Hysteria and Error

The Risk of MAGA Stalwarts Losing Focus

Note: If we [citizen journalists] are going to be the new media, we cannot fall into the same pattern of blind partisan loyalty and ignoring facts as has been the case with the failing corporate media machine. We have to apply the same level of scrutiny and accountability towards those we tend to agree with as we do with those we don’t. The purpose of a free press is to hold power to account, everything else is just punditry and cheerleading.

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For a movement so beset by corporate pundits, strategists and spin doctors who claim that it’s ‘built on a foundation of lies,’ you’d think that extra effort would be exhausted by MAGA’s stalwarts in trying to make sure you have all the facts before opining on the issues of the day.

Unfortunately, this has not always been the case.

Of the people who voted for Donald Trump in this last election, there are a variety of individuals with hopes and beliefs that are not exactly aligned—we saw this with the recent bruhaha between the tech bros and the Steve Bannon contingent—but there are also differences between the everyday Joes in the movement.

Some people only really care about seeing their team win; the Fox News GOP cult of personality has completely captured them, and they see everything through that lens.

You also have the zealots, those who believe their savior can do no wrong. Admittedly, I veer in and out of this grouping. Donald Trump could roll out the North American Union, digital IDs, smart cities, and everything else on the World Economic Forum’s wish list, and these people would bend over backward trying to convince you that it’s actually a good thing, that it’s all “part of the plan.”

Then you have a skeptical contingent, those who are aware of the establishment and are hoping that Donald Trump will put up a meaningful fight against it. These wary individuals will prioritize results over feelings. I think that people who are currently in this category were pulled from all over the spectrum in this last election. In many cases, they weren’t in the trenches with us for the 8-year process that molded so many of us into loyalists to the Trump cause.

There are also those who reluctantly came on board as a result of the Musk, Gabbard, and Kennedy alliance.

Some of these people, even many of those who consider themselves conservative now, are more concerned with the defeat and exposure of the deep state than they are with conforming their personalities to the partisan talking points and dogmatic beliefs held by Con inc. and pop-conservativism.

Newcomers to this movement see that they’ve been lied to and have broken with the mockingbird media, that capitalizes on fear and stokes hysteria, only to come to this movement and see certain factions peddling more of the same.

Here’s a micro-example of what I’m talking about:

Below is a tweet from the popular Libs of TikTok, a conservative influencer who should require no introduction. In the tweet you’ll notice an MSNBC Headline “Laken Riley’s killer never stood a chance,” which Libs reposted, saying “The media is the enemy of the people.”

We can only assume that Libs’ saw the headline and—after years of consuming the contaminated rot that is modern journalism—assumed that MSNBC was attempting to drum up sympathy for Laken Riley’s killer and his attorney.

However, upon applying a modicum of investigative rigor, one finds that Libs’ assumption was premature. Here’s a selection from the same article:

"Sometimes defense counsel just gets handed a truly awful, unwinnable case. The defense’s choice of a bench trial not only saved the state the resources of a wasted jury trial; it also likely avoided unnecessarily prolonging this traumatic experience for the victim’s family."

So, as you can see from the excerpt above, and all throughout the article in question, the author describes Laken Riley’s killer as essentially indefensible. If Libs’ had only read the article, instead of clamoring to join the chorus of the conservative outrage mob, then she would have seen that her and the author actually have the same opinion.

If MAGA has any hope of ushering in a new political age and exposing the skullduggery of the established order in DC, it's going to need the people’s trust, as much of the public as possible. Yet, there are still those who simply see this in terms of right vs. left, and take every opportunity to twist current events to support their own outlook. This kind of thing leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths and has a deleterious effect on MAGA’s ability to win hearts and minds.

This is all setting the stage for a critique of the greater conservative movement’s response to the recent terror attacks, which, in my opinion, were exploited to push an unrelated narrative. In case you need clarification, I’m referring to both the tragedy in New Orleans and the Cyber Truck fireworks incident at Trump Tower in Las Vegas.

Now, there’s a boatload of intrigue here that many others have hashed out on a litany of SubStacks and Podcasts; from the potentially intended symbolism of a vehicle created by Musk exploding near a building built by Trump to the Fort Bragg connections shared by both perpetrators—there’s certainly plenty of speculation to be had about things far more consequential than ISIS. For my part, I am only interested in commenting on some of the dubious reporting and commentary coming from prominent individuals associated with the greater movement.

