The long-awaited transition of power finally occurred in the United States on January 20, 2021 when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in as president and vice president. Two weeks before on January 6, a large number of Donald Trump’s supporters rallied in Washington DC to protest what they believed to be a stolen election by the Democrats. A small fraction of the demonstrators were let into (or broke into) the Capitol Building and staged a riot which was eventually ended by security forces with a small number of casualties.
It is clear that the media and political reactions and the possible long-term effects on freedom of speech are more interesting than the riot itself. Speaking with Geoff Young, a US antiwar activist who ran for the Kentucky House of Representatives in 2012, and several times for the US House of Representatives, and Governor of Kentucky in 2015 and 2019, some additional insight can be added.
He hasn’t won any elections yet, but he has discovered in campaigning how corrupt the Democratic and Republican Parties are when it comes to vote rigging. He currently has active lawsuits against both the Kentucky “Democratic” Party (KDP) and the Republican Party of Kentucky (RPK).
Mr. Young, what is going on here?
One just has to carefully evaluate the media, not only MSM. It’s easy to notice that the framing of the “domestic terrorism” issue is being promoted by public television and radio stations as well as the usual mainstream media corporations, most of which are openly biased in favor of the Democrat Party.
As Glenn Greenwald wrote in a January 19, 2021 article called, “The New Domestic War on Terror Is Coming,”
“The more honest proponents of this new domestic War on Terror are explicitly admitting that they want to model it on the first one. A New York Times reporter noted on Monday that a “former intelligence official on PBS NewsHour” said “that the US should think about a ‘9/11 Commission’ for domestic extremism and consider applying some of the lessons from the fight against al-Qaeda here at home.”
Are they suggesting that the CIA should fire missiles from drones at members of the Proud Boys and Antifa without any kind of legal due process?
Greenwald went on to note that “former Facebook security official Alex Stamos” emphasized “the need for social media companies to use the same tactics against US citizens that they used to remove ISIS (banned in Russia) from the internet — in collaboration with law enforcement — and that those tactics should be directly aimed at what he calls extremist ‘conservative influencers’.”
Glenn Greenwald: “Meanwhile, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) — not just one of the most dishonest members of Congress but also one of the most militaristic and authoritarian — has had a bill proposed since 2019 to simply amend the existing foreign anti-terrorism bill to allow the US Government to invoke exactly the same powers at home against ‘domestic terrorists’.”
In a recent airing of Frontline: American Reckoning – A PBS NewsHour Special Report, the narrator said within the first 30 seconds of the show: “Provoking a mob of his supporters, President Trump upended a long tradition of peacefully transferring power.” That anti-Trump framing continued throughout the entire 57-minute broadcast.
Do you buy this narrative?
There’s no real evidence that Trump ever incited his supporters to break into the Capitol, however, and quite a bit of evidence that he urged them to remain peaceful, nonviolent and loud.
If that is the case, then the Democrats’ second impeachment of Donald Trump was as constitutionally and legally unsound as the first one. Both impeachments were exercises in pure partisan politics designed to benefit the fortunes of the Democrat Establishment and damage Trump and the GOP as much as possible.
With social media and government agencies working in tandem to restrict foreign and domestic news, and to label journalists who are not toeing the US line as foreign agents, the First Amendment is under attack. President Biden has not expressed any interest in dropping all charges against Julian Assange.
Was this a false flag?
It is not at all clear who turned the loud, outdoor demonstration on January 6, 2021 into a riot in the Capitol Building. It could have been the Trump supporters, but it could also have been the Capitol Police, other anti-Trump security forces, international experts in color revolutions such as George Soros, the Trump-hating FBI, the Trump-hating CIA, or the DNC.
If anti-Trump organizations were the ones who got the large rally to turn violent, the riot would have been a coup against Donald Trump as an individual, not against the American republic.
One is reminded of what happened in 1933 – the burning of the German Reichstag. When the German parliamentary building went up in flames, Hitler harnessed the incident to seize power – and that means gaining control of the media and cracking down with laws “to protect society,” and the Constitutional Order (“Ordnung” in German).
For this reason, it is not only appropriate but necessary to revisit history, because whenever citizens and politicians feel threatened by executive overreach, the Reichstag Fire is referred to as a cautionary tale.
Young concludes, “It seems likely that the Democrats are using the January 6 riot as an excuse to impose something like martial law on the American people and to stifle all criticism of the incoming Democrat administration (or regime).”
