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From the 2020 Election to the Capitol Riot: What REALLY Happened…?

Q-Anon: Trust the Plan

The even more serious question might be ‘What almost happened?’ And how much of what transpired between the Presidential Election and the Storming of the US Capitol is being covered up…?

It would be an understatement to say that it’s been really tricky trying to work out or understand what exactly played out during (a) the US Presidential Election and (b) the Storming of the Capitol on January 6th.

Everything has unfolded in such a fog of confusion – of propaganda and conspiracy theory and counter propaganda and counter conspiracy theory – that ascertaining the clear truth is more or less impossible.

That nebulous and confused dynamic in fact characterises virtually all media/information now in this ‘post-truth’ world: but, in the case of the Presidential Election and the Capitol Riot, it’s even more ridiculous.

That said, there’s some very curious information I want to get to here shortly. There’s some really strange stuff that needs to be taken into account.

I’ve spent the passed couple of months really trying to dig into this confused narrative, and I want to lay out here the case for the following; that (1) the ‘Storming of the Capitol’ may have been merely the visible part of a broader plot that may have involved the military and a planned coup; (2) that this broader plot was abandoned at the last minute, leaving the rioters at the Capitol as the fall guys to take all the blame; (3) that the Q-Anon Psy-Op was being run by Psychological Operations specialists for political purposes; (4) that the Nashville bombing on Christmas Day was connected to a planned coup or military-linked intervention to block the peaceful transfer of power, and (5) that all of it might link back to Fort Bragg.

I will of course fully illustrate why I’m making that case and will provide various items of supporting evidence.

We need to ask the question: how close did the United States actually come to either a coup or to the inciting incident of either a Civil War or a move into dictatorship?


But let’s just start with some more basic questions first: and then work our way back to those crucial questions.


First, was the election rigged for Biden and the Democrats, as Trump and the MAGA movement claimed?

Was Trump trying to stage a coup in refuting the legitimacy of the election – and then encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol? Or was the ‘coup’ itself a false-flag exercise, as some claim?

And is the media’s use of the words ‘coup’ or ‘insurrection’ even excessive or misleading – when, in reality, it was more like a riot?

We should address all of that.

But on the allegedly rigged election: it wouldn’t surprise me if election fraud was going on. We saw what the DNC itself did to Bernie Sanders and his supporters for the sake of Hillary in 2016: where outright foul-play was apparently employed to deny the progressive wing of the party any path to the White House. But then, there were also claims – right or wrong – that Republican-aligned actors had rigged the 2016 election in favor of Trump.

Which, given the extent of manipulation involved in helping Trump get elected (the Cambridge Analytica strategy, for example), isn’t too far-fetched a possibility.

So, for all the mainstream outrage over the Trump movement’s supposed defilement of democracy, it’s worth remembering there was no mass outrage in the media over what happened with Bernie Sanders and his movement: on the contrary, the corporate news media in the US seemed to celebrate it, such was their single-minded commitment to Hillary Clinton.

Also, it’s worth remembering that it’s the Republican establishment that has more of a known history of election foul play: as recently as the 2000 election, for example, where thousands of voters were purged from the voter rolls in Florida, which was under the governorship of Jeb Bush. Antonin Scalia and his conservative justices also intervened on the Republicans’ side by stopping the election vote-count.

The same allegations arose concerning the 2016 election too, with claims that over a million voters were purged from the rolls and unable to cast their votes: which worked in favor of Republican victory.

In truth, the Democrat and Republican establishments are as corrupt as each other: so there are no Good Guys in this equation, it’s all just relative. At best, the Biden administration is simply one part of the Establishment reasserting itself after four years of an ‘anti establishment’ (but not really) pantomime.

But in 2020 Trump had telegraphed his script (“they’re going to steal the election”) months ahead of the actual vote-count – which certainly makes it look like he would’ve called it a fraudulent election no matter what (unless he won). It was, after all, the same thing he said ahead of the 2016 election – when he literally said he’d only accept the result if he won.

