Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The J6 Disinformation Game

A new ABC News / Ipsos poll conducted in the days right after the U.S. government charged Defendant Trump with four felony counts over his scheme to overturn the 2020 election found 32 percent of Americans think he should not have been charged and 46 percent think the charges are politically motivated. Another poll has found a majority of Republicans don’t believe Defendant Trump should have been charged at all - and if the election were held right now, they would vote for him.

This begs a question: what has happened to the eyes and ears of one third of America?

The insurrection was televised, the entire nation watched it. Trump’s exhortations to the Georgia Secretary of State to find him fake votes were recorded and can be heard on line. The scheme to put fake electors in place was carried out in public. We know, and have known since the House J6 hearings, that Vice President Mike Pence’s staff and Secret Service agents were terrified that Trump’s wrath put Pence in serious physical danger. (The gallows on the Capitol lawn was not just for Nancy.)

And yet, a third of all Americans are not just unmoved. They don’t believe their own eyes and ears. A third of America is, by my math, around 100 million people. That’s a lot of people whose minds have been wiped clear, whose devotion to the leader is North Korean.

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a 1954 book and 1956 movie, a Cold War cultural product, widely regarded as a metaphor for American paranoia about communists living next door. In it, the Pod People were a fictional extraterrestrial race that, forced to leave their own planet, become spores, float in space for millennia, and land on inhabited planets like Earth, where they replace the dominant species, spawning emotionless replicas, as the original inhabitants disintegrate.

The MAGAs and their wealthier Trumpy affiliates (the ones who love the tax cuts but don’t fly the Fuck Biden flag on their lawns) are Pod-like in their imperviousness to not just textual, but audio and video evidence of Trump’s criminal coup attempt.

The whitewashing of the insurrection, with a combination of blame-deflection and mimnimizing (oh, please, they were just excitable tourists) is surely one of the greatest propaganda operations ever undertaken. Did the syrupy croon of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, laid over the dulcet tones of the J6 Choir - men in DC lockup for bashing cops and defecating on the Capitol floor - singing the national anthem, hypnotize them? Did Fox and its nightly panel of disinfotainers pull off a mass-addling of cognitive function so that viewers, in defiance of their own senses, are convinced federal agents, in league with Antifa, were the ones beating Capitol police with Trump flags?

Many researchers are chipping away at the network of financiers, influencers and media platforms behind this coordinated brainwashing op. I can only focus in on one small corner of it, one into which I happen to have stumbled while working on another project. In the fall of 2020, federal agents arrested a gang of Michigan “militia” members and charged them with an audacious plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer and either float her out into Lake Michigan on a motor-less boat without oars, or hog tie here and “try” her for treason. I was especially intrigued because I spent my childhood in the Michigan woods near where many of the plotters spent their days building explosives, target practicing with AR 15s, while their wives and girlfriends practiced knife throwing and taught themselves nursing skills for when their men led the revolution.

I spent a few weeks in Michigan, gathering court documents in county court buildings where the men were charged and incarcerated, awaiting trial. I wrote a story on the plotters which you can read below. As the earliest and most notorious of a wave of right wing extremist threats against elected officials, the governor kidnapping plot was a kind of dry run for the DC insurrection. In spring of 2020, the men had even invaded the Michigan State Capitol armed and in battle gear and gone a-hunting for the governor.

While the men were on trial, I started noticing a Twitter feed by an Illinois woman named Julie Kelly who presented herself as a stay at home mom who just happened to be really, really interested in how the feds had set up those poor boys in Michigan. Kelly’s avatar was an American flag, and she called herself a journalist for a “news” platform called American Greatness. She had almost half a million followers - bot or not, an impressive number. As the trials got underway in Michigan, within minutes of defense arguments, she was posting cherry-picked documents to make the case that federal agents had schemed up the governor kidnapping plot to entrap these nice men who were just exercising their constitutional right to play army in the forest.

This fake journalist /influencer had previously worked for a bio-tech industry association that promotes GMO, Roundup and Aspartame. Its home page features “myth-busting on pesticides” as one of the top-read articles.

After the Michigan boys were convicted, Kelly moved on to promoting the false flag theory of January 6. Tucker Carlson (using Murdoch money) eventually produced a whole three part documentary “Patriot Purge” on this theme, singling out a Trumper named Ray Epps as the undercover agent point man for the government’s plot to attack the Capitol and blame it on MAGA. Even before the Carlson doc came out, Kelly had been hounding Epps. (Epps’ life was ruined and you can read more about him here.

Where did an online influencer and northern Illinois Just-a-Mom get the money and legal resources to produce streams of cherry-picked court documents and spew “Fed” Epps talking points?

American Greatness is financed by Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel. In 2016, he gave seed money to a new right wing media op called the Rockbridge Network, which spawned American Greatness. Chris Buskirk, the publisher and editor, is a “white nationalist lite” conservative who sometimes shows up on MSNBC and gets published in the Times.

The propaganda campaign to turn Trump’s criminal coup attempt into a federal false flag had a precursor in the response to the Gretchen Whitmer kidnap plotters. Today, thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands - of nodes like Ms. Kelly form the well-oiled and oligarch-financed right wing messaging apparatus, all singing the J6 prison choir’s bullshit song into ever-larger speakers.

And the Pod People lift their heads in unison, their eyes blank ….

RELATED READING

Whitewashing the insurrection

J6 Choir

American Greatness Influencewatch

Media Matters AmGreatness article

Rockbridge, Chris Buskirk and Thiel

My article on the Michigan militia

How Knowledge Panel polls are conducted

SOUNDING THE DEPTHS

A new in-depth article at Airmail Weekly dives into the legal documents revealing more about New York billionaire Leon Black’s Jeffrey Epstein friendship, Borgian depravity and blackmail.

The WAPO reports that if Trump ever goes to prison, the Secret Service - whose services taxpayers are bound to provide to him for life, will have to go in with him.

THREAT LEVEL

On Friday, Trump posted an open threat to Prosecutor Jack Smith on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” The federal judge has warned Defendant Trump not to influence jurors but he remains free - hard to imagine any defendant threatening a prosecutor and not waiting for trial behind bars.

Over at the Daily Wire Matt Walsh is calling for murder. “Like, if our Founding Fathers were on the scene right now, January 6th would be a -- would be a walk in the park. … Like, if Thomas Jefferson came back from the dead and looked at our government now, he would turn to us, the citizens, and say, what are you people doing? You haven't invaded Washington yet and killed all these people? What are you waiting for? What's the problem here? What's the holdup, folks?”