The Senators beat the Red Sox and Phillies, but the road trip ended badly in Baltimore as the O’s took two out of three games, with Carl Morton getting the lone win in a game that cost us Dave Kingman for three days. The O’s a re a tough team; they have quality starters, a good bullpen, and a nasty set of hitters. Pretty sure they’ll make the playoffs. Next up on Tuesday are the Cubs, who I think we have a pretty good shot at beating, but that’s what we play the games to find out. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Certainly I am not the only conservative who has suspected this mysterious “white nationalist” group of being secretly controlled by the FBI, and when the Patriot Front showed up during Friday’s annual March for Life in Washington, everybody with an X account was yelling “Fed.”
With nearly 40 years of experience as a journalist, I certainly do not wish to be counted among the “right-wing influencers and conspiracy theorists . . . peddling false narratives about [Patriot Front being] ‘Antifa’ and undercover federal agents.” It takes nearly zero research skills to discover the basic facts about Patriot Front. The group originated in the aftermath of the August 2017 “Unite the Right” riot in Charlottesville, Virginia (which I had been invited to attend/cover, an invitation I fortuitously declined). A teenager from Texas named Thomas Ryan Rousseau participated in “Unite the Right” as part of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America (VA). Rousseau then split from VA to form the Patriot Front, having gained control of VA’s online channels and using these resources to recruit some 200 members for his new group.
Thomas Ryan Rousseau
So, unless Rousseau was faking his neo-Nazi act as a teenager, he is a sincere white nationalist and his group was at least authentic in its origins. No room for “conspiracy theory” there but . . .
Among other things, Patriot Front has been plagued by what we used to call “piss-poor opsec.” Here I find myself smiling ironically as I cite my source, the Southern Poverty Law Center:
Like other hate and extremist groups, the need to recruit and grow their members makes PF a target for antifascist activists who attempt to infiltrate white nationalist groups to expose and disrupt their activities. Since 2018, antifascist activists have infiltrated PF at least five times, which has led to journalist and activist networks obtaining thousands of documents, including internal chat logs, audio and video recordings, and photographs. The laxed operational security measures of PF that are responsible for these infiltrations led to the identification of more than 130 current and former members since 2019.
Now, if Antifa activists can succeed in infiltrating Patriot Front so often, is it really a “conspiracy theory” to suspect that some members of Rousseau’s group are either (a) undercover FBI agents or (b) FBI informants? How many times have we heard Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray and others swear under oath that “white supremacists” are the Number One terrorist threat in America? The SPLC has called the Patriot Front “arguably the leading white supremacist group in the country.” Doesn’t it make sense that the FBI would be all over them?
Most people have never paid attention to how COINTELPRO-type tactics actually work, especially in the Internet Age, although we get glimpses of these tactics occasionally, such as the bizarre kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, where about a dozen “militia” types got swept up in what most would consider an entrapment that involved two undercover FBI agents and three FBI informants. If the feds can infiltrate an undercover agent who succeeds in gaining trust of a group, it’s possible for such an infiltrator to act as an agent provocateur, encouraging the group to engage in illegal acts for which they can then be prosecuted. Insofar as such agents provocateurs are influencing the group’s activities, then, the other members are unwittingly participating in a federal operation, the objective of which is their own destruction.
Let us not overlook the fact that such tactics have frequently been used against Islamic extremists — Ahmed gets “radicalized” and wants to do something to strike a blow against the Great Satan and, next thing you know, Ahmed gets caught in a sting operation, with FBI undercover agents “helping” his plans for a bombing or whatever. Yea, FBI!
If we’re going to cheer for the FBI when they’re duping jihadi wannabes like that, we would be hypocrites to condemn the FBI for employing similar tactics against Thomas Rousseau and his Patriot Front buddies. But the question is, to what extent is the FBI enabling the Patriot Front? This question arises when you consider what happened in the 2022 Idaho bust of the Patriot Front at a “Pride” counter-protest.
[P]olice in North Idaho had the leader of America’s largest white nationalist group and 30 of his followers unmasked, zip-tied and in custody.
They’d been caught on June 11, 2022, based on a tip that said a “little army” of masked men had been seen filing into the back of a U-Haul truck. Coeur d’Alene police pulled open the back door, found a squadron of men equipped with white masks, metal flag poles, homemade sheet-metal riot shields and a smoke grenade.
