The Oligarchy Sees the War on Terror Winding Down, So They've Repurposed Their Anti-Terrorist Surveillance Programs to Target the New Budget-Justifying Enemy: You

Some great articles on Biden -- Obama's third term -- finishing Obama's project to reorient the "counterterrorism" establishment away from countering terrorists to surveilling, entrapping, prosecuting, and harassing a more justified target: Trump supporters.

And also: putting them through forced deprogramming sessions to deradicalize them.

Julie Kelly has written about this almost every single day, and, to my shame, I have only sporadically linked her work. I often find it too horrifying to want to even think about it.

But I must force myself to think about it. Here is her report of the state-enforced "deprogramming" of the Four Hour Insurrectionists.

"My lawyer has given me names of books and movies to help me see what life is like for others in our country. I've learned that even though we live in a wonderful country things still need to improve. People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street."

That passage is part book report, part white privilege mea culpa submitted to a federal court this month by Anna Morgan-Lloyd, one of the more than 500 Americans arrested for her involvement in the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The 49-year-old grandmother of five from southern Indiana was charged with four counts of trespassing and disorderly conduct even though she walked through an open door and was inside the building for about five minutes. She was ratted out to the FBI by a county worker who saw her January 6 posts on Facebook.

On Wednesday, Lloyd, who has a clean criminal record, pleaded guilty to one count of "parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building" -- but not before she consented to undergo a reeducation exercise at the urging of her court-appointed lawyer. (Like many January 6 defendants, Lloyd does not have the means to hire a private attorney.)

It's safe to say Heather Shaner, a D.C.-based criminal defense attorney representing a handful of January 6 protesters, does not share the political beliefs of her Capitol clients, which is why she's forcing them to read books and watch movies highlighting dark chapters in U.S. history.

In an interview with Huffington Post, Shaner explained her belief that 'this is the most wonderful country in the world, it's been great for all kinds of immigrant groups, except for the fact that it was born of genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of people."

Shaner's legal captives are learning the hard way what the government will do when one resists their commands to comply. Not only have their personal lives been shattered, finances depleted, and reputations destroyed by an abusive Justice Department investigation, Shaner's clients must be indoctrinated with leftist propaganda about America;s alleged systemic racism.

The purge of the populist mindset is underway, courtesy of the fetid Beltway judicial system and the Joe Biden regime. Judges routinely lecture January 6 defendants about the wrongthink of a "stolen election" while prosecutors openly mock their political beliefs, including home schooling and gun ownership.

"I have had many political and ethical discussions with Anna Lloyd," Shaner wrote in her motion agreeing to the plea and probation for Lloyd. "I tendered a booklist to her. She has read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Just Mercy, and Schindler's List to educate herself about 'government policy' toward Native Americans, African Americans and European Jews. We have discussed the books and also about the responsibility of an individual when confronting 'wrong.'"

Their court-appointed lawyer -- their US government-paid lawyer -- is forcing them to undergo a White Privilege De-radicalization Program, and then offering forced confessions to the leftwing judges as indications that maybe they can be successfully re-educated outside of prison.

Shaner also told the court that Lloyd watched the "Burning Tulsa" documentary on the History Channel as well as "Mudbound," a story of two families, one black and one white, living on the same property after World War II.

On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with watching or reading any of Shaner's "booklist." What is very wrong is a taxpayer-paid attorney--one who is supposed to fight the government's charges related to January 6, not play along with its phony depiction that "white supremacists" attacked the Capitol--using her authority to reprogram the political views of people she is supposed to be defending. The presumption of racist beliefs is automatic.

But it all worked. Lloyd changed her opinion on the death penalty; in her review of Schindler’s List that was submitted to the court, she lamented that "my Son-In-Law doesn't believe the Holocaust happened as it did." She admitted that she's "lived a sheltered life and truly haven't experienced life the way many have."

Her attorney and the government seem pleased with Lloyd's reformation. "Though she supported the past president in January, she totally accepts President Biden as the leader of our country," Shaner wrote to the court. "She has worked hard to come to terms with what she believed before January 6th, 2021 and what she has learned since then."

...

The Justice Department pushed back on Shaner's attempts to reprogram her clients. "We don't prosecute people based on their beliefs," Joshua Rothstein, the assistant U.S. attorney handling Lloyd's case, said in court Wednesday.

