A conservative outfit has announced it is organizing a rally on September 18 at the US Capitol to—get this—seek “justice” for the rioters arrested during the insurrectionist raid on Congress on January 6. The man behind this event is a former Trump 2016 campaign aide who after the 2020 election tried to cast himself as an independent elections expert and data analyst who had uncovered evidence of significant voter fraud. He also happens to be someone I’ve done a bit of reporting on.

Matt Braynard is the executive director of Look Ahead America, which describes itself as “an America First nonprofit dedicated to standing up for patriotic Americans who have been forgotten by our government.” Earlier this month, he appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Bannon’s War Room, and said that his group would be holding a demonstration at the Capitol “to push back against the phony narrative that there was an insurrection” on January 6. He insisted the mob that assailed Capitol Hill was “largely peaceful,” claiming that “this was a crowd that was egged on in many ways by Capitol police throwing flash-bang grenades into a relatively peaceful crowd.” Egged on? Did he not see even one of the videos from that day? More absurd, Braynard stated that this protest would “demand justice for these political prisoners”—a reference to the seditious marauders, some of whom pleaded guilty, who have been pursued and prosecuted by the FBI and the Justice Department. His statement echoed Trump’s recent comments about the 1/6 rioters in which he said the people arrested were “military people, and they’re police officers, and they’re construction workers. And they’re tremendous, in many cases, tremendous people, tremendous people.” Trump remarked that it was “not right” that so many of them were “currently incarcerated.”

As for the rally on behalf of these “tremendous people” who brutally attacked cops, threatened to lynch Vice President Mike Pence, tried to thwart a constitutional proceeding, and threatened House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Braynard vowed, “It’s going to be huge...We’re going back to the Capitol, right where it started.”

So now the Trump gang’s effort to whitewash this day of infamy and treason has a grassroots component that will try to replicate January 6. (Peacefully, of course, right?) I have no idea if Braynard and his organization, which doesn’t have much of a track record, can pull off a major event. (The group has fewer than 6,000 Twitter followers.) But this move further shreds Braynard’s already tattered credibility as a self-proclaimed elections expert whose work was frequently cited by pro-Trump forces to prop up Donald Trump’s Big Lie.

After the November election, Braynard, who worked on the data team for Trump’s 2016 campaign, raised over $700,000 for a project that collected supposed evidence of voter fraud. He produced what he described as analyses of the 2020 vote in swing states where he claimed massive amounts of illegal votes had been cast. During a hearing in Arizona, he testified alongside Rudy Giuliani, who as the personal lawyer for Trump was scheming to overturn the election. Braynard’s so-called data was actually used in a number of GOP lawsuits that sought (and failed) to nullify the election in key states. This was a lucrative enterprise for Braynard; he was personally paid large fees to serve as an expert witness on voting data in several of these court cases.

When I interviewed him in November after the election, Braynard insisted that even though he was a Trump superfan, his research was completely objective. He maintained that he “didn’t walk into this with any preconceived notions” regarding the possibility of fraud. He merely wanted to answer a question: “Is this really a clean election?”

When Braynard became embroiled in the fight over the Georgia results, he sent a letter to the state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state declaring that he had uncovered 21,000 illegal ballots there by analyzing various data sets. His findings were eviscerated by established experts. Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor and well-known expert in voting and statistics whose own work Braynard had cited in making his case, slammed Braynard’s findings and maintained there was “no scientific basis” for the claims. When Braynard appeared at an “elections investigative hearing” staged by Republicans in the Georgia House of Representatives, a Democratic legislator made mincemeat of his research. She had contacted people on his list of supposed illegal voters and discovered they in fact had voted properly in the 2020 election. Confronted by this damning information, Braynard had little to say. It was such a thorough and humiliating takedown that the exchange went viral.

With his announcement of a pro-January 6 demonstration, Braynard has revealed himself beyond any doubt to be the Trump toadie he pretended he wasn’t when he was trying to concoct evidence to back up Trump’s baseless accusations of election fraud. Characterizing the January 6 riot as a peaceful gathering, with any violence that occurred being the fault of the Capitol Hill cops, is an act of delusionary and pernicious propaganda. It is also potentially dangerous, as he attempts to create yet another grievance for Trump’s violent-prone loyalists. (In March, Braynard attended a conference held by the organization run by white nationalist Nick Fuentes, according to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.)

