In this meticulously researched and faultlessly evidenced Inauguration Day essay, former US diplomat AJC Boone paints an alarming picture of serial Establishment mendacity. The illumination she throws upon the diabolically spreading darkness of the United States system of government is well timed indeed.

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A couple of decades ago in a Moscow flat I was watching nothing-in-particular on television and happened upon a nature documentary. Something imported, I supposed, with a Russian voice-over. The footage showed some sea-birds rising and falling hypnotically on the swells of a cold grey sea. Once in a while, the birds were disturbed by an amorphous bulge just below the waterline. They expressed their annoyance with a peevish peck or two, assuming that would suffice to drive the nuisance away, which it seemed to do.  Then the camera cut to what was going on under-water: enormous killer whales were rising from the deep, but too slowly to do anything more than just break the surface. The narrator said that the predators, during the off-season, had “lost the knack” (навык) for doing what they meant to do. But within a very short span of time, the killer whales found their form. The camera showed them eventually rocketing through the surface and swallowing the sea-birds whole, in one fearsome, wide-mouthed chomp. One bird after another. 

It was obscene. And it was — I realised then, which is why I kept it all these years — a metaphor, for the fatal naivete of the underinformed.

People come to the Slog, I am guessing, for insight and foresight, and also for something one might invent on the spot and call “backsight” — not in the Orwellian sense of Newspeak, but in an Orwellian cognizance that even our immediate past is being fashioned into Narratives in order to manipulate the Public and set the stage for further manipulation. The re-writes are often used along with the conman’s trick of “talking past the sale” — if an event can be quickly (mis)characterised, packaged and sold, then the public’s attention can be speedily diverted to the next subject. And the original mischaracterisation need only be repeated ad nauseam. It need not be based in fact, well-argued, nor persuasive, and not apologised for when proven false. Because no one will be paying attention by then. The Great Russian Collusion Hoax was perpetrated this way, as were, among others, the “kids-in-cages” border crisis, UkraineGate, the George Floyd beatification, the Trump-played-golf-during-COVID lie, and the double-hoax that a) Joe Biden won a presidential election with b) no evidence of fraud. 

The false stories accrue as a sediment of public opinion. They ease the public towards the desired conclusions and opinions.  

A major and terrifying phony Narrative is being crafted for us currently about “the events of” January 6th. Before getting to the phony version, it might be worth recounting what people experienced on the day itself.

WHAT HAPPENED ON JANUARY 6TH

This Dave Ruben podcast is a conversation establishing events of the 6th of January at the pro-Trump rally, including the President’s speech at the Ellipse and at the US Capitol (2.5 km away), in the words of people who were actually there. The speakers strike me as authoritative because they are by no means natural Trump fans, but people who drifted away from the Left because they valued truth-telling more than the gratification of social solidarity. 

Ms Borysenko’s account (confirming among other things that a post-Trump-speech gathering and picnicking in front of the Capitol Building was on the day’s planned schedule of events) meshes entirely with that of a friend of mine, a 50-something lady-who-lunches, ex-financier and straightforward supporter of Anglo-American values.  Here’s her note to me from the 6 January rally (she sent photos as well, of people dressed up in outlandish red-white-and-blue clothing, “MAGA” hats, but also in other cases religious garb): 

“Dear Amy, 
It was an amazing day – like being at a football game with your favorite team. Lots of fun.

Most people were polite, lovely, patient and enthusiastic. D.C. was completely empty except for Trump supporters.

I have provided some images below to show the diversity in the crowd including cowboys, young male Latinos, [Catholic] priests and Orthodox Jews. There were also loads of Chinese who were patriotic and anti-CCP.

Whole families were there with grandmothers and infants. There were people in wheelchairs.

Everyone was on the lookout for Antifa masquerading as MAGA…”

Here is a video made by rally attendees and posted to Parler before Parler was vapourised. It was reposted for the purposes of mockery (picked randomly from “over 1000”) by a pro-Democratic Party “influencer” with 130K followers. She added the descriptive of “terrorism”. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, or even any of it at all, but if you do watch it, please ask yourself what is conceivably “terroristic” in this video of middle Americans expressing a peculiarly American sort of patriotism, charged by the worry that the days of freedom to do so are numbered. (Reduce your volume.)

