Posted on 01/11/2021 11:28:39 PM PST by A Conservative Future
To the QAnon community, and others involved in storming the Capitol:
The Deep State is real, but it’s not what you think. The Deep State you worry about is mostly made up; a fiction, a lie, a product of active imaginations, grifter manipulations, and the internet. I’m telling you this now because storming the Capitol building has drawn the attention of the real Deep State — the national security bureaucracy — and it’s important you understand what that means.
You attacked America. Maybe you think it was justified — as a response to a stolen election, or a cabal of child-trafficking pedophiles, or whatever — but it was still a violent attack on the United States. No matter how you describe it, that’s how the real Deep State is going to treat it.
The impact of that will make everything else feel like a LARP.
The Real Deep State
I’ve been teaching college students about the Deep State for years, and have interacted with it on occasion. By “Deep State,” I’m referring to executive branch agencies populated with unelected officials, especially those involving national security, law enforcement, and intelligence. The non-nefarious name for it is “the federal bureaucracy,” with the subset that includes the military, CIA, and FBI known as “the national security state.”
In 2017, conservative writer David Frum quipped that if you replaced “Deep State” with “rule of law,” you’d have a better understanding of Trumpist complaints.
There’s some truth in that. Federal agencies and their mandates were created by law, their annual budgets are determined by law, and they’re overseen by elected officials. Their main job is executing U.S. law, and one reason they’ve clashed with the White House is being asked to do things outside their legal abilities, or to not do things that are legally required.
So rule of law is part of it, but it’s not that simple. The president appoints and the Senate confirms top officials, from the Secretary of State to the five members of the Arctic Research Commission, over 1,200 in total. Every other executive branch employee — over 4 million if you include the military, over 2.7 million if you don’t — is hired or recruited, not elected or appointed. This means that the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, the intelligence community, and federal law enforcement are staffed with people the agencies hired themselves.
Their mandates are broad. For example, the FBI is supposed to “investigate federal crimes and threats to national security.” While there are laws giving the FBI certain powers (e.g. to arrest people) and limits (needing warrants), a lot is open to interpretation, especially regarding national security threats.
It’s fair to say the FBI, CIA, IRS, CDC, and other federal agencies have, to some extent, taken on lives of their own. So has the military, and the larger defense-industrial complex. They’re under control of elected and appointed leaders, but also not, acting according to established laws, established regulations (many of which they wrote themselves), and individual judgment calls. You could call that “the Deep State.”
National Security
If you want to understand the real Deep State, the biggest thing you need to know is it’s institutional, impersonal, and operates on a national scale.
The law enforcement-intelligence-national security bureaucracy doesn’t really care about a lot of the little things people think it cares about. It’s mostly focused on terrorists, serial killers, narco-traffickers, and foreign governments. Threats to the nation.
Previous QAnon activity wasn’t on that scale, but the Capitol attack is. I don’t think this has sunk in yet. It wasn’t 9/11, but it was bigger than, for example, Benghazi.
Americans storming the Capitol to prevent Congress from carrying out election law hasn’t happened before. When four Puerto Rican nationalists shot at Congressmen from the House balcony in 1954, they were rightly called terrorists, convicted in federal court, and imprisoned. And that was just four attackers, no one died, and it wasn’t encouraged by a losing presidential candidate to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.
The Capitol attack was a unique event in American history, something they’ll teach about in high school. National security analysts are comparing it to last year’s FBI-thwarted plot to kidnap and execute Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, which came a few months after armed demonstrators forcefully stopped business at the Michigan statehouse. There have been armed post-election demonstrations at multiple statehouses, and reports of plots to storm them next week.
It’s a pattern. And after the Capitol attack, the Deep State is going to take it seriously.
U.S. code defines “sedition” as using “force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” That’s what you did. And the legal process you tried to stop is one of the most important in American democracy.
Five people are dead, and it could’ve easily been more. You beat a police officer to death and injured others. You set up a gallows and chanted “hang Mike Pence.” While some goofy attention-seekers attracted the most focus at first, it’s increasingly clear that some who stormed the Capitol, likely members of far right militias, were searching for Vice President Pence, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and other national leaders, and would’ve killed them if they had the chance. That’s terrorism, fortunately thwarted by Capitol security and luck.
Compare that to, for example, riots this past summer. Looting is bad, but it’s a problem for police and insurance companies. Trying to burn down a police station or courthouse is worse, but that too is a law enforcement problem, perhaps one requiring federal assistance. Storming the Capitol, forcefully hindering the execution of U.S. law, and trying to kill top elected officials is a national security problem.
What you did was on another level, and the reaction will be too.
After the Capitol Attack
By “you,” I don’t mean you personally (unless you were there), but your movement as a whole. QAnon’s fingerprints are all over this.
