UFOs on Capitol Hill: Scapegoating, Schismogenesis, Election Fraud & the Controlled Destabilization of the US in 2021

A participant in the Dave Oshana project (P*) recently expressed a wish to hear points of view opposed to his own. I do not want to categorize human souls, but in the interests of brevity let’s say that P*’s circles pertain to the democratically-minded, Trump-appalled, liberal elect, who “proudly voted for Joe Biden.” P* entered into conversation with another DO-participant, J*, who is more affiliated with “the other side,” and who proudly voted for Trump, seeing him as a maverick outsider attempting to save the US Republic from encroaching socialism, globalism, and a monolithic media-complex.

For some time, P* has been suggesting a discussion group where people with opposing viewpoints can find common ground—a “corpus colosseum” where right and left sides of the sociopolitical hemisphere can connect and harmonize. I have been interested in facilitating such a space and now the time seems to be near at hand, even as the need for such a project rises exponentially.

A few days ago, I shared this article with P*, John, Dave, and my wife, The War on Disinformation Is a War on Dissent, by Ash Staub. From the article:

While it’s certainly an issue that experts and public officials are often wrong or simply lying to protect their agenda when they label reality as misinformation or disinformation, the more pressing problem is that these politically-motivated labels, particularly disinformation, are being used to justify censorship and repression. Tech platforms have routinely censored information deemed “misleading” regarding COVID-19 and the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, while scientific journals refused to publish papers arguing that COVID-19 originated in a lab. Similarly, censorship of election fraud claims are well-documented, with President Donald Trump, along with a host of other conservatives, being censored for “promoting disinformation.” An even more disturbing trend has arisen over the past few weeks: disinformation is now increasingly referred to as “dangerous” and is being associated with “domestic terrorism.”

….

What’s absurd is that many of those attempting to establish a link between disinformation and violence are themselves using disinformation to buttress their arguments, and are guilty of the very thing they are accusing Trump of doing: challenging an election without evidence. The claim that former President Trump willfully “incited violence” by alleging fraud and urging his supporters to take action is easily refuted by the actual transcript of his speech. Moreover, if challenging an election without evidence is equivalent to inciting violence, what would three years of Russiagate histrionics be considered? . . . But of course, hypocrisy is the point. The “disinformation” label is applied inconsistently in order to silence dissent and further the political interests of those in power. By linking disinformation to violence, censorship of certain narratives, and repression of those who espouse them can be justified under the guise of public safety.

*

One thing led to another, and P* wrote a blogpost about his feelings. After reading it, I felt that the gulf we were hoping to bridge seemed larger than I had anticipated and presented an equally daunting challenge. P*’s piece expressed a core belief in institutions that I found to be anathema. The same could be said of John, with his trust in Trump, the Republic, and the Constitution, but at least John is aware of walking on thin ice and doesn’t have the complacency of being backed by a self-elected consensus. P*’s request/challenge felt less open to me than he seemed to think it was—something I have found consistent with those who have the heft and muscle of a dominant ideology, mainstream media, and an official elect on their side.

Oddly, P* inferred something similar in his piece: The more people believe a thing, the less likely it is to be true.

P* believes that a rigged or stolen election is an extravagant claim that requires extravagant evidence. From my own perspective, the idea elections aren’t rigged is a naive luxury particular to a certain class demographic. (Cf. the CIA’s involvement in Mexican or Guatemalan elections, and consider that domestic manipulations are a lot more sophisticated and covert, not to mention decades older in 2021.) This latest case of election fraud seems to me only unique in being so bold-faced. In short, there is, from my scant exposure to this, so much evidence that the election was stolen that the only way to ignore it is to keep replaying the mainstream media’s mantra of trust usssssss until it becomes an internal and impenetrable checkpoint against all opposing facts.

Ergo, I felt it only fair to turn the lazy Susan back on P* and ask him to present his reasoning as to why all this evidence was not valid. At the same time, if I was fully honest, I could say I don’t know because I haven’t spent enough the time on it to be sure. My interest is how and why P*—or whoever, I am sure you know someone who fits the bill—would believe in the institutions of government, media, academia, and all the rest, on whom he bases his trusting view of history and politics, with all the historical evidence arguing against the wisdom of such blind trust.

I wrote as much to P*, and invited my other half to provide the evidence P* was asking for, in the hope of challenging his consensus-endorsed perspective. The bulk of this post is my wife’s research, admittedly cursory since it was thrown together in a single day. I am blogging it now because many of my readers are in the US and therefore, potentially if not actually, in the midst of a minefield of mis- and disinformation, ideological zealotry, increased polarization and policing of thy neighbor (schismogenesis), all of which seems to be inexorably leading, if not to civil war then to widespread scapegoating under the guise of unification. Was it ever thus? Sure, but never was the kindling quite so dry and brittle—the global media so far-reaching and inflammatory—as to suggest a coming inferno that none of us will be exempt from.

*

Over to Mrs. Kephas:

Point # 1: Weltanschauungskrieg

I think it’s really helpful if people have had an experience of being on the other side of a news story i.e., have direct knowledge of a newsworthy event not filtered through the MSM (P* brought up the problem of mediation, but didn’t point out the obvious corollary—unmediated reality).

Funnily enough I woke up thinking about this exact issue this morning. I was seeing very clearly how clever it was for those who wield power (TWWP) to put devices into our hands that we then use constantly to report to us on “reality.” It’s diabolically clever.

[JaHo: Most especially if the medium is the message and the tools we use end up shaping us into instruments of themselves. (“The things you own end up owning you.”) Those who design, build, market and distribute our tools build backdoor access (remote control) into them, and thereby in us, the end-users who covet, purchase, utilize and become dependent on and purveyors of the tools and their programs.]