But… on the other hand, did Joe Biden and Kamala Harris really get 74 million votes? Biden could barely draw a crowd throughout his campaign, even prior to being declared the Democratic Candidate – and Kamala Harris polled so low in her bid for the candidacy that you have to wonder how their combined ticket drew the biggest vote in election history.

Was it purely the extent to which so many people were fed up of Trump and the circus of the last four years? Possibly. And probably. But if that’s the case, then how did Trump himself win the biggest vote number of any Republican candidate before him?

So, certainly, there’s room for confusion or ambiguity in the general perception of what went down.

Certainly, the mainstream media was tripping over itself to declare Biden the president-elect (just as they were tripping over themselves to declare Biden the Democrat Nominee months earlier): and certainly it looked suspicious when states that were going Trump’s way suddenly started going the other way in the middle of the night.

 Biden vs Trump: election night news coverage 

But that was logically because Trump had urged his supporters not to vote by mail, whereas Biden had encouraged Democrat voters to do so: and since the mail-in ballots were only going to be processed after the in-person voting, this naturally meant the “huge dumps” of votes for Biden would come in late and create a big shift.

In fact, it was Republican lawmakers that had refused to allow mail-in ballots to be processed ahead of time. Democrats in key states had actually tried to pass legislation to have mail-in ballots processed ahead of election day, but had been blocked by a Republican-led legislature. Which, frankly, makes one wonder if they wanted the late “dumps” of mail-in votes for Biden to look suspicious when they suddenly created a massive reversal of the apparent trajectory of results.

Because they feared and suspected that they were going to lose the election: and that late dump of mail-in ballots would give Trump, Ted Cruz, and other Republican officials, a basis for calling foul play on election day. These doubts about election integrity were seeded months in advance by Trump and other Republicans, possibly to set the stage for refuting or challenging the results on the day.

As for whether there was anything suspicious about the mail-in ballots themselves – as Trump and his supporters claim – I can’t answer that. There’s nothing inherently suspicious about mail-in ballots: but if there was anything specifically suspicious about these ballots or the way they were processed, it’s difficult to know.

I also acknowledge that it seems rather incongruous that Biden/Harris managed to win even more votes than Barack Obama did in 2008. But, assuming that the election wasn’t rigged, you’d have to put that down to the extreme circumstances of the 2020 election – and of the unique year that had preceded it.


And again, the fact that Trump already planned to call it a fraud long before anything actually happened almost makes it irrelevant whether the vote was rigged or not: because, even if it hadn’t been, he and Giuliani would’ve made the claim anyway – and the same scenario would’ve unfolded: up to and including the dramatic events of January 6th.


And when the President goes on national television and demands that they “stop counting the votes” in the states where he is apparently losing, it clearly isn’t a man who’s interested in the democratic integrity of an election.

It’s also possible that Trump and his allies were hoping or planning for a Scalia-type intervention to stop the vote counts in key states, as was done in 2000 for Bush: which would be why, on election night, a flailing Trump was begging for votes to stop being counted – hoping that Republican judges (including those he had himself appointed) would follow the 2000 precedent and intercede for him.

 Donald Trump tweets about election fraud 

Also, if the Democrats or the ‘Establishment’ had wanted to rig the election against Trump in 2020, why didn’t they just do that in 2016 too – and prevent any Trump presidency from ever occurring? It would’ve been easier – since no one, including Trump himself, was expecting to win anyway; and the DNC had already at that time engaged in foul-play to prevent Bernie Sanders from becoming the nominee.

If there is any clear evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, I haven’t come across it yet: questioning whether Biden or Harris could’ve gotten that many votes, while understandable, doesn’t amount to ‘evidence’. And the general consensus seems to be that, if there was voter fraud or irregular practise going on in any of the states, it wouldn’t have been on the scale necessary to nullify the overall outcome of the election anyway – and that, if there was, then more Republican officials (including ones appointed by Trump himself) would’ve come out to support the claims of fraud.

