By PAUL
MIRENGOFF | POWERLINE
Thursday was the day when some seem to have
feared that supporters of Donald Trump would attack the Capitol. To meet this
supposed threat, National Guard members armed with M4 rifles were out in force.
But the assault on the Capitol did not occur.
According to The
Washington Post, the threat “proved to be a mirage.”
Was there a reasonable basis to fear an
attack? The Post says that the fear was based on predictions by some Trump
supporters that the former president would return to power on March 4, which
used to be Inauguration Day.
But was there any reason to believe that
Trump supporters would commemorate this supposed event by storming the Capitol?
I doubt it.
None of these elements was present yesterday.
Trump did not call on supporters to come to D.C. Trump himself was in Florida
and gave no speech, as far as I know. Congress was engaged in no activity
affecting the outcome of the 2020 election.
Were Trump supporters coming to Washington in
large numbers? Nothing in the Post’s report suggests that they were. Thus, it
seems that the show of force was a response to an imaginary threat.
The Capitol area has been a militarized zone
for two months. Yesterday, the militarization was even more pronounced.
According to the Post:
Along the fence, which stretches from the
east side of the Supreme Court to the Mall, police shooed away anyone who
lingered nearby.
“Have you seen the news?” they asked.
A better question would have been, have you seen the fake news.
About 5,200 Guard members remain on duty in
Washington. The security operation costs $2 million per week to maintain. The
Guard’s mission here is scheduled to end March 12, but the Capitol Police has asked
that it be extended for 60 days.
Why are the troops still here? Why will they
remain after yesterday’s false alarm?
One explanation is that Capitol police force
officials and others with a say want them here. They don’t want to
tolerate any risk, however small, of another January 6. It doesn’t
matter to them whether Capitol Hill is oppressively militarized. That’s not
their concern.
Another explanation is that some officials
want to promote the view that Trump supporters pose an ongoing threat to the Capitol.
They want to get all the mileage they can from January 6.
Whatever the true explanation — and both of
the two above can be true — I think the oppressive security measures on Capitol
Hill are a disgrace.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/03/threat-to-capitol-was-a-mirage.php
________________
Tucker Carlson: The mainstream media doomsday
cult and the growth of the police state
How to justify indefinite occupation by any
means necessary.
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host explains why lawmakers fled
Washington ahead of an imaginary invasion
QAnon is the greatest threat we face. Not inflation,
not China, QAnon. Everyone is saying this, but you may be
wondering: Just how dangerous is QAnon? Here's the answer: the District
of Columbia National Guard announced Friday that all troops who
took part in the mission to protect our democracy from internet conspiracy
theorists will now receive medals in recognition of their heroic sacrifice.
The primary medal is called the Presidential Inauguration
Support Ribbon. That's for people who were there for President Biden's
inauguration. But that medal will be supplemented, in cases in which our heroes
have earned it, by the Emergency Service Ribbon. So if you're a D.C. Guardsman
who's been on duty in the city since late January, protecting America from
Trump voters, you can add another medal to your chest. More may be coming.
According to Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Carver, "Other federal decorations
are also being considered."
That seems like a big deal. For context, more than 60,000
American soldiers and Marines fought on Guadalcanal in the South Pacific during
the Second World War. About 15,000 of them died or were wounded there. Not one
of those men got an official Guadalcanal medal for the experience, because the
Pentagon didn't offer them. Guadalcanal may have been horrible and bloody, but
it just didn't justify its own ribbon. Guadalcanal wasn't North Capitol Street.
The Imperial Japanese weren't as fanatical as Trump voters and not half as
dangerous.
Thursday, they told us, the war against QAnon was likely
to escalate intensely. March 4 would be the Tet Offensive in the fight against
right-wing insurrectionism. It was something called "QAnon Inauguration
Day." Now, we've never heard of that before, but then we don't work at the
FBI. The FBI has been monitoring the enemy through "SIGINT" --
that's "signals intelligence" for the neophytes out there. That means
tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok, James Bond stuff.
According to what our guys were hearing in the field,
QAnon was preparing an invasion of Washington. And that means thousands of
bearded groovy shamans in Viking hats marching across the Key Bridge to pillage
Georgetown Cupcakes and end our democracy. It would have been a gruesome
sight. Needless to say, Nancy Pelosi stopped work in the House of
Representatives so that members of Congress could flee the city for their
lives, and many did.
Andy Kim sounded like a man preparing for the worst. He
went on to tweet: "Another wave of sadness comes from the fact that this
is not getting better. FBI director said this threat is 'metastasizing.'"
