Tag: protests

Federal authorities won’t say why armed Capitol rioters disappeared from FBI’s most wanted list

Federal authorities won’t explain why three men who participated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, have mysteriously disappeared from the FBI’s Capitol Violence Most Wanted list.

One unidentified man wore an earpiece during the riot and was filmed carrying what appeared to be a concealed handgun on his left hip. The man was pictured on the FBI’s most wanted list for over five months until he was removed without explanation on the same day the New York Times reported an FBI informant was at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A second unidentified man was filmed beating police officers with a baton during the riot. The FBI said the man was wanted for assaulting a federal law enforcement officer, but the agency removed the man from its most wanted list without explanation in late February, just weeks after his debut.

The third man, Ray Epps of Arizona, was filmed in the hours leading up to the riot urging Trump supporters to enter the Capitol to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.

Epps has not been arrested or charged for his actions. His unexplained removal from the FBI’s most wanted list on July 1 has fueled speculation from a member of the House Judiciary Committee that Epps may have agitated people to storm the Capitol at the behest of the FBI.

Video footage shows Epps, a former president of the Arizona Oath Keepers militia group, urging a crowd of Trump supporters on the evening of Jan. 5, 2021, to “go into the Capitol” the next day, provoking allegations from the crowd that he was working for the federal authorities.

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The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes

The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic. “House Democrats [waited] their turn on the House floor to talk to Dick Cheney as a beacon for American democracy,” reported CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere; “One by one, Democrats are coming over to introduce themselves to former VP Dick Cheney and shake his hand,” added ABC News’ Ben Siegel. Nancy Pelosi gravely introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to sermonize and sing about the importance of American democracy. The Huffington Post‘s senior politics reporter Igor Bobic unironically expressed gratitude for “the four legged emotional support professionals roaming the Capitol this week, helping officers, staffers, and reporters alike.” Yesterday, CNN’s Kaise Hunt announced: “Tomorrow is going to be a tough one for those of us who were there or had loved ones in the building. Thinking of all of you and finding strength knowing I’m not alone in this.” Unsurprisingly but still repellently: Kamala Harris today compared 1/6 to 9/11.

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Twitter creates January 6th “harmful” content enforcement team

Twitter has announced the formation of a team of content reviewers to scan the platform for “harmful” content relating to the January 6, 2021 riot.

The platform said that it “convened a cross-functional working group” from members of its Site Integrity division and the Trust and Safety team.

This new team will scan the platform for harmful content about the anniversary of last year’s riot at the US Capitol.

The new team is part of Twitter’s commitment to “strong enforcement action against accounts and tweets that incite violence.”

“Our approach both before and after January 6 has been to take strong enforcement action against accounts and tweets that incite violence or have the potential to lead to offline harm,” a representative for Twitter explained in a statement to Reuters.

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J6 Hysteria Is How Media And Other Democrats Are Avoiding Accountability For Their Rigging Of The 2020 Election

The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.

Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.

Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.

Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.

With the exception of a single Time Magazine article admitting there was a “conspiracy” by a “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” who worked to “change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” to create a “revolution in how people vote,” corporate media have largely kept silent about or downplayed how the establishment secured its victory for their man Joe Biden.

Time’s article didn’t come out until February 4, 2021, but in the months prior to its publication, Republicans grew increasingly concerned that the rigging it described had, in fact, happened.

Their desire for free and fair elections they could trust, elections that “well-funded cabals of powerful people” weren’t able to rig, resulted in mass protests following the November election. The fact that the election was exceedingly close didn’t help matters.

Media and other left-wing pollsters had put out preposterous suppression polls to help Biden get over the finish line. For example, the Washington Post’s final poll claimed Biden would win the swing state of Wisconsin by 17 points, indicating a nationwide blowout of historic proportions. (He won it by seven-tenths of a percent.) The actual outcome took weeks to calculate and came down to just 43,000 votes across three states, even closer than Trump’s close victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The media and other Democrats have used the January 6 riot at the Capitol as a way to ignore legitimate concerns about what they did to the election system, and as a way to continue the assault on election security.

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Seattle Police Faked Reports of Armed Proud Boys to Spook George Floyd Protesters

Seattle police staged sightings of Proud Boys in conversations on public police radio frequencies during last year’s protests over George Floyd’s murder, just after protesters had taken control of a police precinct and the police had left the “autonomous zone,” according to a scathing report released Wednesday by Seattle’s Office of Police Accountability (OPA).

The “misinformation effort,” as the report dubbed it, “improperly added fuel to the fire” of the already tense protests, wrote OPA Director Andrew Myerberg.

“The use of the Proud Boys when it was known that the transmissions would be monitored took a volatile situation and made it even more so,” he wrote.

For more than two hours on the night of June 8, officers made remarks like “It looks like a few of them might be open carrying” and “Hearing from the Proud Boys group… They may be looking for somewhere else for confrontation.” In their radio transmissions on an open channel, cops fabricated reports of a brewing fight between the Proud Boys and protesters in Pioneer Square and a police response to it.

The precinct captain who ordered the ruse, Bryan Grenon, told OPA that he was looking for “an innocent way to just throw out some distraction” at a time when the police department was short-handed and under pressure.

According to the report, an unnamed journalist who was with protesters that night told OPA “that, in his perspective, things were going fine in CHAZ/CHOP until people in the crowd heard reports that the Proud Boys were coming. The journalist stated that, when this occurred, it seemed like everyone in the crowd who owned guns went to get theirs and the event went from being peaceful to something entirely different.” CHOP stands for “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” the site of last summer’s racial justice protests.

Captain Grenon told investigators the purpose of the faked conversations was to “get [protesters] into other areas” because “we were overrun with, you know, forces or protesters.” Grenon said, “It was never my intent to cause alarm,” adding that “Hindsight is 20/20.”

Then-Chief Carmen Best told investigators that she had not been informed about the tactic.

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