The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 01.29.25 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | January 29, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.29.25 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Shit just got real.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: People You Know Can Be a Threat
EBL: The Newsreader, Jim Acosta Quitting CNN, Kazoo Day, Prime Target, and 28 January 1986 : USS Challenger
Twitchy: Megan Kelly In The Background Was All Of Us When Bernie Sanders Asked RFK Jr. To Condemn Onesies, Former Kenyan Prez DRAGS Nations Mad About Foreign Aid Cuts, and If The Left’s Triggered Now, Wait Until They See This New Poll On Dem vs. GOP Approval
Louder With Crowder: “Captain America” actor claims Captain America shouldn’t represent…America, Reporter shares shocking IMMEDIATE effect Donald Trump has had on the border crisis, Here’s how Donald Trump CAN abolish America’s income tax, The Trump Admin held their first press briefing where Karoline Leavitt unleashed berserker fury on the MSM, and Morbidly Obese Influencer Files Lawsuit Against Lyft After Driver Refuses Services
Vox Popoli: Ukraine Peace Proposal, NFL Scripting Confirmed, Dark Horse Drops Gaiman, Where the Men Are, and Why the Scripting Will Continue
Cedar Sanderson: Home Library
Bugscuffle Gazette: Poetry Tuesday
Stoic Observations: The Other Black Captain America
L’Ombre de L’Olivier: SARs & Debanking

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: The Cable Wars Continue
Don Surber: California EPA is killing the state
Protein Wisdom Reborn: Notes from a cluttered mind
STUMP: SALT Watch – Is Trump Onboard With Removing The Cap?

Amazon Warehouse Deals
H&R Block Deluxe & State Tax Software w/Bonus Refund Offer
Today’s Deals
Best Sellers – Home & Kitchen
New Releases – Home & Kitchen



 

Category: Linkagery

Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update

Posted on | January 28, 2025 | Comments Off on Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update

Y’all didn’t think I was going to let this story go with just one blog post, did you? How many times in my career am I going to get the chance to use “Vegan Transgender Death Cult” in a headline? In for a dime, in for a dollar — you’re gonna get in-depth coverage, my friends.

The “Zizian” plot continues to become more complicated:

A man accused of murder in California appears to have sought a marriage license with a woman charged in connection with the fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont.
The woman, Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington state, faces two weapons charges in connection with the Jan. 20 death of 44-year-old Border Patrol Agent David Maland.
A prosecution motion seeking Youngblut’s detention Monday says she was in frequent contact with someone who is a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.
Court records show that Maximilian Snyder, 22, was arrested by Vallejo police on Friday. He was charged Monday with murder and has a court appearance scheduled Tuesday in California’s Solano County. An attorney was not listed for Snyder.
In November, individuals identified as Teresa Youngblut and Maximilian Snyder took out a marriage license, according to a records search in Washington state’s King County. . . .
According to the criminal complaint filed in Solano County, Snyder allegedly killed a person with a knife on Jan. 17. The complaint alleges the person, identified as “C.L.,” was a witness to a crime who was “intentionally killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding” or to retaliate for his testimony.
A gofundme.com page for a Curtis Lind mentions he was attacked on his property in Vallejo on Jan. 17 and died.

Curtis Lind made the mistake of renting his property to three members of the Zizian cult — Emma Borhanian, 31, Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, 27, and Suri Dao, 21. All of them were transgender. Leatham goes by the alias “Somnulence ‘Somni’ Logencia.” In November 2022, the trio of Zizians attacked Lind with a samurai sword:

Lind’s family said he had been trying to evict a group a people who hadn’t been paying rent.
His son, Carl Lind, said, “A big part of this problem was this moratorium on rent, COVID. People took advantage of it.”
Patrick McMillan, who lives on the property in a motor home, said after the attack Lind came to him covered in blood.
McMillan said, “He had a samurai sword stuck to his back with about a foot of it sticking out in front, his face cut up all over.”
“After they attacked him he got his gun out and shot two of them, killed one of them. The other one had three shots to the chest,” McMillan said.

Emma Borhanian

Borhanian was killed, Leatham was severely wounded, and both Leatham and Dao were charged not only with attacking Lind, but also with the death of their accomplice, Borhanian. “Lind was set to testify against his alleged assailants as the sole eyewitness in a criminal trial scheduled for April,” so the murder motive was to prevent him from testifying.