In broader terms, while Trump did win an enormous number of votes, there were also more than enough people simply fed up with the Trump show (and, one assumes, the supposedly catastrophic response to the COVID crisis – regardless of whether we think the pandemic is being honestly reported on or not) that it swung the result towards the Democrats: not because 74 million people were excited about Biden or Harris, but simply because they’d run out of patience with Trump and with four years of a reality-tv-show.

Given the bleak events of 2020 in general, that seems about right. In other words, there’s something of an inevitable logic to how the election result apparently panned out: up to and including the dramatic trajectory-reversal on election night once the mail-in ballots started to be counted.

And again, the point is that, regardless of whether there was fraud or not, Trump clearly would’ve CLAIMED there was anyway: which renders his whole position null and void.

Could the election have been rigged? Certainly. Was it rigged? Possibly, but probably not: but again, does it even matter, given that Trump was already crying foul play months before the election?


So, let’s move on: was Trump trying to stage a coup – both in the refusal to acknowledge the election result and in the fiasco that unfolded on Capitol Hill on January 6th?


Well, that rag-tag mob that stormed the Capitol was hardly going to accomplish a ‘coup’.

If the sitting President of the United States wanted to stage a coup or hold on to power, surely he would call upon governmental or military agencies or actors to accomplish that objective – not a rag-tag mess of cultists and Average Joes? What were they going to accomplish?

Did anyone think the entire American political system and establishment would simply surrender to an angry – but relatively small – mob? And then what? Allow Trump to remain President for life?

 US Capitol Riot: January 6th 2021 

If that was Trump’s idea of a ‘coup’ or holding on to power – it was batshit crazy. And would never have worked.

Or was the whole thing stage-managed, as some people seem to believe, from beginning to end – by anti Trump parties? To create the IMPRESSION of an attempted ‘coup’ and a violent attack on democracy? Why? Well, for starters, in order to shame or discredit both Trump and those Republicans who were – at that point – still planning to oppose Biden’s claim to the presidency. Clearly, after the madness of January 6th, most of them backed down and gave way.

The ‘inside job’ suggestion is not one I’m willing to entirely dismiss – but it’s a question of degrees. And we’ll circle back to that possibility.

At any rate, if this was the idea, then it could be argued that this worked out pretty well. No actual Senator or Congress man or woman was harmed; but we did get a dramatic event. And it made Trump look like a coup-instigator. The problem is that Trump DID tell those people march on the Capitol and to ‘Stop the Steal’. And Rudy Giuliani DID verbally encourage ‘combat’ in his speech. And Q-Anon cultists did fully believe January 6th would see the election result overturned and a mass arrest and/or execution of various officials in the streets.

So… we’re going around in circles here.


So let’s look at what information we do have.


For starters, there are the Republican Party insiders who allegedly aided and abetted the mob. What were THEY hoping to accomplish?

Well, it’s possible that some of those Republicans are so scared of the Republican Party being split after Trump’s exit that they might fail to recover the numbers needed to win another election for some time to come. In which case, they were simply desperate to keep Trump in office – just for the sake of keeping the party in power. Some fairweather advocates for Trump – like the scumbag Senator Lindsey Graham – decided to reverse course and save their skins at the last possible minute, suddenly deciding that contesting the election result was bad form after all.

But others, like Ted Cruz, pushed on with their claims of a fraudulent election.

If there was any Republican abetting of the rioters on the day, it may have been designed to create a powerful impression of ‘Populist’ momentum and ‘people power’ for the sake of intimidating the opposition. Or it may have just been a massive misjudgement by very stupid people, which backfired. You would tend to think that elected officials would be intelligent enough to realise that a mob storming the Capitol wasn’t going to work in their favour politically: but then, I guess, when you look at who some of those officials are – Ted Cruz, for example – and they aren’t exactly the brightest people in the world.