Ah, if only that were true. Nearly every charging document filed by Joe Biden's Justice Department in the Capitol breach probe mentions the defendant's belief about the 2020 presidential election as evidence of wrongdoing.

Here's just one example in a court filing in the case of Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keeper who has been behind bars since January after the government successfully argued for her pre-trial detention. "There is no new or material information that casts the defendant in any less dangerous of a light than when this Court decided to detain her approximately one month ago," prosecutors wrote in March. "The information advanced by the defendant to support her motion [for release] does nothing to undermine her extremist and violent views regarding how to address what she believed to be a fraudulent election." (Emphasis added.)

This isn't just a read the whole thing, but a read-her-entire-output. Which I will start covering every day she puts out a fresh report.

Julie Kelly is one of the only journalists bothering to write about this. The rest of the "conservative media" won't touch it because the rest of the conservative media are corporate quislings being paid to put down the threat to the oligarchy posed by a disobedient working class and middle class.

Conservative, Inc. media can write a hundred articles about the Four Hour Insurrection, and dozens of "articles" praising the courage of Liz Cheney, but strangely enough, cannot spare a single reporter to cover the US government engaging in actual political reprogramming against (fictive) "threats to the regime."

But they're really conservative. Just ask their leftwing donors!

Or their corporate donors, who are glad to use the state's counterterrorism machinery to stamp out a threat to their unchallenged power.

I guarantee you: None of them -- none -- will write about this.

If Trump had a similar program of forcing Muslims to confess their Muslim Guilt after being caught committing terrorist acts, they would write about it, in shock-horror, to prove to their friends on the left that they're really One of The Good Ones.

But when it's a Trump supporter?

Let the Reeducation Camps do their holy work. It's critical we not just wipe out the threat of not only Trumpists, but Trumpism. The challenge to the corporate oligarchy must be one on the most intimate battlefields of all: in the minds of the enemy.

Lee Smith discusses Julie Kelly's work as well as other indicators the US government has declared actual war on conservatives:

But wait, America isn't the kind of country that puts nonviolent offenders into reeducation camps. It wouldn't hold dozens of citizens without bail for having the wrong political beliefs or attending political demonstrations. Federal law enforcement agencies exist to protect Americans from dangerous criminals, not to frame people for political crimes defined by a powerful elite. The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't call on Americans to turn in their neighbors for supporting the wrong political candidate. That kind of stuff may happen in third-world countries, but the idea that America would use courts, secret police, intelligence agencies, and the media to prosecute political warfare against other Americans sounds like the drug-riddled account of a bad 1960s-era acid trip. Sure, that's when the FBI launched COINTELPRO and tapped Martin Luther King Jr.'s phones and sent letters to his wife, but the Church Committee put an end to all that. Didn't it?

Last week, families of the Jan. 6 detainees held at the Correctional Treatment Facility in Washington, D.C., relayed that authorities imposed severe lockdowns in retaliation for Mark Levin's Sunday night Fox show, which raised questions about the ongoing prosecutions related to the "deadly insurrection" of Jan. 6, 2021. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.) and journalist Julie Kelly, one of the only reporters who has interviewed the detainees and their families extensively, had appeared on Levin's show to discuss the case's ever-growing irregularities.

Kelly, a reporter for the right-leaning publication American Greatness, has been writing for months about the treatment of the detainees, some of whom have been held in prison without bail for months. "There have been no trials, no convictions, but pretrial detentions for dozens of cases," Kelly told me in an interview. That includes first-time offenders charged with nonviolent crimes who are being held without bail because they protested Biden's victory. "Judges are signing off on the detentions, contending that because the detainees don't believe Biden was legitimately elected, they therefore won't follow U.S. law or obey its court system, and that makes them a danger to society."

And, she notes, there is reason to suspect that the "Insurrectionists" were encouraged and led by paid FBI ringers, plants, and agents provocateurs.

Glenn Greenwald pointed out that the majority of "terrorism plots thwarted" by the FBI turned out to be plots concocted by the FBI, for the purpose of arresting jihadists who agreed to the FBI's plans.

That may or may not be legal entrapment. But either way, the FBI seems to be padding its W/L record on terrorism with convictions for FBI-plotted fake terrorism. Update: they pad their records with fake terrorism W's, while pretending that their losses -- allowing a string of "known wolf" jihdists to murder people dozens at a time -- are not in fact terrorism at all, but "work-related violence" or "anti-gay violence" (as at the Pulse Nightclub, where the terrorist had no idea the club was even gay -- he found it on Google searching for "clubs," not "gay clubs").

