W. Niederhut

This article, essentially, blows the bogus Tucker Carlson/Glenn Greenwald "patriot purge" narrative about January 6th out of the water. I'm surprised this analysis hasn't received more media attention. It places the cozy relationship between Trump's 1/6 Capitol attackers and the FBI in the historical context of the Trump administration's well known shift of focus away from the threat of white, right wing domestic terrorism in the U.S., beginning in 2017-- to eventually focus instead on Black Lives Matter and "Antifa" protesters. I'm sure we all remember Trump's massive deployment of National Guard troops in D.C. during the largely peaceful George Floyd protests-- a dramatic contrast to January 6th. FBI Obscures Real Reasons For Being Unprepared On January 6th FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House committee in June that his agency was unable to monitor extremist social media accounts without 'proper predication,' a claim that is contrary to the FBI's published guidelines. https://crooksandliars.com/2022/01/fbi-jan-6-christopher-wray January 15, 2022 Excerpt The apotheosis of the Trump administration’s skewed priorities was the effort in the summer of 2020 by Homeland Security (DHS) officials to attempt to dig up evidence of terrorist planning activities by “antifa” during anti-police protests in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere. Indeed, a later review showed that senior DHS leadership pushed unfounded conspiracy theories about antifascists, encouraged the contractors they hired to violate protesters’ constitutional rights, and made spurious connections, based on no real evidence, between protesters who engaged in criminal activity. The same tendencies were part of the FBI’s cozy relationships with a number of the major conspirators in the Jan. 6, connections that may have encouraged the groups’ apparent sense of impunity in besieging the Capitol that day. This is acutely true of the Proud Boys, who up until they were arrested had believed that both federal and local law enforcement authorities were on their side. The FBI maintained an informant relationship with at least four key Proud Boys before the insurrection, including the group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio—but the information the FBI sought from them was not inside data on the group, but rather sharing the intelligence on their leftist opponents, particularly antifascists and Black Lives Matter, that the Proud Boys assiduously collected. Proud Boys board member Joe Biggs, currently awaiting trial in the group’s Jan. 6 conspiracy case, was also an FBI “antifa” informant, and enjoyed a similarly cozy relationship with Oregon cops. The Oath Keepers likewise were extremely close to a number of law enforcement officials on Jan. 6. The “Patriot” group—which emphasizes recruitment of military and law-enforcement veterans—has a long history of aspiring to act as semi-official security forces at Trump events dating back to at least 2019. Founder Stewart Rhodes has frequently envisioned his paramilitary organization as a complement to law enforcement, “a pool of people that can be utilized by the governor, by the sheriff, or by the president of the United States.” And Oath Keepers provided personal security for former Trump adviser Roger Stone on the day of the Capitol siege, while one of the multiple Oath Keepers indicted for his actions that day, Thomas Caldwell, is a former FBI agent who had top-secret security clearance. The cozy relationship that far-right groups enjoyed with law enforcement generally, in fact, has played a key role in their continual emboldenment over the past five years, constantly ratcheting up their violence and threatening rhetoric, culminating in the events of Jan. 6. On that day, many of them directed their fury at police officers, believing they were being betrayed by forces they had assumed were on their side. Contrary to the fevered hallucinations of critics like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald—who have claimed that these relationships are evidence that the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were being manipulated into criminal actions by an FBI intent on persecuting white Trump voters—the evidence regarding federal law enforcement’s ties to extremists instead clearly indicate a serious problem with these agencies failing to adequately prioritize them as a threat and instead to treat them as allies, with kid gloves.

Ron, I need to do some remedial reading on this one. Milton Erickson's collected works on hypnosis are a fascinating read, but I wasn't aware of his possible association with the CIA. It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I should know better by now. The Company has, obviously, had a long history of contracting with people in the academic community.

