(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
In a desperate gambit to lay the blame for last week’s U.S. Capitol occupation at the feet of America’s firearms owners, gun haters are ginning up more slanderous claims aimed at prominent Second Amendment supporters.
Gun-toting freshman Congressional representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado is one who has been singled out for the anti-gunners’ smear campaign.
Boebert is being falsely accused of offering some Trump supporters a “reconnaissance” tour of the U.S. Capitol the day before the building came under siege. Her political enemies say the tour was a seditious act giving “insurrectionists” a good look art the interior of Capitol in advance of the assault…except the claim is a pathetically false.
Below is the widely circulated tweet that purports to show Rep. Boebert posing on the U.S. Capitol steps before taking that group inside, a group that Twitter users say includes Capitol Hill rioters.
The lie was caught by Will Sommer, a politics reporter for The Daily Beast, who posted proof that the “insurrectionist conspiracy” picture was more than a year old and taken more than a thousand miles from the U.S. Capitol.
This Lauren Boebert picture that’s getting misleadingly promoted as a Jan. 5 pic in front of the US Capitol is actually a Dec. 2019 picture from outside Colorado’s state capitol. Here’s the source article: https://t.co/AtZEteLKmb pic.twitter.com/BuseXXFE9Z
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) January 13, 2021
In truth, the picture used to smear Boebert was taken in December, 2019 on the steps of the Colorado statehouse just after Boebert had launched her campaign for Congress. At the time the picture was taken, Boebert was a high profile gun rights activist and owner of a restaurant where the servers famously open-carry firearms.
After the Twitter user who posted the smear was publicly shamed, the offending tweet was deleted.
At the time of the crisis at the Capitol, Boebert had become a lightning rod for the anti-gun crowd when she declared that her reputation for packing heat would extend to carrying her sidearm to work each day in Congress.
Elsewhere, a New Jersey Democrat Congresswoman is also amplifying the apparently baseless claim that other “patriot sympathizer” Members gave “reconnaissance tours” the day before the Capitol was occupied.
?BREAKING: Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a Navy veteran and Annapolis grad who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said she saw fellow members of Congress “who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on Jan. 5, a reconnaissance for the next day.” pic.twitter.com/YbZkW1qq7T
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) January 13, 2021
Adding to the online blizzard of lies, slurs and accusations are posts about a DC armed takeover being planned in plain sight.
That’s because there are a handful of “armed citizen” call-out posters circulating that the left claims is a precursor to a follow-on attack timed for the days leading up to the Biden inauguration on January 20th.
This poster has been widely shared online for more than a week, with plaintive cries from Twitter users to “make sure the FBI sees this!!”.
Like many other alleged “militia call-out” posters, this one immediately set off false flag warnings.
hmmmm interesting i knew i had seen this image before pic.twitter.com/xO2sPOZ1o1
— Magnus (mag) Lowdor COLLAPSAFARIAN (@chan_rst) January 13, 2021
And he was right. It turns out the graphic was ripped from a Black Lives Matter poster from last November, as seen below.
Here’s the original poster . . .
As “Magnus” notes, it reeks of a “fed plot because the colors are wrong and no one had stood up and said hey I made this.”
While intense efforts continue to conjure up armed confrontations around the country in the days leading up to January 20th, gun owners will be challenged commit to a longer view…that the campaign to demonize and subjugate the very citizens the left fears most — America’s gun owners — will not stop anytime soon.