justice

Capitol riot investigation: You’ve been had

The investigation into the capitol storm is heating up. There is concern of possible insurgencies and riots after the midtern elections this year and after the presidential elections in 2024. Some people hope that the capitol riot investigations will have a deterrence effect and prevent further problems. But of course it may just have no deterrence effect or make things worse. The average rioter gets thrown under the bus and the same goes with “Oath Keepers” and “Proud Boys”. Higher ranking Republicans are notorious for stringing their audiences along with PR stunts and dreams of a new revolution. Even decades ago the John Birch Society kept “patriots” waiting and hoping. You’ve been had.

We’ve seen recentr reports of the US military spying on it service members to find individuals who may not accept a Democratic president in 2024 and instead consider the Republican candidate the true winner and commander in chief. We’ve seen reports of wargaming in order tp prepare for uprisings and insurgencies.

Now what’s really going on?

Naturally the Democrats frame all of this as grand rightwing world conspiracy. The Republicans frame it as a grand leftwing world conspiracy. Let’s talk vote fraud: The ideal situation for the upper class is  to have the political pendulum swing back and forth on a regular basis. The two big parties should be neck to neck. Otherwise you may see new political parties emerge which makes controlling it all a hassle.

It’s not difficult to inject money into the political sphere to maintain the equilibrium. But it’s harder to make up for the fact that many older Republican voters are dying each year and young people are growing up on the internet and not in very traditional ways. During the 2000 presidential elections this demographic, political imbalance became a problem. The Democrats had had their run and now it was time for the pendulum to swing back into the other direction. Veteran investigative reporter Greg Palast documented how legit voters were eliminated from voter lists and how legit votes were eliminated. The situation back then was a lot more serious than 2016 with some Russian interference, some dirty ploys. We had actual evidence of meaningful vote fraud. However the Democrats did not properly fight this. The Republicans nowadays have continued to use the same type of vote manipulation and they also have managed to patch things up with the consumers of tradittional conspiracy media. During the Bush admin, conspiracy buffs were enemies of the GOP and they would not have voted enthusiastically for a candidate like McCain. FOX News at the time was describing conspiracy theories about 9/11 and against the Bush admin as treason.

Once Obama became president, the GOP and conspiracy buffs became closer and then in 2016 with Trump it sort of merged where you even saw Fox News peddle grand conspiracy accusations.

You have to have to be prepared for different scenarios over the next years. It may be just more pendulum swings with no significant change of the system and the living conditions for people. The Democrats may win the midterm elections but lose the White House. The Republicans may win the midterms but fail to take the White House. This pendulum swinging can go on forever. They want to string you along and keep you occupied with activism and they want people to fight among each other. It’s also possible that we see some uprisings, some insurgencies which are then squashed. This would deter many people from trying this again over the next 10 to 20 years. We would see more pendulum swings instead of more insurgencies. It’s possible that the US goes to war with China. This could shake things up a bit. If a Democrat is in the White House and drafts rightwingers for military service, will these rightwingers comply, or instead think this is all a communist trap? Draft dodgers may move to Republican dominated states and some of these states may disengage from the Union. This could leave us with two Americas. One for the woke soy latte crowd. And one for the beers and guns crowd. The pendulum would stop swinging but the population in each of the two Americas would be effectively trapped.

So, was the Capitol a rightwing conspiracy or a left wing conspiracy or something else? Well, there was no grand vote fraud by the Democrats in 2020.  No millions of fake ballots. This is not how the pendulum system works. If it’s too crazy the system becomes unbalanced and breaks.

The GOP just did not manage to find enough new voters, to attract women. The highly polarizing nature of Trump just scared many people away and caused significant lasting damage to the GOP.

When Trump lost in 2020 we immediately saw the accusations of gigantic fraud and the climax was the capitol storm. From a classic leftwing perspective it looks like a righwing conspiracy to overturn a legitimate election result, a right wing coup orchestrated by Trump, General Flynn and these types of players. Not only was Trump to be reinstated a s commander in chief, there may have been arrests of leading democrats, show trials, and the establishment of a rightwing dictatorship.

If a righwing group had truly intended to create a classic dictatorship and put an end to the pendulum system, there would have been much better options. A war, just to name one example.

Who honestly believes powerful rightwing circles would put everything on the line to have some average Trump fans invade the capitol? To have strange groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys make fools of themselves?

An actual coup needs a wide array of complicated preparations. Not just some bureaucrats huddled up in the Willard Hotel, or making public statements about grand battles to be fought. The average person invading the capitol expected the cavalry to arrive at some point. They expected the culmination of those great fantasies from Qanon or Flynn. Pence was expected to denounce the election results. But none of that happened.

Higher ranking Republicans under investigation can obviously claim that all of this was simply a publicity stunt that went off the rails. The idea had been to give the impression to the voters that everything has been tried to save America except a full blown violent coup d’etat. The idea had been to promote the stolen election myth to use it as a jumping board for further elections.

Some higher ranking people under investigation may have been under the impression that the capitol storm was a lot more than just a PR stunt.  Some may have intentionally lied about vote fraud to overturn the election results.

We saw Steve Pieczenik right after the capitol storm on the Alex Jones show, claiming repeatedly that there was a plan for a military coup. And that Jones had been used as a tool for that coup. Why would Pieczenik admit to this publicly, escpecially right after the capitol storm when it was clear that there would be investigations? It’s very strange.  