But I’ve been lucky enough(?) to have had several experiences of being on the other side of “news,” so I’ve seen how even small stories routinely get misreported. Here’s one that is not small: Robert “Willy” Picton, the notorious Canadian serial killer who isn’t. Well, he is. But his brother was the brains and it was an organized crime operation involving many people and including Vancouver police officers who drove some of the murdered women to the pig farm. The parties at the Picton farm were huge—thousands of locals attended them over ten or so years. I’ve talked to a number of people here who attended them and who have opined that, from what they saw,  Willy took the fall for the brother and the Hell’s Angels for their big money-making scheme.

Here is another—a close friend of mine was present in the courtroom when lawyers Jack Cram and Renate Auger were arrested. I arrived too late to witness the fracas myself, but I spoke with my friend moments after the courtroom was cleared. She was one of quite a large number of activists and protesters present who were still milling about excitedly inside and outside the building when I arrived.

Cram and Auger had been collecting evidence of a pedophile ring that was targeting Native children, that involved high level establishment folk around here. That report of what happened in that courtroom is fantastical, but substantially true. The investigation, and the investigators were brutally shut down and so it stands: Jack Cram was forced into psychiatric care and Renate Andres-Auger slipped out of the country and hid <— another of my friends was able to check that she was okay from time to time.

(Readers who are paying attention may notice some correlation between those two stories?)

So that’s one major news story that was massively reported—falsely—and another that was never reported in the mainstream press at all.  Both indicate the presence of a twilight underworld for which there are thousands of witnesses and yet no public acknowledgement. Hence, cognitive dissonance-inducing, mutually exclusive versions of reality.

 

Point #2: The Scapegoat Mechanism

Which, I think we agree is about where we are at today, post the Trump presidency—schismogenesized by the hype on our screens 24/7 and on our way to catastrophe:

The second movement in mimetic theory is that of the scapegoat mechanism. As rivals become more and more fascinated with each other, friends and colleagues may be mimetically drawn into the conflict as rival coalitions form. What began as a personal battle may escalate into a Hobbesian battle of all against all, threatening the cohesion and peace of an entire community. …

All that’s required for the scapegoating solution to work is that his guilt is universally agreed upon and that when he is punished or expelled from the community, he will not be able to retaliate. The proof of his guilt is found in the peace that now returns to the community, obtained by virtue of the unanimity against him.

Mimetic theory allows us to see that the peace thus produced is violent, comes at the expense of a victim, and is built upon lies about the guilt of the victim and the innocence of the community.

Scapegoating also operates in individuals at the level of identity. We all construct identities over against someone or something else. I’m a woman, not a man. I’m a liberal not a conservative. I’m an atheist not a believer. And most problematically, I’m good not bad. When we need some other person or group to be bad so we can maintain our sense of ourselves as good by comparison, we have engaged in scapegoating. We are using others to solidify our identity the same way a community uses a scapegoat to solve its internal conflict.

[Rene] Girard points out that to have a scapegoat is not to know you have one. This blindness on the part of the participants with respect to what they are really doing – killing an innocent victim – is the one essential element required for the scapegoating mechanism to work. In other words, participants in the scapegoating mechanism hold an authentic belief in the guilt of the victim, a guilt seemingly demonstrated by the restoration of peace.

What is Mimetic Theory?

That’s a very brief precis of the scapegoat mechanism. You can see how that might fit with the cancelling of Trump, his expulsion from polite society and the current attempt to impeach him for a second time—even though he is no longer president and aught to be beyond the reach of such Constitutional actions?

But there is a problem. Not everyone is convinced of his guilt. In fact, about 75 million Americans may think that he is being lied about, betrayed, misrepresented and unjustly persecuted.  Rather than stabilizing a fractious populous, that’s an ongoing, dis-unifying aggravation.

 

Point #3: Capitol Hill: The Reports Were Exaggerated

Now let me demonstrate something in answer to what P* wrote here:

Worst of all, we live inside bias bubbles whereby our beliefs are reinforced because we are exposed only to the information that reinforces it, and small amounts of counter information from the “other side” that inoculate us, and further hardens our belief bubbles. This situation has reared its ugly head in the US with the “election fraud” controversy, and the subsequent riot that ended the lives of five Americans. The corporate media censored and canceled the information offenders, and the alarm of “censorship” has been raised. But is this truly “censorship” in an Orwellian or anti-American sense? Or is it just good journalism and responsible stewardship of public forums? That would be a matter of opinion, but we’ll get to that. Let’s start with facts.

First, I want to assert that the inability to solve this conundrum amongst ourselves has resulted in five dead Americans. Hence, the seriousness of the issue.

I’ve encountered all this framing before—it may well have been broadcast on NPR every other day for the last 4 years, it’s so familiar—so I know that this isn’t P*’s original thinking on this, just “talking points” that he agrees with, thereby ironically demonstrating his point.

This meme of the “deadly insurrection” at the Capitol has become a bloody big stick to big-up what amounted to what was actually pretty mild riot—as compared to 570 violent BLM protests and that time Antifa set fire to the mayor of Portland’s apartment building with residents in it. Note the graffiti:

So here are the five people who died that day:

  1. Ashil Babbitt, (decorated senior security forces 12 year Air Force veteran) shot by an unnamed Capitol Hill police officer (see Point # 4)
  2. Benjamin Phillips 50, “died of a stroke,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer
  3. Kevin Greeson, 55, had a “history of high blood pressure and suffered a heart attack” according to his family
  4. Rosanne Boylan, 34, The chief medical examiner of Washington, D.C., said ‘Boyland’s cause and manner of death are “pending”’.
  5. Officer Brian Sicknick, not struck by a fire extinguisher, despite what you’ve heard—the ME reports no “blunt force trauma”.