There is also footage — multiple short videos — of Capitol police opening barricades or doors and waving demonstrators into the Capitol building or of people walking through the Capitol building like tourists, not marauders, abiding by the velvet rope barriers.

There is also indication that agents-provocateurs were active in the crowd including this from a Japanese journalist who considers the circumstances of the killing of one of the protesters by a plainclothes Capitol sniper .

Already one of the individuals (John Earle Sullivan, member of BLM-affiliate “Insurgence USA”) described by the Japanese journalist as egging on the crowd and “agitating” for violence, in the Bolshevik terminology, was seen to be working with a CNN journalist to give his eyewitness account of events (which leads to serious questions about who exactly is cooperating with agents-provocateurs and crafting the Narrative, and to whose orders). Sullivan is now the subject of a criminal complaint.

Sullivan and his comrades conceivably “agitated” hapless or even feisty Trump supporters into harm’s way. According to multiple videos, the person who shot and killed Ashli Babbit looked like these plainclothes gunmen (the tweeter, Ari Melber, is die-hard anti-Trump):

A former Buzzfeed (“news” outlet that customarily runs hit-pieces for the Establishment) employee is also among those arrested for participating in trespassing in the Capitol. 

A short piece of footage was posted by former NYC Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik on Twitter that looks to his professional eye like Antifa agents-provocateurs coordinating mayhem at the Capitol.

Infiltration by anti-Trump activists would be consistent with investigative reporting by James O’Keefe/Project Veritas from 2016  showing Democrat Party activists working to provoke violence among Trump-supporters at rallies, in order to create supporting “evidence” to Hillary’s characterisation of Trump’s “deplorable” base as dangerous brown-shirts.  

Finally, here is President Trump’s speech, which you can judge for yourselves. Legal scholars like John Turley and Robert Barnes submit that there is nothing that amounts to “incitement” by legal standards in the speech, and moreover that its content falls under Constitutional/First Amendment protections. Trump himself seemed completely blindsided by this latest extreme ratcheting up of the political screws against him. He made more than one appeal for peaceful behaviour after the breach of the Capitol Building but he also maintains (with justice, you will see, if you watch the speech) “…they’ve analysed by speech in my words and my final paragraph, my final sentence and everybody just thought it was totally appropriate.” (On “Face The Nation,” 12 January 2021.)

THE MANUFACTURE OF A PHONY NARRATIVE ABOUT JANUARY 6TH 

Unfortunately, the fact that an irreproachable telephone call between Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelensky led, nonetheless, to an idiotic impeachment-flavoured farce a year ago establishes that even actual video footage and actual transcripts of events showing what happened on January 6th are no match for the coordinated falsification of history. Nancy Pelosi and the usual suspects immediately blamed the President for having “incited an insurrection” with his speech (though others have pointed out that people inside the Capitol building had gotten ahead of the script, by “breaking into” the building while Trump was still giving his speech, at a distance of 2.5 km away). The accusation that “incitement to insurrection” had occurred was instantly taken up among all the usual (Trump-hating) suspects.

Speed was in this case a tactical mistake, because it strains credulity that circumstances of a big messy event would be clear so soon — clarity feels like foreknowledge. Moreover, cries of “coup!” along with a simultaneous huge social media purge looks suspiciously similar to another infamous false flag, the Reichstag Fire of 1933, launched by the Nazis to discredit their Communist adversaries in the (kangaroo-)court-of-public-opinion.

Even a quick confirmation with Wikipedia shows the Reichstag and the Capitol share several key ingredients: 1) blocking public discussion and access to dissenting accounts, 2) flooding the newspapers and airwaves with fake news, and 3) hysterical charges that a “coup” had been the objective:

“…The day after the fire, at Hitler’s request, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law by using Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution.

1) The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone. These rights were not reinstated during Nazi reign. [The effect of this is the same as the effect of the social media purges: to try to block public chatter, or in other words to kill the public’s ability to “crowdsource the truth.”]

2) The decree was used by the Nazis to ban publications not considered “friendly” to the Nazi cause. Despite the fact that Marinus van der Lubbe claimed to have acted alone in the Reichstag fire, Hitler, after having obtained his emergency powers, announced that it was the start of a Communist plot to take over Germany.

