There are a number of reasons for our skyrocketing crime rate–the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd hysteria are obvious culprits–but one obvious factor is that we do not punish crime severely enough. When criminals are let go, they tend to commit more crimes.
My colleague David Zimmer created this simple chart for our state, Minnesota. It shows the dramatic relationship between fewer incarcerations and more crimes–specifically, serious (Part 1) crimes ranging from murder to arson:
I believe Minnesota currently ranks 48 among the states in rate of incarceration, so we are an extreme case. But the principle holds nationwide. Locking criminals up–preferably for a long time–is the most effective antidote to crime.
Fox News was one of the few remaining right-wing strongholds Americans could count on to cut through leftist lies. Not anymore.
by KYLEE ZEMPEL at the Federalist:
The right has come to expect transgender accolades in the corporate media, with networks such as CNN and MSNBC perpetually promoting that left-wing ideology. But conservative viewers were stunned on Friday to see that radical narrative being pushed by the only major cable network still sympathetic to their views: Fox News.
As part of its push for Pride Month, Fox aired a segment about a family who transitioned their now-14-year-old daughter when she was only 5 years old because, as Fox said, “before Ryland could even speak, ‘he’ managed to tell his parents that he is a boy.”
The entire segment, about Ryland Whittington and the rest of the family, was trans propaganda. It legitimized the idea that incoherent toddlers can discern their sex, that sterilizing children is compatible with “Christian faith,” that pumping wrong-sex hormones into young bodies protects them from suicide, and that pretending a girl is actually a boy is what “living authentically” looks like.
Fox News viewers felt deep betrayal — not only because the segment promoted the abuse of children and flew in the face of everything they stand for, but because in a culture where the left controls virtually every major institution, corrupting the few remaining places conservatives have a home with lies throws the game away.
Aside from a shrinking batch of good churches that still preach the gospel and the remaining nuclear families that have prevailed against societal odds, the left dominates all major institutions.
It controls universities, which it uses to pump out political activists with otherwise-useless degrees and silence students who dissent.
The left dominates health care, where conservatives are made to quit or violate their consciences over experimental vaccines, gender-bending procedures, and the killing of the unborn.
The left owns big tech, which routinely censors any deviation from the leftist script and props up Democrat political candidates and policies.
It controls taxpayer-funded public schools, which are weaponized to instill radical ideas about race and sex in young minds.
It dominates the FBI and the rest of the deep state, which it uses to harass and intimidate conservatives.
It’s captured the military, which now prioritizes nonsense diversity and inclusion quotas over ability and preparedness.
The left even controls language, with leftists deciding how words are defined in the dictionary and how media are instructed to communicate (such as using the plural pronoun “they” to refer to a singular person who rejects the realities of sex).
Likewise, the left controls corporate media, from print newspapers at The Washington Post and The New York Times to a plethora of cable news networks that shape the way Americans across the country see the world through both overt left-wing rhetoric and subtle framing. Every day, the left-wing media tells the country what they should care about through what they cover versus what they conceal.
Fox News, along with a few online conservative publications, was one of the few remaining places normal Americans, abandoned and despised by every other institution, could count on to give it to them straight. Fox was a network conservatives could trust to give them cultural courage: To say, no, violent riots are not peaceful protests; yes, critical race theory has infiltrated classrooms; no, boys are not girls and girls are not boys. But on Friday, viewers were betrayed.
By lying that a 14-year-old girl is actually a 14-year-old boy, Fox News threatened its spot as a trustworthy network — for now. But the network has a choice.
First, it must not allow rogue producers and so-called reporters to call the shots and lean into lefty gimmicks like Pride Month. Those who greenlighted a transgender-accolades segment should be called to account and probably fired. Otherwise, honest employees and contributors should resign — and Americans will stop watching.
We can be force-fed trans fodder from anywhere. Why on earth would we put up with it from Fox?
But because the right has so few safe harbors, Fox News has a real opportunity here, and it must meet the moment. If it cares about its viewers, and therefore its revenue, it must own up to its mistake.
Americans crave the type of call-it-like-you-see-it programming they could count on from Fox. They need the one network that’s willing to air anything but the sham Jan. 6 show trial that nobody but Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi cares about. The one network where someone can say, no, actually we shouldn’t go to war with Russia. No, the Capitol riot wasn’t an insurrection. No, the president isn’t cognitively fine. This is the way.
