Tuesday marks six months since a horde of angry, desperate Trump fans stormed the United States Capitol in a doomed attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win over their Orange God Emperor. Almost from the start, MAGA Nation tried to act like it was no big deal, that it was a big deal but it was somehow Nancy Pelosi’s fault, but also it was still no big deal again.

What follows is a rundown of how GOP politicians, commentators, and trolls fought reality with unreality in the aftermath of that brutal assault on American democracy.

PatriotTakes on Twitter posted a photo from an photograph disgraced General Mike Flynn posted on Telegram Tuesday.  And yes, that’s mattress magnate Mike Lindell in the photo.

For a better look at the white board, outlining how Trump is apparently the center of everything, which is prime Glenn Beck meets Pepe Silvia, behind them…

A 65-year-old cosmetic dentist from Scranton, Pennsylvania who is a friend and golfing partner for Donald Trump, was charged with indecent assault for groping a female patient after a dental appointment in his office, the Washington Post reports.

Albert Hazzouri Jr. was previously known for sending a note to Trump proposing an oversight committee on dental spending in by the government, which he would’ve presumably led.  The note was written on stationery from Mar-a-Lago and the salutation line read, “Dear King.”

Trump once called Hazzouri during a 2016 campaign rally in Scranton.  “Stand up, Albert. Where the hell are you, Albert? Stand up, Albert. He’s a good golfer, but I’m actually a better golfer than him. Right?” Trump said.

In an affidavit, a Scranton Police detective alleged that Hazzouri volunteered to escort a female patient to her car.  When they were in a stairway, Hazzouri attempted to get a female to climb on his back for a “piggy-back” ride; the female declined.  Hazzouri then groped the woman, grabbing her buttocks, breasts and groin, when they reached the bottom of the stairs.

UPDATE 7:37 p.m. ET:  The Associated Press declared Adams the winner of the Democratic primary. 

Brooklyn borough president and former police officer Eric Adams has a slim lead in New York Democratic mayoral primary, holding a 1% lead over Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, the New York Times reports.

Adams led Garcia by just over 8,400 votes in the latest totals released by the New York City Election Board.  This is the first application of a new rank-voting system of casting ballots in the city.  The board drew jeers last week when it released a tally of test votes as preliminary results.

Attorney Maya Wiley, a liberal favorite in the race, fell to third as more mail-in ballots were counted.  She had been in second place after the count of in-person votes.

In the second attack on US facilities in the country in two days, a drone laden with explosives impacted at the airport in Erbil, Iraq, apparently aimed a US military facility on the airfield, Reuters reports.

Yesterday, an attack of rockets and at least one drone was conducted on Ain al-Asad air base, which houses U.S. troops, and the US consulate in the city, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, was the target of a separate attack.

No injuries or significant damage were reported in any of the attacks, according to the Pentagon.  Since April, the Iranian-backed militias have been using unmanned drones to attack US facilities in Erbil and Baghdad.

Traffic safety warning sign spotted at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Utica Avenue in Brooklyn by National Zero’s New York City bureau chief on Monday. “PEDS” probably means “pedestrians” but you never know these days. Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan are still in Congress after all.

Today Attorney General Merrick Garland visited one of our roll calls to thank our brave USCP Officers and give them an update on the January 6 cases.

We thank Attorney General Garland, the @TheJusticeDept, and all our law enforcement partners for their support! pic.twitter.com/npG2vMcevn

— The U.S. Capitol Police (@CapitolPolice) July 6, 2021

Bloomberg: “Russian government hackers breached the computer systems of the Republican National Committee last week, around the time a Russia-linked criminal group unleashed a massive ransomware attack, according to two people familiar with the matter. The government hackers were part of a group known as APT 29 or Cozy Bear, according to the people. That group has been tied to Russia’s foreign intelligence service and has previously been accused of breaching the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and of carrying out a supply-chain cyberattack involving SolarWinds Corp., which infiltrated nine U.S. government agencies and was disclosed in December.”

“It’s not known what data the hackers viewed or stole, if anything. An RNC spokesman on Tuesday denied its systems were breached and referred to a statement citing IT provider Synnex Corp. released on Saturday. ‘Microsoft informed us that one of our vendors, Synnex, systems may have been exposed,’ Mike Reed, a spokesman for the RNC, said in the earlier statement. ‘There is no indication the RNC was hacked or any RNC information was stolen. We are investigating the matter and have informed DHS and the FBI.’ A spokesperson for the Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The attack on the RNC, coupled with the recent ransomware attack, is a major provocation to President Joe Biden, who warned Russian President Vladimir Putin about cyberattacks at a June 16 summit. It’s not clear if the attack on the RNC is connected in any way to the ransomware attacks, which exploited multiple previously unknown vulnerabilities in software from Miami-based Kaseya Ltd.”

