And the good guys became the bad guys.
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.
A bunch of people, mostly well meaning, but as duped by leftists as the folks who fell into the Jim Jones cult.
// The real deep state is the Uniparty that takes their orders from Davos every year - the World Economic Forum rules the world. Politics is nothing more than bread and circuses to keep the unwashed masses from looking behind the curtain. //
Yep, Deep state Uniparty swamp. We’ve known it for years & Pres Trump called it publicly. This is a strange disinformation type or naive article.
Ridiculous
GREAT synopsis GREAT that is exactly how I feel!!!
It was not an attack on the Capitol.
Saw today that congress has an approval rating of only 15%.
I don’t think it’s that low by just polling the groups he’s talking about.
And the good guys became the bad guys.
Where has the rule of law been for the last decade???
What drama queen crap.
The translation is “bring it on”.
Moron forgets they stormed the Capitol during Kavanaugh.
You 2020 people are shills.
You are a victim of derp state propaganda.
Utter bullshit. The Capitol incursion was stage-managed by the same pros who managed the deadly riots in Seattle and Portland. If any anons went along, they were just duped and swept along to be used as cover and diversion.
No one says “Qanon” except the anti’s. There is Q, and there are anons, but there is no such thing as Qanon.
This is not Democrat/Republican politics, this is unrestricted warfare, and it does involve foreign adversaries. People need to get their frame of reference calibrated, and damn quick.
This article is the culmination of the derp state's battle with "Qanon".
We are now to believe that so-called "Q-anon" attacked America with the fake 'attack on the capitol'. All Trump supporters are therefore domestic terrorists.
Nobody is to believe the things that "Q-anon" (Trump) exposed about the international derp state. Trump (Q+) is to be totally discredited and rather than the good guys they are, they are now the bad guys and the derps are the good guys.
This is how derps do it. Anybody that falls for it is not just a sucker, but a victim of derp state propaganda.
If you are against Q, and ultimately Trump (Q+), you are against America, whether you think you are or not.
Let that sink in. Don't play the derp's game.
There is no Qanon. There is Q. And there are Anons. But, no Qanon.
The first giveaway that the article would be crap is that there is no such thing as Qanon. There is Q. There are Anons. But, No such thing as Qanon
This author is just an Intel Swamp apologist.
Ther Nat Sec bureaucracy has been wanting to go against “domestic extremists” for years. Because it gains them Democrat support and protects their budgets.
The Capitol Hill riot gave them the excuse. But it also exposed the incompetence and futility of a multi trillion dollar National Security bueaucracy that cannot even protect its most important 500 VIPs.
I have voted GOP since 1972, and I also will never vote republican again. Tomorrow I go to the registrar of voters and I am quitting the Republican party. I would encourage each and every one of you to do the same, that might get the attention of those treasonous quislings who allowed this fraud to happen.
And as for the media and democrats being so outraged by the supposed Trump rioters, antifi spent the summer rioting and burning down cities, not Trump supporters. I think this staged riot was 100% antifa and Trump supporters had nothing to do with it.
A Q-lieutenant explains why we should do nothing.
That'd be nothing new for you, derpo.
Unless you consider crying on the internet something.
” The author can ESAD. “
‘ZACTLY !
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