3) Nazi Party newspapers then published this fabricated “news”. [See the entirety of US and UK mainstream press corps, instantly carrying the story (with po-faced sanctimony) that “insurrection by Trump supporters storming the Capitol after Trump’s incitement” was what happened on January 6th.]

4) This sent the German population into a panic and isolated the Communists further among the civilians; additionally, thousands of Communists were imprisoned in the days following the fire (including leaders of the Communist Party of Germany) on the charge that the Party [read: Trump and his supporters]  was preparing to stage a putsch….” 

Of course as terrifying as the comparison looks now — the artificial manipulation of public opinion through selective stifling of news and information sources and promulgation of false narratives should terrify all those who believe themselves to be living in a democracy — even worse is the way in which a staged event could be exploited as a pretext to falsely stigmatise and punish “enemies”, starting with Donald Trump with yet another phony impeachment. 

Incidentally, I was feeling quite clever for hitting upon the Reichstag comparison (bold and obvious as it was) just a day or two after the grotesque Beltway reaction started to take shape. But it turned out that not only had our own John Ward already made the comparison in a throwaway reference in an essay, but educator Dennis Prager also had devoted an entire column to it, likewise lawyer Alan Dershowitz, director of Jihad Watch Robert Spencer, and Times of Israel essayist James Russell.

Also, it appears that already on 8th January, Washington-based Russian economist Andrey Illarionov, attached to the (supposedly libertarian) Cato Institute had published a blog in a private capacity on events, including the dodgy election, that had led to January 6th, and what it all meant looking ahead. He entitled his blog entry “The Burning of the Reichstag, 2021.  In a shocking and despicable parallel with 1933’s original event, Illarionov was within days sacked by Cato for his excellent-if-non-Beltway take, shamed by the press which (falsely) labelled him a “friend of Putin”, and smeared as a Russian agent through social media.
  
As for the authorised Narrative, the Atlantic magazine, a reliable delivery-vehicle of the Establishment’s every fake-news Narrative du jour, produced its version at lightning speed. Within hours, it published “Five Lessons From the Coup Attempt [sic]: The Sun Is Up. Impeach and Convict. What can we take away from yesterday’s coup attempt?”  

Here is the dramatic black& white photo used by the Atlantic, tear-gas substituting for the smoke from an actual fire:

(Looks vaguely familiar, nicht wahr?)

Numerous corporate entities have issued statements reiterating the official Swamp version of events in order to condemn them. Deutschebank and Signatory Bank both used the official phony “incitement” line to publicly proclaim an end to their business relationships with Trump.

Here is Amazon mouthing the need to justify unilaterally ending alternative social media platform Parler (notice the Pulitzer-winning deployment of BS with the words “chillingly real”, rather than merely “real”, or the more truthful “unreal”):

The story continues to be embellished, even though the Department of Justice had to walk back its initial egregious report that there had been a plot to kidnap and murder legislators. (This is the same DoJ that has to date not found any notable misbehaviour directed against President Trump, even as John Brennan’s hand-written notes have come to light confirming the Russian collusion story was an invention designed to distract from Hillary Clinton’s massive email-related security breaches

Hillary Clinton herself actually pretends to believe Trump and Putin were coordinating the 6 January putsch.  

And now even Republican Senator Mitch McConnell is blandly peddling the “incitement” nonsense unadorned. A snide woodcut circulating among courtiers upon the death of Russia’s impatient moderniser, Peter the Great, was captioned: “The mice bury the Cat.”

THE COMING AFTERMATH

Even before the 6th of January, commentators representing the Uniparty, the Establishment, the Blob, were turning their attention to Donald Trump’s base of supporters, whose protector and standard-bearer had now been vanquished and would soon be gone.  Words like “cleanse” and “purge” were used. With the new handy pretext that their targets intended to topple the government, the gloves can come off. The photogenic “Progressive”, junior Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has floated “truth and reconciliation” committees, and “deprogramming” white supremacists and “conspiracy-theorists”.  To highlight the self-evident danger and drive the point home to millions of television-viewers, some 20,000 National Guards garnish the perimeter of the Inauguration of the new President.

We must keep the Public safe from threats, mustn’t we? And good heavens, what measures would you not take if your opponents were “domestic terrorists”? 

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