Curtis Lind

Based on a post warning “the rationalist community” about the Zizians, “Suri Dao” also made bail, while Leatham/“Somni” is apparently still in custody. Meanwhile, the cult leader, Jack Lasota, a/k/a “Ziz,” was also arrested in connection with the January 2023 murder of Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69, who were the parents of a Zizian cult member named Michelle “Jamie” Zajko. However, “Ziz”/Lasota was released on bail in June 2023, but not before Maximilian Snyder, a/k/a “Audere,” had tried to raise money for Ziz’s bail. Based on the latest news, then, it appears that the Vermont shooting suspect Youngblut (who identified as “Milo”) was married to Snyder/“Audere,” who is now accused of murdering Curtis Lind. That would be no fewer than five deaths — Borhanian, Lind, Richard and Rita Zajko, and now Border Patrol agent Chris Maland — connected to the Zizian cult.

AI Doomer Cool Kids Club

What must be understood about “Ziz”/Lasota and his followers is that all this craziness originates in the West Coast world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. If you thought this tale was convoluted and confusing so far, just buckle your seatbelts, because we’re about to dive headlong into an abyss of insanity. Ziz attended a workshop sponsored by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and an associated organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). “In 2000, Eliezer Yudkowsky founded” what was to become MIRI “with the purpose of accelerating the development of artificial intelligence”:

However, Yudkowsky began to be concerned that AI systems developed in the future could become superintelligent and pose risks to humanity, and in 2005 the institute moved to Silicon Valley and began to focus on ways to identify and manage those risks, which were at the time largely ignored by scientists in the field.
Starting in 2006, the Institute organized the Singularity Summit to discuss the future of AI including its risks, initially in cooperation with Stanford University and with funding from Peter Thiel. The San Francisco Chronicle described the first conference as a “Bay Area coming-out party for the tech-inspired philosophy called transhumanism.”

Following so far? Well, because of Yudkowsky’s idea that AI could “pose risks to humanity,” he spun off CFAR to promote “rationality,” as some sort of defense against this risk. In 2016, the New York Times did a feature story about CFAR, and this would have been no more than two or  three years before “Ziz”/Lasota attended a MIRI/CFAR workshop. It would appear that among nerds interested in AI research, being part of “the rationalist community” is like membership in the Cool Kids Club.

What I’ve shared with you so far is the briefest, most superficial summary of MIRI/CFAR that I could devise. This background is important because Lasota/“Ziz” first became notorious in 2019 when he and his followers staged a protest against CFAR that resulted in a police standoff.

Ziz accused Yudkowsky of sexually abusing minors and other malfeasances, but the accusations were expressed in a bunch of jargon that struck police as insane gibberish. And this is where I direct you to Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s article from September 2024, “When Effective Altruism Takes a Dark Turn.” Y’all remember that “Effective Altruism” (EA) was part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX scam. There is a close connection between EA and the “rationality” promoted by CFAR.

The nexus of this is “AI Doomerism,” i.e., the belief that “the most pressing problem in the world is preventing an apocalypse where an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) exterminates humanity.” This is the organizing fear of the existential risk (“x-risk”) community, which concerns itself with probability of doom, “p(doom).”

Weiss-Blatt quotes AI researcher John Wentworth as saying that “some people are very predisposed to craziness spirals”:

“’AI is likely to kill us all’ is definitely a thing in response to which one can fall into a spiral-of-craziness, so we naturally end up ‘attracting’ a bunch of people who are behaviorally well-described as ‘looking for something to go crazy about.’” . . . “On that model,” he concluded, “insofar as EAs and rationalists sometimes turn crazy, it’s mostly a selection effect. ‘AI is likely to kill us all’ is a kind of metaphorical flypaper for people predisposed to craziness spirals.”

Is the point clear enough? The “rationalist community” originated with Yudkowsky, the Godfather of AI Doomerism, and it was logically predictable that this would attract a lot of crazy people, which is what ultimately explains how “Ziz”/Lasota became the leader of a vegan transgender death cult. Some further reading:

As you can see, this story is beginning to attract more widespread attention, although it is not yet a national media story. Eventually, I think it will be the subject of a documentary on Netflix, at the very least, and perhaps a segment on “60 Minutes.” In the meantime, I’ll keep updating you — got a lot of traffic Tueesday from a Reddit link — because how can I resist the temptation of writing more RADICAL VEGAN TRANSGENDER DEATH CULT headlines?

