Capitol Rioter Sentenced to Prison Admits Being a White Supremacist and Anti-Semite, Blames Police He Interfered With

     Maryland has been the center of a lot of the action related to Capitol riot legal proceedings this week. Nicholas Rodean, the man who famously wore his work badge to the Capitol and appeared next to QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley, was convicted on all charges, including a felony, by a Trump-appointed judge; he faces a maximum of 14 years and six months in prison when he is sentenced in October. In a few days, I will be highlighting the case of a Capitol rioter from Maryland separately charged with federal gun and drug offenses. Also coming up is the trial of Maryland resident Daniel Egtvedt, the overweight GOP donor tossed down the steps of the Capitol by police officers he berated and resisted.

     Then there's David Blair. There are few moments from the Capitol riot that send chills down my spine, but the case of David Blair is one of them. There were a handful of black Capitol rioters, nearly all of them from the District of Columbia itself, that Trump supporters use to dispel the notion that the crowd was a white supremacist mob. However, these folks were far outnumbered by open white supremacists alone: from Robert Keith Packer, the man in the "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt; to Lilith Saer and Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, both infamous Nazis; to Kevin and Hunter Seefried, the father and son who flew the Confederate flag in the Capitol; and numerous others. Then there's David Blair, who donned a skull mask, attached a Confederate flag to a lacrosse stick, shouted at a police officer, and then used the lacrosse stick to check said police officer, who understandably had pushed Blair away from him during the altercation. This occurred under the thick blanket of a winter night on Capitol grounds. He was struck multiple times by police with a baton and hospitalized overnight for a concussion; police found a knife and duct tape in his backpack, which he claimed was for "Antifa." During processing, he apologized but also called the police officer he attacked a "motherfucker" and said that the police officer had instigated it, the same defense used by New Yorker Thomas Webster in another Capitol case; Webster was convicted of numerous felonies at trial.

     In spite of facing up to 14 months in prison under the terms of his plea agreement, David Blair was sentenced to five months in prison with 18 months of supervised release and $2,500 in restitution. While he asked for probation only and said he regretted what he did, Blair made it quite clear that he is not, in fact, sorry for what he did, nor have his views become any less extreme. He said that he is from South Carolina and that he became involved with Trump because he wanted to stop the removal of a statue of Wade Hampton III, the former state governor and a Confederate general Blair is related to by blood. "I'm tired of our history being erased in this country," Blair said. I think Blair should put himself in the position of being a black person who will have to go to school and be told "both sides" of slavery if he wants to talk about "history being erased." In his court filing, his attorney said the "brute force" with which a Capitol officer "attacked" Blair was not justified; the government pointed out that Blair often traded messages online with an anti-Semite and, as a result, came to believe that Israel was the cause of all of the world's problems.

     No, Mr. Blair: while there is no single source of the world's problems, a great many of them come from vile, violent, subhuman bigots like you.