There’s this other revealing detail. In 2017, Braynard, as part of the coursework for an MFA he was pursuing at Columbia University, created a literary magazine called Otoya, which was billed as a “Literary Journal of the New Nationalism.” The publication, Braynard explained in a brief editor’s note, was titled in honor of Otoya Yamaguchi, whose name may not be famailiar to people outside of Japan. In 1960, Yamaguchi, a 17-year-old right-wing ultranationalist in Japan, brutally murdered Inejirō Asanuma, a legislator and chairman of the Japan Socialist Party. Yamaguchi stabbed Asanuma with a samurai sword at a televised election debate. The image capturing the horrific moment became one of the most famous news photos of the 20th century. After being arrested, Yamaguchi committed suicide and became a hero of the Japanese far right.

And he’s a hero for Braynard, too. His note described this murderer as a courageous nationalist who valiantly killed a leftist. He pointed out that Yamaguchi shared a birthdate “with another great patriot who put bayonets through the enemies who threatened his nation, George Washington.” In our interview, I asked Braynard about his admiration for Yamaguchi. He recalled visiting Cambodia, where he says he saw piles of skulls of victims who had been murdered during the bloody reign of the Khmer Rouge. “I think [Yamaguchi] may have prevented the same thing from happening in his own country,” Braynard said. “He should be memorialized and remembered.” Huh? There was no relationship between the leader of an established socialist party and Pol Pot, the psychopathic leader of the Khmer Rouge who was responsible for the genocide of between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians. Braynard was justifying a murderous act of political violence with historical gobbledygook. (Only one issue of Otoya was published.)

Braynard shows there is no distance between pushing the Big Lie and whitewashing the recent history of January 6. Both endeavors are essential and intertwined parts of the Trump cult’s assault on democracy. Braynard said there will be high-profile speakers at the September event, including members of Congress. Maybe. Given his research work after the election—and his description of what occurred on January 6—it’s not clear his powers of observation can be trusted. But his current venture was granted the Bannon seal of approval, an important imprimatur in Trumpworld. And that’s just another sign the Trumpists will not give up their attempts to deny reality to serve their Dear Leader. In this crusade, Braynard is a loyal foot soldier.

An Inspiring Tale From the Myanmar Jungle

When Dr. Sasa was a teenager growing up in a remote jungle in western Myanmar, one of his fellow students died. Over two days through rough terrain, Sasa and three other boys carried the body back to the family. These days, Sasa is the leading spokesperson for the democratically elected government of Myanmar that was overthrown by the military in February. The junta arrested the top officials of the National League for Democracy, the party that had won the election in November, and this included NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi. As the coup was taking place, Sasa disguised himself as a taxi driver and managed to elude arrest by escaping the capital city of Naypyitaw for a safe—and undisclosed—location. Since then, he and other deposed officials have set up a virtual government and sought assistance from the United States and other nations to beat back the coup and restore democracy to Myanmar.

Sasa, who left his jungle village to pursue his education in Yangon, India, and then Armenia (where he attended medical school), is now the public face of this shadow government. Since the coup, I have reported a series of stories on the crisis in Myanmar—one harrowing piece described a political assassination in Myanmar and the possibility of civil war there—and an intermediary informed me that Dr. Sasa would be amenable to an interview. Not long ago, I had a two-hour-long chat with him over Zoom. He couldn’t say where he was for security reasons. (The military regime has been targeting him and his compatriots with cyberattacks.) But he discussed the additional steps the Biden administration could take to help the democratic government regain power. If you give a damn about democracy overseas or just want to be inspired by his remarkable personal tale, please read the article I wrote about him.

What to Read, Watch, and Listen To

Allison Russell, Outside Child. Soul, country, blues, rhythm and blues, rock, roots—you can hear it all on Allison Russell’s impressive debut solo album. You will also discern in her mesmerizing vocals traces of Lauryn Hill, Rosanne Cash, Nina Simone, and Regina Spektor. A longtime collaborator with other musicians, Russell breaks away from the singer-songwriter pack in Outside Child. The gripping and hook-laden songs recount her disturbing personal tale. She was born in Montreal. Her father was a Grenadian student who had returned to the island, and her mother, a Scottish Canadian teenager, had schizophrenia. Russell ended up in foster care until her mother married a white guy who adopted and abused her. When she was 15, she fled her home and lived in a cemetery. “I was the Queen of Westmount Park,” she sings, accompanied by a soulful guitar lick and mournful organ on “4th Day Prayer.” “It was all mine after dark / Old willow tree, it was my throne /Til I, 'til I went home / Father used me like a wife / Mother turned the blindest eye / Stole my body, spirit, pride /He did, he did each night.”

