(Last) Weekly Roundup: What If The Feds Held A Fed Rally And Only Feds Showed Up Edition

If you're looking for a reason to lose faith in America, this past weekend's "Justice For J6 Rally" would be a good place to start. The ostensible reason for the rally was to bring attention to the plight of numerous people who attended the January 6 "insurrection", were allowed to enter the Capitol Building by police who moved the barriers out of the way and waved them in, and who were then hunted down and "captured" by a massive federal effort in the months after the fact. Dozens of them are still being held without bail, over half a year later. (You can see the status of individual cases here.) It is widely believed that the January 6 "insurrectionists" have been treated much more harshly than the "peaceful protestors" who burned and looted cities across the country in the summer of 2020.

(For a contrary viewpoint, arguing that the Jan 6 protestors have been treated with remarkable leniency, see this AP story and this Politifact pravda.)

This "rally" struck everyone with an IQ over room temperature as an Extremely Bad Idea. Donald Trump told his followers that it was a "setup", a sentiment echoed by everyone from Andrew Torba to Vox Day. As a consequence, virtually no one showed up. The lack of attendance allowed some of the Uniparty's bones to show through the skin --- and the coverage of the event, both during and after, proved to be most illuminating.

There were four arrests at the "Justice" rally, but the one that garnered the most attention was a cluster-foxtrot in which some Feds arrested another Fed. "The officer was not there in an official capacity," quoth the press. And that's why he had his badge and gun. An image of several other "protestors" who were totally not federal agents has been widely used as meme fodder, as seen at the top of this article.

The remarkable optics of this rally, coming hot on the heels of a Buzzfeed report on the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, should give every citizen in this country cause for concern. The bizarre affinity of federal law enforcement for supporting, encouraging, and in some cases just plain fabricating "domestic terrorism" is not new; it now appears that an FBI informant armed the Black Panthers and encouraged them to behave violently. The Whitmer case, however, probably represented a new low in entrapment. The "plot" was designed and paid for by federal informants, and when the non-feds in the conspiracy got cold feet, the federal assets repeatedly bullied or threatened them into continuing. Without the FBI, the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot would not have existed at all. It was an American take on the Reichstag fire.

Why was the "Justice for J6 Rally" swarming with plainclothes Federal assets? After all, you can't control or even dampen a riot from the inside. Nor can you use undercover operatives to get information on a riot, the way you can on a criminal conspiracy. The only real purpose to have "assets" in a riot is the same purpose that such people have always had: namely, to serve as kindling for a fire. To get a riot started when there isn't any riot to begin with. While such tactics have always been used in dictatorships, they do (and should) feel a little un-American. Crowds of people can be easily manipulated by a few people who seem to have a plan of action. When the cry comes to "attack the pigs", is it reasonable for Americans to expect that it is not, in fact, a "pig" raising that cry?

All of this would be less worrisome if the Biden Administration had not designated "domestic terror" as the greatest threat facing America at the present time. Scratch that. If the federal government has to manufacture the bulk of domestic terror in this country, as it appears to be doing, perhaps that's reassuring. But it does lead the even moderately curious thinker down any number of fascinating paths. How many of the people in the January 6th "insurrection" were federal agents attempting to accelerate the pace, violence, and terror of the "Capitol attack"? What percentage of mass shootings is aided and abetted by federal law enforcement? How, exactly, did Stephen Paddock get forty-seven guns into a Vegas hotel room without appearing on a single security camera? The putative "mastermind of 9/11", Mohamed Atta, was repeatedly stopped and/or arrested by police in the year before the attack, but somehow they always found a reason to let him walk away. How'd that happen, exactly?

It should be noted that, contrary to appearances, there is always something deeply comforting about a conspiracy theory that involves the Feds, whether that conspiracy is related to the Las Vegas shooting, Kent State, or Pearl Harbor. It suggests that America's power is so absolute that it is really only vulnerable to its own internal machinations. All you have to do is uncover the conspiracy, as in the famous OJ Simpson film "Capricorn One", and the whole world will be safe.

For that reason, any suggestion that the Federal Government is "behind" 9/11, the January 6 "insurrection", or any other major occurrence should be subjected to a higher-than-normal burden of proof. Occam's Razor should apply: there is nothing about 9/11 that can't be explained by a simpler theory. Jet fuel can, in fact, melt steel beams, given enough time; to believe otherwise is to believe that medieval blacksmithing simply wasn't possible.

When it comes to "domestic terror", however, there are plenty of reasons to be cynical. Days after Trump told people not to attend the "Justice" rally, the media faithfully parroted the line that the lack of attendance showed Trump's "declining influence". They knew that the Blue Tribe rarely reads Red Tribe materials, and vice versa. The media also relied on its readers not to notice the eagerness with which the Biden Administration erects walls and barriers around its capitol while simultaneously decrying the effectiveness of those tactics on the southern border.

At the same time, the chattering class was praising Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her designer "Tax The Rich" dress at the Met Gala, an event that more than one wag described as being "straight out of the Hunger Games". AOC's message was supposedly meant to confront and upset the wealthy --- but they loved it, and her. It's obvious why: Miss Ocasio-Cortez's eager attendance of the event spoke much louder than any derriere-mounted slogan. The truly wealthy know that her taxation of "the rich" will exclude the truly rich. It will simply mean additional pressure on the disappearing middle class. The generationally wealthy won't suffer from her policies, but your pediatrician will feel the sting.

Similarly, the hue and cry about "domestic terror" is meant to be applied liberally and locally against normal Americans who disagree with the country's current direction. The purpose is to criminalize dissent via association. Anyone who is not content to be part of the masked servant class is going to be painted with a very broad brush. It matters not that you have no plans to do anything violent, or even confrontational. You can be punished for your beliefs anyway, because they are associated with "insurrection" and violence. They don't need you to actually do anything violent. And why would they? Apparently, there's a whole Bureau to handle that particular job.

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Last week, for Hagerty, I:

• talked to a Gemballa

• remembered an unappreciated Nissan

• drove a really fast Lambo

• imagined a horrifying future