UPDATE: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Zizian ‘Anti-Law Enforcement Ideology’



 

Shop Electronics at Amazon

Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials

Shop Amazon Basics

Office & School Supplies

Category: Crime, The Transgender Cult, Vermont

Unarmed Suspect Shot to Death by Police in Tampa, and Nobody’s Protesting

Posted on | January 28, 2025 | Comments Off on Unarmed Suspect Shot to Death by Police in Tampa, and Nobody’s Protesting

Jeremiah Bailey

Well, they thought he might have a gun and, considering that he’d gone on a hit-and-run rampage that killed one man and injured three others, Tampa citizens seem to understand the situation:

The Tampa Police Department released video of the pursuit that ended with shots fired on I-275 late Sunday night.
Jeremiah Bailey, 48, was shot and killed after the pursuit. He is the suspect in a series of hit-and-runs that turned deadly.
Tampa Police Chief Lee Bercaw said it started around 8:30 p.m. Sunday with a dispute at Dollar General off Dale Mabry Hwy. and Interbay Blvd. in South Tampa.
Bercaw said Bailey used his car to block 47-year-old Eric Archield’s car, then moved his car and followed the victim to a friend’s home near W Meadow St. and S. MacDill Ave., where Bailey hit the victim with his car before taking off.
Archield suffered minor injuries and was treated at the scene, police said.
According to TPD, Bailey then intentionally hit Jesse Rickett, 43, on MacDill Ave. near Interbay Blvd. Rickett suffered head injuries and is listed in critical but stable condition at the hospital.
Minutes later, they say he purposely hit a man who was walking on the 5800 block of Interbay Blvd., police said. He later died.
Then around 10:15 p.m., a fourth hit-and-run was reported in the area of Westshore Blvd. and Lemon St. The man who was hit there was conscious and alert at the scene, TPD said.
None of the victims knew Bailey.
According to Bercaw, officers pursued Bailey onto I-275 northbound, where police executed a PIT maneuver near the Howard Ave./Armenia Ave. exit.
Police said Bailey refused to come out of the car and appeared to reach for something, leading to officers firing shots. Bailey died at the scene. . . .
Bailey’s criminal history includes battery on a law enforcement officer, battery on an EMT, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

More background: “Bailey had served prison time for attacking an Outback Steakhouse manager” and “according to court records had a history of mental health issues.” Gee, ya think so?

Bailey was still on probation at the time of his deadly rampage. So far, we haven’t gotten the “family demands answers” headlines on this case, and Ben Crump’s not showing up in Tampa to demand “justice.” Most importantly, no statues have been toppled and nobody’s looted Best Buy in “mostly peaceful” protest of this shooting, because when a career criminal gets killed by cops, nobody cares, as long as he’s white.



 

Shop Electronics at Amazon

Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials

Shop Amazon Basics

Office & School Supplies

Category: Crime, Florida

In The Mailbox: 01.27.25

Posted on | January 28, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.27.25

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Mondays have gotten a tad harder since so many Substackers like to pontificate over the weekend, and it just tends to pile up. Bitch, bitch, whine, whine.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Piglet and Pooh bemoan the nature of time.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Conservative Art or Apolitical Art?
EBL: Tulsi Time, Kaddish at Yad Vashem, Colombia accepting its illegal immigrants back, Aramaic Kaddish Sung and Played to a Melody, and Vice President JD Vance’s first interview on Deface the Nation
Twitchy: Honest Question – What is The Benefit Of Banning Treansgender Troops? Intel Officer Forgets To Remove Her Name From “Secret” Post About Sabotaging Trump Administration, and SecDef Hegseth “Deadnames” Bases Whose Names Were Changed
Louder With Crowder: Of course! Woke, Soros-funded district attorney looking for state-level charges against pardoned J6ers, Donald Trump has NOT forgotten North Carolina (unlike Democrats) and he let hurricane victims take the mic, Beware MAGA! Leftists are totally threatening you for eating Mexican food over Trump’s deportation orders, JD Vance gives his first interview as VP, “Face the Nation’s” Margaret Brennan’s face tells you how bad he CRUSHED it, and Singer makes shocking claim Ozempic left her with life-threatening bone disease
Vox Popoli: The Deep State Purge, The NFL’s Scripting Crisis, Inside the OODA Loop, One Pertinent Question, and Who is That?
Bugscuffle Gazette: Zero Out Of Ten, 
Jim McCoy: Shirtaloon’s He Who Fights With Monsters
Bacon Time: Stocking Mill Coffee
Draw & Talk Comics: Raise Your Hand If You Have This Problem
Defending The Wood Perilous: The Lesson of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man
Gab: DeepSeek – A Sputnik Moment for AI
Toni Airaksinen: CANCELLED – UMD SJP Order for “Swastika-Lite” Palestinian Flag Sweater Shelved By Clothing Company