A 35-year-old woman named Ashli Babbitt, shot by Capitol police as she climbed through an opening near where elected officials were hiding, was a QAnon believer who thought she was taking part in the prophesized “storm.” The guy in the horns who traipsed through the Senate chamber is known as the “Q Shaman.” QAnon slogans and hashtags, such as “where we go one we go all,” can be seen on shirts and signs at the riot, and on tons of related social media posts.
This means that, for the first time, the Deep State cares about you.
No matter what anyone’s told you, Deep State operatives weren’t spending their time messing with your internet discussions. That’s below their radar. It wasn’t until May 2019 that an FBI intelligence bulletin warned of the potential for terrorism from “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” using QAnon and Pizzagate as examples. But it didn’t become a law enforcement or counterterrorism priority.
I should know — I’ve been trying to get them to take QAnon more seriously. This past August, after Trump publicly acknowledged the movement, I warned of the potential for election violence in a national security publication called Defense One:
Win, lose, or too close to call, Trump will be in a position to activate the violent subsets of QAnon, deliberately or inadvertently. The president has been insisting, without evidence, that the election will be rigged, blaming an ambiguous “they” or a rotating cast of villains. The conspiracy-minded QAnon community makes for a receptive audience.
If Trump starts tweeting things like “RIGGED! They’re trying to take your country. Don’t let them! THIS IS IT! Second Amendment!” — let alone if he uses QAnon lingo like “the Storm is upon us” — there’s a risk that some violence-embracing QAnon followers decide to act. And if some do, it could encourage others.
That’s basically what happened. If anything, I think I guessed low.
But now that QAnon was involved in violent sedition, the national security state is paying attention. Arrests of people caught on camera storming the Capitol have already begun. Prosecutions will follow. Big tech companies — who, while powerful, are weaker than, and have a healthy fear of the government — are now treating QAnon almost like how they treat ISIS. A giant federal apparatus built to fight al Qaeda will shift some capacity to fighting you, especially the white nationalist and anti-government militias in your orbit.
You cheered on lawyers who said they’d release the Kraken. But now you’ve poked Leviathan.
This is what you need to absorb: QAnon and “stop the steal” are forever associated with a violent attack against the United States. Maybe that’s not what it’s meant to you, maybe you think that’s a misread of last week’s events, but that’s how the real Deep State, a lot of elected officials, and much of the public sees it. If that isn’t what you signed up for, now would be a good time to get out.
The article is crap. The author can ESAD.
+ Infinty
They are so far out of touch with reality outside of the Beltway that we are at a tipping point.
The flag officers might be behind the steal and ok with it, but the line troops are not. After all, anyone O-6 or above right now got there during Obama’s reign and passed his loyalty exam.
The left thinks the military is with them, because the Generals tell them they are at cocktail parties. This battle won’t be waged with strategic weapons - more like bayonets.
The FR primary wars of 2015-16.
The impeachment wars of 1998-99 were a real thing, and I remember those. Inadvertently inserted that.
You were not wrong about TBP, however.
Kinda funny this guy trying to explain to Q what Q has been trying to explain for 2 years now.
— the National Security Bureaucracy — ?
Is this guys name Beuller?
Pretty much.
Frightening that the author “teaches” the subject of “the deep state” without understanding it AT ALL.
He might as well have penned “nothing to see here, move along” and called it good.
He’s wrong about almost EVERY element... making it clear he’s an OUTSIDE observer... with no relevant experience... and who appears to have gone out of his way to avoid ever gaining that experience ?
Reads a lot like those early left wing apologies for Stalinism... butterflies in the field type stuff...
Author is not correct.
Some of the January 6 Protest participants - specifically those who engaged in *violent* crimes - allowed themselves to get carried away; and they will likely pay some penalty under the statutes applicable.
Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of the other protestors, stood up, showed up, to demonstrate their dissent and resistance to the abuses of government authority.
An example of the protestors’ arguments, is how much the political left has been promoting, that several rights (such as due process) of American citizens, should be CANCELED.
An example of the protestors’ arguments, is how much the government has been UN-EQUALLY APPLYING THE LAWS.
And the CANCEL “CULTURE” plus the UN-EQUAL APPLICATION of LAWS, ARE AN ATTACK UPON OUR DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLIC THAT IS AMERICA.
Rule of law?
Where has rule of law been all of last year?
What a bunch of BS
The writer misses the mark....the bureaucracy he writes about has become filled with people who put their own interpretations of the laws foremost and not what the laws governing their agencies were actually supposed to cover. That is how for example a law governing safety equipment of boats got inflated by one agency so that this agency claimed control of all navigable waters in the USA.
Which ones? I missed that part. Unless this guy is being overly dramatic.
[This is a very good explanation of why so many Republicans did such a one eighty after the events of the Sixth; why Cumulus Media ordered a halt to the fraud talk; and why Big Tech is terrified of being held liable for anything related to the events. It’s not censorship, it’s their lawyers telling them to get that stuff off their platform yesterday if they don’t want to be charged with aiding and abetting terrorism.]
