Late in the evening....

The recovery from bariatric surgery proceeds apace. We are two weeks and a day out, and I ventured a little cottage cheese. I also tried what some might call a meal. I mean, it's more of an astronaut space meal that could be squeezed through a tube. One "dish" ("squeeze bottle") was a curried chicken salad, pureed. The other was a refried beans with a dash of chili powder, which would have been awesome on nachos if nachos were not verboten. Turns out, the refried beans only had to be fried once. 

This semester, Eve teaches a Tues/Thurs schedule and I'm MFW, but I'm her ride to campus, which means I go every day for at least an hour and a half. Today, I packed a lunch, complete with tiny forks and spoons and chicken salad vindaloo and a pudding. It all went into my lunch box. I have a lunch box. I felt like I was going to camp. 

Teaching these days...

I came back to the classroom today, virtually at least. I wanted to talk the big important things going on in the world out with my students. My class of first-year students, which is a section of Critical Thinking and Reading, is reading newspapers. For the last several years, the disengagement of my students from national and world events has been surprising and often disheartening.

This class is my attempt to work on that.

This section of FRST 1002 is totally different from everything I've done before. I've chucked my longstanding syllabus for this class out the window, and I think I've done so for sound pedagogical reasons. In the spring, students taking FRST programs are often, though not always, students who were not successful in the class in the fall. There's nothing homogenous about the students or why they are in their second semester of CT, as far as I can tell. Since something is holding each of them back, however, I'm trying to give them every opportunity to succeed. That means changing a LOT about my teaching habits. 

I've mostly done away with required readings, though reading is still required. I've had them get subscriptions to three good newspapers: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. I had wanted to do this for a while. I just want students to have had exposure to consistently solid journalism, the type that costs something, that you have to pay for, that isn't given out cheap on the streets, to take a step back from social media and its algorithms. I genuinely don't know what the discussion is going to be about from day to day.  

The class is the conversations we have. That's it. They need to generate a journal of what they have read, but that's just so I have something tangible to prove the class existed. And we're having the right kinds of conversations, in my opinion, these are very much the type of conversations that I remember having in college. We shoot the shit and get into deep water sometimes, and these students, some of whom were not successful in the past, are doing it. They're game. They're talking. They're throwing out the right questions, hard questions, and they are trying to tackle it. And it's fun; I think they are having fun. Along the way, I'm trying to help bolster civil literacy, which is totally in line with the mission of public education and my school specifically. For instance, during the talk about Ukraine, someone asked, "What is NATO?" Like, thank god someone asked, man. I'd hate to think that I'd say something about Article 5 and my students not have a vocabulary to make sense of what is going on. 

Yeah, it's going well.  

Out of the hospital...

On Wednesday morning at 4:00 AM, I woke up to my alarm and took a shower using a special body scrub that had been given to me by my doctor. I took the pills I was allowed to take with my last gulp of water for a while. We were out the door by 6:00 and at the hospital by 6:30, downtown Atlantic City. I had been to this hospital once before, when we had just moved here and I did not have a doctor to write a prescription for me. That morning, however, I was having surgery. My roommate dropped me off at the front door, and I found the surgical suite without any problem. I gowned up and within an hour I was under anesthesia.

Apparently there was a small crowd. 

I underwent roux-en-y gastrectomy. Behold:

This was a decision a long time coming. I think that I first heard it was an option was during graduate school, when a doctor mentioned it in passing. I had wanted to wait until I had tenure to do it, but that happened in the middle of the pandemic. So I waited. A year later, when we were vaccinated, I got the bar rolling and saw a doctor to consult about it. They envisioned a three month process of prepping and testing; I was only feeling it out to see what the options were. I was not really ready at the end of the summer of 2021 to have the surgery. I planned to do it over winter break. Then omicron came along, and I was not going into a hospital while that was on the loose. So it was delayed, and this time, I decided that work would have to accommodate me. I wrote a week into my syllabuses where I was going to be out.

When I came out of anesthesia, I was groggy and only vaguely remember moving up to 7 Harmony, the name of the floor I would spend the next 24 hours on. The nursing staff was great. The surgery went fine. I went home the next day after lunch. I was feeling pretty much like a boss when I downed hospital jello. Honestly, eating now doesn't feel any different, though I've been careful to sip and not chug. The clear liquid diet ends in a few hours and then I'll be on full liquids. I'm trying to get in 65g of protein a day and several bottles of water. I'm on vitamins and various supplements and will be from now on. But that's fine. 

