Yesterday, violent right-wing terrorists forced their way into the U.S. Capitol following a pro-Trump protest that everyone on the planet—except, oddly, anyone involved in law enforcement—knew was going to escalate to dangerous levels, leading to a day that the United States will never and should never live down. And, according to Pitchfork, there were a couple of familiar faces in the crowd outside the White House, specifically Ariel Pink and John Maus. The two appeared in a photo posted by filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer from Washington D.C., prompting Pink to tweet that he was there to “peacefully show [his] support for the president” and that he “went back to hotel and took a nap” before all the sedition started. So that’s cool, right? He was just there to express how much he likes the idiotic despot who drove the protestors into a fury in the first place and spent the last four years convincing people that he’s universally beloved and that the only possible explanation for anything bad happening to him is a vast conspiracy of Antifa super-soldiers who (despite the 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 fucking stupid one.
As for Maus, his explanation is a bit harder to parse. He posted a link on Twitter to a piece of religious writing from 1937 that denounces idolizing specific people or governments, which would seem to be anti-Trump, but other than whatever the hell this means, he hasn’t offered any clarification. Also, as pointed out by our friends at Jezebel, he was one of the musical artists involved with Adult Swim’s short-lived alt-right sketch show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace and seemingly refused to consider the possibility that the people he had worked with were anything but “nice.” After all, as he told Noisey in 2017, they weren’t “burning crosses or doing anything like that.” Again: fucking stupid.
That brings us to Alex Lee Moyer, who told Pitchfork in an email that she was there because she “felt obliged to record what was happening.” Until today, Moyer was probably most famous for TFW No GF, a sympathetic documentary about incels that allowed angry white dudes on the internet to finally tell their side of the story. In a post on her now-private Instagram, Moyer shared the photo with Pink and Maus alongside the caption: “The day we almost died but instead had a great time.” A great time! Good for her. One could hypothetically ask how you could 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 great time, which—after consulting our handy chart on “Explanations From People Who Were At The Riot”—is… let’s see here… oh yes, fucking stupid.