Now look at this headline: Capitol riots: Names of people killed during Washington DC siege released

While Ashil Babbit, 35, was shot and killed during the riots, three others died from “medical emergencies” [i.e., Benjamin Phillips 50, Kevin Greeson, 55, Rosanne Boylan, 34.] Asked whether the three who died of medical emergencies were part of the storming of the capitol, Mr Contee said he couldn’t specify if the three were actively part of the riots or entered the building. There were a lot of people on the grounds of the Capitol yesterday and I guess the extent that we can say right now is that they were on the grounds of the Capitol when they experienced their medical emergencies,” Mr Contee said.

Notice how the headline contradicts what the article reports?

Here is CNN quietly reporting on the findings of the ME’s that contradict the narrative that they’ve been pushing for a month:

According to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma, so investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.[!!]

And here’s what his family says:

Capitol Officer’s Family Asks Media to Not Politicize His Death as Evidence Begins to Point to an Underlying Medical Condition

“He texted me last night and said, ‘I got pepper-sprayed twice,’ and he was in good shape,” said Ken Sicknick. “Apparently he collapsed in the Capitol and they resuscitated him using CPR.”

The site said that on Thursday, family members were told that the officer had a blood clot and suffered a stroke and was on a ventilator.

 

Point #4: Undercover Ops (Ashli Babbitt)

Because of the prevalence of veterans employed by private security companies, it’s just a good idea to look closely at Ashli Babbit’s background:

The Air Force on Thursday confirmed that Babbitt, who served under the name Ashli Elizabeth McEntee, was a security forces airman who achieved the rank of senior airman, or E-4, while on active duty. According to service records released by the Air Force Personnel Center, Babbitt served more than 12 years in different parts of the Air Force. . . . 12 years in the Air Force – 6 years of those as a “Capital Guardian” tasked with “civil disturbance missions” in DC: The New York Times reports she was assigned to a unit based near Washington [DC] that is known as the “Capital Guardians” as their primary missions was defending the city. In what the Air Force calls “civil disturbance missions,” security forces in the squadron regularly train with riot shields and clubs, the report explains. As per an Air Force spokeswoman, she was deployed twice more, to the United Arab Emirates in 2012 and 2014.  (ref)

She served more than a decade […] Six of those years were spent in an Air National Guard unit whose mandate is to defend the Washington region and respond to civil unrest. Its nickname: the Capital Guardians.  (ref)

The Air Force on Thursday confirmed that Babbitt, who served under the name Ashli Elizabeth McEntee, was a security forces airman who achieved the rank of senior airman, or E-4, while on active duty. According to service records released by the Air Force Personnel Center, Babbitt served more than 12 years in different parts of the Air Force. . . . AFPC said later on Thursday that Babbitt deployed overseas on multiple occasions, including to Afghanistan in 2005, Iraq in 2006, and the United Arab Emirates in 2012 and 2014. Babbitt’s awards include the Iraq Campaign Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal. …

The Air National Guard said that when Babbitt separated, she was with the 113th Security Forces Squadron of the DC Air National Guard which is stationed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. [<— that’s the “Capital Guardians”] (ref)

And here is the 113th Security Forces Squadron training to “execute civil disturbance missions” at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Oct. 17, 2020, just before the 2020 election (Facebook link).

Hmmm . . . right?

From a parapolitical perspective, it is not unreasonable to consider the possibility of a number of covert groups running multiple operations that day: Provocateurs? Perhaps. Also, any number of people, including those on the job, tasked with a “civil disturbance mission” plus others – foreign, domestic, public, private intelligence entities, interested in getting into those Capitol Hill offices for a wee scrounge. In which case, the actual Trump-supporting protestors—the ones who were that—were just the idiots used for cover.

(BTW, the private security services marketplace is booming—31bn USD.)

There’s also the long game to consider and Biden’s ongoing crisis of legitimacy—didn’t it perfectly provide his team with just the right imagery and narrative to justify a multi-valent assault on his their political enemies and frame half of Americans as White Supremacists and dangerous domestic terrorists  in need of deprogramming?

[JaHo: And in case anyone reading this believes Joe Biden is an OK guy, or at least “the lesser of two evils” that justifies proudly helping get him into office, legitimately or not, here’s the video of him publicly leching over a Chris Coon’s daughter that was doing the rounds several years ago.]

 

Point #5: Follow the $Mainstream Media$

The situation wasn’t good before the Capitol Hill riot either: look at what happened to Mark Crispin Miller, NYU Professor of Media Studies, who teaches a course on propaganda and is the author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. An obvious Progressive Leftist, Miller is now re-positioned by his University as a defender of white supremacy because he questioned the efficacy of wearing masks to stop the spread of covid!

But now the situation is downright hairy, see for example:

WTF?!

Here I want to insert just a quick comparison between Trump supporters and BLM activist:

As of June, 2020, 279 companies are on record supporting Black Lives Matter  inc Bank of America(!), Pfizer, FoxTV and DoD contractor, Cisco.

vs. this:

As of January 12, 2021, something like 30 companies have gone on record with their intention to stop providing services to Trump and Trump supporters including JPMorgan Chase, Facebook, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Visa, American Airlines, BP, and Coca Cola.

Hmmm . . .

[JaHo: Good to know the major corporations have got our backs!]

Pro-tip: Support from banks, multinational corporations and DOD contractors is a strong indication that BLM is an Establishment—rather than outsider, or dissident—movement.