Also, I'm sleeping really well. And frequently. 

B

Sen Johnson, why don't you want me to go to bed early?

So, a life-long friend of mine sent a text with the image of the front page of a letter dated February 1, 2022 on the letterhead of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that was addressed to Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense. This is, in its entirety, the message that I saw:

On January 24, 2022, I held a roundtable featuring world renowned doctors and medical experts who shared their perspectives on COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and safety and the overall response to the pandemic. At that roundtable, I heard testimony from Thomas Renz, an attorney who is representing three Department of Defense (DoD) whistleblowers, who revealed disturbing information regarding dramatic increases in medical diagnoses among military personnel. The concern is that these increases may be related to the COVID-19 vaccines that our servicemen and women have been mandated to take.

Based on data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), Renz reported that these whistleblowers found a significant increase in registered diagnoses on DMED for miscarriages, cancer, and many other medical conditions in 2021 compared to a five-year average from 2016-2020. For example, at the roundtable Renz stated that registered diagnoses for neurological issues increased 10 times from a five-year average of 82,000 to 863,000 in 2021. There were also increases in registered diagnoses in 2021 for the following medical conditions:

• Hypertension – 2,181% increase
• Diseases of the nervous system – 1,048% increase
• Malignant neoplasms of esophagus – 894% increase
• Multiple sclerosis – 680% increase
• Malignant neoplasms of digestive organs – 624% increase
• Guillain-Barre syndrome – 551% increase
• Breast cancer – 487% increase
• Demyelinating – 487% increase
• Malignant neoplasms of thyroid and other endocrine glands – 474% increase
• Female infertility – 472% increase
• Pulmonary embolism – 468% increase
• Migraines – 452% increase
• Ovarian dysfunction – 437% increase
• Testicular cancer – 369% increase
• Tachycardia – 302% increase

Renz also informed me that some DMED data showing registered diagnoses of myocarditis had been removed from the database. Following the allegation that DMED data had been doctored, I immediately wrote to you on January 24 requesting that you preserve all records referring, relating, or reported to DMED. I have yet to hear whether you have complied with this request.

Now, I don't know what this is in reference to, so join me on a voyage of discovery, which illustrates how hard it is to be a well-informed citizen sometimes. First, what is DMED? It's the Defense Medical Epidemiological Database. What does it do? Enjoy an infographic from the webpage:

Looks like a neat tool that I can't access, but whatever. What's the rest of the letter, I wonder?

At the roundtable, Renz revealed the names of the brave whistleblowers who uncovered this information in DMED: Drs. Samuel Sigoloff, Peter Chambers, and Theresa Long. Any retaliatory actions taken against these individuals will not be tolerated and will be investigated immediately. In order to better understand what, if any awareness DoD has about COVID-19 vaccine injuries to service members, I request you provide the following information:

 
1. Is DoD aware of increases in registered diagnoses of miscarriages, cancer, or other medical conditions in DMED in 2021 compared to a five-year average from 2016-2020? If so, please explain what actions DoD has taken to investigate the root cause for the increases in these diagnoses.

2. Have registered diagnoses of myocarditis in DMED been removed from the database from January 2021 to December 2021? If so, please explain why and when this information was removed and identify who removed it.

Please provide this information as soon as possible but no later than February 15, 2022. Thank you for your attention to this matter. 

Sincerely,

Because I was only sent the front page, I did not know who the author of the letter was. After some poking about on the Googles, it turns out it was Ron Johnson. Oh, as they say, dear. This is gonna suck.

So, with the complete letter I can start looking for context and names and relevant information to figure out...what I'm looking at. Who are these "brave whistleblowers," as Johnson refers to them? 

Joseph Sigoloff, well his story is.... a mess. He was in Alaska when the pandemic broke out. He started, using an article from Dr. Peter McCullough as justification to a pharmacist, to use hydroxychloroquine on at least one patient. Peter McCullough has recently blasted Joe Rogan's viewers with word shit and misinformation about covid. Sigoloff says he's used ivermectin on himself. Neither of these work. 

He seems to have been disciplined for, as he put it, refusing to carry out illegal orders. The thing that got him in trouble specifically, he says, was giving out vaccine exemptions. He was suspended from the clinic. But yeah, seems like a not great doctor, at least based on the brief interview with the chiropractor above. It's a bad sign when you are being championed by America's Frontline Doctors. 