OR… it may have been, as I said earlier, merely the visible part of a broader plan: one potentially even designed to lead to either Civil War or dictatorship. Which is a hypothesis that warrants serious consideration, as will be illustrated here.


There are various curious details about the events of January 6th: such as the claim, for example, that the panic buttons had somehow been removed from various Senators and Congress peoples’ rooms – a fact that was reported by more than one of the officials caught up in the mayhem that day.


So… who had the panic buttons removed? And when? And why?

You then have to ask who would have the authority or the means to have those panic buttons removed too.

When you factor that detail in, the whole thing becomes very suspicious: almost as if someone or someones on the inside not only had foreknowledge of the attack, but actually wanted the elected officials inside to be exposed to maximum vulnerability. Did said someone or someones on the inside actually want elected officials to be physically attacked… even killed? It seems an extreme suggestion: but why else would the panic buttons be removed?

Unless the claims about those panic buttons have been made up, it’s therefore unlikely that the Senators and Congress people themselves were in on any ‘inside job’ or stage-managed attack. But what isn’t clear from the media coverage is whether *everyone’s* panic buttons were removed. Or was this only done to specific elected officials – to leave specific individuals vulnerable?

That’s only my speculation: but this business of the panic buttons is one aspect of the story that confuses me, and could in fact be the key to understanding the entire story.

We’re told that, for example, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a specific target – she claimed she could hear rioters calling out her name and asking where she was. She has also openly accused Ted Cruz and others of trying to have her killed. Another target was Nancy Pelosi. Her laptop was apparently stolen – though we’ve yet to hear anything about whether there was anything interesting or incriminating on that device. And another target was Mike Pence – the rioters had in fact erected a mock gallows and were apparently chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence!’.

Is it possible then that certain officials – and other insiders, possibly security personnel – were involved in the removal of the panic buttons from certain offices?

It’s worth actually also noting that the Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is also being blamed by some for the refusal to call in the National Guard on January 6th. Which, if true, would further complicate any analysis of the situation: and might actually lend itself to the ‘false flag’ suggestion of a stage-managed incident.

 Nancy Pelosi: US Capitol Riot 

But it’s difficult to ascertain whether this claim about Pelosi is true or not, given that the only source is four Republican officials and no one else appears to be supporting the claim. It needs to be said, however, that it’s very suspicious that more than one Capitol Police officer involved in January 6th has apparently ‘committed suicide’: so something is clearly being covered up.

In terms of Republican officials collaborating with the ‘insurrectionists’, let’s look at Rep. Paul Gosar as an example. Gosar has a relationship with the armed militia, the ‘Oath Keepers’. From this article: ‘They called it “The Coming Civil War?” and in its opening seconds, Jim Arroyo, who leads an Arizona chapter of Oath Keepers… declared that the conflict had already begun. To back up his claim, Mr. Arroyo cited Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona… Mr. Gosar had paid a visit to the local Oath Keepers chapter a few years earlier, Mr. Arroyo recounted, and when asked if the United States was headed for a civil war, the congressman’s “response to the group was just flat out: ‘We’re in it. We just haven’t started shooting at each other yet.’”

The ‘Oath Keepers’ were of course involved in the events of January 6th on Capitol Hill – we’ll come back to them shortly.

There are also actual Q-Anon supporters in the (Republican) Senate, such as Lauren Boebert and the batshit-crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene has been accused of using social media to apparently endorse the execution of various Democrats. And January 6th, according to various Q-Anon cultists, was meant to be the day all of that began.


The next question that emerges, once we acknowledge the likelihood of insider collaboration, is the question of whether this was part of a planned ‘coup’ or seizing of power.


Certainly, it didn’t look that way on the surface of it – it looked much more like an unplanned event that snowballed into a major incident when over-zealous demonstrators went too far.

