Y’all know I can occasionally get a wild hair up my @$$ about some silly little thing just because it starts down a slippery slope. And so it is with the “Viking” who led “the insurrection” earlier this month. So here’s a quick fact-check and some questions and insinuations which may flow therefrom.

1. He wasn’t dressed as a Viking. Obvious to a LOT of us for several reasons. First, the horned head-dress. Vikings didn’t wear them. I know. I know. The Geats wore them. Beowolf was a Geat. The whole horned helmet wearing Viking thing came from costume designer Carl Emil Doepler who included them in the 1870’s era production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
2. So why did the media insist on referring to him as “a guy dressed as a viking?” See that reference to Wagner above? Ring cycle? Y’all know about the Nazi/white supremacist connection there right? It’s a VERY short step from “Viking” to “Nazi” to “White Supremacist.”
3. So what WAS he dressed as? Why don’t you ASK him? Multiple YouTube video interviews exist. He’s from Arizona. He self-identifies as a shaman (a word typically associated with Asian and North American so-called indigenous persons) who might also be termed a Medicine Man. Dude was LARPING as an American Indian.

But we can’t call him THAT, now can we? Doesn’t fit the narrative. And might tend to impugn the integrity of a protected minority group.

Gonna be a long four years.