Not everyone ran from the sound of the approaching QAnon
shamans. A few hardened war correspondents, like Chris Bedford of The
Federalist, ran toward that sound. Chris Bedford of the Federalist is a
man like that. While our elected representatives were clinging to the struts of
the last chopper out of the city, Chris Bedford was at the Capitol itself.
And what was the scene there? With an empty street behind
him, he said, "I was told that all of us conservatives are insurrecting
today. Am I at the wrong place?"
No, Chris Bedford, you weren't in the wrong place. There
was simply nobody there. It took The Washington Post five crack reporters to
determine this. They rushed to the scene, and their conclusion was,
"…streets were quiet. People walked their dogs in the morning sun. Masked
students sat on steps drinking coffee. Construction crews continued with their
projects." That was their dispatch.
Jeff Bezos spared no expense. One reporter was assigned
to monitor the construction crews. Another on the dog walking beat. No one
there.
So why wasn't there anyone there? Where was the QAnon
battle? "What?!" said MSNBC. "What QAnon battle? Nobody really
thought there was going to be a QAnon battle."
Anchor Chuck Todd asked NBC News Justice correspondent
Pete Williams: "Have we learned more about any specifics of this
threat, or are you starting to think this is under the umbrella of maybe where
we're being a little more precautious [Author's note: This is not an actual
English word] since we underreacted on January 6th?"
"Definitely the latter. Chuck, no question about
it," Williams answered. "The intelligence that was gathered by
law enforcement, I'm told, was of a specific group talking about the idea of
doing an attack on the Capitol today on March 4th, talking about an idea, in
other words, aspirational. I don't think anybody expected anything to happen
today. But nonetheless, you know, abundance of caution seems to be the watch
phrase here."
Did you catch the key line from Williams? "I don't
think anybody expected anything to happen today."
"But wait a second," you sticklers for
precision might be asking, "didn’t the FBI issue a bulletin warning the
country that a military force was planning to seize control of the Capitol
building? Didn't they put up razor wire around the whole place and send in
thousands of soldiers with rifles? Didn't Congressman Andy Kim and his friends
run away in sadness and terror and then tweet about it?"
Yeah, that all happened. But it wasn't a big deal. It was
a drill, just a drill. You can relax now.
That's one explanation for the empty Capitol yesterday.
But, by the time night fell and the city remained quiet -- except, of course,
in the poor neighborhoods where people are still shooting one another in ever-
growing numbers and no one is noticing -- MSNBC had decided that, in fact, they
had saved the day.
It turns out QAnon didn't invade Washington because
neo-liberal cable news anchors successfully defended our country. What Joshua
Chamberlain was to Little Round Top, Chris Hayes was to QAnon Inauguration Day.
"This was the scene in Washington, D.C.
today," Hayes intoned last night, "where two months after
the attempted insurrection, the area around the Capitol is still on lockdown
because of worries over postings on QAnon forums about a plot for another
violent attack today, March 4. Thankfully, nothing happened."
Reporter Brandy Zadrozny chimed in, "I will say that
media coverage of how silly this all is made it seemingly less palatable for
QAnon people over the last week ... It's a lot, Chris. It always is with these
people. Luckily, they stayed behind a computer."
It turns out QAnon’s battalions look to MSNBC for their
news coverage -- maybe it's on in their break room. And after watching
Chris Hayes and Brandy Zadrozny flex their intellectual muscles, they realize
they were totally outgunned. These MSNBC people are just too clever, so QAnon
decided to stay home and fight another day.
Newsweek, for one, was not buying that. One of
their reporters came up with this explanation: "QAnon theorists switch the date to March 20 after no
Trump inauguration, call the March 4th date 'false flag.'"
Well, how did Newsweek know what QAnon was up to? Well,
the story explained that a man called Ken had "told reporter Dave Weigel
that Donald Trump will be inaugurated again on March 20."
So, in other words, forget everything you heard about
March 4, Ken told Dave, the real invasion is going to be March 20. So be
afraid.
At some point, listening to all this, you have to wonder
how the Democratic Party and its minions in the news media are different from
any other doomsday cult. They're always telling us the world is going to end,
whether it's from global warming or a White nationalist insurrection. When the
world doesn't end, they don't even pause and they don't seem ashamed. They just
change the date of the world ending. It's all pretty embarrassing, but they
never seem embarrassed.
Jeane Dixon used to do this. She was a professional psychic
and had a column in hundreds of papers for decades. Dixon once predicted
the world would end on February 4, 1962. When that didn't
happen, she very cleverly just extended the timeline and predicted
Armageddon in 2020. Lucky for Jeane Dixon, she was long dead by 2020 and she
didn’t have to explain why the world still existed, not that anyone would have
asked.
