Stewart Rhodes showed up on Capitol Hill to meet with Republican lawmakers, aka his co-conspirators

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes didn't waste any time after his own co-conspirator, Donald Trump, ordered the Jan. 6 insurrectionist freed from prison. The coup leader strolled right up to Capitol Hill for a little treat.

Rhodes was spotted in the Dunkin’ Donuts inside Longworth House Office Building, which is accessible to the public, with a group of people. He said he did not go into the actual Capitol building.

Oh my. Well, I'll give him this, the man has guts. If I were him I would have spent a lot of time wondering if I was going to make it back out of the building alive.

Rhodes said he was there to meet with lawmakers to press for the release of an Oath Keeper ally who went to prison not for his Jan 6 actions, but because federal investigators who came to arrest him for his Jan. 6 actions found two illegal guns, two military grenades, and a classified Department of Defense document squirreled away in an RV at his home. Rhodes appears to be pushing for the release of that man, Jeremy Brown, on the logic of "well if the FBI hadn't rudely come to arrest him for what he did on Jan. 6 then they wouldn't have found the explosives and other illegal crap he was hoarding."

Your honor, he was entrapped! They weren't allowed to find his stash of grenades!

While every news outlet was quick to write up their own stories on Rhodes tromping right back up to his Jan. 6 target, very few of them mention what would appear to be the most salient information the public would like to know. Which "lawmakers," exactly, were the ones who either invited or accepted meetings with one of the main conspirators in a now court-proven plot to overthrow the United States governments? We want names, damn it. Which Republican assholes shook the hands of this traitorous piece of shit, fresh out of prison for the coup Republicans helped bring about?

Not much of a peep about that. The only House Republican admitting to meeting with the seditionist responsible for multiple police deaths is Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida, who's trying to weasel out of it with the claim that oh, he was meeting with someone else and they happened to bring Rhodes along to be their emotional support dog or whatever.

A spokesperson for Bilirakis confirmed the meeting, saying: “Congressman Bilirakis met with Jeremy Brown’s mother and girlfriend. Mr. Rhodes joined them.”

Well, you could have kicked the coup guy out, you know. You're in charge of your own office, and there is no damn way in hell you don't know who Stewart Rhodes is or what he looks like, so now we know that Bilirakis, at least, is happy to re-establish Republican contact with Trump's favorite violent traitor.

While I'm surprised that The Criminal indeed neglected to specify that his allied brownshirts are allowed to possess explosives now and that any felon with even a glancing involvement in his coup attempt should be freed to collect more of them, what I have not seen from any outlet is the outrage, the sheer, raging outrage, that this unfathomably shitty piece of shit's Capitol Hill return should have elicited.

Think, right now, of how many Capitol Hill officers were seriously injured after Rhodes' thugs and goons attacked them as part of the plan to overthrow the government. Think of how many of those officers probably still have PTSD from the attacks—we know the number is large.

How many of them were on duty on Wednesday, and how many of them looked up at some point to see this violent seditious piece of shit tooling down a Capitol Hill hallway?

I can't imagine that feeling—except actually, I can. What I can't imagine is the internal conflict each of those officers must have felt as they reflexively put their hands on their holsters and mulled if a long, long prison sentence would be a good trade for putting a bullet in Rhodes' seditionist head.

I'm not kidding. I don't know what amount of training it takes to overcome the innate human urge to, at the least, punch the traitor into unconsciousness. Those officers have more restraint than most people in America could probably muster.

There's also quite the disconnect here. The entire premise of Rhodes' operations and domestic terrorism is that the federal government is out of control, an oppressive force stripping our freedom, one that can only be overthrown with violent force. Yet he didn't seem the slightest bit worried about that out-of-control government as he traipsed through the building looking to meet with its elected officials?

Go. Figure.

My first reaction upon hearing the news that Trump was immediately freeing even the most violent of his seditionist allies was the obvious one: Ah. Trump is looking to provoke new violence, which was the core of the plan the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were acting out during his first coup attempt, and there's no better brownshirts he could find than ones who have already proved willing to commit violent felonies on his behalf. This will be the paramilitary goon squad that his fascist allies had yet to assemble, the only missing piece of what otherwise has been a cookie-cutter repeat of how the Nazi Party and other fascists moved to consolidate power.

The Jan. 6 coup plan was to incite violence at the Capitol and around Washington, D.C. so that Trump could then use that violence to "invoke the Insurrection Act," call up the military, and announce that he's seizing voting machines and retaining power until something-something-something.

It's self-evidently the same plan now. Trump's White House allies are rushing to put through executive orders that in many cases are written to be maximally incendiary even if they are legally ridiculous. Project 2025 head Russell Vought, in particular, has been vocal in declaring that his goal is to create a sense of despair in rank-and-file government. A sense of crisis.

Is it an intentional plan to provoke mass protests and, inevitably, spark violence? And will the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other fascist groups be swiftly resuming the tactics that they became infamous for before their leaders ended up in prison: staging rallies designed primarily to goad strong onlooker responses so that they can then retaliate in force?

Probably, yes. From the Claremont Institute's frothing issuances to Elon Musk's obviously mirror-practiced Nazi salute to, now, the new purge of "DEIA"—the new letter standing for Accessibility, signaling that disabled citizens are now among the top targets of the new regime just as they were top targets in Nazi Germany—all of it is cribbed directly from famous fascist movements, and there's no reason to expect it won't continue.

I'll say this, though: The likelihood of a double-digit number of the felons Trump released dying violent deaths in the next few years seems high. Almost none are repentant. Many know precisely who turned them in, all of them know who testified against them, and both Rhodes and his Proud Boy equivalent came out of prison demanding vengeance—"retaliation"—against those that imprisoned them.

The odds that more than a few of these thugs are going to seek vengeance against the family or friends who turned them in, only to find out that their targets knew they were coming and spent the last two weeks of evenings doing target practice at their local indoor shooting range so that they'd be ready for the visit, ain't zero. The same goes for squabbles between the released felons themselves.

And, of course, with the fame that Stewart Rhodes now has he finally gets to be what he always falsely imagined himself to be when he first started practicing to overthrow the government: a target, publicly despised from coast to coast and around most of the world. Don't be surprised if Trump takes the SS detail that he just stripped from former aide John Bolton and instead orders special government protection for his top coup ally. You know, just to keep the violent thug safe while he plots new acts of domestic terror.

Oh c'mon. You can't possibly say Trump wouldn't do that. Odds are at least 2 to 1 Trump will appoint Rhodes to a cabinet position in the near future.