And now they're using those same tactics against Trump supporters:

Why? In a separate article, Greenwald argued that Jan. 6 is behind the U.S. military leadership’s sudden interest in critical race theory:

To justify the current domestic War on Terror that has already provoked billions more in military spending and intensified domestic surveillance, the Pentagon must ratify the narrative that those they are fighting in order to defend the homeland are white supremacist domestic terrorists. That will not work if white supremacists are small in number or weak and isolated in their organizing capabilities. To serve the war machine's agenda, they must pose a grave, pervasive and systemic threat.

Greenwald is right. Counterterrorism is a multibillion-dollar Beltway industry, filling a trough that feeds Republican and Democratic constituencies including the State Department, spy services, and Washington-area NGOs and think tanks. As America downsizes its presence in the Middle East, national security bureaucrats and their parasitical private sector partners fear shrinking budgets. Hence the big move from countering violent extremism in Muslim communities to confronting "domestic terrorists." The system has readily adapted to the new model as counterterror experts have plugged in the same keywords--radicalization, self-radicalization, lone wolves--for what is essentially the same enterprise. All they've done is replace brown teenagers with white middle-age Midwesterners.

Lee Smith notes that it's beyond mere vulgar desire for funding:

But wanting to keep the money flowing is not the only reason the national security bureaucracy and its media partners are targeting Trump supporters. The Biden administration embodies the interests of America's increasingly powerful oligarchy, comprising the corporate as well as the political establishment. This class represents glaringly small segments of the country like tech workers, teachers unions, and cultural elites. The oligarchs have incentivized street gangs from antifa, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Palestinian antisemites to weaponize their resentments by turning them loose on the Democratic stragglers unlikely to support initiatives at odds with their own interests, like defunding urban police forces.

But they sure do oppose anyone else getting the idea that "Mostly Peaceful Protests" and "Mostly Peaceful But Fiery Protests" are a valid tactic for anyone except their own street paramilitaries.

Do read the whole thing, maybe over the Fourth of July weekend.

Kyle Shideler, an actual expert in the field of counter-terrorism, agrees that counter-terrorism is now largely Counter Conservatism.

The Administration wants to cast American patriots as villains in a tired television narrative.

There is a moment in nearly all post-9/11 thrillers that anyone of a certain generation will be familiar with. It's the point in the third act of a TV series like 24 or Homeland, or the last mission of video game franchises like Call of Duty, where the whole conspiracy has finally unraveled and the true villain is revealed. And he (it is always a he) turns out to be not an Arab jihadist, or a Russian ultranationalist, but a self-styled American patriot.

These reveals, intended to be shocking, always came off a bit contrived. ...

One cannot help but get the same sense from the Biden Administration’s recently revealed National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. We have seen this one before and the whole thing comes off...a little formulaic.

Having waged two decades of unsuccessful war against global jihadists, and suffering through a summer in which black-masked anarchists orchestrated rioting, burning, and looting of urban neighborhoods in dozens of cities, the real enemies to domestic tranquility have finally been identified. And you knew basically without looking what the general plot of the Biden Strategy was going to be.

All those who oppose the present regime are racists, and by the transitive property, all racists are terrorists.

The Biden Strategy had already been widely foreshadowed by surrogates, including think tank types, journalists, and intelligence officials before its release, promising a massive, whole-of-government counterinsurgency effort. They used to compare it to Afghanistan, but now that the U.S. is pulling out of that effort in ignominious surrender, they've had to go all the way back to Reconstruction for a successful example of an insurgency they are prepared to defeat.

...

The authors [of the Biden "counterinsurgency" doctrine] proceeded to stretch the definition of "related threats" here well beyond suspension of disbelief to include the ongoing rash of street violence against Asian Americans and against Jews, violence committed overwhelmingly by black men.

...

Will the Biden Administration find it difficult to insist that the "most persistent and lethal" terrorist threats are militia extremists and "those who promote the superiority of the white race" when the best examples they can come up with are a heinous attack from nearly three decades ago [the Oklahoma City Bombing] and two terrorist attacks [James Hodgkinson's attacks on Republicans, the BLM sniper's attacks on Dallas cops] on behalf of causes with which the administration is politically aligned?

Not at all. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Again, read the whole thing.

posted by Ace at 03:22 PM

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