Question: Does anyone really believe they can trust the media at this point—when 15 Billionaires Own All of Americas’ News Media?:

Some billionaires, like Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg are long-time media moguls who made their fortunes in the news business. Others, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, bought publications as a side investment after building a substantial fortune in another industry. Billionaires own part or all of several of America’s influential national newspapers, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the  New York Times, in addition to magazines, local papers and online publications.

[JaHo: And if no one believes they can trust the mainstream media, why are people still slavishly following it and regurgitating its narratives? Answer: because they are both hooked on and hooked into the media that delivers the message. We are sleeping human fetuses in matrix pods whose life force is powering the great AI attention harvest machinery. We are ideological carrier waves, human data streams (see this article) that can no more question the current that carries us through our mediated life-simulations than little fishies can question the existence of water. End rant.]

 

Point # 6: Lawfare

With that preamble out of the way, let’s get to the evidence of election fraud. Are you familiar with the term “lawfare”? It’s a way to retain power and win political and legal disputes through attrition. I saw it employed in Canada against Native Sovereigntists. There is an old law in the Canadian Constitution that is still on the books that says that Native land belongs to Natives unless there is a treaty or a sale. In BC, approximately 95% of the province is untreatied and unsold—that is a problem for all levels of government here, natch. The soveriegntists spent 20+ years trying to get courts in Canada to address this law—that would create a precedent which could be used to generally challenge any imposition of settler law on unceded lands.

That was a big problem. How the courts got around it (and get around it) is simply by refusing to address the law.

So a similar strategy is being employed with the election cases—of which there are many and some of which are very serious indeed. The media beats its drum—baseless, baseless, baseless! And the courts refuse to look at the cases. Rinse and repeat.

So is it possible that election fraud took place?

Let’s begin by bringing the thing out from under its shroud of “unthinkable” or “impossible” human activities—I mean American human activities, because it seems perfectly plausible to us in places like Cuba or Nigeria.

Let’s look at a couple of rather big cases with criminal convictions:

1. A judge, county clerk, and 5 other election officials convicted of 13 counts of election fraud for 2002, 2004, 2006 elections—mostly Democrats but also a Republican:

After a seven-week trial, a jury convicted Douglas C. Adams, Russell Cletus Maricle, William E. Stivers, Charles Wayne Jones, Freddy W. Thompson, William B. Morris, Stanley Bowling, and Debra L. Morris on every charge levied against them by the government. . . . Political candidates pooled money to buy votes and to pay  vote haulers”  to deliver voters whose votes could be bought.1 In order to be paid, voters had to vote for a particular set of candidates, known as a “slate” or “ticket.” To ensure that these voters actually voted for the correct slate, co-conspiring election officers and poll workers reviewed voters’ ballots—a practice known in this case as “voting the voter.” Once the proper slate was confirmed, a token (such as a raffle ticket) or marking was given to the voters to confirm that they did in fact vote for the proper slate. Voters with the token or marking were then paid by members of the conspiracy in a location away from the polls. Conspirators retained lists of voters to avoid double payments and to keep track of whose votes could be bought in ensuing elections.

In addition to hiring vote haulers, defendants allegedly utilized other methods of buying votes. Absentee voting and voter-assistance forms helped minimize the difficulty of checking paid voters’ ballots. In the latter case, co-conspiring poll workers were permitted to be in the voting booth under the pretext that they were assisting voters; in reality, co-conspiring poll workers were confirming that voters chose the proper slates. When electronic voting machines were introduced to Clay County in the 2006 election, the conspiracy both stole and bought votes. To steal votes, conspirators, typically poll workers, purposefully misinformed voters that they did not need to click “cast ballot” on a screen that appeared after voters had selected candidates for whom they wished to vote. Co-conspiring poll workers would enter the voting booth after the voter exited and change the electronic ballot to reflect the slate before finally casting the ballot. (UNITED STATES v. ADAMS, July 17, 2013.)

2. Two [Ohio] election workers were convicted of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review.

 

… Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and Kathleen Dreamer, a ballot manager — were each convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They were also convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty. 2007.

3. Here is an arrest for “vote harvesting” for Biden 2020:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton today announced the arrest of Rachel Rodriguez for election fraud, illegal voting, unlawfully assisting people voting by mail, and unlawfully possessing an official ballot. Each charge constitutes a felony under the Texas Election Code. Rodriguez was exposed in a Project Veritas video last fall while she engaged in vote harvesting leading up to the 2020 election. The Election Fraud Division of the Office of the Attorney General reviewed dozens of hours of unedited, raw footage, which led to this arrest. In an uncharacteristic moment of honesty, Rodriguez acknowledged on video that what she was doing is illegal and that she could go to jail for it. If convicted, Rodriguez could face up to 20 years in prison. (Ref)

4. And here is a crowd-sourced public databaseof all sorts of election fraud documentation-including historical cases.  It includes an analysis of the vote data from the PA public data which concludes:

191,725 mail-in ballots were touched by alterations, illegality, or anomalies according to data.PA.gov.

In Pennsylvania’s response to the Texas lawsuit, they did not address the mail-in ballot anomalies

And just in case anyone thinks this is over, here are more legal challenges to the election results coming up:

Election Cases We’re Watching

Supreme Court to consider election lawsuits in February

Arizona Senate seeking contempt charge in election fight

This is the difficulty of states like Texas and Arizona: Other states, like PA, changed their state and local laws to allow for mail-in voting and No-ID voting, contrary to the Constitution, i.e., Federal law. Federal elections are governed by Federal Law (makes sense?). Therefore if some states follow strict Federal law but other states don’t, the outcome of the Federal election is de-facto non-representative. De-facto.

This is a recipe for civil war.

 

Point# 7: A Policy of Destabilization?

At this point I’m half convinced that there is an effort to precipitate civil strife (à la Yugoslavia, or, heaven forbid, Rwanda), especially since that Time article:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.