Analysis and Commentary
It is doubtful that any expected FBI investigation into the causes of the riot will ever incriminate the FBI or crisis actors but the very talk may be used to invoke some kind of crackdown on those who “take exception” with the new government and its policies and methods.
It should be noted that the PBS broadcast also examined the impact of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric throughout his presidency and the government’s missed opportunities to manage the spread of misinformation and the rise of domestic terrorism. These are valid issues to be discussed; however, all who supported Trump cannot be labeled as fringe groups, totally disgruntled or domestic terrorists.
As Time Magazine so accurately describes, “Rolling back those freedoms has served in other countries as a prelude to authoritarianism, and it is easy enough to imagine a future US President deciding to label his opponents terrorists before stripping them of their fundamental rights.”
It is an overreaction to be calling for a domestic war on terrorism. Nonetheless, it is easy to collectively take words and actions of Trump’s supporters, even when they renounce the results of a [supposedly] free and fair election and label such discontents as being against the Constitution or legal order.
However, let us not forget the double standard, and how former President Trump attempted “to designate Antifa, a loose band of left-wing radicals, as a terrorist organization, a move that civil liberties groups successfully resisted. The larger purpose, however, appears to paint all those groups in the wake of the storming of the Whitehouse on any group which supported Trump, and label all those who will not recant their support as potential domestic terrorists or conspiracy theorists.
Even PBS admits there have been double standards in how such breaches of government building are addressed.
It would be nice to believe that freedom of speech will continue to mean that people are free to engage in certain forms of protected speech, including criticizing the government and politicians, without control or reprisal by the government, provided they don’t call for direct violence or overthrow. However, that may be short lived, and now Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, plans to reintroduce the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which passed the House last fall but went nowhere in the Senate.
Its purpose is to authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism.
Biden is keeping to the script, by stating soon thereafter, “don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, {they were] domestic terrorists: It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”
However, it is not that simple, in light of the emotions running high in the US. These words may come back to haunt him and his administration, as a self-fulfilling prophesy. And now Biden is just as guilty as Trump for dividing an already divided people, with his own fiery rhetoric:
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” the president-elect said
The timing and choice of wording is most inopportune and inappropriate, as much of what the US has accused other nations of doing, controlling media, and its people, is fast becoming a US production. In fact it is as if Biden is borrowing pages from Trump own play book.
This does not come at at good time, with social media and government agencies working in tandem in restricting foreign news and domestic news, and labeling journalists who are not toeing-the-US line as foreign agents. There have even been instances of where native born US citizens have been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department simply for writing articles and publishing them on Russian media sites.
All the while, the plurality of the US media is at its lowest point ever, controlled, manipulated, bought and paid for. There is no longer a fine line between news and blatant propaganda. Being labeled as part of a group that really believes that the US election result was tainted now may put you on a list for a visit from Homeland Security or some anti-terrorist organization.
There was no Trump Era!
He was merely a papier-mâché cut out puppet, and who out of his bottomless narcissism reined over the corporate media news and talk shows with his Mad Hatter Tweets, using the same Twitter that mobilized the Arab Spring masses to screw up their countries too, a pre-test before fanning it out on a declining ready for figuratively beheading much of the US domestic population over their political preferences.
The post Trump period is being compared on PBS to post Civil War, “incitement of insurrection,” and “how US President Grant realized how the KKK was an essential threat to everything that had been achieved by that bloody war, and various commentators claim that that is what the Federal Government is now facing.
Those who stormed the White House are described (43:00) as “white nationalists, and there is a need to aggressively pursue and root out this cancerous menace of white nationalism and the “kind of” white extremist militias that are really a functionally revanchist movement in American Society.”
All things considered, and the swing of the pendulum, things will not get better with Biden anytime soon, maybe even worse, because the ruling elite in their “close knit societies,” have it all mapped out in detail. It appears as some of the Capitol guards let the fed agent provocateurs, and if some of the crisis actors just waltz right in … and keep in mind that the Reichtag Fire was not engineered by the guards circling and within the Reichtag.
There are too many unanswered questions, just look at the US Congress, most of the powerful have been in office for over 50 years, and never leave office, and the newbies, especially in the Democrat party, are former military or CIA trained or Intel Democrats, young and frisky.
It is a threatening time (even more than during Trump), and that era is fading; however, it seems America may be in for some rough times with the crackdown on civil liberties because of COVID and the NEW domestic terrorist label.
Protecting the American people from themselves is the NEW doublespeak.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