The left owns way too much cultural ground for conservatives to watch one of its few remaining harbors like Fox News give the game away. It’s time for Fox to come back to its viewers so its viewers can come back to Fox.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
It is never the pretext—putative Russian collusion or protests at the Capitol—that is at issue but rather the ontological unacceptability of Trump and all he stands for.
Perhaps the best comment I saw in the hours leading up to the opening performance of Washington’s latest entertainment, the January 6 committee’s “Get Trump” show, was in the Babylon Bee. The Bee promised that Miley Cyrus would be performing at halftime. Alas, our new paper of record was pulling our leg. Miley was nowhere to be seen. It was only Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the show’s emcee, and his substitute for Vanna White, soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).
That was a disappointment. But at least the Bee was accurate in its description of the show’s basic plot line. “The January 6 Committee said,” the Bee reported, that “the opening ceremony of the hearing will include previously unseen video footage of the Capitol riots, followed by a ritual burning of Trump in effigy.” The burning happened off stage, it is true, but I am told that the snazzy television producer the committee engaged to produce the show provided some aromatherapy for the audience inside the Capitol.
Discussions are underway with Gwyneth Paltrow to provide a scratch-and-sniff option for home viewers in season two so no one need miss the ritual aspects of this sacrificial reenactment.
The Democrats went all-out with this entertainment. I cannot, however, pronounce it an unqualified success. Nor did the public, which mostly reacted with a yawn. (The ratings, many outlets reported, were “dismal.”) No surprise there. For one thing, as certain carping critics have noted, this entertainment is really only an updated rebranding of that earlier Democrat-sponsored farce “The Robert Mueller Show,” starring Robert Mueller and co-starring James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, with cameo appearances by Michael Sussmann, Glenn Simpson, and George Papadopoulos, among others.
Some nasty commentators said that that long-running show should have been called “Waiting for Godot” because of its pretension and surreal lack of incident. The story centered around Donald Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia. But there was no collusion to be had, not for a lack of trying on the part of the Democrats. The expensively produced burlesque quickly became box-office poison and had to be canceled about halfway through its third season.
The January 6 Committee has taken up where the Mueller show left off. The great difficulty for both shows is their utterly incredible premises. Donald Trump did not “collude” with Russia or kowtow to Vladimir Putin. With every passing month we know with greater clarity that that entire $34 million entertainment was cooked up by Hillary Clinton and her agents. Which is why former Attorney General Bill Barr, no friend of Donald Trump, just opined on Glenn Beck’s podcast that Clinton might be guilty of sedition in her covert attack on Trump.
“I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis,” Barr said, adding, “whatever you think of Trump, the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office.”
Acknowledging that the charge would be difficult to prove, he nevertheless said that he believed that Clinton’s machinations were “seditious,” a fancy word for treasonous. What Clinton aided and abetted with the whole Russian Collusion Delusion, Barr observed, “was a gross injustice, and it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we’re seeing in Ukraine these days. It distorted our foreign policy.”
And what was the outcome or upshot of all that? Ask Michael Sussmann, who was recently acquitted from the charge of lying to the FBI, or Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who altered an email—i.e., he forged evidence—and, in so doing, helped get a FISA warrant on Carter Page approved. Clinesmith got a little slap on his wrist and has just had his law license restored. It’s good to be a member of a protected species.
It’s the same with the January 6 jamboree. The whole raison d’être of the January 6 committee is to show that Donald Trump colluded with various nefarious forces—in this week’s episode, it’s the paramilitary group called the Proud Boys—to stage a “coup” and “overturn” the 2020 election. The problem is that the unruly protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was neither an “insurrection” nor an attempted coup. It was, as Tucker Carlson said at the time, a protest that “got out of hand,” and besides Trump didn’t even know who or what the Proud Boys were until after the event.
Now, opinions about the character of what actually happened on January 6 can legitimately vary. Honest observers can be distraught about the event and condemn it as a “riot.” I agree with Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie that the entire episode was to a very large extent stage-managed by government actors and that most of the roughly 800 people who have been arrested are political prisoners guilty of nothing more than walking around the Capitol that day.