And on the group’s leader, Thomas Rousseau, police found a note laying out a detailed plan to establish a “confrontational dynamic” at that day’s gay pride festival.
If the threat of “white supremacy” is as serious as Merrick Garland and others keep saying it is, wouldn’t you think that the feds would jump into action to make sure that this arrest put an end to the Patriot Front? And yet, that’s not what happened at all:
Kris Goldsmith, head of an anti-fascist research organization, said the Patriot Front case should not have been handled by local prosecutors to begin with.
“Expecting a city prosecutor to take on a national white supremacist organization is disappointing,” Goldsmith said. “The FBI is just sitting on their hands.”
In fact, court documents suggest, the FBI made prosecuting Patriot Front a lot harder.
You can read the whole thing and, if you do, you’ll have to decide for yourself whether mere incompetence is sufficient to explain how the feds dropped the ball when they had a chance to wreck the Patriot Front. Instead, they got away with slap-on-the-wrist treatment, and if one were in the mood to entertain a conspiracy theory — note the hypothetical — you might conclude that the feds very much want the Patriot Front to keep going. In this hypothetical scenario, it serves the political interests of the Democratic Party to have this flamboyant white supremacist group keep showing up to stage public protests, thus helping to further the narrative that the Great Racist Menace is alive and kicking, and that there is no real distance between the Patriot Front and those evil right-wing racist Republicans who elected Donald Trump, i.e., a psyop.
Of course, this is just hypothetical speculation and, as I stipulated previously, I have no desire to be a “conspiracy theorist.” However, my experience as a journalist has taught me to be skeptical of any story that seems too “just so,” conveniently offered as validating someone’s pet political agenda, like the UVA rape hoax. The activities of the Patriot Front seem to fit that category, as they zoomed to prominence during Trump’s first term, then kept popping up at public events during Biden’s term, conveniently representing the Threat to Our Democracy that Biden kept talking about. So now, just four days after Trump got back in the White House, BOOM! The Patriot Front shows up in D.C., and we’re all expected to think this is just a coincidence? A spontaneous event?
Pam Bondi will soon be confirmed as Attorney General, and Kash Patel will be the new FBI director, and my hunch — just a hunch, not a conspiracy theory — is that we will soon see the Patriot Front disappear, like the morning dew evaporating in the noonday sun. We might never learn the whole truth (“sources and methods” must be protected), but if my hunch is correct, Trump’s DOJ won’t continue . . . Well, “sponsoring” is perhaps too strong a term for what the feds have been doing with the Patriot Front, but call it what you will, it’s going to end soon.
At 16-year-old girl was killed, another was wounded, and a third student suffered a non-shooting injury Wednesday at Antioch High School in Nashville, and the gunman, Solomon Henderson, killed himself.
There was a “manifesto,” and also another file that’s called a “diary,” posted online by 17-year-old Henderson, who also livestreamed his crime.
I’m seeing some additional claims on X about the identity of the shooter but I’m not going to post them yet because nothing has been confirmed. Authorities also haven’t said anything about a possible motive yet but it has only been a few hours so that’s not surprising.
So I went to bed early and woke up shortly before midnight and said, “OK, let’s see if they’ve ID’d the guy yet,” and started scrolling on my phone. Knowing how these things go, I checked KiwiFarms, because if anybody’s going to have the shooter’s manifesto, it’s the KF crew, right? Downloaded the PDF and it’s just utter nihilism. Someone suggested Henderson appeared to be a copycat of Wisconsin school shooter Natalie Rupnow, about whom I said this in December:
Most importantly, there is no politics here. People trying to turn Natalie Rupnow into a symbol of the Left or the Right, in order to score political points for their side, are misguided. This is not a crime with a clear political motive; this crime is a product of mental illness.
Or evil, if you’d prefer to call it that.
Ditto, Solomon Henderson. I’m sure the analysts at the FBI will have fun trying to discern some kind of coherent ideology in his manifesto, but it’s really just a collage of nihilistic craziness — “soyjak” memes, tributes to various mass murderers, “groyper” stuff, etc., and honestly what I want to say to these kids is simple: Y’ALL NEED JESUS!