In Congress, we have two major factions - the GOP (Mensheviks) and the Democrats (Bolsheviks). Each agency is, of course, its own faction. Within each agency are multiple opposing factions. To pull a Franco, you’d need to be intimately familiar with the players, and have go-between capable of doing the liaison work necessary to get everyone together. That’s not The Donald, occasional WWE emcee, showbiz impresario and real estate tycoon.
So all this Democrat talk of a Capitol Hill insurrection is nonsense on stilts, talk intended as an excuse to eliminate the political opposition, much as the Nazis used a genuine arson attack by 4 Dutch communists as an excuse to reshape the German state to give themselves absolute power. The hysterical, overwrought and Orwellian language employed by the media and the Democrats is something that Republicans must push back against, lest they be relegated to the role that the opposition was under Hitler’s rule. GOP elected officials must rally their partisans and change their tone. The Democrats aren’t satisfied with stealing a single election - they want to steal an entire country out from under us, the way the Nazis hijacked the German state for their purposes. They must not be allowed to succeed in this endeavor.
This idiot thinks QAnon is an organization with secret decoder rings and handshakes. He is creating "hey presto" domestic terrorists out of whole cloth. He actually said he has been trying to get the Deep State to take QAnon more seriously and now he is getting thrills down his leg because he finally has his false flag event to create more Police State control. Yet, not a word about BLM and AntiFA.
Others have noticed this disconnect. There seemed to be no particular fear when Washington D.C. was invaded by violent protesters who hated President Trump. They set fires and beat people. No big deal. But once righteous anger was directed at the politicians in general, the flag went up. The citizens aren’t angry at Trump they realized, they are angry at US! We will designate them as terrorists and punish them severely! The Deep States understands with crystal clarity that the public is livid. And that is why 6,000 National Guard troops will be at the inauguration of a fraudulently elected President, worthy of being equal to a Venezuelan election! The Deep State must perpetuate the fraud and ruthlessly ram it down our throats, and it MUST protect him, and themselves.
You said it all, except to include the medical establishment in with DC. They have been guilty of cowardice and malpractice for neglecting the chinese virus victims by denying them early agressive treatment.
Five people are dead, and it could’ve easily been more. Anyone who says this, is being deceitful, leading readers, by omitting key facts, to assume that all five were innocent Democrats killed by Trump supporters. But the truth is that three were Trump supporters who had medical issues whose deaths had nothing to do with the rioters or Trump, just bad luck that could have caused there deaths at any time. One of the 5 was a supposed Trump supporter who got shot by someone whose identity is being withheld who was NOT a rioter. The last was the cop who was assaulted, who also was a Trump supporter. So far all the dead were Trump supporters There was also a 6th, a cop, who died elsewhere by his own hand, not at the hands of rioters, and it isn't known if he was or was not a Trump supporter.
You beat a police officer to death and injured others.
Who is "you?" The universe of Trump supporters? If you're going there, you are illogically including the cop who was beaten to death among the perpetrators of his own beating. So narrow that accusation down to those who actually were on scene doing the deed and not broadbrush people who only attended a speech or who took a tour of the capitol building.
You set up a gallows and chanted “hang Mike Pence.”
WHen I saw the photo of the gallows [street theater prop] before all this I pointed out it was stupid and counterproductive. Most Trump supporters would probably agree that the only side to benefit from that display would be Biden and the libs.
While some goofy attention-seekers attracted the most focus at first, it’s increasingly clear that some who stormed the Capitol, likely members of far right militias,
There is no evidence of that. In fact, one person maybe two on scene when the Trump supporting woman was shot was a BLM supporter who founded InsurgenceUSA, a lib anticop/social justice group, and he previously is known from his arrest in a an antiTrump protest in Utah where someone was murdered.
were searching for Vice President Pence, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and other national leaders, and would’ve killed them if they had the chance. That’s terrorism, fortunately thwarted by Capitol security and luck.
Ah, you want the nation to mourn for the 5 dead, including one of the very people you say would have killed these politicians if they had a chance. Crazy.
[Next he becomes a defender of terrorists, falling back on Antifa's own excuse that their targets are insured therefore it is OK to destroy stuff.]
Compare that to, for example, riots this past summer. Looting is bad, but it’s a problem for police and insurance companies. Trying to burn down a police station or courthouse is worse, but that too is a law enforcement problem, perhaps one requiring federal assistance. Storming the Capitol, forcefully hindering the execution of U.S. law, and trying to kill top elected officials is a national security problem.
No, what really has you scared is that 80 million people are going to vote for Trump in the next presidential election, and will be willing to crawl over broken glass to do it.
That wont make a difference..those same rigged voting machines will put enough Republickers in to be the “Loyal Opposition”
Without the ‘lckers it would be too obvious we live in a Banana Republic Dictatorship..ruled by 1 party...
Good point
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