But, again, the mystery of the removed panic buttons absolutely points to the event not being as random as the footage suggests. And, to state the obvious, those rioters would’ve had no capability whatsoever of influencing what went on inside the Capitol building prior to their arrival (as in, the removed panic buttons, the scaling down of security or the failure of the National Guard to be dispatched to protect the Capitol): so it could ONLY have been INSIDE manipulations designed to aid the rioters.

 US Capitol Riot, January 6th 

So then we have to come back to this question: what was the riot supposed to accomplish?

A dominant theory now doing the rounds in right-wing media is that the whole thing was staged just to create the green-light for the massive crackdown on anti-establishment Internet activity in general, and right-wing agitators in particular. Which does appear to be what’s happening. But was the January 6th event really necessary for that? There have been all kinds of incidents over the last few years (Charlottesville, for example) that could’ve been used as the catalyst for that – but weren’t.

And the Internet purges have been going on for long before this already: I should know, as I was one of the sites purged back in 2019. And the so-called ‘anti misinformation’ campaign in regard to the COVID pandemic has already provided near-blanket pretext for mass censorship and take-downs anyway.

So, while the dramatic events of January 6th are certainly going to be milked fully in terms of crackdowns, censorship and arrests: I’m not entirely convinced this alone would’ve been the motive for either ‘enabling’ or stage-managing the Capitol Riot.

Interestingly, one of the best bloggers out there, VISUP, speculates that the assault on the Capitol might’ve been a staged/fake ‘coup’, even involving elements of the Pentagon. He argues that, if Trump or pro-Trump elements had wanted to stage a real coup or do real damage, they could’ve done a lot better. There are plenty of (pro-Trump) armed militias and right-wing groups that would’ve been capable of storming that building in an even more violent manner, for one thing: and who would’ve caused much more harm than those rag-tag rioters did.

On the other hand…

It’s pretty clear that some of those involved – the instigators – were fully intending to cause maximum trouble: up to and including the invasion of the Capitol building and the physical damage and violence.


So, we have to ask, who were THOSE people? Who were the instigators or ringleaders?


Right-wing claims that the violence was instigated by undercover ‘Antifa’ agents is predictable (they always say that) – and difficult to prove or disprove. Even if some agent-provocateurs from the left were involved, it certainly didn’t appear to take much to incite those people into storming the building – indicating that said agent-provocateurs weren’t even necessary. And certainly the vast majority of that mob did not consist of ‘leftist’ actors – half of them were known individuals in alt-right, MAGA or Q-Anon circles and were openly advertising their actions and intentions all over the Internet.

The right-wing media’s focus on John Sullivan or ‘Activist John’ as having been a Black Lives Matter or Antifa actor who ‘led’ the MAGA mob in its attack on the Capitol has been thoroughly debunked (for example, here at The Intercept). While Sullivan is certainly a known figure involved in Black Lives Matter events earlier this year, as The Intercept piece points out, he recorded the entirety of his involvement at the Capitol Riot in chronological order and uploaded it online: and he clearly wasn’t an ‘instigator’ or ‘leader’ in the attack.

Moreover, as the thorough article explains, BLM organisers had in fact disowned him months ago and in fact issued actual warnings about him to other activists, with concerns that he might be a plant or an agent-provocateur. In one case, Sullivan allegedly led BLM protesters right into a police trap.

It is odd that a BLM protester would take part in the MAGA march on the Capitol: but it’s entirely possible ‘Activist John’ is a COINTELPRO-style asset and was planted into the BLM events and then even planted into the Capitol Riot. It’s worth noting that Sullivan’s father is in the military and that his brother, James, belongs to ‘Civilised Awakening’: apparently a far-right movement with armed militias links. It’s odd that two brothers would be on such polar opposite sides as ‘activists’ – one with BLM and one with supposed far-right activism.

However, it is curious to try to work out who the instigators were: who was leading the charge – and whether or not they were doing so in coordination with certain Capitol insiders who were in on the operation.