The January 6 committee announced that it would be airing never-before-seen video footage from the event. In the abstract, that is a good idea, since there are some 14,000 hours of footage, very little of which has been made public. But in the event, what the committee showed was edited in a misleading way. For example, Donald Trump urged the people attending his “stop the steal” rally to proceed “peacefully and patriotically” to Capitol to make their views heard. The video aired at the Capitol omitted that critical qualification.
Other omissions include the bodies of Ashli Babbitt, the air force veteran who was shot point blank without warning by Capitol police Lt. Michael Byrd, later exonerated in the killing, and Rosanne Boyland, the woman who was gassed, beaten while unconscious by the police, and who later died.
In an essay about philosophical idealism, the philosopher David Stove remarks that “all sane use of language requires that we never relax our grip on the tautology that when we speak of kangaroos, it is kangaroos of which we speak.” His point is that idealists like Bishop Berkeley, by urging us to replace actual kangaroos with our idea of kangaroos, start us down the garden path to crippling irrationality. Something similar can be said about the January 6 committee. Their PR suggests that they are aiming to get to the truth about what happened that day and who was responsible. But “a picture holds them captive.” What they are really trying to do is lay the blame for the day’s events at the doorstep of Donald Trump in order—and this is the key point—to prevent him from running in 2024.
They half admit this. As a piece in The Wall Street Journal put it, the House committee “made clear in its first hearing that its main goal is showing Donald Trump was to blame for the attack on the Capitol, raising the question of what legal or political consequences the former president might face at the end of the probe.” Being hanged, drawn, and quartered was not explicitly mentioned. But neither was it excluded.
Just as sanity requires that we hold fast to empirical reality and insist that when we talk about trees, kangaroos, tables, etc., it is those real things we are talking about, not “phenomenal” transcripts, so it is critical that when the subject is Donald Trump versus the regime we hold fast to the reality that it is never the pretext—putative Russian collusion or protests at the Capitol—that is at issue but rather the ontological unacceptability of Trump and all he stands for. That is the key.
Donald Trump wouldn’t put it that way, of course, but he understood and articulated an important corollary. “They’re not after me,” he said after being impeached for the first time, “they’re after you. I’m just in the way.” Bear it in mind.
More than a decade ago, Michael Walsh dubbed the Democrats, “A criminal organization masquerading as a political party.” I once thought this was overstating the matter, but I no longer do. If you can’t fully accept this characterization, recent events surrounding the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, should unshutter your eyes and let in the light. Democratic leaders are encouraging lawless, threatening behavior against Supreme Court justices, and their attorney general refuses to enforce the law against such behavior. This criminal organization has a huge public relations outfit working around the clock for it, the Major Media, which is why you may have missed this.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that the leaders of the party are openly inciting violence in an effort to force the Court to decide cases based on fear of the mob, instead of the law.
In May, pro-abortionists began illegal parades around justices’ homes as the draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked. Attorney General Merrick Garland did not one thing to enforce the applicable federal law by arresting the protestors. In a bipartisan display of concern, the Senate passed a bill to extend around-the clock security protection to the justices’ families. The House Democrats have refused to sign on.
Not one single Democratic leader has spoken out in opposition to the terroristic actions against the Court.
Worse, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer clearly incited this threatening behavior, telling the crowd assembled outside the Supreme Court, “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” That clear threat also violated federal law, but don’t hold your breath for Garland to do anything, or Schumer to retract it, or any Democrat to criticize his intemperate statement. Chief Justice John Roberts condemned the statement as dangerous, to which Schumer replied he was “misinterpreted,” that he meant Republicans would suffer, though it would take a skilled gymnast to maneuver a twist like that. And I don’t find that explanation persuasive.
Last Wednesday, a heavily armed man (a Glock 17 with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, a tactical knife, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crowbar, zip ties, and duct tape, among other gear), Nicholas John Roske, was arrested outside of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, after he approached a U.S. Marshal and expressed his intentions to kill the justice. Roske’s plan was to sneak into the home and he even had specially pad-soled boots to do so without waking the family. Even after this, the protestors have returned to Kavanaugh’s home to demonstrate. Why Kavanaugh? He joined the majority in the Alito draft opinion but apparently the Chief Justice had not yet circulated Kavanaugh’s concurrence, and the hope will be that they can still change his mind. Roske, of course, had a more brutal strategy in mind. Indeed, at least one man who (has since removed it), tweeted that if the conservative justices were assassinated, Biden could nominate and get confirmed new justices more amenable to their way of thinking.
