Yesterday, violent right-wing terrorists forced their way to the U.S. Capitol after a pro-Trump protest that everyone on the planet – except, strangely, anyone involved in law enforcement – knew would escalate to dangerous levels, leading to a day that the United States will never live and should never live down. AND, according Pitchfork, there were some familiar faces in the crowd outside the White House, specifically Ariel Pink and John Maus. The two appeared in a photo posted by Washington DC filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer, taking Pink to tweet that he was there to “show peacefully [his] support for the president ”and that he“ went back to the hotel and took a nap ”before all the sedition started. So this is cool, right? He was just there to express how much he likes the stupid despot who drove protesters to fury in the first place and has spent the past four years convincing people that he is universally loved and that the only possible explanation for something bad happening to him is a vast conspiracy of Antifa super soldiers who (despite their name) are the real fascists. So if “I was just at the peaceful White House rally” is supposed to be a defense, it’s a pretty stupid thing.
As for Maus, his explanation is a little more difficult to analyze. He posted a link on Twitter to a religious text from 1937 that denounces idolizing specific people or governments, which seems to be anti-Trump, but beyond what the hell that means, he offered no clarification. Besides that, as pointed out by our friends in Jezebel, he was one of the musical artists involved with Adult Swim’s short alt-right sketch show Extreme million dollar gifts: world peace and he apparently refused to consider the possibility that the people he had worked with were anything but “legal”. After all, as he said Noisey in 2017, they were not “burning crosses or doing anything like that”. Again: fucking stupid.
This leads us to Alex Lee Moyer, who said Pitchfork in an email stating that she was there because she “felt obliged to record what was happening”. To this day, Moyer was probably most famous for TFW No GF, a nice documentary about incels that allowed angry white guys on the internet finally tell their side of the story. In a post on his now private Instagram, Moyer shared the photo with Pink and Maus next to the caption: “The day we almost died, but we had a great time instead.” AN good times! Good for her. One might wonder, hypothetically, how you would almost die if you were only at the “peaceful” White House rally and not the siege of the Senate chambers, but whatever. The point is that she had a lot of fun, which – after consulting our helpful chart in “Explanations of the people who were in the riot” – is … let’s see here … oh yes, stupid.