Lt. Col. Peter Chambers, then. Who is he? Well, there's not a huge amount, but I found an affidavit, which I believe is in support of a request for an injunction against a military vaccine mandate, in which he says:

Based upon the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) vaccine adverse affects websites known as Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) data and my own experience over the last 18 months monitoring, advising and treating COVID patients, I cannot in good conscience nor under the hypocritic oath (do no harm) advise Soldiers to take an unapproved high risk “vaccine” still in a phase III trial.

His first mistake is mentioning VAERS. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System can not determine causality; it's just not the right kind of data. Antivaxxers always trot out VAERS data, which is an exercise in the post hoc fallacy. Epidemiologists know this. Drug manufacturers know this. This guy apparently doesn't. His second error is failing to recognize that personal experience is anecdotal, and therefore no better than VAERS for determining causality (they are essentially the same thing). The last mistake is putting vaccine in scare quotes, because it is in fact a vaccine. Not especially credible on this matter. 

Dare I hope that Theresa Long is more credible? I saw she was also named in the affidavit and is a Lt. Col. as well.  Let me go search...

I'm back. Found her affidavit. You know what? I don't have time to read 11 pages. I'm going to search for the word VAERS on the page, just to see if I can save myself some time. And I can:

According to the VAERS data, which admittedly underreports by as much as 100 times the actual SAE’s, there are well more than 600,000 documented Serious Adverse Events (ones requiring medical attention) alone and more than 13,000 fatalities directly linked to this particular vaccine. I cannot understand how this vaccine remains on the list of available options to treat Covid, when there are so many other non-deadly or injurious options available.

She's misusing VAERS. I can instantly kick her opinion to the curb, because VAERS can't even in principle determine causality. Sorry, but these people are not reputable. Who is the lawyer? The lawyer for America's Frontline Doctors. Of course he is. So, it's a Ron Johnson clown show. 

Alright then, how can one possibly explain the changes to the data in DMED? Surely, those reflect an actual spike in disease related to the vaccine that is being sinisterly suppressed and not at all a problem with the data that was fixed...

Oh. 

It took me an hour to figure out and write up what was going on. That's how hard you have to work to come to good conclusions about the news sometimes and why documents taken out of context are unlikely to be very revealing. Anyway, I suspect that the Department of Defense is not really the intended audience of this letter; I think the intended audience is the friend who sent me this. 

B

A few notes...

One of the most infuriating parts of working through a pandemic is not being able to inform students that they were sitting in the same room as someone who had been exposed to covid. As far as I can tell, we have not had a major outbreak on campus, however, on Friday afternoon, I received four messages from the Dean of Students that a student is unable to attend classes. These are typically students who have been exposed to or have confirmed covid. Here are yesterday's numbers for covid on campus: 

I'm on the Galloway campus, and if the numbers the school gives at the end of the day corresponds to reality, one of my students is in there. They were responsible and attended online on Wednesday and Friday. I have one who was exposed, has no symptoms, and is in 10-day quarantine. The others are unknown to me. 

I am having surgery at the end of February. I really would like to not be sick before that happens. I suspect it would invalidate all of the testing that I went through before I postponed it in early January. Sigh. 

B

University to Employees and Students: "You're on your own, fuckers."

I've spent the last few years trying very hard not to think about what is going on outside the walls of my house. We start up in-person classes again next Tuesday at the worst point in the pandemic, and the administration at my school seems like it is dead-set on opening as if it were last semester, with covid under control locally because everyone has shots. And I think my misgivings about opening in the fall were ultimately unfounded. We were masked and vaxxed. Cloth masks, but that seemed to do the trick. Yeah, I avoided big crowds and met students outside of class online whenever possible, but there was little disease on campus. I know one person who was sick, and those she was in close proximity to did not contract the bug. I don't think that we could expect that to happen with omicron. 

A week ago we received an email from our Provost:

Dear Colleagues,

Happy New Year! We are excited to start the Spring 2022 semester.

As we embrace the excitement of returning to campus and engaging with our students, we acknowledge the accompanying concern of how to manage classrooms during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently, we plan to start the Spring 2022 semester as per the planned calendar and course modalities.  However, please prepare accordingly, should we need to shift to an online modality due to concerns for health and safety related to the pandemic. We are closely monitoring the situation and our policies to maintain the health and safety of our campus community.

