It’s sort of bewildering to me that the Feds were so desperate to get the Proud Boys that they apparently orchestrated an elaborate trap for them on 1/6 (of course with unintended consequences ensued like Capitol windows getting busted - Ray Epps later said that window breakage "was not supposed to happen!" - and the counting of electoral college getting delayed.)
Kudos to The Revolver for doing the remarkable reportage that journalists won’t do. This impressive stuff - along with this gal’s tweet thread - is the sort of citizen-journalism I aspired to with a certain Colorado and GA Sec of State but never got too far.
As we know, previous Trump rallies had been peaceful so all you needed on 1/6 for it to be a success from the Fed’s point of view was for someone to take down some temporary barriers with wire clippers, equip a couple undercover with bullhorns, escort the Proud Boys onto the Capitol grounds and then - voila! - you have them all trespassing and whatever else you feel like charging them with. Shows over. Seems an extraordinary length to go in order to get these guys. So what’s the backstory? Are they the evil empire within?
Well, I was surprised to learn that a few months before 1/6, even after the Antifa riots, white supremacist groups were deemed the biggest threat to national security. From NPR in Oct 2020:
In its first-ever “Homeland Threat Assessment” released on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security named white supremacist groups as the single most dangerous domestic extremist threat to the nation.
Since 2018, white supremacist groups have been responsible for more deaths than any other domestic extremist group, the report adds.
The report does mention protests that broke out in cities like Portland, Kenosha, and New York City over the summer – but attributes this violence to “anti-government/anti-authority violent extremism” as opposed to specific white nationalist groups.
Wow. Big if true! So I tried to dig into the deaths they’d been responsible for and eventually found this:
From Newsweek:
[2019] was the deadliest on record for domestic extremist violence since the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. White supremacists were responsible for most of that bloodshed – 39 out of 48 deaths, including 23 people who died at the hands of an anti-Hispanic racist in El Paso, Texas, and a Jewish worshipper murdered at Poway Synagogue in California.
Turns out he El Paso shooting was indeed perpetrated by a white racist just as a black racist recently killed people in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Both are heinous crimes but seem to lack any status as a “trend”.
In the Jewish worshipper murdered (according to Wikipedia): "Officials said he had no previous criminal record or contacts with police, and no known connection to any white supremacist group.”
So that accounts for about 2/3rds of the 48 deaths and I’m not sure where the other fifteen white supremacist deaths are coming from nor am I confident the government would give us accurate statistics on crimes assigning the correct motivation anyway. As Clear Talk Media host Monica Matthews recently tweeted, “This year taught me one thing. Trust no one.” But you try to use data even from soiled sources (like the MSM and feds).
So back to the Proud Boys who have exercised such a remarkable hold on the FBI’s imagination (and Biden’s, who singled them out in a speech albeit calling them “the Poor Boys”). You can’t attack them for their thoughts alone, can you? There has to be violence, supposedly, so I googled for Proud Boy violence and came up with the quote below via NPR:
To reach the fourth degree, [Proud Boys founder] McInnes said, "you get arrested or in a serious violent fight for the cause." (During the interview, Rogan responded, "So you're promoting violence?" and told McInnes, "You should erase that part." McInnes has, at times, claimed the fourth degree should be reached only in self-defense.)
Officially, the group rejects racism and touts the multiracial backgrounds of some members. But they also describe themselves as proponents of "Western chauvinism" — the belief that Western European culture is superior to all others.
He also wrote in an email that violence is not core to the group's identity. "The violence you see from Proud Boys is a reaction to the unmitigated violence from antifa that the media ignores," he said, and that "I have encouraged FIGHTING BACK."
He also said that he discouraged the group from any involvement in the pro-Trump rallies on Jan. 6. "I made it very clear the whole thing was a bad idea and implored Proud Boys not to go," McInnes wrote.
So the Poor/Proud Boys are certainly not without sin but to create a 1/6 sting op seems just crazy given the risks to, er, the Democratic process and counting of electoral votes. But hey enjoy the show - it was your tax dollars at work! :-)
UPDATE: Ah, some light shed by Jack Posobiec’s recent book on Antifa:
What the intelligence community understood was that many in Washington D.C. on both sides of the aisle had begun to outsource their personal responsibility to the assessments and reporting of so-called experts. Rather than taking the time to dig in and understand an issue, a report is placed on a congressman’s desk, or a briefing is conducted, generally with staff, and their decisions are essentially made for them.