And that leads to some curious details. For example, a leader of the the ‘Proud Boys‘, it turns out, was an informant for federal law enforcement, as per a Reuters report from a few years ago, which covered a federal court proceeding in 2014. Enrique Tarrio on multiple occasions had operated undercover, according to the court documents. It’s curious that such a figure would be able to lead so prominent an ‘extremist’ group as the Proud Boys and be involved in the Capitol riot.

Certainly, as is widely reported, the Q-Anon movement also played a massive role in the attack. Scores of those involved in the Storming of the Capitol were self-proclaimed Q followers or members, and lots of them were wearing Q-Anon merchandise (yes, merchandise – because what self-respecting Psy-Op doesn’t come with merchandise?).

And Q-Anon, as I argued years ago, is so obviously a Psy-Op.


The question is: what type of Psy-Op and for what purpose?


Was Q-Anon’s purpose to build up a mob/cult movement to fulfill the function of helping usher in an American dictatorship?

It certainly looked that way right from the beginning. ‘Q – The Plan to Save the World’ posited, from the outset, that Trump – and a cabal of ‘White Hat’ loyalists in American military and government circles – was secretly fighting the evil, ‘Satanic’ Deep State and that this Trump-led cabal might even eventually resort to declaring martial law and establishing a temporary dictatorship: in order, of course, to combat the deep corruption in Washington and America.

 Q: The Plan to Save the World 

For four years, the scores of Q enthusiasts were told to ‘Trust the Plan’. ‘Trust the Plan’ is a great mantra – because, essentially, if you have enough people who do ‘trust the plan’, you can do anything (including, potentially, subvert democracy or even the constitution). The cultists were never actually told what the ‘plan’ WAS – only to ‘trust’ it.

Which led, basically, to four years of armchair cult-members trying to connect dots and piece together ‘theories’ or ‘interpretations’ regarding the cryptic ‘Q’ drops and how it related to whatever master plan it was that Trump was carrying out.

“He’s playing 4-D chess!” they would proclaim, ascribing to President Trump a level of super-intelligence that just shows how much ‘Q-Anon’ itself was an exercise in mass cognitive dissonance.

What was created was, quite simply, an army of brainwashed cultists willing to ‘trust the plan’ no matter what: whether it led to dictatorship or martial law or anything else. To be clear, these were not ‘nice’ people, for the most part: these were people who wholesale believed – and celebrated – the idea, for example, that Senator John McCain hadn’t died a natural death but had been executed by the military on Trump’s orders.

These people were out for blood – with almost gleeful excitement, they were waiting for arrests and executions of various public officials and high-profile figures, including everyone from Barack Obama to Lady Gaga.

Of course, as with most cults, the prophesied outcomes never arrived.

Nothing happened. Obama was never executed, as they hoped. Hillary never went to jail (though she probably should be in jail, in all honesty). And they watched in dismay as Joe Biden was inaugurated as President: and as every court and judge in the land, including Republican officials – and including those appointed by Trump himself – threw out Trump’s and Giuliani’s claims of election fraud and insisted the election had been legitimate.

Trump’s supposed ‘4-D Chess’ game, in the end, consisted of asking a mob of civilians to march on the Capitol. And that was it. That’s not even 1-D chess. You know, that’s not even chess – it’s more like just playing marbles or something.


But this brings us to an even greater underlying enigma: who was running the Q-Anon Psy-Op?


Was it some element in the military: perhaps in a psychological operations department? Michael Flynn, perhaps, as has been suggested? Was Trump himself aware of this program, or was he oblivious to it? Were people in the Pentagon aware of it? Or would it have been a rogue operation?

Or was ‘Q’ – as some claim – simply the creation of some random 4-Chan or 8-Chan jokers playing games with people? That’s certainly just as possible as anything.

