We're All Journalists Now

We’re all journalists now because the pros are all on strike.  And so it falls to the amateurs to be truth tellers.  From Dr. Francis Collins to Merrick Garland, it's a sea of disinformation and low information out there. I mean no disrespect to a fringe outfit like The Revolver, but it's a crazy world where they should win reportorial prizes. 

Maybe it’s always been this way and we on the conservative side are just slow on the uptake and not particularly keen at politics.  We saw an example of this in the Trump administration where the babes in the woods came into office in ’16 and brought plastic cutlery to a gun fight. 

Take Trump advisor General Keith Kellogg, who was also Pence’s National Security Advisor. He admitted this on a podcast: 

“You make an assumption going in there, based on my military time, that people are basically good. Well, that is not necessarily true at all. The one lesson I took out of this...if I had to do it again, I’d walk in the door [on day one] and say ‘everybody out. Today’.” 

I was no different at the time and was likewise blindsided; I had no idea it was a gun fight either. It's a painful lesson to have to learn "on the fly" but it's pretty much in the Republican DNA to be reactive, assume good will, be patriotic, and never anticipate domestic evil. (Witness the fubar of the '20 election.)

Part of it is that the Right is out of its league with Antifa, Democrats, and the Feds, all of whom have been doing politics for far longer, are familiar with psyops, and target vulnerable individuals with impunity.  It’s funny/sad that so many on the right thought maybe 1/6 was made worse by Antifa infiltrators but not their own government.  The party of law and order is afoul of law and order! (If we had law and order...). 

I’m not sure how this can come out as a win.  As long as only the media was against us then there was hope. But when you add government, courts, corporations, the IRS, and perhaps eventually even financial institutions it’s hard to see a good path forward; best we can do is punish on the margins those we can by boycotting/voting against corporations/politicians.  I’m not sure how we can even do protests without getting infiltrated by either Antifa or the Feds and then getting blamed for violence. 

As The Revolver comments: 

“The case of ‘mere’ Federal foreknowledge of the so-called ‘siege on the Capitol’ is bad enough, and amounts to a national scandal in its own right. Indeed, if elements of the federal government knew in advance of conspiracies to ‘siege the Capitol’ or otherwise disrupt the Senate proceeding on 1/6, the natural question arises as to why they did nothing to stop it. Given that the government and their allies in the Regime media have framed 1/6 as a 9/11-caliber domestic terror event, the possibility that elements of the federal government knew about it in advance, and yet sat back and let it happen for political purposes, is incredibly damning. This would amount to nothing less than the government conspiring, for the most malicious of political reasons, to falsely cast tens of millions of law-abiding patriotic Americans as domestic terrorists.

Given the magnitude of its implications, it is well worth repeating that federal foreknowledge is a virtual certainty. Just weeks ago the New York Times itself begrudgingly acknowledged the presence of a Proud Boys militia member and informant who was texting his FBI handler thought the entire day on 1/6, as well as several days in advance. The Times notes that the presence of this informant, and likely many more, suggests that ‘federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known.’”