If there were a genuine interest in assuaging tension, “They” i.e., the Democratic Establishment and its corporate stake-holders, would allow a couple of these cases through the courts, just for show and then they could launch a long, drawn out, Dept of Justice investigation that makes a lot of noise and signifies nothing, just like that Mueller Report on Russian interference of the 2016 election—see, now I’m belly-laughing! Har har!

But it would calm things down. A lot.

I’m just going to jump to the end now. It seems that Trump has provoked almost every US institution to de-legitimize itself. That is profoundly destabilizing. When things are uncertain, people behave irrationally and are going to be more actively looking for scapegoats. Finding and exiling or killing a scapegoat that everyone agrees is guilty may be stabilizing, but if there isn’t agreement, it is the opposite of stabilizing. It creates a martyr and a potential uprising.

So the question is, how do we come together?

A: With graciousness?

*

Parapolitics 101 for extra credits:

 

 

 

Outside the Bubble: Moving from Ideology to Truth

For me, the key passage in my wife’s response to P* was this one:

I’ve encountered all this framing before—it may well have been broadcast on NPR every other day for the last 4 years, it’s so familiar—so I know that this isn’t P*’s original thinking on this, just “talking points” that he agrees with, thereby ironically demonstrating his point.

P*’s response to my wife’s research seemed to consist mostly of what I jokingly call UFOs: unfounded opinions, secretly constructed in underground bunkers by shadowy agencies. In response I shared a formula I was working on back when we were planning a Socratic radio station in Hope. It went something like this:

  • opinions aren’t arguments
  • arguments aren’t evidence
  • evidence isn’t fact
  • facts aren’t truth

It occurred to me that we could add one to the start: ideology isn’t opinion

There’s a very long and arduous, and potentially disheartening, journey between coat-tailing a dominant ideology (one that disguises itself as opinions posing as arguments without evidence, and that ignore facts) and brandishing the sword of Truth, capital T. The ratio of opinion to evidence in my wife’s summary above vs P*’s perspective evidences the difference between research and recycled soundbytes from mainstream punditry. Listening to NPR and Conservative Talk to get “both sides” (as P* does) is like hoping to get justice by listening to a good cop and a bad cop. Bullshit is bullshit, regardless of ideological slant. If we want information, opinions founded in reality rather than ideology, we first have to leave the reservation.

This is a frightening prospect for all of us, especially (say) a white American guy with liberal progressive family and friends. Even starting to question the official version around Capitol Hill, the election, etc., could lead, in today’s climate of fear and zealotry, to getting involuntarily committed for intensive deprogramming as a potential white supremacist and/or domestic terrorist. This is no joke. The pressure being applied to conform to the dominant ideology, to uphold its opinions and parrot its non-arguments, and to keep signaling to the mob that you are not scapegoat material, is immense. And it is only growing.

I suspect this is the kind of bubble-suffocation that P*, among many others, is looking to break out of. If you are, or want to help someone who is, take baby steps. Keep quest(ion)ing; see if you can start to reformat what you think of as evidence, or what demands evidence. Question especially the assumption that more mainstream or institutionalized sources are more trustworthy, or that widely held opinions are more reliable, as compared to individual researchers who, while not without prejudice, at least are driven by a personal need to find the truth, rather than in service to larger interests.

Most of all, it pays keep in mind that the election controversy (or whatever it is that we are attempting to understand about our world) is just one pressing example of the mashup of truth and lies that’s our current mediated experience, and that it’s not really about getting to the bottom of any particular worm can, since there is no end to those worms. It is about restoring our capacity for sense-making, finding our footing in our bodies, in Nature and in the world, so that we can return to a more essential way of perceiving and navigating existence. It is about getting free from the burden of ideology and from being routinely abducted by shady UFOs in the darkest dead of night, and moving into the light of the truth that sets us free.

The crucial distinction (tacitly acknowledged in P*’s piece) is this: are we trying to sort truth from lies as a means to fortify our position in the world and establish consensus? (This is when we use a new nail to replace rather than drive out an old nail, and it always seems to require a scapegoat of one sort or another.) Or are we doing so as a means to sharpen our tool set and to gather courage for the essential movement outside consensus, beyond the world of the mediated matrix-mind, and into the unknown, where reality is?

Until then, any assignation of value (sinner-sainthood, good president vs. bad president) is besides the point or worse, like trying to build your house on a wobbly stepping stone. It is the first sign of premature conclusion, which just leads to more delusion. No ideology, opinion, argument, or body of evidence will save us. Truth is beyond even the hardest of facts, as much as it is beyond the loosest of lies. And goodness, paradoxically, exists in a realm beyond (all socialized, politicized, and languified concepts of) good and evil.

23 thoughts on “UFOs on Capitol Hill: Scapegoating, Schismogenesis, Election Fraud & the Controlled Destabilization of the US in 2021”

  1. I don’t mean to flog a dead horse, but… history. Ancient, modern, or anything in between, take your pick.

    If in doubt over an institution’s or organisation’s trustworthiness, a brief look into how such entities have acted before today will serve as an indicator. If it’s been documented that the media have been used as propaganda tools, there’s a strong chance that it’s happening now. If the military have used false flag attacks to justify offensive wars, they might be doing it now. If claims of domestic terrorism or counter-terrorism have been used before, a dead horse is being flogged. It’s quite simple really. Transpose what is recognised as historical fact and compare it to current affairs. If it happened anywhere in the world, it might be happening somewhere else in the world.

    There is not one valid reason to presume that institutions of power (and people who staff them) in our present day are any ‘better’ than they were in the past. If anything, practice makes perfect.