Addendum: Mitch McConnell's top priority now is to sabotage President Biden, regardless of the merits of Build Back Better or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

I'm posting this excellent political history article for people on the forum who are, apparently, unfamiliar with the history of Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and modern Republican obstructionism in Congress during the past quarter century. The context for this post is the truly bizarre claim by a forum member on this thread that Mitch McConnell is an erstwhile champion of bipartisan "unity" in the Senate. That's like arguing that George Wallace was a champion of Civil Rights. How the GOP Prompted the Decay of Political Norms The Republican Party laid the groundwork for dysfunction long before Donald Trump was elected president. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/gop-decay-of-political-norms/540165/ September 19, 2017 Excerpt The Republican Party’s disregard for political norms intensified further with President Obama’s election. Immediately after Obama’s inauguration in 2009, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues embarked on a deliberate strategy of obstruction across a broad range of policies. McConnell made his objective clear in a comment that came to epitomize his approach: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Republicans tried to cast their response as a reaction to purported aloofness and high-handedness on the part of Obama and his congressional allies. In fact, as Republican Senator George Voinovich explained, McConnell from the start had advised his colleagues of Obama, “If he was for it, we had to be against it.” The decay of norms is not an abstract problem. It threatens the most basic commitments of our democracy. McConnell bent the norms of the Senate to a degree the body had never seen before in his use—and misuse—of the filibuster. Cloture to end a filibuster (an imperfect but helpful measure of how often the filibuster was used to block Senate business) were filed rarely in the 1970s—in some years, they averaged less than one per month. During the Obama era, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid took to filing for cloture more than once a week. And in 2013, when a frustrated Reid decided to eliminate the filibuster for all presidential nominations except for the Supreme Court, a Congressional Research Service study showed how dramatic the abuse had become. In all of American history, it found 168 cloture motions had been filed on presidential nominations—and nearly half of them, 82, happened during Obama’s presidency.

Ron, I agree that hypnotic suggestibility can be an important component of mass propaganda and advertising. There is so much more to the human mind than our mere rational, analytic consciousness. Some of the most effective propaganda is directed at the subconscious-- via appeals to primal libidinal and tribal instincts. Our closest biological relatives, chimpanzees and pygmy chimps, are fiercely tribal and genocidal, and human history is written in blood. Authoritarian propaganda tends to appeal to subconscious tribalism-- e.g., the Cold War era Mockingbird propaganda about communism, the "Green Menace" propaganda in the U.S. media during our 21st century "War on Terror," and Trump's relentless fear-mongering about people with dark skin-- Mexicans, blacks, Muslims, etc. I conducted some sodium amytal interviews during my psychiatric career, and also used EMDR, (Eye Movement Desensitization and Re-Processing) but I was never a practitioner of hypnosis per se. However, I have studied the classical literature on the subject, by Milton Erickson and others, and I believe it is a very powerful technique for influencing behavior in suggestible people like Sirhan. When I was a teenager, I spent a summer studying Spanish in the Mexican city of Saltillo, near Monterey, and I once attended a popular show by a traveling hypnotist named, "Tauro del Brazil." It was quite an impressive demonstration of hypnotic suggestibility, featuring several local Mexican citizens. We are all capable of dissociation and trance states, going back to childhood years, but some people, like Sirhan, are far more suggestible than others.

My favorite new album last winter was 80 year old Paul McCartney's remarkable one man studio album McCartney III. This winter, it's 70 year old Sting's The Bridge, released on November 19, 2021. I have followed Sting's career closely, from the earliest days of The Police to his solo career, The Last Ship, and his Deutsche Gramophone recordings of John Dowland's Renaissance songs. The original songs on The Bridge draw, stylistically, from his entire, eclectic repertoire. It's all good. Mostly melancholy. I don't know any details, but it sounds like Sting's marriage is on the rocks. In any case, they're promoting two of the pop numbers, but my favorites on the new album are his simple, beautiful classical guitar songs-- For Her Love, The Bridge, (title track) The Bells of St. Thomas, and Waters of Tyne-- along with his bass jam/skat number, Captain Bateman's Basement, that sounds like something written by Charles Mingus or the jazz fusion recordings of Stanley Clarke.