But knowing what we know about military psychological programmes or about psy-ops in general, it’s hard to believe that the Q project wasn’t being run by some department or group with a vested interest in keeping Trump in power for whatever reason. I would argue that it’s even possible that ‘Q’ started out as some random 4-Chan hoax, but that – once it gained so much momentum so quickly – it might’ve gotten co-opted by some higher agency or element that saw how useful it could be.

Trump, as well as people connected to Trump (including Eric Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and various others) have tweeted or retweeted Q-Anon material on various occasions: Trump’s former Defense Secretary Michael Flynn even apparently recited a ‘Q-Anon pledge’ in a video.

Flynn had in fact said that Trump could deploy the military to “rerun” the 2020 election: and the military element is something we need to come back to shortly.

But, clearly, Q-Anon was more than just a chance viral sensation.
 
Q Anon protester 

If so, it seems logical to deduce that the purpose would’ve been to facilitate an extreme right-wing or even fascist coup in the United States.

The idea would’ve been to build a mass movement of ‘believers’ willing to act as the street army for said coup: so that perceived ‘people power’, rather than actual military intervention, could help accomplish the objective – at least in its initial stage.

Because actual intervention involving any element of the military would be a point of no return: had any part of the military intervened for Trump and against Biden’s inauguration (as Michael Flynn had advocated), there would’ve been a schism in the military itself and the logical outcome of that would be civil war: and, one would assume, all parties were too scared of going down that road – even if it was, at some stage, on the cards.


So having an angry civilian mob take action instead is much safer: firstly because it’s just better optics (it looks like ‘people power’) and, secondly, because if it fails, it’s no big deal – they’re just cannon fodder, after all.


If you don’t think the military – or elements of the military – would conduct such a psy-op, you need to think again. Let’s remind ourselves, for example, of the infamous Satanist Michael Aquino, who – among other things – happened to be a ‘Psychological Warfare Specialist’ who worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Special Forces, Green Berets, etc. And also happened to be a practising Satanist (of Antony LaVey’s Church of Satan), ran the ‘Temple of Set’, and was apparently involved in child sexual offenses.

It was Aquino who developed the ‘Mind War’ and ‘mind architecture’ models (as previously discussed here) and wrote the paper ‘From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory‘, and was involved ‘…in pioneering work in military psychological operations (“psy-ops”)... which introduced such notions as “information warfare” and “cyber-warfare” into the Pentagon’s lexicon…’


With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that Trump activist Captain Emily Rainey was a Psy-Ops officer at Fort Bragg, and she apparently led one of the groups up to the Capitol for the January 6th debacle.


And here I want to cite the blogger VISUP again, because as he points out on his website, there’s some very strange stuff that’s been going on in regard to Fort Bragg; which happens to be the core of the special operations arena in the US. As he explains, this is where the US Army Special Forces (the Green Berets) and the Joint Special Operations Command are headquartered. As he informs us, this includes ‘the Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, the Intelligence Support Activity, and draws upon other units such as the US Army Rangers and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (the “Night Stalkers”). Throw in the Green Berets, and one is left with virtually all of the nation’s elite forces falling under the sway of Fort Bragg.’

Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it?

There are two particularly interesting things about Fort Bragg in regard to our current subject matter. First is, as VISUP reports, the curious number of mysterious deaths in that area lately. And second is Fort Bragg’s established connections to far-right extremism.

In terms of the latter, it appears that the base was ‘a haven for right-wing extremism during the 1990s. In 1995, three paratroopers from the elite 82nd Airborne Division (also garrisoned at Fort Bragg) were involved in the murder of an African-American couple, allegedly to earn their stripes in a neo-Nazi gang active on the base… Also present on the base at the time was white supremacist Wade Michael Page, who later gained infamy when he shot up a Sikh temple in 2012.’

 Fort Bragg  

In terms of the mysterious deaths, VISUP reminds us that ‘Over 30 soldiers assigned to the base have died this year, with about half of them from suicide. By far the most incredible of these deaths involves paratrooper Enrique Roman-Martinez. In May, