PATRIOT GHOSTS: Roger and Sherri Down By the Cemetery
PATRIOT GHOSTS: Roger and Sherri Down By the Cemetery
While in DC, I paid a visit to the Congressional Cemetery, where I met Roger and Sherri, who believe they are patriots
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Roger and Sherri have posted up in front of the DC Jail for 678 days. Roger, sad-faced, stained shirt, lets Sherri do most of the talking. Occasionally, he grunts in with some misinformed facts that he got off the internets. Sherri, however, is a woman of passion and conviction. She uses words like “patriot” and “constitutional” a lot, and she wears her love for America on both shirt and hat.
Her head is a repository for Russian propaganda, but I don’t think she knows that.
“We stand with Ashli Babbitt’s mother,” Sherri says, her voice trembling. “Ashli Babbitt was a multi-combat veteran who was shot and killed on January 6 inside the Capitol. She was unarmed, she was not aggressive, and she was killed by a rogue cop.”
In 678 days, no one — not a single person — told them Ashli Babbitt was armed.
I let her continue her speech — it was Sherri’s MAGA Howl.
I have learned not to contradict the facts of the radicalized. I have learned from Dr. Hassan to ask the polite, curious question.
And although I was tired and under the weather, I listened and asked questions for 12 minutes — that was all I could take, not a second more. They call the area where they stand Freedom Corner, but it felt more like a self-imposed prison. They are true believers in a lost world, mind-hacked by Russian active measures and US traitors that act like flaks for Putin.
Sherri’s MAGA Howl
After Sherri concluded her misinformed jabberwocky about “heroes” and “truth” and things that made sense in the upside down where facts are pesky things, I asked her why does she think that many Americans see J6 as the darkest day in our history and believe the people that she and Roger call heroes to actually be domestic terrorists?
Sherri thinks the divide in America is a political divide, and that the J6 domestic terrorists are locked up because of their political beliefs.
I feel like singing the blues…
Sherri don’t know bout the Big Lie
Sherri didn’t see A Storm Foretold
Sherri don’t know bout Roger Stone
Sherri don’t know about Mike Flynn
How those two traitors created a ruse
So her J6 heroes their freedom would lose…
Sherri don’t know. Sherri continues:
“The mainstream of America believes these people are terrorists because of the lies they were fed, because of the extremely false committee hearing that they absolutely lied in… these guys cry to us every night.”
So I go in poet… snap snap snap… quietly, I ask them if they know about Jeff Sharlet’s book, like Colombo I fumble for the name, even though I know it by heart. I can’t give them an uppercut, I have to do a slomo haymaker with an ever so gentle landing.
I ask them if they saw Ashli Babbitt’s knife on the cover of his book. There on the cover of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Moving Civil War was the police exhibit of the knife Babbitt was carrying. Was it a bowie knife? I don’t know my knives, but I know it was deadly, and she was armed.
Both Roger and Sherri tell me they never knew about that.
678 days standing beside the Congressional Cemetery where true patriots are buried like John Philip Sousa and Leonard Matlovich and a mind-hacked domestic terrorist armed with a killing-knife becomes their martyr.
I ask them the question I have learned to ask because I am a student of great scholars and authors. I know from Peter Pomerantsev who I met the day before at TedX MidAtlantic that what unites the American mind-hacked is a hatred for Joe Biden (ne Hillary Clinton) and a belief in American exceptionalism.
So I say, “Don’t you think this inability for Americans to have a shared narrative of truth weakens us on the world stage? Don’t you think that Americans continually fighting each other makes us weak?”
Roger and Sherri agreed with me.
Score one for unity!
My last question — about Bannon going to prison and Trump being a convicted felon — had them calling me “fake news.”
They explained to me that Trump was not a convicted felon and that I was spreading fake news. They believe the judge will set him free in July. Bannon is simply another political prisoner, Sherri explained.
I asked Roger and Sherri to share their news sources with us. Roger gets his news from YouTube. My podcast is on YouTube, but I don’t think he’s surfing that algorithm.
Sherri gets her news from Gateway Pundit, which she says tells both sides.
Sigh.
Sherri don’t know.
I wanted to tell Sherri how I’m friends with Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who is also a veteran. I wanted to tell her that he is my definition of a patriot, and that I will always believe he is the greatest of Americans for standing between a mob of mind-hacked killers and our Capitol, so our flag would still be there in the morning.
I wanted to tell her that I, too, would be happy to see low-level prisoners set free if it meant Roger Stone and Mike Flynn would be rung up for treason for their role in plotting the insurrection.
Instead, I politely thanked them both. They are standing their ground — unaware that their ground is fouled by digital poison and that MAGA was always a Russian op.
My friends who know Roger and Sherri say they are larpers, and maybe they are. But I believe that they believe.
I returned to the graveyard to get a photo of Elbridge Gerry’s tomb for David Pepper.
As I whistled past the graveyard, I could hear patriot ghosts weep then howl.
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Thank you so much Julie! I included my Hassan interview which has great tips — I also have learned to do more listening than talking but by the end Sherri said more convos need to happen so at least that
I don't know how you do it, Heidi. Honestly. You are a democracy champ and hero. Sending much gratitude.