This recent analysis by a professor of epidemiology at Kings College is a fairly precise description of the Omicron symptoms my wife and I experienced recently. What are the symptoms of omicron? https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-symptoms-of-omicron-174476 January 11, 2021

Ben, Gastrointestinal symptoms are not typical for Omicron infections. Did you eat some bad pad thai? My wife and I both tested positive for COVID on Christmas morning, two days after my daughter tested positive. It was most likely Omicron, because we are fully vaccinated, with third boosters in late September. I don't know how typical our personal experiences with Omicron were for vaccinated people in their 60s, but we recovered fully after about 10 days. Our Omicron symptoms were largely upper respiratory-- coughing, scratchy throat, myalgias, fatigue, and sinusitis-- without progression to pneumonia and shortness of breath. I never lost my sense of taste. I did experience some transient trigeminal nerve inflammation and left-sided facial twitching on Day (?) 3 or 4. Somewhat creepy, but short-lived. It has taken me another 10 days to get back to doing my regular weight-lifting and aerobic work outs, but I feel pretty much back to normal now. No symptoms. Not sure how my bout of Omicron compares with those of the unvaccinated. A recent study from Sweden showed a strong T-cell response to Omicron infection in vaccinated people, but an insufficient initial antibody response to prevent infection.

Given all of the ballyhooed GOP concerns during the past few years about alleged voter fraud, I'll bet Fox News and the Republican media pundits (Breitbart, Newsmax, Sinclair, OAN, et.al.) are outraged by reports of these forged GOP electoral documents... 🤥 I'm guessing that they are also providing their viewers with extensive coverage of the shocking sedition charges against Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, which further debunk their oft-repeated claims that January 6th was a Deep State false flag. But, I might be mistaken.

But, apparently, in the Lincoln-Douglass debates, Abe was opposed to the extension of slavery into the Western states and territories, and Frederick Douglass thought the issue should be decided by local state legislatures. 🤥 Thank God for the Trump GOP's well-informed Project 1776.

And, stranger still, Donald Trump thought that Frederick Douglass was still alive... 🤥 Talk about people who could really benefit from some exposure to "critical race theory."

Apropos of Mitch McConnell's latest nonsense about his use of the filibuster to sabotage the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, in the interest of bipartisanship.

Anyone who thinks Mitch McConnell is an honest spokesman for constructive, bipartisan "unity" in the U.S., obviously, knows nothing about American political history during the past decade. Here are some remedial facts. 1) Mitch McConnell became the Koch brothers head GOP Senate bellboy after 2009-- during the depths of the Great Bush-Cheney Recession of 2008-10. He led the GOP opposition to the Affordable Care Act and to Obama's 2009 Stimulus Recovery Act, which played a critical role in America's recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. 2) In October of 2010, McConnell told GOP donors that the top priority of the GOP-- during the Great Recession(!)-- was to "limit Obama's presidency to a single term." The top priority, mind you. Not governing the country through the economic collapse under Bush and Cheney in 2008, or resolving the multi-trillion dollar Bush/Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But "limiting Obama to single term." Talk about bipartisan "unity..." 3) In 2016, McConnell blocked the appointment of Obama nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court for over 300 days, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, on the grounds that 2016 was an Election Year. McConnell abruptly reversed course and appointed Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett to the SCOTUS just weeks before the 2020 election, following the death of Justic Ruth Bader Ginsburg. More McConnell "unity," eh? 4) Also in 2016, Mitch McConnell blocked Obama's efforts to issue an honest, bipartisan warning to the American public about Russian interference in the U.S. elections. (We now know that "Moscow" Mitch and many other 2016 Republican candidates, including Donald Trump, received campaign funds from Russian oligarchs. Russian oligarchs funneled $30 million to Trump through the NRA alone.) 5) As for McConnell's current use of the Jim Crow filibuster to sabotage the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, it's the same sort of good old boy sabotage of Civil Rights and Voting Rights that we have witnessed during the past century in the Congress. The only difference is that yesteryear's Dixiecrats are today's Trumplicans.

Yeah, Ron, my photo is probably about ten years old by now. I just submitted my first ever premium payment to Medicare, so I guess I'm, officially, a senior citizen! I can buy a Colorado fly fishing license this year for $10 instead of $50, unless they've raised the rates.

