess that Biden won in 2020, but the great mass of lumpen Trumpers, who believe the Big Lie with unshakable force, oblige them to pretend otherwise. Like so many others, Patterson is doing his best to parse a torrential flow of political information, and he is failing. His failures leave him, nearly always, with the worldview expounded by Trump.
We fall into a long conversation in the sweltering heat, then continue it for weeks by phone and email. I want to plumb the depths of his beliefs, and understand what lies behind his commitment to them. He is prepared to grant me the status of fellow truth-seeker.
The Stop the Steal rally for election integrity was peaceful, he says. I think the big takeaway is when Old Glory made its way into the Rotunda on January 6, our fearless public officials dove for cover at the sight of the American flag.
What about the violence? The crowds battling police?
The police were seen on video in uniform allowing people past the bicycle-rack barricades and into the building, he replies. I mean, thats established. The unarmed crowd did not overpower the officers in body armor. That doesnt happen. They were allowed in.
Surely he has seen other video, though. Shaky, handheld footage, taken by the rioters themselves, of police officers falling under blows from a baseball bat, a hockey stick, a fire extinguisher, a length of pipe. A crowd crushing Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, shouting Heave! Ho!
Does Patterson know that January 6 was among the worst days for law-enforcement casualties since September 11, 2001? That at least 151 officers from the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, chemical burns, and a Taser-induced heart attack?
Patterson has not heard these things. Abruptly, he shifts gears. Maybe there was violence, but the patriots were not to blame.
There were people there deliberately to make it look worse than what it was, he explains. A handful of ill-behaved, potentially, possibly agents provocateur. He repeats the phrase: Agents provocateur, I have on information, were in the crowd They were there for nefarious means. Doing the bidding of whom? I have no idea.
On information? I ask. What information?
You can look up this name, he says. Retired three-star Air Force General McInerney. You got to find him on Rumble. They took him off YouTube.
Sure enough, there on Rumble (and still on YouTube) I find a video of Lieutenant General Thomas G. McInerney, 84, three decades gone from the Air Force. His story takes a long time to tell, because the plot includes an Italian satellite and Pakistans intelligence service and former FBI Director James Comey selling secret U.S. cyberweapons to China. Eventually it emerges that Special Forces mixed with antifa combined to invade the seat of Congress on January 6 and then blame the invasion on Trump supporters, with the collusion of Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In a further wrinkle, Pelosi, by McInerneys account, became frantic soon afterward when she discovered that her own false-flag operation had captured a laptop filled with evidence of her treason. McInerney had just come from the White House, he says in his monologue, recorded two days after the Capitol riot. Trump was about to release the Pelosi evidence. McInerney had seen the laptop with his own eyes.
It shook me that Patterson took this video for proof. If my house had caught fire 10 years before, my life might have depended on his discernment and clarity of thought. He was an Eagle Scout. He earned a college degree. He keeps current on the news. And yet he has wandered off from the empirical world, placing his faith in fantastic tales that lack any basis in fact or explicable logic. ... McInerney, the Military Times reported, went off the rails after a successful Air Force career. For a while during the Obama years he was a prominent birther and appeared a lot on Fox News, before being fired as a Fox commentator in 2018 for making a baseless claim about John McCain. Last November, he told the WVW Broadcast Network that the CIA operated a computer-server farm in Germany that had helped rig the presidential vote for Biden, and that five Special Forces soldiers had just died trying to seize the evidence. The Army and U.S. Special Operations Command put out dutiful statements that no such mission and no such casualties had taken place.
Of course, Patterson wrote to me sarcastically, governments would NEVER lie to their OWN citizens. He did not trust the Pentagons denials. There are seldom words or time enough to lay a conspiracy theory to rest. Each rebuttal is met with a fresh round of delusions.
Patterson is admirably eager for a civil exchange of views. He portrays himself as a man who may be wrong, and if I am I admit it, and he does indeed concede on small points. But a deep rage seems to fuel his convictions. I asked him the first time we met if we could talk about whats happening in the country, not the election itself.
His smile faded. His voice rose.
There aint no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020, he said. That is not going to fucking happen. Thats not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.
He had many proofs. All he really needed, though, was arithmetic. The record indicates 141 [million] of us were registered to vote and cast a ballot on November 3, he said. Trump is credited with 74 million votes out of 141 million. That leaves 67 million for Joe; that doesnt leave any more than that. Where do these 14 million votes come from?
Patterson did not recall where he had heard those figures. He did not think he had read Gateway Pundit, which was the first site to advance the garbled statistics. Possibly he saw Trump amplify the claim on Twitter or television, or some other stop along the storys cascading route across the right-wing mediaverse. Reuters did a good job debunking the phony math, which got the total number of voters wrong.
I was interested in something else: the worldview that guided Patterson through the statistics. It appeared to him (incorrectly) that not enough votes had been cast to account for the official results. Patterson assumed that only fraud could explain the discrepancy, that all of Trumps votes were valid, and that the invalid votes must therefore belong to Biden.
Why dont you say Joe Biden got 81 million and theres only 60 million left for Trump? I asked. Patterson was astonished.
Its not disputed, the 74 million vote count that was credited to President Trumps reelection effort, he replied, baffled at my ignorance. Its not in dispute Have you heard that President Trump engaged in cheating and fraudulent practices and crooked machines?
Biden was the one accused of rigging the vote. Everybody said so. And for reasons unspoken, Patterson wanted to be carried away by that story.
I'll say it as many times as I need to - this was the product of too many misinformed, uneducated people being brainwashed as the result of having too much unrestricted access to unregulated social media platforms.