On “Persephone,” she pays tribute to a friend who was a first (or early) love who takes her in when she escapes her home. The opening track, “Montreal,” is a French and English ode to her hometown. (“Oh you Cathedrals / Your shadows felt like loving arms / I was your child, Montreal / You would not let me come to harm.”) Her melodies are full of captivating grooves, and her lyrics relate gut-wrenching agonies and yet are imbued with the triumphant defiance of survival. “His soul is trapped in that room,” she sings in “Nightflyer.” “But I crawled back in my mother's womb / Came back out with my gold and my greens / Now I see everything.” Outside Child is an extraordinary piece of deeply realized art and the best new album I’ve heard in a while. It will haunt you. My favorite number is “The Runner,” in which Russell proclaims she found her “deliverance” in rock ’n’ roll: “I had to sing, to sing, to sing.” We are all so fortunate she did.

Got any recommendations of what I should be reading, watching, or listening to? Send them to thisland@motherjones.com.

Read Previous Issues of This Land

August 7, 2021: Are non-vaxxers and anti-maskers just too damn selfish?; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Mailbag (can you still watch your favorite old movies if they now make you cringe?); MoxieCam™; and more.

August 3, 2021: When “worse than Watergate” is really worse than Watergate; Apple TV+’s “comedy” Physical is no comedy, but it’s worth watching; This Land in Photos (West Virginia); and more.

July 31, 2021: Can you still watch your favorite movies?; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Mailbag (more on Lennon versus McCartney); MoxieCam™; and more.

July 29, 2021: Is a country music star encouraging more January 6-like violence?; a civil rights hero more people should know; and more.

July 27, 2021: Are Republicans going to sabotage police reform that doesn’t even go far enough?; how to put a senseless murder to good use; how sober is Liz Phair?; and more.

July 24, 2021: Has Paul McCartney finally won me over?; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 22, 2021: My bizarre encounter with Rep. Jim Jordan—and why Speaker Pelosi was right to bounce him from the 1/6 committee; celebrating and grieving with musician Steve Earle; and more.

July 20, 2021: The time a Republican president did the right thing to stop an epidemic; Trump’s big narcissism fail; Nelson Algren and Norman Podhoretz; a new psychedelic Beatles-esque tune; and more.

July 17, 2021: Why the Guardian’s Trump-Russia bombshell—dud or not—doesn’t fully matter; Dumbass Comment of the Week; why Bosch works in spite of Bosch; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 15, 2021: Does President Joe Biden really stand with the Cuban people?; the time I really pissed off the Cuban regime; J. Edgar Hoover vs. MLK; one of the best movie reviews of all time; and more.

July 13, 2021: A coming referendum on Donald Trump; a suggestion for Hunter Biden; a new book on how the super-rich screw us all; and more.

July 10, 2021: Why the Republicans are right to be terrified of the new House committee investigating the 1/6 attack; Dumbass Comment of the Week; Joni Mitchell’s Blue 50; and more.

July 7, 2021: How The Summer of Soul counters the GOP’s season of hate; a debate on the recent UFO report; Garry Trudeau, American Dostoyevsky; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 3, 2021: Donald Rumsfeld, Christopher Hitchens, the Iraq War, and me; the perils of taking a home DNA test; Dumbass Comment of the Week; a Springsteen story; and more.

July 1, 2021: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and perjury; Adam Serwer’s new book; Cézanne’s crime scene; and more.

June 29, 2021: How the new UFO report is bad news for UFO believers; my own UFO tale; HBO Max’s Hacks; an anti-racist anthem; and more.

June 26, 2021: Is Josh Hawley dumb or evil? (The answer is not both); Dumbassery that encourages mass “executions” in the United States; renowned guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson’s new tour and new book (and his claim regarding the best strings arrangement ever on a popular song); MoxieCam™ (before and after photos!); and more.

June 24, 2021: How an alleged 1/6 conspirator who called for executing Trump’s foes hooked up with a prominent Republican Party official; new Los Lobos; and more.

June 22, 2021: Why the GOP is pushing “political apartheid”; Ted Cruz wins Dumbass Comment of the Week; recommendations for an Apple TV+ series and a book on the curious origins of the universe; the first Clash tour of the United States (and being trapped in a van driven by a punk on acid); MoxieCam™; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.