Yes, Ben and the talking heads at Fox News have been re-arranging deck chairs on the Trumptanic for the past year. Today, they finally hit the iceberg. RIP ‘No January 6 Sedition Charges,’ the Right’s Favorite Trump Defense https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/stewart-rhodes-oath-keepers-january-6-sedition-insurrection-charges.html

This one should also sting a bit... 🤥

I didn't post opinions about Trump's "stochastic terrorism," Ben. I posted facts-- historical examples. Do you know the difference? Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 🤥 Republicans Sticking With Debunked Capitol Riot Conspiracy Theory https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-ray-epps-conspiracy-theory_n_61df3ee8e4b04e9d84dfcb69 January 12, 2021

Ben, Right wing hate crimes and domestic terrorist acts have been increasing in the U.S. ever since Trump's Republican primary campaign back in 2016-- especially after Trump increased his popularity in the primaries by making slurs against Mexicans. January 6th won't be the last incident of domestic violence by the Trump cult. Trump deliberately hitched his political wagon to the white supremacist MAGA element in 2016 to promote himself and, in the process, he became a bona fide "stochastic terrorist"-- i.e., a demagogue who incites violence against targeted minority groups and the political opposition. Do you remember Trump's MAGA Bomber, Cesar Sayoc? How about the murders of the newspaper journalists in Baltimore? Mexicans have been another prominent Trump target, and the El Paso Walmart massacre was directly provoked by Trump and his Fox News associates rabble rousing and fear mongering about the Southern Border. Obviously, blacks have been another major Trump target, (going back to his Central Park Five travesty.) He aggressively attacked the BLM protesters in the NFL, and he told Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, and other NFL owners, that they needed to suppress the Black Lives Matter protests, because "it lifts me." Trump attacked Michigan Governor Whitmer about masks mandates, prompting an armed occupation of the state house by right wing Trumpsters. He has incited death threats against Dr. Anthony Fauci and his family, and against election workers throughout the U.S. As for Civil War, I suppose it's possible-- especially if Trump and his deranged fascist movement isn't stopped. The man is a sociopathic demagogue who belongs in prison.

I'm still bewildered about the fact that voters in Texas chose a sleazeball like Ted Cruz over Beto O'Rourke in that last Senatorial election. A tragedy for Texas and the country. I'm guessing it had a lot to do with guns, religion, and cowboy libertarianism-- similar to our Western Slope Colorado cowboys voting to send Lauren Boebert to Congress, (with the obvious difference that Cruz is a clever Princetonian and Boebert is a high school drop out.) But are Mexican American voters in Texas also laboring under the delusion that Ted Cruz represents their interests, because of his Hispanic surname? I've never studied the demographics of that Texas election. The only thing more bizarre than working class Hispanics thinking that Ted Cruz represents their interests is Ben Cole's oft-repeated conviction that Trump's January 6th "Stop the Steal" attack on Congress was a Deep State false flag. At least Ben is, allegedly, "keeping an open mind" about the evidence debunking his fixed belief. 🤥

Jim, IMO, one of the main shortcomings of Chomsky and Edward Herman's landmark 1988 text, Manufacturing Consent, was that it virtually ignored the major role of the CIA's "Operation Mockingbird" (and it's post-Church Committee permutations) in the manipulation of mass media information and public opinion in the U.S. The book was useful in raising public consciousness about corporate and financial influences on propaganda in the U.S. mainstream media, but said almost nothing about the CIA's "Mighty Wurlitzer," which had been operational since the days of Frank Wisner and the OSS psy ops experts who established the CIA. It was a very strange omission, because Herman and Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent a decade after Colby's Church Committee testimony about Mockingbird, (and Carl Bernstein's famous CIA and the Media essay in Rolling Stone.) I remain puzzled by Chomsky's strange silence about CIA involvement in our M$M, generally, and about his persistent denial (or blatant dishonesty) about LBJ's role in reversing JFK Vietnam policy-- especially since Chomsky was such an active, early critic of the Vietnam War. I suppose it's possible that Chomsky's recent erroneous comments about JFK and Vietnam are mainly a result of sheer ignorance about the declassified data of the past 30 years, and fixed opinions from the Halberstam era. But that wouldn't explain his apparent dishonesty about the things Ray Marcus shared with him back in the day.

My mistake, Richard. Not sure why I thought Greene was from South Carolina. I have always tended to think of South Carolina as an epicenter of anti-Federal, white supremacist culture-- going back to the days of John C. Calhoun and the 1830s "Nullification" movement, followed by the era of Wade Hampton and the attack on Fort Sumter.