A detailed FAQ outlining campus operations is updated regularly to provide the campus community with timely information. We encourage flexibility, as we all navigate this uncertain time, and we remain sensitive to students, faculty and staff who may become ill due to COVID.

We recognize that you likely have more questions but wanted to provide an update and a summary of existing procedures and practices. Please see below.

 

Thank you,

D. Womblebritches

Provost  

This was followed by a handy list:

PLEASE FIND REFERENCE INFORMATION BELOW

As a friendly reminder, current policies provide guidance to manage the classroom. Adherence to State and Federal accreditation standards, and Middle States Commission on Higher Education, as outlined below, ensure [we] can continue to provide students Federal Financial Aid and maintain our accreditation to deliver higher education in the state of New Jersey (see below and references).

CURRENT COURSE MANAGEMENT POLICIES

[...] Procedure 2030: Course Attendance outlines expectations for course attendance, including what to do if a student becomes ill. In the case of contracting COVID, a student or employee should update the COVID-19 Reporting form in the [online] portal. The student would choose the “Student Life” tab, click red "COVID-19 Reporting” button and complete the form. If a student becomes ill and cannot complete the semester, and it is past the drop/add period, the University has a detailed website that outlines the Late or Medical Withdrawal process.

During the semester, if only a few students are absent due to illness or quarantine, a faculty member should continue to offer instruction in the face-to-face modality. However, if the number of absent students becomes significant, the faculty member can choose to temporarily switch to an online modality. Faculty MUST provide an updated course calendar to their Dean’s office to ensure that courses are compliant with applicable standards and to allow the University to track students for health and safety reasons in case of emergency.

If a faculty member/instructor becomes ill or needs to quarantine, they should follow existing practices for course coverage, for example:

·         Should the faculty member be quarantined and feel well enough to conduct class, they may temporarily provide online activities.

·         Should a faculty member be quarantined and not feel well enough to conduct class, they could use current school guidelines to create alternate course activities or arrange for a guest instructor.

·         In either case, faculty MUST provide an updated course calendar to their Dean’s office to ensure that courses are compliant with applicable standards and to allow the University to track students for health and safety reasons in case of emergency.

·         The Center for Teaching and Learning Design (CTLD) has some valuable resources and examples of online pedagogy that may be useful should a faculty member/instructor need to transition.

INSTITUTIONAL COMPLIANCE

While we fully support faculty discretion in pedagogy and course instruction, we are required to adhere to the State, accreditation, and Federal statutes.

·         [We are]  registered in the State of New Jersey and Middle States as a residential campus, which requires that students have 50% of their coursework Face-to-Face (see references provided below).

·         Thus, faculty are not able to shift their course modality for the entire semester. [We are] relegated to the internal modality definitions provided to Middle States and for Title IV designation.

·         The University is temporarily modifying its definition of a Face-to-Face class to 70% of class sessions held in-person (30% may be online), rather than 100% in-person (our current definition). This will give faculty the flexibility they need to ensure continuity of instruction. Meanwhile, the Senate Standing Committee on Information Technology and Media Services revisits our internal definitions.

·         If a faculty member needs to temporarily provide online activities due to instructor illness, quarantine, or caring for those who are ill or are in quarantine OR due to a significant number of students being absent due to illness or quarantine, two-thirds of class sessions MUST be held face-to-face.

·         In addition to the attached Classroom Management Reference Materials, we also wanted to provide you with additional resources that could be used in the case of a faculty member’s absence from class. For additional ideas during faculty or student absence, view this resource on alternate course delivery on the Center for Teaching & Learning Design (CTLD) webpage and explore creative pedagogy ideas.

 

OK, so accreditation is important; we don't want to become the University of Austin, after all. I would note, however, that Middle States, our accrediting agency, which does not, to my knowledge, cram hundreds of people into residential lazarettos, has had its annual meeting remotely in both 2020 and 2021 (last month), whereas it had previous held the conference in-person in 2018 and 2019. If it is too risky for the accrediting agency to meet in-person, what's the justification for not suspending in-person requirements for the institutions it accredits?  

I thought it was perhaps promising that the Provost left open that little "prepare accordingly, should we need to shift to an online modality," which suggested, yeah, things might be bad.  The faculty and staff union clearly has been hearing from concerned faculty. We've looked at sister schools in the state and see that many of them are delaying in-person classes for a week or two while the curve is vertical.