The Ghost of PsyOps Past

Some of you may recall that time we, as a nation, collectively relinquished our rights and gave the Federal government unprecedented surveillance powers all in the name of fighting terrorism and bolstering our “national security.”

Now, some 23 years after the events of 9-11, many polls have shown that Americans largely regret supporting the Patriot Act, the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and Afghanistan, and other excesses taken during the “global war on terror.” However, some Psychological Operations are so strong, so anchored to the psyche that they persist in shaping Americans’ worldview well into the future despite being exposed as the propaganda that it was.

Watching conservative media this past week in the wake of the two attacks (New Orleans, Las Vegas) felt as if I’d been transported in time back to 2002 at the height of the Terror hysteria. I believe most of us can agree that our country was radically transformed by the ability of the government to exploit the terrorist attack of 9/11, to convince us to start wars that many in the government wanted to start well before 9/11, as well as to significantly bolster the surveillance of American citizens.

These kinds of attacks are valuable to those who wish to capitalize on them for an agenda, typically regarding some kind of militarism or war, or a crackdown on civil liberties, but most importantly, it is done to shape and steer consensus in a certain direction. This is exactly what I observed last week in corporate conservative media, but in Trump world as well.

Before I go through the litany of disappointing and unfortunate takes by many figures in the movement, I want to set the stage by revisiting the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo and the left’s response to it.

In that attack, the shooter was an avowed white supremacist who went to a heavily African American neighborhood, entered a supermarket, and began executing as many people as he could. Like all sensational killing sprees, the shooter left a manifesto that was rather similar to the one left by the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand. Naturally, the corporate media and Democrat politicians seized both opportunities to advocate their policy agendas and heap scorn on their political opposition.

Blame was being cast on just about every major conservative figure, but they particularly tried to claim that the person who was most to blame for the attack was Tucker Carlson.

These accusations were completely cooked up; in the manifesto, the shooter listed many individuals who inspired him, but nowhere did he mention Tucker Carlson. Still, those individuals captured by that corporate liberal media cult of personality took it as gospel; in their minds, it was Tucker Carlson’s fault.

There are many such cases.

It’s almost a political tradition in the U.S. at this point that, whenever there is some tragic event where an individual commits a violent act against the citizens of a country, both political parties rush to determine the sex, ethnicity, and ideology of the individual to use as some kind of weapon against the other side.

In the above example, it was used to justify the government's official claim at the time that the greatest threat to the American homeland and its national security was not al-Qaeda or ISIS or Islamic radicalism, but right-wing populism. As always, the reality is far more nuanced than they portrayed. I think we can all agree that casting shade on such a wide range of people is historically a dangerous thing for governments to do, and highlights the hypocrisy of the “inclusive left.”

However, the left is not alone in this type of behavior, as was evidenced this past week.

The two events in question can be seen below.

First, we have the New Orleans incident, where a man drove his car down Bourbon Street on New Year’s morning, knowing people would be in the streets and clearly with the intent to cause as much damage and loss of life as possible; this intention was made explicit in his manifesto.

The driver was identified as 42-year-old Shamsud Din Jabbar, a United States citizen and Army veteran.

In the second incident, we’re told a decorated soldier named Matthew Livelsberger exploded a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas.

You might notice how the perpetrators of both attacks were not only American citizens, but they had even served in the armed forces. However, in the soulless world of political squabbling, it is a rule of thumb to never let the truth get in the way of a good attack line, especially if it drums up sentiment for military activity.

So, to get a taste of how corporate conservative media and Republican politicians are shaping the discourse around these attacks, I present you with a clip from Fox News, featuring House speaker Mike Johnson:

Fox News, showing an image of a brown man as Johnson pontificates about open borders would lead the low-information observer to assume that Jabbar was a terrorist from some Muslim country who came here illegally with the sole intent of committing acts of terror against the United States. Despite the angle both Fox and Johnson seem to be going with here, the fact remains that Jabbar was a legal U.S. citizen.

Now, you can agree with the points that Mike Johnson is saying here, that untrammeled immigration is an actual threat to our national security and that open borders can lead to more acts of terrorism, but that doesn’t change the fact that what he’s insinuating here is completely false. The border has absolutely nothing to do with this attack, and it’s not exactly clear whether or not Mike Johnson even realizes this.