Let's put Greene's disturbing "Second Amendment" threat to Stacey Abrams in historical context. Charleston was the main slave port on the East Coast when the Bill of Rights was written, and South Carolina was a state that had a majority black (slave) population prior to the Civil War. The slave colonies/states in the South maintained well-armed militias (aka "slave patrols") to police their slave populations. Some historians have made the case that the Second Amendment was drafted, partly, to protect the legal right of slave states to maintain "well-armed militias" -- i.e., slave patrols-- from Federal interference. So much for preventing tyranny. After the Civil War, the policing functions of the old Antebellum slave patrols morphed into white vigilante "rifle clubs" and police forces focused on "keeping the (freed blacks) down." It's a phenomenon that can be traced right down to the present in the U.S. So, in a perverse sense, it's not surprising that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-South Carolina) is evoking the old "slave patrol" Second Amendment today as a threat against a black woman who has been actively working to enforce and protect the 15th Amendment right of black citizens to vote. IMO, it's not really about standing up to tyranny. It's about white supremacists like Greene tyrannizing black people and "libs" who support Civil Rights and Voting Rights.

On a lighter note, can't make this stuff up... 🤣 Sarah Palin accuses liberals of wanting to "pound, pound pound" when it comes to sex. https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-liberals-aoc-want-051404655.html

Ben, I'm responding to your comments in red here. Thank you for the advice. I have looked at some of the materials you advised, and recently I explored the thermite question, as you can see. Ben, the explosive demolitions of the Twin Towers are clearly visible and audible on film. It's not a question of whether the buildings were expertly demolished by high-tech explosives, but how. The definitive science articles on the evident use of nano-thermite (and the physics) of the explosive demolitions of WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 are published at the website of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. These guys aren't conspiracy kooks-- as the government/M$M propagandists want people to imagine--they're accredited experts in physics, engineering, and architecture. I can't imagine that you have actually studied all of these detailed science articles today about the thermitic residues at Ground Zero, extreme high temperatures, (which persisted for weeks) and the overwhelming scientific evidence of explosive demolitions, although I could be mistaken. I'm also posting a useful summary article from the 911research.wtc7.net website. https://911research.wtc7.net/essays/thermite/thermitics_made_simple.html http://architectsandengineersfor911truth.org/ http://architectsandengineersfor911truth.org/ The observation that the 9/11 towers must have been imploded artificially at the time of the jet strikes is interesting, due to the way the towers collapsed. The near free fall acceleration is definitive evidence that the lower steel structures of all three skyscrapers were abruptly, explosively demolished-- creating zero resistance to free fall collapse. But when one examines what it would take to wire up a 100+ story tower to properly implode---the proposition becomes iffy, IMHO. But not just one 110+ tower, but two. And then WTC 7 also, but no one noticed while preparation for the largest building implosions of all time went on. Your comment reads like M$M or on-line government propaganda about 9/11. It's like quoting John McAdams.edu on the JFK assassination. I'll re-post these references for you on the subject of building security and prepping of the demolitions. You must have overlooked them the last time I posted them for you. https://aneta.org/911experiments_com/articles/HowCouldExplosivesBePlanted/index.htm https://911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_p1.html Anyways, as you can see from the 9/11 literature, intelligent engineering-architect type people both agree with, and disagree with, your interpretation of 9/11. Dead wrong. The scientists (Byzant, NIST, Cherthoff) et.al.) who have promoted the false government narrative about 9/11 are all working for the people who perpetrated the 9/11 black op. They were providing a pseudo-scientific cover up of a black op. They are analogous to the case of Nobel Laureate physicist Luis Alvarez and his pseudo-scientific exploding melon "simulation" of JFK's head, as an ersatz explanation for the retrograde trajectory during the fatal head shot. You probably don't know that the fraudsters who published the Bush/Cheney government NIST computer "simulation" of the WTC demolitions refused to publish the physical parameters used in their bogus "simulation." Nor did they acknowledge the obvious explosions that brought the buildings down! Perhaps it is time to agree that we disagree and let it go at that. Not good enough. You still haven't studied or understood the scientific facts in the case. I entirely agree the Bush-Cheney Administration used 9/11 as a propaganda platform to start fantastically expensive yet volitional and counterproductive perma-wars in the Mideast, alongside copious amounts of human dislocation and carnage. It's worse than you think. Study the history of the Project for a New American Century. Scaring the public is often the first step to war or greater domestic suppression. Bingo. Study what General Wesley Clark was told by Pentagon officials shortly after 9/11.

Ben, You won't learn anything about 9/11 from Wikipedia. Study the scholarly references that I posted for you.