An Indiana state judge concurred with the Republican governor of the state over the state’s Republican attorney general in a decision regarding a case where the governor is suing the Republican-led state legislature, the Associated Press reports.

Governor Eric Holcomb defeated the motion brought by Attorney General Todd Rokita after Rokita declared that only the state’s attorney general can determine if a law passed by the state legislature is legal.   Judge Patrick Dietrick sided with the governor in settling the motion, saying the power to determine if a law is legal lies with the Governor, a decision that allows a lawsuit filed against the state legislature by the governor to proceed.

“This is an absurd result that could not have been intended by either the drafters of Indiana’s Constitution or the General Assembly,” Dietrick said.

“New: Rep. Matt Gaetz’s Floridian confidante Joel Greenberg has asked to delay his August sentencing, so he can continue to speak to investigators in a sprawling sex trafficking probe, according to a new court filing. @kpolantz reports” CNN’s Jim Sciutto reports.

Chicago Police officers arrested Keegan Casteel, a 34-year-old man from Ankeny, Iowa, after cleaning staff at a hotel found a rifle with a laser sight in his room, which overlooked a public beach on the shores of Lake Michigan, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Police were called to the W Hotel on the 600 block of North Lake Shore Drive at 6:45 p.m. local time Monday evening after a member of housekeeping staff providing turn-down service reported finding the rifle and a handgun on a window sill of the 12th floor room overlooking the beach.

“This employee saw something by entering a room to clean it that likely prevented a tragedy from happening,” Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said Tuesday. “So it’s significant and very valuable and we ought … (to) praise that employee for being aware and letting us know so we could react quickly and potentially avoid tragedy.”

https://youtu.be/u8qqC_crZ3k

On one of the few media platforms that will host him, mattress company founder and renowned conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell claimed that Donald Trump won the November 2020 election by more than 10 million votes.  Speaking on Steve Bannon’s video-streamed radio show, Lindell said that people who will review his data will say, “True, true, true, true,” and that it will be obvious during the “biggest livestream event in history, I want.  Everybody look at me.”

Lindell has set the date for Trump to be reinstated into the presidency as August 13th… subject to future adjustments.

Miami-Dade County Fire Chief Alan Cominsky told reporters during a midday briefing that rescue workers are “not seeing anything positive” concerning signs of life or available voids for survivors to be sheltered in the rubble of the collapsed Surfside condo complex, CNN reports.

Thirty-two people are now confirmed dead from the pancake-style collapse of Champlain Towers South, and more than 120 are still unaccounted for.  The dead range in age from four years old to 92.

The searchers are continuing to treat the site as a rescue operation, though the likelihood of survival for people two weeks after the collapse seems slim.  The portion of the structure that remained standing after the June 23rd collapse was demolished Sunday night in hopes that it would give rescuers additional safer routes to burrow into the rubble and alleviate a potential danger of the tower falling on the rubble pile unexpectedly.

Black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones will forgo a position at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill after the college rescinded the tenure for a professorship when alumni, conservative media personalities and politicians objected to her Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the 1619 Project.

Instead, Hannah-Jones and fellow writer Ta-Nehisi Coates will join the faculty at Howard University, a historically-Black university located in Washington, DC.

Hannah-Jones was originally offered the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured position in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, but administrators rescinded the chair’s tenured status when offering it to her.  In a vote last Wednesday, the board of directors reinstated the tenured status for the chair and restated its offer to Hannah-Jones.  She obviously had been making other plans.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday it is canceling a controversial $10 billion cloud computing contract the Trump Administration signed with Microsoft, and instead it will pursue a joint project with both Microsoft and Amazon, the Associated Press reports.

Amazon has brought multiple legal suits against the federal government, claiming that the contracting process was tainted by Donald Trump’s animosity toward Jeff Bezos, the recently-retired CEO and founder of Amazon who is also the owner of the Washington Post.

Amazon Web Services had been considered the leading candidate to get the contract for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI, which would provide secure cloud storage for the vast amounts of data the Pentagon uses for operations and war planning. 

Fox News: “General Motors will no longer offer compact disc players in any of its passenger vehicles starting with the 2022 model year, GM Authority reports, so you can finally ditch the sun visor CD rack. The automaker is dropping the option on the last two models that offered in, the Chevrolet Express and GMC Savana.”