One active member of U.S. SOCOM told me “the Beltway intel community is one big circle [expletive]. They read the Washington Post every morning, watch CNN all day, and consider themselves informed. They never consider the fact that they might be getting information from bad sources.” He continued, “Look at 2020. You had looters and Antifa tearing up American cities every night of the summer, biggest riots since LA, but FBI barely even mentioned them. All these kids come in with criminal justice or poli sci degrees and think that counts as real-world experience, but they wouldn’t even know how to clear a corner.” I asked what sorts of reports were coming in during 2020. He said, “Well all the analysts were working from home because of COVID so they really only had access to unclassified. So they’re sitting home using Google and CNN to write OSINT (open source intelligence) and everyone wants to write about the same Q Anon or white supremacist nut so we end up with 15 reports about one event and the SES thinks it’s some kind of crisis. Then they brief the director about it, and then he goes to congress and tells them it’s the biggest threat in the country.” The intelligence community has fallen for the trap of circular reporting in the past, when the CIA falsely reported to the Bush Administration that Iraq had active weapons of mass destruction program.
One can often assign laziness to nearly everything: laziness of Congress members to do research, laziness of the intelligence community to do anything but read the news, laziness and herd-thinking on the part of reporters and laziness of American voters to acquire alternative sources of information given the media is one large cauldron of misinformation.
Update 2: Ah, it's a continuing education course. I didn't deep dive into Charlottesville back in 2017, seeing it too much in Trump terms due to the media falsely putting him at the forefront of it. But in this case the joke had a deadlier impact by setting up the country for the summer of '20 riots with the media's approval and acceptance of Antifa. (This may also have misled rioters on the Right in the lead-up to 1/6 thinking the playing field was level, that violence was acceptable.)
As much as I think the dominant media had and has been thoroughly discredited, they have great influence where it most matters (the elites in law and government bureaus).
Turned out, Charlottesville was in some ways a defining event for the country and surely part of the reason for the "white supremacy is the greatest domestic threat" that popped up a couple years later.
From Posobiec’s book discussing it:
..Yet by every account, as violence broke out between white supremacists and opposing anarchists, the police stood by as it escalated into a deadly brawl...
Charlottesville was an unmitigated disaster, resulting in the tragic deaths of three people – including the murder of demonstrator Heather Heyer, horrifically mowed down by a neo-Nazi. The left continued to bring up this event almost daily for years throughout the Trump presidency, and Joe Biden made it central to his election campaign in 2020. Through endlessly repeated lies and misrepresentations, in the minds of millions, Donald Trump remains branded as a racist, while Antifa was all but absolved of its role in the violence...
In short, Charlottesville was among the first of the great false narratives of Trump’s aptly named “fake news” era.
By “whitewashing” the role played by Antifa’s thugs in the violence – and also keeping the klieg lights far from the local Democrat officials who conspicuously failed in their sworn duty to uphold order – the national media more dramatically than ever before exposed itself as terminally corrupt.
They went to great lengths to legitimize Antifa’s role in the mayhem. CNN host Chris Cuomo infamously compared their actions in Charlottesville to those of the soldiers who landed on the Normandy beaches in 1944. Thus began the legitimization of Antifa in the eyes of the media...This book could be entirely comprised of nothing but major media praise for Antifa in the wake of Charlottesville.
Update 3: Maybe the risk to the Capitol wasn't as great as thought because looks like there was a contingency plan.
From Newsweek:
The presence of these extraordinary forces under the control of the Attorney General—and mostly operating under contingency plans that Congress and the U.S. Capitol Police were not privy to—added an additional layer of highly armed responders. The role that the military played in this highly classified operation is still unknown, though FBI sources tell Newsweek that military operators seconded to the FBI, and those on alert as part of the National Mission Force, were present in the metropolitan area. The lingering question is: What was it that the Justice Department saw that provoked it to see January 6 as an extraordinary event, something that the other agencies evidently missed.
As Darren Beattie said:
And yet, despite this mysterious revelation, the Capitol enjoyed uniquely poor security on 1/6...Makes sense...
And came an anonymous reply to him on Twitter:
It was a delicate situation. They had to make sure their school play didn't devolve into an actual sacking. The bigger question is, was Babbitt's shooter operating under these orders?