Now, what he’s saying is half true. The attacker had expressed recent and sudden support for ISIS. Before that, he was a relatively banal figure. He worked as a manager of residential apartment buildings, he served in the Army and he worked in kind of paper-pushing jobs, but according to his family, it's only very recently, within the last year, that he started to become much more focused on extremist versions of Islam.

Of course, Christopher Wray’s FBI sent out some goon to do a presser, where he put on the same kind of righteous outrage act that we saw countless pundits and spokespeople for the government put on in the wake of 9-11; he also fumbled as badly as Joe Biden at the podium.

Additionally, it is worth noting that ISIS, at the time of this writing, has not yet claimed responsibility for the New Orleans attack.

Again, I’d remind you that the purpose of this article is not to change anyone’s opinions on Islam or open borders, but rather to highlight how easily certain elements of this movement are still utilizing and/or being swept up by the same tired propaganda tricks that were used to manufacture consent in the post 9-11 era.

I’m only highlighting the fact that people are still susceptible to it, and, unfortunately, some are willing to use it to further their political agendas whether they realize it or not.

On January 1, just hours after the attack, the Republican attorney general of Louisiana, Liz Murrill went on Fox News to spew more of the same.

Not only did Fox News lie about the suspect driving the car across the border, but it turns out the car never even crossed the border at all. It was just driving around Eagle Pass over a month ago.

You cannot simply make up facts that you hope are real to forward a cause you have been supporting for a long time; doing so actually hurts the initiative and fuels the idea that paranoid conservatives are trying to close the border because they’re mindlessly racist.

It’s a lesson for anybody watching these things unfold to be extremely guarded and skeptical before rushing to X to post your outrage take.

Fox News has since corrected the report.

Consider the war in Ukraine—how, in the two or so weeks after the attack, the media perfectly manipulated the emotions of Western audiences to support that war, particularly those on the left who had already been primed during the previous 6 years to see Russia as this looming adversary working with Donald Trump to snuff out everything good and decent in the world.

They showed a constant barrage of clips and interviews designed to maximize public support for all that was to come. This is the same strategy we saw deployed following the October 7 attack in Israel, and it seems as though we are watching it happen again, this time targeting conservatives and playing the song to their tune.

I always thought that the lesson of 9/11 was that you can't just go crazy and start supporting any maximalist response that is put up to you after a horrific incident or violent act because you'll come to regret it. The reason you will regret it is because it is dishonest. It is an improper method of reasoning that leads to acts that are at best ineffective, if not morally repugnant.

Stephen Miller, the future president Trump's senior immigration counselor, said that this incident should make us more fearful of both of these issues: Islam and immigration.

This is a prime example of what makes me so frustrated with the current state of things. We act as though the needle has moved so far yet we get statements like this that contradict the truth.

Islamist terror was demonstrably a United States-sponsored creation; Al-Qaeda and ISIS didn’t exist until the Western hegemon and its intelligence apparatus—with the support of friends in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—began grooming future enemies during the Soviet-Afghan war, radicalizing entire generations by indoctrination in much the same way we see wokeness spreading in America today.

At this point, I think we deserve to be treated like adults.

It’s like when your parents continue to pretend that Santa Clause exists after you’ve caught them placing presents under the tree. Stop pretending that Islamic extremism wasn’t the direct result of United States operations in the region. The people deserve to be told the truth instead of being slapped across the face with weak ass Bush-era rhetoric.

It is not my intent here to deny that a violent, extremist current exists within Islam, but let’s be crystal clear about what nurtured, fueled, and facilitated that current: it was the dark parts of our government, intelligence community, and military which have long operated outside of the public purview and with no government oversight.

There’s plenty of literature and documentation on how this happened.

If you enjoy a good read, you could look into America’s Jihad, The Terror Factory, a 2002 Washington Post article called From the U.S., The ABC’s of Jihad, or you could read an in-house encapsulation of the subject titled Operation Cyclone - The Seeds of Terror.

I believe that these knee-jerk reactions to news stories are having a net negative effect on the movement. I believe we are at a place where the American people are ready to hear the hard truths about what really created “Islamist terror” and how fear has been used against us.

It gets worse. Here's the prominent conservative personality Tomi Lahren’s take:

You know, if you are in our streets, waving Palestinian or ISIS flags and chanting an intifada revolution, you should probably be on a watchlist and/or deported immediately… Just a thought.