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  2. Just quickly scanned your article so probably not fair to comment but this is my general thoughts. If you did not have first hand knowledge of an event you are relying on second hand narrative to imagine the event. If this narrative comes from a source that had proven to be inaccurate in past narratives then logically you can infer that this narrative may be also untrue. How can one know if a previously untrustworthy source is or is not trustworthy this time if you were not witness to the event. Thus all stories become suspect and one is left to believe the stories that resonate with their world view, which reinforces their view. The correct, but hard, path is to stop taking in second hand narratives and leave it all behind. Focus on self and try to find the cause for seeking out such stories that get you trapped in imaginary concepts of what is going on out there in the world. Ego likes to be well informed but ego is a fool.

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  3. Jasun: “The pressure being applied to conform to the dominant ideology…is immense…I suspect this is the kind of bubble-suffocation that P*, among many others, is looking to break out of. If you are, or want to help someone who is, take baby steps. Keep quest(ion)ing…especially the assumption that more mainstream or institutionalized sources are more trustworthy, or that widely held opinions are more reliable, as compared to individual researchers who, while not without prejudice, at least are driven by a personal need to find the truth, rather than in service to larger interests.”

    A few thoughts:

    Genuinely wanting to get to the truth versus wanting to feel accepted/comfortable/seen

    Baby steps is one useful startegy but going Cold Turkey also has its uses: It takes 40 days to form a habit. Try going 40 days without once looking at your “go-to” source of current affairs/news and notice how many times you have to resist the urge to look…

    A related discussion point: the potential importance/usefulness of metaphysical/”spiritual” frameworks (e.g. Steiner) as the basis of complimentary modes of sense-making that might more easily allow one to wrap their head around things like the degree to which we have been manipulated and the extent of the devilry at work in the world — not as a spiritual by-pass to *feeling* that (although that could be a danger?) but potentially the opposite in fact — a framework/lens that finally allows unpalatable data points through to the Psyche/body, previously blocked by an encrusted (and conditioned) intellect….
    What was it Steiner said about not believing in Ahriman being a “dreadful Maya”?

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    • “Baby steps” until they are able to cope with acknowledging in some sort of unified way
      the depth of the problem; 40-day cold turkey once they’re at the point where they want to ‘fight’, and you’ve pointed out to them the first place they have to fight is within themselves.

      However, the last 20 years and particularly the last four already took a lot of people through their
      baby steps. Republicans had a tendency to not want to look at media bias and corruption around 9-11 and the Iraq war, although there was a leading edge of people with integrity that
      resigned from the Republican party –doing various things, some found refuge in the Constitution Party, which showed signs of knowing how corrupt the Republican party was but
      not the next layer of the problem in government.

      As it was, I had followed a spiritual teacher, Patricia Sun, who unfortunately didn’t focus on putting herself forward that much, and she didn’t have the social media tools, but she was focusing on the
      wedged state that polarization put people in –even in the 90’s before it had made things so obtrusively dangerous for everyone. She constantly pointed people to looking to their “either-or” thinking, and I was astonished at how powerful that one highly abstract understanding was. She also had some other very applicable insights.

      In any event, many of the ‘normie’ Republicans who would not believe in conscious bias in
      media corporations, after what they’ve seen over the last four years, some will never forget it.
      As yourself what the roots of the blind spots are though and try to educate around that.

      One famous one–and this sounds like scapegoating but it isn’t– is that people need to understand in their thinking in a robust rather than occasional way, that there are other people who can and do do things that they can’t and they wouldn’t. Its easier for people
      with personal experience of severely disordered people to have this thoroughly integrated in their thinking albeit there is quite a price to pay in terms of lack of innocence for this understanding.

      This even effects thinking about something like election fraud. People don’t talk about how to do it, and many people wouldn’t do it, although we’ve gotten to a point where far too many would. But if you never thought about the principles of how elections are either secured or
      stolen, you also don’t even know where to look for evidence that the election was stolen.

      Atop of our many other problems in thinking, that’s an example of our existence in a general state of “woolly-mindedness”. Def. “showing a vague or muddled way of thinking.” And this is only growing worse, with the media in many instances, seemingly having substituted a no details story that something happened for the traditional, “who, what, when, where, why.”

      Religions can indeed give some people–the habit of honesty and courage and forgiveness, leading to the presence of a clear enough mind to think—see Rep. Justin Amash and Sen. Josh Hawley for instance, but unfortunately there’s a lot of spiritual bypassing going on.

      Speaking of lawfare, I believe some very old lawfare helped get us here. The tax exemption with the IRS was changed in either the 50’s or the 60’s, to prohibit not just churches endorsing candidates (as the NGO’s were in general prohibited from engaging in this…they can publish their report cards), but also advocating specific legislation. Now the Catholic church probably gets away with some of this due to its global power, but this eliminated the one local gathering place for people to think together in a non-partisan fashion, and apply their values to their politics. It was very disintegrating, and the people it (relatively) disenfranchised were
      middle and working class Americans who owned this institution, not the newspapers, television stations and now Big Tech.

      It not only weakened most people’s communities for thinking, and organizing, and thus corrupted our politics, it also weakened the churches themselves. In fact, this is how the Soviet Union decided to deal with their churches. They didn’t destroy all of them and repress them outright—what they did was prohibit them from performing any community functions that weren’t strictly religious, which was enough to slowly strangle them by attrition. They no longer had the means to be a community where “Love Thy Neighbor” was experienced in its many applications, but only a place for it to be *talked about*. What this caused then in the Soviet Union, and has caused deeply for decades in the United States is mass attrition of the youth, because the church is focusing on spiritual issues that have never, even traditionally and historically, been the proper bailiwick of the young, who aren’t in the correct season of life to look for general spiritual principles before they have even accumulated any life experience—this eventually leads to total failure of these churches.