Only a stupid person would cave to such pressure. Do it once, and every highly charged decision would mean more of this. Josh Blackman is right:
…can’t fathom why anyone would want to serve on the Supreme Court. To be more precise, I can’t fathom why any conservative would want to serve on the Supreme Court. Liberal jurists are feted with honors at every juncture. But conservative jurists are excoriated and personally attacked. I wonder, in hindsight, if Kavanaugh still would have pursued a position on the Supreme Court, knowing what we know now: the first confirmation hearing, baseball tickets, Spartacus, Christine Blasey Ford, Michael Avenatti, Ronan Farrow, the second confirmation hearing, yearbook, beer, Klobuchar, Saturday Night Live, Matt Damon, the Dobbs leak, and now an assassination attempt outside of his home. During this time, Kavanaugh and his family have been dragged through such painful experiences, one after the other. Was it all worth it? And to what end? To swallow the Chief’s blue plate special?
“I’d get in their faces, and add a concurrence naming democratic politicians who have attacked the court and accusing them of fomenting violence against it, and warning that Americans will, perhaps rightly, feel free to start ignoring the Court’s rulings if they feel they are the result of illicit pressure and threats of violence.”
After the attempted assassin was arrested, the domestic thugs continued to harass his wife and children and Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s family as well. The home addresses of these judges and Barrett’s church and children’s’ school were publicized by an outfit called Ruth Sent Us which is coordinating this thuggery. (It’s ironic because in the name of former Justice Ginsburg they are demanding Roe not be overturned when even she conceded the decision had been a mistake.) John Hinderaker at Powerline Blog offers a compelling explanation for the failure to enforce laws against intimidation of judges:
I can’t think of an alternative explanation of why Merrick Garland and other Democratic Party authorities have failed to enforce laws against demonstrating outside judges’ homes. I can’t think of another explanation of why leaders of the Democratic Party can’t bestir themselves to condemn an assassination attempt. I can’t think of another explanation for why the Washington Post buried news of the attempted murder of Justice Kavanaugh deep in their “local news” section.
Nor can I think of another explanation of why leaders of the Democratic Party haven’t called off “Ruth Sent Us” in the wake of the Kavanaugh assassination attempt. Could they do so? I am pretty sure they could. But let’s find out! Who, exactly, is financing “Ruth Sent Us”? How do those people (or maybe just one person) relate to assassination-inciter Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Party generally?
Inquiring minds want to know. The effort to intimidate or, better yet, assassinate Supreme Court justices didn’t begin with marginal characters like Nicholas Roske, just like the idea of assassinating the House Republican baseball team didn’t originate with James Hodgkinson. The leaders of the Democratic Party are in the dock. Can they defend themselves?
So far, they haven’t even tried.
President Biden not only failed to condemn this outrageous behavior, he doubled down on it. In a tongue bath “interview” with Jimmy Kimmel he predicted a “mini-revolution” if the atrocity called Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court.
Biden’s eliminationist rhetoric about mini-revolutions came just hours after police arrested a man with a gun and burglar tools in Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood. Authorities claim he was determined to murder Kavanaugh. Why? Because in a leaked document, Kavanaugh signed on to overturn Roe. Police also say the man was upset over mass shootings.
Of course, once again, we see disparate justice. Indeed, the force of criminal justice brought harshly to bear on one side — even for legally protected conduct, while the worst criminal behavior that advances the Democratic party’s interests is ignored.
What possible reason could there be for doing this [targeting Justice Barrett’s family] except to hope that radical mobs descend on this school and this church? And what possible reason could there be for that other than to coerce, terrorize, and intimidate a justice of the highest court in the land regarding her expected decision on a case before that court?
Where is Merrick Parents Are Domestic Terrorists Garland on this? Right. Nowhere. Parents waiting their turn and then speaking out against public school policy at public-are-welcome school board meetings are the real threat, not these actual lawbreakers whose violations are actually under his jurisdiction.
Here’s the thing, you can bet your last dollar that if the pro-life right were doing the same thing to leftist and left-leaning SCOTUS justices over their opposition to overturning Roe, the full power and fury of the law and federal government would drop on them like Thor’s hammer.