The righwing circles and truther media seemingly have agreed upon a narrative about the capitol riots: It was supposedly an all out Democrat ploy. A peaceful demonstration was subverted by agents and assets to make Republicans look bad.

There is a host of suspicious behavior before the riot. Despite clear intelligence that rightwingers wanted violence, assassinate AOC, take Nancy pelosi hostage and these things, the protection of the capitol was weak at best.

Then there is the issue of possible informants and provocateurs. The lowest level were Qanon cult members on that day. Then you had the more organized and connected groups on the ground such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. They have been linked to Alex Jones and Roger Stone among others. They wanted to appear professional and militaristic. Yet they used radio communications on open channels, and a lot or all of these frequencies were monitored and recorded. They left a trove of revealing chat communications. Members have been charged with serious crimes and some of them are cooperating with the investigations now. The Oath Keeper leader had his phone taken by authorities which, according to reports, produced a lot of data. Hes has been talking with investigators aganst the advice of his lawyer. He himself is Yale Law School educated man. He of all people should know that it is never advisable to talk to police.

Ted Cruz has tried to patch things up lately with conspiracy buffs and certain Republicans, by grilling government officials about possible informants or even FBI agents being tied to the capital riots. Obviously these questions cannot be answered publicly, at least not right away. The FBI will not reveal sources and methods. There have been many cases and scandals in the past. The FBI is a hybrid between a police agency and an intelligence agency. To be fair: Counter terrorism is hard. If you send your agents out to infiltrate a group, or you recuit a lower level source, they can only rise up in this group by providing useful things to that group.

Once you have properly infiltrated a group, it may be advantageous to just observe and let this group continue. If you make arrests, new groups will form that will have to be infiltrated again and then the infiltrations may become much harder because your tagets get smarter.

Radicals have the habit of committing a lot of felonies. They disregard firearm restrictions, they finance their acticities with drug dealing. Even just talking about assassinations and terror attacks and making certain preparations is serious.

Often times when a group gets busted we find out that one or more of the members were confidential informants for the FBI or Homeland Security or various police departments. Obviously the group members being charged have the opportunity to downplay their own roles and to exaggerate the work of the informant. We already see the Republicans using this tactic going forward. But at what cost? Exposing FBI sources may give away precious secrets. Not only democrats are responsible for recruiting rightwing assets. What if some of the FBI provocateurs had been recruited unter Republican political leadership? What if it becomes too obvious how much the rightwing sphere has been infiltrated? This may expose and unbalance the pendulum system.

The low level Qanon cult members from the capitol storm may be thrown under the bus completely. They were supposedly led by FBI assets and traitors to make the Republicans look bad. But mainly these low level cult members were readicalized by rightwing media and Republicans. If a provocateur on the ground says “let’s go into the building and take Nancy Pelosi hostage” and you do that, you are not off the hook. You are not legally protected. You have no immunity. No get out of jail free card.

FBI domestic spying has spiralled and rightwing circles are not very good at distinguishing between friends and foes. Solid ideas and bad ideas. It’s legitimate to complain about the overall situation. But complaining is not going to help much. It can very hard to detect a traitor, a confidential source, an actual agent. Real agents using a full blown cover may claim to be estranged from their parents and other family members. They may claim to have a source of income that allows them to travel a lot. But a confidential source could be your friend. Someone whom you have known for a long time.  They may act as usual. They may be more explicit in their rhetoric.

There are many documented cases iny many countries througout many different time spans, when domestic spying ran out of control. You can barely find any radical group that hasn’t been infiltrated. But it’s not just about controlling certain people. It’s also about controlling peoples ideas. We may find out that FBI field offices and state justice departments under Democrat political leadership had recruited people involved in the capitol riots. But it was not Democrats or the FBI who put these ideas into rigtwingers heads that the elections were stolen and that the Pandemic is supposedly a gigantic fake and a leftist conspiracy.

The capitol riot investigation may end in a draw. The Democrats will get some convictions, but by far not everything they want. The Republicans will take some damage, but will not be crippled by it. The pendulum keeps swinging.

And everybode seems to be framing the whole thing according to their political ideological preferences. Things are rarely the way you want them to be. You need to make the pendulum stop swinging.

Influencers tell you what you want to hear. That you can save the situation and save america through more of the same old same old activism.

A lot of the traditional American conspiracy ideas go back to the John Birch Society. Industry titans such as Koch industries financed this as a way to string people along, frame everything bad as a leftist conspiracy and claim there were good rightwing billionaires and circles that you should trust. Most of todays conspiracy media is based on the Birch Society even though the organization itself is largely forgotten and many of todays conspiracy buffs don’t even know this background.

Even decades ago the target audience was strung along with fantasies of rightwing uprisings and coup d’etats, led by politicians, genrals and intelligence people. Of course these coup d’etats never happened. They were never meant to happen. Someone connected to the mighty DuPont family once approached the retired General Smedley butler and asked him to get involved in some grand march on Washington D.C. and a soft coup. Butler reported this attempt to recruit him and the media framed him as a silly crank, even though he was a highly decorated man who realized that war was a racket, that most conflicts are just imperialism and a money making scheme. Why was he approached? Was there really a plan for a coup? Or was the intention to spy on him and to compromise him? To string him along? The capitol storm might be just the same kind of setup. A giant PR stunt to prevent the actual cizitens to think and act for themselves. People never seem to learn from these old traps and mistakes.

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