“Both of the aging heavy duty vans will only be available with auxiliary jacks and USB connectivity for external media storage devices for the 2022 model year, according to the latest ordering information. GM was the first automaker in the post-cassette era to eliminate CD players from a mass-market car with the introduction of the 2013 Chevrolet Spark compact hatchback and removed it from its full-size SUVs when they were redesigned for the 2021 model year, leaving the vans as the final stalwarts of the old tech.”

Hackers easily swept up more than 90,000 user emails from people who signed up for the newly-launched GETTR social media site set up by former Trump advisor and surreptitious abortion supporter Jason Miller, Vice News reports.

Vice’s Motherboard tech column obtained a spreadsheet that contained the email addresses, user names, birthdates, bios and locations for more than 90,000 people registered on the site.  Motherboard then contacted some of the email address users to confirm that they had indeed set up accounts on GETTR.  For other email addresses, the news organization tried setting up new GETTR accounts, but got the message that an account already existed using that email address.

“When threat actors are able to extract sensitive information due to neglectful API implementations, the consequence is equivalent to a data breach and should be handled accordingly by the firm and to be examined by regulators,” Alon Gal, the co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, told Motherboard in an online chat.

Sun-Sentinel: “Immediately after Donald Trump supporters went on a rampage through the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block counting of the electoral votes that confirmed Joe Biden’s presidential victory, people responded 1,000 miles away in South Florida. Within hours, voters began leaving the GOP. Within weeks, thousands of South Florida Republicans changed their voter registrations. Voter registration data show the surge was real. But six months later, something else is clear from registration data analyzed by the South Florida Sun Sentinel: It didn’t last.”

“By the end of January, some 6,270 Republicans in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties left the party. Republicans left their party at more than five times the rate of Democrats. It was even more pronounced in the immediate aftermath of the violence in Washington, D.C. In the first day and a half, more than seven times as many Republicans as Democrats changed their party registrations in Miami-Dade County. The ratio of Republican to Democratic switches was almost as high in Palm Beach County. In Broward, the most Democratic of the three counties, it wasn’t as lopsided. By themselves, the numbers don’t show the outsized nature of the defection from the Republicans because the base of Democrats is so much larger in the three counties. But the percentage of Republican defections was higher. In the three counties combined, 0.63% of registered Republicans left the party in January; 0.12% of Democrats left that month.”

https://youtu.be/s4MQ5BJ763o

Fox News hosts Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino blamed everyone else for believing a lie the network repeatedly broadcast that the US Women’s National Soccer Team insulted a 98-year-old World War II who played the National Anthem on a harmonica before their Monday game against Mexico.

While some members of the team faced the performer, other members turned to face the flag that was flying above the end of the stadium.

They turned to Clay Travis of Outkick.com, one of two people chosen to fill the radio slot of the dead Rush Limbaugh, to explain how the conservative media lies and false narratives aren’t really to blame for people believing the ginned-up story.

Greg Sargent, Washington Post: “As we hit the six-month anniversary of Jan. 6, the GOP’s radicalization against democracy continues to hurtle forward. And very few prominent Republicans will stand athwart that radicalization and yell, ‘Stop!’ House Republicans are now all but certain to try to sabotage the select committee examining the insurrection. GOP leaders still haven’t punished a far-right congressman for claiming Jan. 6 was an FBI plot. GOP candidates in the 2022 elections are actively campaigning on the lie that Donald Trump’s reelection loss was illegitimate. GOP voter suppression laws are getting worse. A group of Never Trump Republicans is now attempting to step into this breach by launching a new campaign to hold Republicans accountable for the party’s widespread voter suppression and election subversion efforts.”

“The group’s name: Republicans for Voting Rights.”

“As such, the campaign will also champion efforts to expand voting access and structurally protect democracy on multiple fronts. That’s not a widely held position among contemporary Republicans, to put it mildly. Which raises a question: Is it possible to meaningfully defend voting rights – and to defend the integrity of Trump’s loss as pivotal to the larger mission of protecting democracy – while remaining a member in good standing of today’s GOP? Some Republicans did defend the legitimacy of Trump’s loss and continue to advocate for the GOP to refrain from casting doubt on it. But they have faced appalling censure, and the new group hopes to help clear more space for such civic virtue going forward. ‘We need people like that in the party,’ Amanda Carpenter, a prominent Never Trump commentator and director of Republicans for Voting Rights, told me. ‘We’re better for it.'”