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Condition of the Navy’s Amphibious Fleet & Its Impact On Marines, also, This Is Where The Navy Gets More Money
Dana Loesch: Selena Gomez Posts Vanity Video Weeping Over The Deportation Of Violent Criminals
Don Surber: A very Trumpy weekend
Glenn Reynolds: The Left Gave Us Trump 2.0, 
STUMP: 2025 Update On Senate Demographics, The Week In Meep, 

Amazon Warehouse Deals
H&R Block Deluxe & State Tax Software w/Bonus Refund Offer
He Who Fights With Monsters
Today’s Deals
Best Sellers – Automotive
New Releases – Automotive


 

Category: Linkagery

Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Implicated in Border Agent’s Death
UPDATE: Landlord ‘Impaled With a Sword’ by ‘Vegan Sith’ Cult Members

Posted on | January 27, 2025 | Comments Off on Radical Vegan Transgender Cult Implicated in Border Agent’s Death
UPDATE: Landlord ‘Impaled With a Sword’ by ‘Vegan Sith’ Cult Members

Jack Lasota, a/k/a “Ziz”

You’ve never heard of the “Zizians,” and neither had I until this afternoon, but you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more about them now that this weirdo California cult has been connected to the shootout in Vermont last week that left a Border Patrol agent dead. Credit to Andy Ngo for putting together the pieces of this bizarre puzzle. When the shootout went down in Vermont on January 20, the initial reports were very thin, but piece by piece, we’ve learned more about the two suspects, Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old from Seattle, and Felix Bauckholt, a math genius from Germany who had worked in the financial industry on an H1B visa. About seven months ago, Youngblut’s parents had reported her missing, saying she had cut off contact with them and they were concerned she might be in a coercive relationship. The police didn’t do anything, saying that as an adult, she couldn’t be considered a runaway.

Youngblut and Bauckholt showed up in Vermont a couple of weeks ago and attracted suspicion because they were wearing black “tactical” gear and Youngblut had a pistol in a visible holster. Eventually, this led to an attempted traffic stop on I-91 in which both Youngblut and Bauckholt pulled pistols. Bauckholt was killed in the resulting shootout, but Younglut survived and will face charges. This was mysterious. Why were they in Vermont? What were they doing with the tactical gear, an “arsenal” of weapons and even night-vision goggles? But then there’s this:

In court papers filed earlier Monday, federal prosecutors in Vermont said Youngblut and Bauckholt both possessed firearms purchased by a resident of the state in February 2024. That person, who was not identified, is a person of interest in a double homicide in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, prosecutors said.
Bauckholt flew into the U.S. in the hours before the Pennsylvania murders. Prosecutors also said that Youngblut has been in “frequent contact” with an individual who was detained during the investigation into the double homicide.
That individual is also a person of interest in a murder investigation in Vallejo, California, federal prosecutors said. No other details were provided.

That’s three other murders that this is connected to. And then, thanks to Andy Ngo (and @jessi_cata) we learned that both of the suspects in the Vermont shootout were transgender, Youngblut identifying as “Milo” and Bauckholt calling himself “Ophelia.” Furthermore, it appears that both of them were involved with the Zizians, whose leader Jack Lasota, a/k/a “Ziz,” became notorious for a 2019 protest against CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality). Among other things, the Zizians are radical vegans. The Pennsylvania double homicide was in January 2023 and the victims, Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69, were the parents of a Zizian cult member named Michelle “Jamie” Zajko.

It appears these highly intelligent people lacked common sense. They got sucked into the vortex of radical vegan transgender craziness, despite being warned about this cult, and now Bauckholt is dead, as is a Border Patrol agent, while Youngblut is likely facing life in prison.

Have I mentioned lately that Crazy People Are Dangerous?