They’d rot in jail, every Republican politician from their town dog-catcher to their House rep and senator would be blamed. There would be shrieks of threats to democracy, insurrection, and racism/sexism/insert whatever ism. There would be bills voted on and passed with lightning speed to abridge the Constitutional rights of anti-infanticide proponents, the FBI would be sent out to look for still-boxed Lego sets, and the entire sprawling DHS would fan out sniffing under every rock looking for anyone who doesn’t support abortion until the moment of birth.
But it’s the radical left breaking federal law and endangering the lives of SCOTUS justices, their children, and their church members, so it’s just some people doing some things because they are “passionate” about a just cause.
Not satisfied with terrorizing justices and their families, these tyrants are just now plotting to blockade the Supreme Court, ostensibly to prevent the decision from being handed down.
If all this is news to you, you can thank the media, which has deliberately hidden it. The Washington Post covered the assassination attempt under Local Crime. As for the New York Times, you’d have to scroll through 16 stories of such significance as the Jurassic Park cast on its home page to find it.
Do you really want to live in a country controlled by thugs? You think there aren’t enough banana republics in the world, and you want to add this country to the crowd?
Turns out we don’t need celebrity lectures and gun control to keep kids safe. We just need locked doors and adults who do their dang jobs.
KYLEE ZEMPEL
While Democrats continue exploiting the Uvalde shooting victims to prattle on about “assault weapons” and so-called “common-sense gun control,” another school was attacked on Thursday, but it won’t make the headlines.
That’s because this school — Walnut Park Elementary School in Gadsden, Alabama — didn’t have any victims except the would-be invader, who was shot dead by police after he tried and failed to bust into the building. Here’s how it all reportedly went down.
A passerby saw a man “aggressively” trying to get into the school building. When the man was unsuccessful, he tried several other doors, all of which were locked. The responsible observer called to report the man, the school principal put the building on lockdown and called in a police officer who doubles as the school resource officer, and that officer called for backup. If the reports are correct, the chain of command worked smoothly thanks to decisive action and quickly followed protocols.
The resource officer reportedly engaged the would-be invader, who then also allegedly attempted to forcefully enter a marked police vehicle and to take the officer’s gun. More police officers rushed to the scene to help, and the assailant was shot and killed. According to the city’s school superintendent, the schoolchildren who were there “seemed to be unaware the incident occurred.”
In other words, a man who “aggressively” tried to break into a school and take the firearm of a police officer was stopped because doors were properly locked and police officers acted bravely and urgently.
Hmm. That’s interesting. Because according to President Joe Biden, failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke, rom-com celebrity Matthew McConaughey, and late-night political scold Jimmy Kimmel, the only way to end the “carnage” of schoolchildren being murdered is to pass anti-gun laws or issue executive orders that radically infringe on the Second Amendment but are slapped with an innocuous “common-sense” qualifier so they don’t sound so bad.
Nothing else would do the trick, such people say — despite the fact that the Uvalde killer had no problem passing a background check, entered through an unlocked door, and faced little resistance from law enforcement for a disgustingly long time.
When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz responded to the Uvalde murder with calls for better school security in the form of locked doors and single-point entry, which could have prevented that killing, leftists and the corporate press ridiculed him for focusing on doors. “[S]enator Ted Cruz comes out bravely against doors,” scoffed The Atlantic’s Molly Jong-Fast on Twitter. “Are they really gonna make it about ‘too many doors on the school’? They are, aren’t they?” chimed in woke comedian Patton Oswalt.
Meanwhile, nobody on the left wants to talk about the criminal failures of the Uvalde police and the Department of Public Safety. That’s in part because if they had done their jobs rather than standing outside like cowards for the better part of an hour, lives undoubtedly would have been spared. It’s also because the implication of Democrats disarming responsible citizens is that the only remaining defense will be armed government employees, who may or may not have the courage to actually help anyone.
Thankfully, in Alabama on Thursday, police did have that courage, and lives were saved because of it. But Democrats and their media lapdogs won’t speak a word of Walnut Park Elementary because it obliterates their gun “do somethingism.”
It turns out we don’t need celebrity lectures and sweeping gun control to keep schoolchildren safe. We just need locked doors and adults who do their dang jobs.
OK, I watched it. And if there’s anything about the first of the so-called “hearings” on the alleged “insurrection” of January 6, 2021 that surprised me, it wasn’t the predictably kangaroo-court nature of the affair, or even the Democrats’ brazen lying and selective omissions. What still managed to surprise me was the media’s complicity.
It certainly didn’t surprise me to see the same video clip that had been played at President Trump’s second impeachment trial. That was the one showing Trump urging demonstrators to march to the Capitol, but conveniently edited to omit his telling them to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
I wasn’t surprised by the complete lack of subtlety in the way the cynical purpose behind this theatrical production was revealed. Rather than even purporting to “let the people watch and draw their own conclusions,” the folks putting on this duplicitous production repeatedly uttered statements that would have raised objections in an actual trial because they assumed facts not in evidence and certainly not yet proven. Objections would have also been raised for leading witnesses.
There was also the fact that there was no opposing counsel. Certain questions of witnesses were conspicuous because of what the interlocutors never asked. I kept waiting, futilely, for a witness to be asked, “And what manner of weapons did you observe these ‘insurrectionists’ carrying or employing?”
(Despite the repeated characterization of that day’s events as “deadly,” only one person was unquestionably killed, and that was Ashli Babbitt, a veteran of 14 years in the Air Force, shot by a Capitol policeman. Neither her name nor her death was mentioned in the hearing.)
I wasn’t surprised at Democrats’ unity in perpetuating their narrative about the events of January 6 — namely, that the evil Donald Trump orchestrated “an attempted violent overthrow of our government.” Nor was I surprised that ostensible Republicans and supposed erstwhile Trump loyalists had been trotted out in an attempt to lend a non-partisan artifice to the proceedings, with Liz Cheney (whose name almost rhymes with “chicanery”) at the forefront.
No, what did surprise me, though, was how thoroughly corrupt, complicit, and in cahoots with the Democrats and how thoroughly on board with this charade America’s so-called journalistic establishment has revealed itself to be. Talking heads across all the channels lined up to parrot the talking points and reinforce the narrative, every one of them having apparently received the same memo and having apparently sworn the same loyalty oath.
Having observed for some time the way in which “news” is managed, this shouldn’t have surprised me, but the sheer seamlessness of the way the Democrats and their committed propagandists coalesced to advance a common agenda was, in its way, rather impressive. Like the Democrats, the so-called journalists have abandoned any subtlety or pretense about their loyalties or their agenda. They are masters of propaganda who would make Dr. Goebbels look like a mere tyro, and they’re past caring who knows it.
As Michael Savage has often said, “The Fourth Estate is now the Fifth Column.”
Was January 6 a Reichstag moment?
I remember listening to the way the events of January 6 were reported at the actual time they were happening. And while my own cynical nature had already expected the Democrat regime to stage some sort of Reichstag moment, a false-flag op calculated to discredit Trump and his supporters, one alleged occurrence, in particular, convinced me that, while genuine Trump-supporters had been caught up in the storming of the Capitol, the breaching of the barricades and the breaking and entering had been calculated, provoked, instigated, fomented, and enabled by agents provocateurs (possibly even including members of some of those “3-letter” agencies that had traditionally been considered incorruptible and above reproach).
And that alleged occurrence, as I noted it at the time, was this:
5:45 P.M. EST: Juan Williams (that genius and paragon of modern journalism!) is reporting that the “mobs breaching the Capitol” (characterized as “Trump supporters”) have entered Mitch McConnell’s office and “have taken down the American flag and put up a Trump flag.” EXCUSE ME?! Does that sound like something patriots and people who revere America and its Constitution would do? Or does it sound like a Reichstag moment, a (literal) false-flag op perpetrated by Antifa and its ilk?
(For anyone who needs a historical refresher, Hitler, the recently appointed chancellor, blamed the communists for the February 27, 1933, Reichstag fire, an arson attack on Germany’s parliament. He then used the event to consolidate his power, invoking an act that abolished freedom of speech, assembly, and privacy (legalizing surveillance of telephone calls and mail), and suspended the autonomy of federated states. He had some 4,000 people arrested by his “Stormtroopers,” party members whom Hitler had enrolled as “auxiliary police” to infiltrate existing law enforcement, all for “Protection of the People and State.”
That conveniently timed act of arson — whether perpetrated by the Nazis or merely exploited by them — enabled Hitler to “fundamentally transform” Germany.)
Juan Williams’s claim, just like the political theater piece to which we were treated Thursday night, pegged the needle on my BS meter right into the red zone.
Stu Tarlowe has, since 2010, contributed well over 150 pieces to American Thinker.
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