That's not happening at my school. According to an email that I have gotten from my union:

Thus far, the university has failed to implement the following changes to ensure your health and safety in the workplace: 

1. Updating Our Masking Policy and Procedures to Reflect Current Data (i.e., recommend and/or distribute higher-grade masks such as KN95 or equivalents)

2. Updating all university vaccination requirements to align with new CDC recommendations for students and employees to “stay up to date” on their COVID-19 vaccines, which includes booster(s). 

3. Permitting faculty to teach remote for the first 1-3 weeks of the semester for any reason. We initially requested that the university permit online instruction for any reason for the first 1-3 weeks of the semester (similar to other New Jersey institutions), and later countered with a request to go virtual for the 1st week (through the end of drop/add week) ending on January 25th.  Management declined to adopt either of these recommendations, nor did they offer any alternative suggestions that would respond to these concerns.

All of these changes would have been welcomed. However, given that the university is committed to begin in-person classes on January 18th, they should do everything in their power to implement additional mitigation strategies of a) updating mask requirements and b) adding boosters (when people are eligible) to the vaccine requirement. 

The university is not only being obtuse and inflexible, but opaque; I have seen no attempt to explain the decision to "let 'er rip." This is the best I can come up with:

I like my job. It's literally the best job when there is not a pandemic. It is absolutely unconscionable to bring students onto campus when the pandemic is at an all-time high. 

So, what can I, a lowly peon do? I introduced myself to my students via email, letting them know who I am and what I'd like to accomplish this semester. (I do this every semester anyway.) I also was upfront with them my concerns about safety and asked them for their suggestions about how to make sure my classroom is as safe as possible. I floated some ideas to them, and having heard back from them I've gone forward and ordered over 300 N95s for my students. That's 3 per student, one for each day of the week we meet. We will be reusing them (yeah, I bought brown paper bags for them to store them in), and I'll have KN95s for students who forget or ruin their high-quality masks.

Someone has to do something. And I swear to fuck if I get sick, I'm going to convalesce in the waiting room of the President's office. 

B

Ray Epps--International Man of Mystery

I continue my series discussing claims related to election fraud and the riot at the Capitol last year, which is part of a discussion I am having with an old friend via text. In the most recent exchange, my pal brought up a person I had not heard of before, but who seems to be figuring large in the right wing media-o-sphere at the moment: Ray Epps.

one question. answer why ray epps was never investigated by the fbi in spite of being caught on camera instigating the run on the capitol. most people said get lost.

I looked up Ray Epps on Snopes, and sent that to my friend. The Snopes article is only two days old, so this really is a very recent story that's going around. Snopes concludes:

Ray Epps is a retired Marine with connections to a far-right anti-government militia group who traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally in support of Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen. While in D.C., Epps was filmed telling other Trump supporters to go “into” the U.S. Capitol “peacefully.” In another video, Epps is seen de-escalating a fight between police and protesters. 

There’s no evidence to indicate that Epps went into the Capitol himself or that he committed other criminal offenses. As of this writing, Epps has not been charged with any crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack.

My friend continued:

Inciting an insurrection is illegal. Just because the guy didn’t go into the capitol, allegedly, doesn’t preclude him from having broken other laws. I would say a more legitimate analysis would look at what the many other protesters were charged with. There are likely plenty of people charged that did less than what epps did. 

Being a member of Oathkeepers doesn’t preclude him from being a fed agent. The government likely has planted agents in militia-type group before 

Alright, a big issue here is that we are now talking about legally charging people with a crime, and I know from any number of cases that the legal meaning of a word may be different from its colloquial use. 

According to Suzanne Spalding (a lawyer) and Devi Nair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the law states that seditious conspiracy is to:

conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof. 

Notice, however, that the crime is "seditious conspiracy." Conspiracy is defined as:

An agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement's goal.  

Would you say that shouting in a room full of Trumpist yobbos is an agreement? I think it's a hard case to make, especially if, as my friend says, people mostly told him to pound sand. And the language of the law seems to be designed this way for a reason, to protect First Amendment activity. According to CSIS:

It is important to consider that federal law refers to “seditious conspiracy” as opposed to just “sedition.” There is the added burden of proof that an individual must actively be conspiring and taking steps toward a violent action against the government, not just making comments that seem to merely reflect that desire. This is to ensure that First Amendment activity is protected under the Constitution, and only actions that overtly demonstrate individuals’ plans to take dangerous steps toward overthrowing the United States’ constitutional government are charged.