So now, according to the denizens of pop-conservatism, you should be PUT ON A WATCH LIST if you express that you disagree with Israel’s U.S. funded war against Palestine by waving a Palestinian flag.

Has the pendulum already swung so far back that we’re now going to employ the same kind of rhetoric and tactics used by the liberal elite against conservatives for the last decade?

Granted, Foreign agents, extremists and the (Soros) NGO arm of the apparatus are balls deep in these protests and the organizations that orchestrate them, but by and large, it is regular American citizens who the ones protesting, who empathize with the civilians of that country.

Additionally, I wonder how the sizable voting block that swung in favor of Trump in Dearborn Michigan feels about this kind of sentiment?

She also conflates the Palestinian flag with the ISIS flag, which showcases a general lack of understanding and differentiation between a country whose citizens are being culled and a U.S.-created Terrorist organization.

It’s all the same though, right?

There’s no discernable difference between what Lahren is advocating for here and what the Biden regime has done to Conservatives because of J6.

Here is a Tweet from the exact same person just two years ago:

Free speech REALLY triggers the Left. Weird.

If you're somebody who's arguing that the government should crack down on people, including Americans, or put them on a watch list for waving the flag of a cause you dislike, you are not somebody who's in a position to lecture anybody else about being triggered by free speech.

Here’s a tweet from Randy Fine, a state senator from Florida who's running to fill the seat vacated by Florida congressman Matt Gaetz. He is the overwhelming favorite to win that seat in a special election that's going to be held later this month. He's such a fanatical supporter of Israel that it's going to make Lindsey Graham and Debbie Wasserman Schultz look like Hamas supporters.

So we have the same people who claim to hate the neocons sounding like rabid neocons.

Here's Gad Saad, who is a fanatical Israel supporter as well, a prominent and popular commentator on the right.

Note, he’s not merely referring to the extremists and radicals, but Islam in general; everyone from Loise Farrakhan to the Wu-Tang Clan should be declared an existential threat to the West?

Fortunately, there were individuals in Trump's universe who opposed this. Richard Grenell, who was a high-ranking official in the State Department under Trump, is also well-known in the MAGA community and currently holds a diplomatic position at the State Department. Grenell was even a candidate for the position of secretary of State, but Trump ultimately selected Marco Rubio for reasons that are not yet clear.

In response to Randy Fine, Grenell did what most partisan hacks are incapable of: he exercised nuance.

The real goal of the consensus builders and foreign policy wizards here is to convince Americans to hate Muslims, to not even differentiate between the various sects and nationalities, in large part because there are a lot of people who want the United States to continuously finance Israel, but also, there are those who still want an escalation with Iran to usher in what Steve Bannon calls “the kinetic part of the third World War.”

Again, it’s not my goal to convince everyone to love Islam or that untrammeled immigration isn’t destroying this country—obviously it is. However it is my goal to let you know that, from my personal perspective, we’re being played.

Clowns in MAGA clothing are using language and issues (IE Immigration, Terrorism) to lull you into place where you’re going to support whatever comes next. They want you focused on the man in the turban rather than the wolf with an American flag pin on his lapel, they want you to see Jihadis in every shadow.

Here’s some data that shows how the opposite is actually true, that extremist Muslim plots have been trending downward to virtually nil for the last several years.

Despite this, they want you to believe that there are Muslims lying in wait around every corner, plotting the destruction of America, when in reality the ones who are truly plotting America’s destruction are in Washington DC, occupying the highest halls of power in the land.

It’s time that individuals who seek to be spokespersons for the movement get hip to the less than honorable role that the United States played in creating the Islamic extremist threat in the world, and call out the grave, costly errors of the past rather than attempting to memory hole them.

We always talk about how the United States is on a posture of endless war, that our Pentagon is bloated, that our U.S. Security State is out of control, that it has unlimited powers and interferes in our politics for reasons that do not benefit the American people; and naturally people ask, how did things get this way?

These tragedies are valuable to bad actors because human emotion is very powerful, and people who understand how to exploit those emotions in the moment to build consensus and direct you to some cause that they want you to support.

I believe it is the responsibility of all individuals—in this movement especially—to be skeptical of the claims being made by the government and the media, as well as the attempts to exploit these events for a political narrative and/or agenda.

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