UPDATE: Thanks to Ms. EBL for pointing this out:

The theoretical basis for Zizian social conduct is Yudkowsky and Soare’s “functional decision theory”. “Functional decision theory” is designed as an answer to Newcomb-like problems where the actions of others are conditional on which decision theory an agent uses. In normal English, it’s about situations where the environment will change depending on who you are. . . .
In Zizian thought this concept is expanded to justify behavior that would make a Sovereign Citizen blush. Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you.

As I remarked in the comments, the philosophical basis of Zizian belief is a lot of lunatic gibberish about “ethics” and “effective altruism.” Meanwhile, mainstream journalism catches up:

Two young people who applied in November for a marriage license in Washington have each been charged by authorities in separate January killings that claimed the lives of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont and an 82-year-old landlord in Vallejo, according to police and court records obtained by Open Vallejo.
Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old data scientist arrested in Northern California on Friday on suspicion of murder, and Teresa Youngblut, the 21-year-old computer science student charged last week in connection with the shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland, appear to follow a fringe, self-described “vegan Sith” ideology that started in the Bay Area and has connections to violence . . .
Vallejo police arrested Snyder around 12:40 a.m. Friday in Redding, California, in connection with the Jan. 17 stabbing death of Curtis Lind . . .
In 2022, Lind was allegedly impaled with a sword and blinded in one eye during an attack by several young people who lived in box trucks on his Vallejo property and had stopped paying Lind during the pandemic-era rent moratorium. Court records obtained by Open Vallejo show that Lind was set to testify against his alleged assailants as the sole eyewitness in a criminal trial scheduled for April.

Latter-day Manson gang, a gigantic pancake stack of craziness.

UPDATE II: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update.

UPDATE III: Linked at KiwiFarms, who took their sweet time about it.

MORE UPDATES:



 

Shop Electronics at Amazon

Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials

Shop Amazon Basics

Office & School Supplies

Category: Crime, The Transgender Cult, Vermont

Rule 5 Sunday: Snow Bunny

Posted on | January 27, 2025 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Snow Bunny

— compiled by Wombat-socho

@kbdabear on X has been posting up a storm of Rule 5 pics, including this luscious fur-clad gal.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule 5 Hard Work Friday and the first Saturday Gingermageddon of 2025.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, “Cruella DeVille”, I Puritani, Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, “Will Ye No Come Back Again?”, The Assassination of Caligula, Service Members Dancing At The Inaugural Ball, A Dance to The Music Of Time, Pete Hegseth Advances To Senate Vote, She Walks In Beauty, Greyzone, MAGA Inauguration Day, “The Pussy Hat Song”, Lady MacBiden, Dark Matter, and Trump Dances to “YMCA”

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Rule 5 Saturday – Too Tall Lucie Tabitha, Fish Pic Friday – Mermaid Stef, Holdin’ On To Something, The Wednesday Wetness, Pennsylvania Studies Blotchy Bass, Tattoo Tuesday, Today’s The Day!, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Random Celebrity News and Palm Sunday 

BACON TIME: Rule 5 Redheads

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

Amazon Warehouse Deals
H&R Block Deluxe & State Tax Software w/Bonus Refund Offer
Deals on Premium Beauty Products
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts


 

Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: A Long Week Of Much Baseball

Posted on | January 26, 2025 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: A Long Week Of Much Baseball

— compiled by Wombat-socho

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.

5-4 is good enough for a Curly W1

FMJRA 2.0: Reds Menace
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: Meanwhile, Back In The Kitchen
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL

END OF AN ERROR: Joe Biden Leaves in Disgrace as Trump Returns Triumphant
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.21.25 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Black Incel Solomon Henderson, 17, Identified as Antioch High Shooter
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.23.25 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.23.25 (Evening Edition)
357 Magnum
EBL
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 01.24.25
357 Magnum
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending January 24::

  1.  EBL (8)
  2.  357 Magnum (7)
  3.  A View From The Beach (6)

 

Amazon Warehouse Deals
H&R Block Deluxe & State Tax Software w/Bonus Refund Offer


 

Category: FMJRA Award

Is the ‘Patriot Front’ a Fed PsyOp?

Posted on | January 25, 2025 | Comments Off on Is the ‘Patriot Front’ a Fed PsyOp?

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.



 

Shop Electronics at Amazon

Save on Groceries and Everyday Essentials

Shop Amazon Basics

Office & School Supplies

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Crime, Racism
« go back — keep looking »