I’m eager to try out my new toy! » « Matt Ridley’s steady descent into dangerous British loonhood

At least they made him cry

Look at that smiling white man and his bag of killing tools!

That’s Cleveland Meredith, a right-wing asshole who drove to Washington DC in January to participate in treason and maybe, if he was lucky, get to murder a few Democratic politicians.

In other messages sent the following day – while Pelosi and Bowser were making public remarks about the riot – Meredith texted, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG c***.” Meredith then sent a similar text about Pelosi, saying he was, “Thinking about heading over to Pelosi C****’s speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.”

His defense was to claim he didn’t really mean it.

Meredith addressed the judge near the end of the hearing, saying he’d had “no intention” to act on his messages. He described them as “political hyperbole that was too hyper.” He apologized to Pelosi and to his family and was audibly tearful as he asked to be able to go home.

Right. He just packed up a pistol, a rifle and 2,500 rounds of ammunition in his truck, and drove more than halfway across the country, from Colorado to Washington DC, to commit an act of hyperbole. The judge sentence him to 28 months in prison. I don’t know if that was sufficient, but at least it may have slapped him into a brief awareness of his own madness. Brief. Because then he made the usual excuse:

That’s not who I am, boo hoo. It was exactly who you are. He’s a grown man, 53 years old, and he was blustering misogynistic bullying abuse about murdering people, and he drove off giggling about the prospect.

I’m eager to try out my new toy! » « Matt Ridley’s steady descent into dangerous British loonhood

Comments

  1. says

    Did they take away his guns too? Did they ban him from ever owning a weapon again? 28 months won’t mean shit if two and a half years from he comes out, raids his cache and goes on a shooting spree anyway.

  2. Akira MacKenzie says

    Cowardice aside, the one thing that everyone—the MSM, the administration, the Democrats— is missing is that the mainstream right is now willing to commit acts of violence to achieve their ends. Even though we have groups planning the next Jan 6 and Red State governments openly defying the federal government, Biden and Co. does nothing to stop this terrorist threat.

    If they were serious, we’d wouldn’t be hearing this clown’s whining at all.

  5. notaandomposter says

    @1 he got a slap on the wrist- my understanding (IANAL) “sending threatening communications” isn’t a felony – conspiracy to commit murder is – the former wouldn’t ban firearm ownership- the latter would

  7. whheydt says

    Re: Ray Ceeya @ #1…
    I don’t know about Federal law, but part of the distinction in California between a misdemeanor and a felony is that the former can’t have a sentence longer than a year. So with a 28 month sentence, it should be a felony and if it is, that should bar him from ever–legally–owning a gun again. It’s why I want to see as many of these yahoos as possible get felony convictions.

  8. Susan Montgomery says

    At least he didn’t say “it was satire” and try to turn it into a freeze peach thing.

  9. Walter Solomon says

    What if there’s some type of QAnon brainwashing machine that sends out hypno-waves that middle-aged white men are particularly vulnerable to?

    Maybe there should be ads on TV saying “It’s 11 o’clock, do you know where your middle-aged white man is?” We need more compassion to the needs of middle-aged white guys with homicidal fantasies that aren’t of their own mind.

  10. stroppy says

    In addition to amber and silver alerts, maybe have white alert B.O.L.O.s for crusty geezers last seen watching Fox News.

  14. davidc1 says

    He even had some armour piecing rounds .see the way he has taped two mags together ,nice touch .
    While we are on the subject of batshitcrazy wackaloons that david barton claims that amuricans have to right
    to own a nuclear weapon

  16. birgerjohansson says

    Inspired bt T****: can we nuke those storms before they get dangerous?
    If we shoot enough rounds into the storm, it should alter the energy that is powering the weather. And If conventional munitions cannot do it…

  17. Susan Montgomery says

    @PZ I guess reading does open up a whole new world ;)

    @13 who would have thought…?

  18. says

    Y’know, back under G. W. Bush, with full support from the Usual Gang of Centrist Idiots, there were laws passed which permitted the government to declare groups terrorists for infractions far smaller than the Trump administration committed, and also to immediately freeze the assets of anybody who backed any terrorist organization. Obviously those laws were meant to be employed on Muslims and left-wing activists like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, but the language is such — and the Supreme Court precedents when people tried to challenge the legality of these measures are such — that Biden could, with perfect justification, just declare Team Trump terrorist, and shut down the big Republican donors and send them all off to Gitmo, and there would be very little which could actually be done about it, because it has been established that the Supreme Court thinks that nobody has standing to challenge those decisions.

  19. John Morales says

    Vicar, your wishful thinking regarding one side being just as bad as the other is on display.

  20. notaandomposter says

    @The Vicar and John Morales
    I don’t believe that a (up until recently) Political party falls under the scope of the anti-terrorism statutes. However many organizations under the ‘alt right’ banner should- proud boys, neo-Nazis and other groups and ‘militias’ that did acts that could only be called acts of terrorism – like driving a car into a crowd of protestors at the ‘unite the right’ rally in Charleston, or conspiring to kidnap/murder the governor of Michigan, or storming the capitol – causing congress to literally flee in terror from the mom and their chants of “hang Mike Pence”–someone(s) weaponized ‘tea-party’ style conservatism and white nationalist type organizations – I hope those someones get held accountable – It saddens me that I believe my hopes are unrealistic