Seriously. These kids see no meaning or purpose in their lives, which is an inevitable consequence of the de-Christianization of our culture. Our education system is openly hostile to Christianity, based upon the liberal secular humanist belief that Christianity is harmful, but if our Soros-funded cultural overlords were ever to make the mistake of inviting me to speak at one of their confabs at Davos or Aspen, I’d wake them up from their secular pipe dream: You think the “Religious Right” is dangerous? Wait until you get a look at what the Atheist Right has in store for you.
In the hyper-politicized media environment, incidents like this always lead to a search for some political angle, but what happens when it doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of the narrative? That was the case with Natalie Rupnow, just as it was the case with the school massacre that really got this whole trend going, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on their 1999 killing spree at Columbine High. There was no politics to what happened at Columbine; whatever Harris and Klebold were, they weren’t representatives of any political cause. They were just nihilists, killing for the sake of killing, and yet where was there any recognition of the danger posed by young people with no sense of meaning and purpose in life? Or where was the admission by the leaders of the public education system that they have created this problem?
Stipulate that mass murderers are, by definition, atypical rarities. It is always unfair to generalize from such rare examples in an attempt to scapegoat some group with which the killer is affiliated. Most of the weirdo geeks posting “soyjak” memes on a Discord server, or blabbering about “Zionist” conspiracies or whatever, are basically harmless. They may be hateful scum, but few of them are actually going to log off long enough to go commit a massacre. They’re just making chatter online. A more appropriate criticism of them would be, why are they just wasting their lives this way, spending so many hours regurgitating useless nonsense? If your teenagers or young adult offspring are engaged in such activity, ask them a simple question: Why aren’t you working?
Like, you’re spending at least 20 hours a week “gaming” or whatever, why not put that time into an actual job? Twenty hours a week at $15 an hour, that’s $15,000 a year. Certainly you could make enough to buy a gym membership, and between the extra money and improvements to your physique, you might actually be able to attract a girlfriend and stop being a useless incel. A whole lot of what’s wrong with underperforming youth — besides them needing Jesus, I mean — is simply that they have too much leisure. They are allowed to waste time doing stuff that doesn’t help them in any way, and which is in many cases detrimental to their physical and mental health. Work is always beneficial to young people; work tends to keep them out trouble, if nothing else, but the psychological rewards of work are worth considering. No matter how crappy your job may be, at least it’s better than lying around doing nothing. You get out of the house, meet actual people and hey, you get paid for working.
Doomscrolling . . . is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on the web and social media. . . .
It can be considered a form of internet addiction disorder. In 2019, a study by the National Academy of Sciences found that doomscrolling can be linked to a decline in mental and physical health.
Solomon Henderson may not be typical of anything, except as the tip of an iceberg of psychiatric damage caused by the always-online culture of the 21st century. Because my job requires a lot of online research, I have to find ways to avoid the swirling vortex of bizarre craziness that’s always out there beckoning — when you stare into the abyss for a living, the abyss is always staring back at you. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, and perhaps this would be a good time to remind readers that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:
Well, this was supposed to be done this afternoon, but apparently Substack’s servers shit themselves, so I’m just finishing it now. Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.
Mark Penn is a Democrat — he was pollster for both Clintons — so his denunciation of the last-minute pardons of Biden’s “political accomplices” carries more weight that anything a Republican might say on the subject. Biden’s tenure in the White House was corrupt from start to finish, but why bring up those 3 a.m. ballot dumps at this late date?
We have survived these four years, and now Donald Trump has been sworn in as president again, completing the greatest comeback in American political history. Will update this post momentarily.
UPDATE: As commenters have already noted, doesn’t it feel good to say “former President Biden”? And now, a few inspiring words from our 47th president’s inaugural address:
From this day on, the United States of America will be a free, sovereign and independent nation. We will stand bravely. We will live proudly. We will dream boldly, and nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans. The future is ours and our golden age has just begun. Thank you. God bless America.
TRUMP: “The golden age of America begins RIGHT NOW.”
“From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of… pic.twitter.com/CzuzoIcbKr
UPDATE II: Just minutes before he became former President Biden, the corrupt old fraud completed his disgrace:
With less than 30 minutes to go until Donald J. Trump becomes the President of the United States, Joe Biden just dropped his final act as President: Pardoning his brothers and sisters for any and all crimes they may have committed since 2014 pic.twitter.com/hJTr8fccbs