      The Soviet Union information you can find in Will Durant’s well written lively book, The Tragedy of Russia…you used to be able to find a free copy of this 90 year old book online–but
      a brief search by me didn’t find it, so here’s an extremely hostile
      review of the book by Communists, polarized, mind-closing, information-lite name-calling style:

      https://thesanghakommune.org/2019/08/20/the-tragedy-of-durant-how-will-durant-lied-about-soviet-russia-1933/

      My church had a parish house with a stage and a kitchen. The entire time I was growing up the stage was never used, and the kitchen only was used once. My own childhood church was a place of talking about a distant, place-less seemingly fairytale past where animals spoke and people walked on water, with no modelling of taking spiritual principles into the everyday life of the present, but only looking forward to guaranteed entrance into heaven in the future. It had been *transformed* into the opiate of the masses (remember, Marx had been talking about the state churches of Europe, not the independent, non-state churches of America, which had done things like help organize the Underground Railroad, and save tens of thousands of Armenia survivors of the genocide of WW1.)

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    • thanks AC; intriguing and rapid response that has some ironic repercussions at this end & renders my redacting of P*s name on request also somewhat ironic (as well as a case of closing the barn after the apostle has bolted)

      I referred to Jason the healer in Acts in my piece n Philip K. Dick; I believe because he converted a king called Sebastian..?

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        • I was impressed by the piece, esp. since it appeared so spontaneously, it felt fully formed with little superfluity and a blend of lightness & gravitas, a rare but tasty combo.

          Have we met before under other names?

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    • This all is making me think of the saying, “the way to master a subject is to teach it.”

      Even though we are finding much to criticize about Paul’s perspective, it is providing a lot
      of impetus for reflection.

      What you are saying is making me think about philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s contention that science poses a threat to freedom– and as a survivor of Nazism as a German he’d have motivation to be concerned. Even though I had a scientific education (perhaps, especially because) I’ve been concerned about the rising scientism and ironically but unsurprisingly, considering that its clearly being influenced to be a manipulable mob, one among many, its lack of precision, absurdity, and rejection of its own falsification ideal.
      IFLS is a great place to go for nature photographs.

      Its also making me think about the social difficulty or impossibility of infinite epistemological
      freedom: Clifford Geertz the anthropologist witnessed the decolonizing process in Indonesia which involved major religious upheaval, and he spent the rest of his life working on the topic, as he knew it would be highly germane in a globalizing world. Geertz’s documentation of
      a funeral in Indonesia during this period, in his book The Interpretation of Cultures may be the most resonant thing I have ever read to the atmosphere of the US now from about 2015 onwards.

      I like the way you put this:

      “The problem for Paul, therefore is that he is already inside the cave looking in rather than outside the cave looking everywhere he can – and by this I mean he wants to find a way for everyone to arrive at what R.A.W. would term ‘consensus reality’, rather than first question for himself whether scientific materialism (or at the least its application to information flows in the world) really has sound foundations.”

      This is clearer and less inflammatory than using the word f_ _ _ _ _t to describe this mentality.
      But that word is helpful in terms of pointing people to looking at the literature that came out of WW2, as to what makes the person more vulnerable to being part of a destructive mass.

      Alice Miller, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromme even wrote a book, “Escape from Freedom.”

      We need enough of a consensus reality to function as a society.
      We’re in this extremely uncomfortable, long-for-us-humans moment of interregnum of philosophies, and many of us are afraid of heading towards something worse than what we’ve got as there are so many examples scattered through history.

      We shouldn’t feel uncomfortable upholding the truth as we know it, as long as we are letting ourselves be aware of change at the same time. I like the distinction you made between politics and religion, but
      George Washington said there has to be enough concern for truth in society for a democracy to function, and I think he was right. Distinction doesn’t mean no intercourse. And at the same time, we need to be open to an upgrade on democracy, ie. a replacement of how we now do it, with caution about getting a downgrade in terms of human welfare instead.

      Jurgen Habermas’ idea of consultative democracy could no doubt be useful, although it could also be misused.

      When we are born, in five minutes or so, a newborn switches their circulation from the umbilical cord to the lungs. Both conditions pre-birth and post-birth are essential, but the moment in between is fraught with danger, and the infant can die or suffer permanent damage if the one source of oxygen is cut off before the other is established.

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  4. really weird to see my name with a blue twitter check next to it
    if guys like Dice were retweeting me, I’d have to kick my own ass

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  5. @P* (and anyone interested in another perspective on this)

    Take a look at the latest piece by “Lefty” (/”New Ager”) Charles Eisenstein…

    https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/to-reason-with-a-madman/

    I wouldn’t normally link to others’ work here, and my linking isn’t an endorsement of CE’s work as such (I have found his perspective helpful/illuminating in the past, but there are certainly holes you can pick, as he seems to acknowledge himself in this latest piece). In short, the piece struck me as so relevant to this topic and as a potentially useful perspective in bridging the “gulf” Jasun referred to… judge for yourselves if interested…

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    • The interesting thing here is that CE only goes so far with his analysis. Something is stopping him from going all the way (looking at some of his other conclusions on Wikipedia and his website, one can see he is capable of maximalism in other contexts): CNN have a left bias, he concludes, but doesn’t really consider the larger narratives of cultural Marxism, globalism, etc.

      In fact he seems to dismiss these as ‘conspiracy theories’, which is always disappointing.

      And he says in another essay that “Today, the broad consensus trust in science and journalism is in tatters”

      What a joke. Most people will believe anything they are taught in school and hear on TV. If trust in authority were in tatters, people wouldn’t be under the COVID spell, period.

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      • That’s a very good point AC… CE has definitely run up against the limits of his own perspective. I brought him into the conversation more so because I think he has some use in Jasun’s suggestion of ‘baby steps” in P* desire to break out of his own reality bubble….
        Yes CE doesn’t go far enough but he is potentially useful in allowing someone to take the first step in dis-spelling their illusions….
        My vague sense was that this could be useful for someone like P*…
        When I first started reading Jasun’s work I initially baulked at some of his suggestions… sometimes we have a-ha moments and other times it is subtle process of slowly re-configuring our perception matrices…

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          • “Do you write yourself?”

            (@AC)
            Only here at auticulture it seems… and that’s enough to often leave me wondering if I’ve bitten off more than something in me wants to chew, as I suffer from “verbal indigestion” (a case of giving myself “verbals”?) — the words I write repeat on me (literally) — I suppose i eventually swallow them and shit them out but it is hardly the model of a well-functioning digestive system…

            …in short, I’m wary that starting a blog or something would be a case of “feeding the hungry ghosts”… on the flipside, writing does seem to be useful in helping one arrange their thoughts…
            Probably time for me to “grow a pair” and participate in a zoom-meet or two (does zoom count as a “big-tech platform”?, how about WordPress?)… presently “lockdown idle” so no excuse really…

      • ” If trust in authority were in tatters, people wouldn’t be under the COVID spell, period.” Yes.

        “Today, the broad consensus trust in science and journalism is in tatters”.

        As a public social critic , if he wasn’t, Eisenstein should be a little clearer in distinguishing between science and government science policy. Just as with journalism, distrust in our government ‘science-based’ policy is a sign of some residual functioning immune system of the American mind.

        People still trust science—things like cell phones, anesthetics and electric lights provide immediate empirical personal knowledge to everyone that sciences exist and
        can provide gratifying fruits.

        But they can understand, although this awareness still seems to be at far too low a level, that they can be getting fake science from the government. And they are, literally. William Marcus at the EPA blew the whistle on falsification of research to show that water fluoridation was safer than it was, for example. But our new Church of Science movement in the US doesn’t want to know about such social influences on science, anymore than religious people have ever been happy to find out about variations in the text of manuscripts of the Bible.

        I imagine this is topic of skepticism is connected to Republican rejection of global warming science which is generally tribalism rather than skepticism. The major threats to science are two: the corruption of the funding process through mixing government and corporate funding in academia (brought about by Reagan), and
        the glaring defects of public educational system in every subject but especially science.

        Meanwhile, the commonest discourse about the “threat” to science is that fundamentalist Christians are the present threat to science, which is absurd. I didn’t learn about evolution in school, and no doubt neither did most American students, and we still have science. Fundamentalist Christians clearly don’t run the United States.

        Bad education, a political system based on the repression of the majority (in such a system limiting access to the power provided by scientific empowerment is essential…the less revolutionary cults know about how to do damage, the better), and terrible, cut-off-from-humanity science policy are the major threats to science.

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  6. A whole can of worms but have you looked into John Sullivan/Jayden X, one of several who filmed the shooting of Babbit? Far-right plant? Antifa double agent? Or confused kid looking for likes and subs and adrenaline rush? Attended many BLM protests but was quickly disavowed by activists, and has been described as a “riot chaser” who travels the country looking for revolution. He says he’s a neutral journalist who has never voted because he doesn’t believe in the 2 party system. In the video he can clearly be heard shouting to burn the place down and admitting to vandalizing a window. Interesting background detail: one of 3 black children (all boys) adopted by a white mormon army lieutenant colonel. As you know, high percentage of mormon in intelligence.

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  7. I have been reading a bit lately about the apparatus attempts to delve into the murky waters of the blogosphere. Consider yourself mapped Jasun ! They are sending footsoldiers to try and talk you in off the ledge. Little do they know that in parapoliitcal terms, its like being sent on a dinner for two with Hannibal Lecter. Good luck with that , intell

    Epistemic bubbles merely overlook alternative narratives while echo chambers actively exclude them. I pointed out in an academic context recently that the entire western system of neoliberal consumer capitalism is a gigantic echo chamber that forcefully rejects any competing worldviews and then attempts to pursue them to total destruction. All i got was stumned silence, moreso when i pointed out what we do to Nationalists, Marxists and Muslims, all with their own different systems.

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  8. A great summary of the surreal months since Election Day here in the U.S. One of the things that made it difficult for a long time for me to buy into the election fraud thesis was the absolute clownshow nature of Trump’s legal efforts (e.g. claiming Venezuela was somehow involved in reprogramming the Dominion machines). The involvement of 9/11 fixer Giuliani was also hard to square with being on the up-and-up. But now I find myself pretty sympathetic to the perspective that the whole thing was a big schismogenetic op that Trump was in on the whole time. So while he and some of his associates presented a relatively compelling case, at the same time they threw the legal battles to ensure the Trump supporting side would be left outraged and disenfranchised: http://blog.banditobooks.com/the-implications-thereof/

    If that is indeed what was intended then the op seems to have been a stunning success. With Trump’s Twitter ban and the Amazon AWS shenanigans with Parler, half the country will be cleaved off into totally separate communications channels, even running on different infrastructure. And even if this one wasn’t rigged, they’ve pretty well established that they *could* rig an election and then simply have the media insist that was not the case, and most people will buy it. Trump has been so useful for these ends that, with his acquittal in the second impeachment trial, I think there is a good chance he is going to run again in 2024.

    Is anyone aware of a solid rundown of all the best evidence for election fraud contained at a single link, free of the endless disinformation that’s been pumped into the mix to muddy the waters? I’d really like to understand a bit more about this but have had a hard time finding a good source (and perhaps, one does not exist).

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