Nancy Pelosi is our Jeane Dixon, a batty old
soothsayer who just happens to run the Congress. How long until that Ken guy,
who talked to Dave, the one of the Newsweek article, winds up in an FBI
bulletin justifying another indefinite extension of the occupation of the
Capitol? More razor wire? Really? I don't think these guns are powerful
enough. Let's bring in howitzers. We're not even joking. Remember, the
FBI isn't concerned with what's actually going to happen. They're concerned
with what one or two random people write online or put on TikTok.
And as long as what those people put on TikTok justifies
more power for the people in charge, the FBI, their slavish servants will put
it in a terror alert and scare the crap out of the country to justify even more
power for their bosses.
How do we know they do this? Because they've done it a
lot. They did it in January and our media repeated it without any
hesitation whatsoever. The dummies were terrified. They had a news alert
for you: QAnon was coming to "all 50 state capitals and the U.S.
Capitol." According to the FBI, QAnon was about to go national, if not
international. The sleeper cells were going to activate the week of Biden's
inauguration.
Whatever happened to those 51 armed protests? Well, they
came down to just one guy. A dude called Mark Leggiero, who was seen peacefully
waving a flag at the state capitol in Albany, New York.
"I came out, wanted to be part of the patriot party
to join supporters of Trump," he said. "I find myself kind of by
myself out here, but [I've] come out here with nothing but peaceful
intentions. I wanted to be peaceful, you know, everything to be peaceful."
Do you ever notice how all the scary internet conspiracy
theorists -- the radical QAnon people -- when you actually see them on camera
or in jail cells, as a lot of them now are, are maybe kind of confused with the
wrong ideas, but they're all kind of gentle people now waving American
flags? They like this country. They're not torching Wendy's. They're
not looting retail stores. They're not shooting cops. No, that's not them, it's
the other people doing that.
Good thing Mark Leggiero wasn't shot to death by the
police like Ashli Babbitt. He might be if he tried that today. What's amazing
is that even as they lie to us again and again and again about the threat of
QAnon, the insurrection, the White supremacist militia hiding in the closet
-- hyping it all beyond recognition and doing it for their own
psychological and political reasons -- they downplay and ignore actual violence
in this country. The violence that is rapidly accelerating in every city in the
nation and killing a lot of people. It's been going on for months.
An AP reporter called Jonathan Lemire denied this
week that there were violent Black Lives Matter riots this summer.
"In June, these were nonviolent protesters, racially
mixed, a lot of young people fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement, those
outraged by the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed under the knee of a
White police officer in Minnesota. There was no violence there ... And the
Biden White House has made it clear that they think that the threat posed by
domestic terrorism is equal to that posed by international terror groups like
ISIS, which is such a sobering thought that fellow Americans could be perceived
as such a dangerous threat to their countrymen and women," he told MSNBC.
There was no violence in Minneapolis? Have you been
there, Dumbo? We were there two weeks ago. Go to the spot where George Floyd
died, on the sidewalk outside a market. The whole area is trashed. The
police station down the road is still boarded up because the lunatics burned
it. No, there was no violence. It was more like a Pepsi commercial. It was
multiracial. They were arm-in-arm.
No, it was QAnon. It was QAnon who burned hundreds of
buildings, killed more than 20 people, shot more than a dozen cops during the
George Floyd riots. Yeah, it must have been QAnon. Everyone knows that, because
QAnon is the real threat.
______________
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's
opening commentary on the March 5, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson
Tonight."
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-mainstream-media-doomsday-cult-police-state
_____________________
IN
THE NEWS
Tucker: What happened to the QAnon incursion of Capitol Hill?
TUCKER CARLSON: THE OCCUPATION OF WASHINGTON AND LIBERALS'
DEEPEST FEARS
MEDIA
FEARS OF MARCH 4 VIOLENCE BY QANON DON'T AMOUNT TO ANYTHING
FLASHBACK: MEDIA HYPES NON-EXISTENT RIGHT-WING INAUGURATION
DAY VIOLENCE
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: 'MY GUT'S TELLING ME' TRUMP WHITE HOUSE
BEHIND LACK OF CAPITOL PROTECTION JAN. 6
QANON:
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE FRINGE CONSPIRACY THEORY AND ITS INFLUENCE
HEAVILY FORTIFIED STATEHOUSES AROUND US SEE SMALL PROTESTS
LIBERAL MSNBC HOST OFFERS NO PUSHBACK AS AP REPORTER CLAIMS GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS WERE NONVIOLENT