Given that Epps seems to encourage people to go into the Capitol "peacefully," and since he is seen deescalating a confrontation between cops and protesters, it's perhaps not surprising that he has not been charged. Until there is evidence that he was in the Capitol, he deserves to live his life unmolested. It certainly doesn't mean that the FBI is "protecting" him any more than the FBI is "protecting" my friend. 

One further note before I go on: if Epps "incited an insurrection" and deserves to be arrested then Trump certainly does.  

Back to my discussion with my friend. He says:

the reality is it may or may not have been encouraged by feds. 

This is a weak version of the appeal to ignorance, in essence saying, "We don't know, but in the absence of evidence we assume it's true." But that's now how coming to conclusions works. My pal points out that the FBI has infiltrated white supremacist and militia groups before, and this is true, but unless the vast majority of the members of the Oath Keepers are known to be FBI, it makes no sense to assume that any individual is a fed. 

definitely lack of clear ROA (rules of engagement) by capitol police leadership, and a few knuckleheads that got caught up in the mania in the crowd. by and far 99.99% of the people there said fuck this and left. 

It looks like about an upper limit of 40,000 people showed up for the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, based in part on the 25,000 people who passed through Secret Service screening to attend. the low estimate of the number of people on the Capitol grounds illegally, who got there by beating their way past a police line, is about 2000. Suggesting that at least 1 in 20 participants ended up committing a crime that day, 3 orders of magnitude bigger than my friend seems to think. Some 700 hundred have been charged. 

you likely took the 1st article from a google search that placated what cognitive dissonance you have momentarily felt. Conveniently google placed that article at the top for you.

The first Google result I found was for a Ray Epps who was a former basketball player. I was pretty damned confused for a minute there. I teach about the Google algorithm (and other algorithms) in my first year seminar classes. I talk about the dangers of using services that feed you things that it thinks you want to over things that you need to hear. I know Google-Fu. My buddy then sent me a screenshot of his search from another website: 

This is the front page of [the] Quant search engine search of ray epps. Much different results. There are facts and views in those article that the snopes article naturally leaves out.

In fact, the first page of the Quant search first throws up a number of unintentionally hilarious, auto-generated T-shirt ideas based on my search:

After that, however, I do get the same list of articles/sources that my pal does. But--and this is important--I've literally never heard of almost any them. They have, from my perspective, no reputation, no authority. What are their standards of evidence? Do they have editors? What are their newsroom practices like? And when they are making an extraordinary claim, why should I take it seriously? From my POV, there seems to be no inherent reason to trust them.

So, let's click on a few links to see where my friend is getting his information from.

The first article I see is from the World Tribune and attributes unhelpfully to "Staff" "Who is Ray Epps and why has the FBI protected him?". No bias there. No siree.

And the basis for the conclusion that they've reached by the end of their headline, and I'm not making this up, is that some Republican badgered the Attorney General about him during a hearing, knowing full well that the AG can't comment on individual cases. That silence is not coverup; even if they weren't covering something up, he still wouldn't say anything about it. Also, the congresscritter seems to be concerned that the picture of Epps that was on a Most Wanted page had disappeared. But it's not like he's considered a top 10 criminal: his anonymous photo appears among hundreds of other anonymous people there at the Capitol. It would take Rain Man to notice that his photo had been taken down. This is an example of "anomaly hunting," which is common in conspiracy theories, paranormal investigations and other forms pseudo-research. The form is very similar to the argument from ignorance: "I don't understand something, therefore I understand that something nefarious is happening." No, you don't understand something so you don't understand something; you just can't insert a conclusion of the basis of nothing. 

Here's another poser that nobody seems to be asking: How could a group like the FBI be so adept at masterminding a coup but so inept that they'd post an image (and video) of one of their agents committing a crime? It's a classic, "They're omnipotent and also foolish" gambit that we see in conspiracy theories.

What about the next article in the Quant search results, Revolver? Welp, this is at the top
of their page:

Ah, a conspiracy theory site. The Deep State is not a thing. It's a phrase that started in Turkey to describe an entrenched military that actively slowed down reforms. It's now used to mean "any career employee of the government who does not instantly bend to the will of the executive." So it's a conspiracy theory site. Dismissed.

So, if a Quant web search is turning up crummy results, maybe we should go over and click the News tab... Oh dear:

To my good friend who said that Google "conveniently" put the Snopes article at the top for me, I say: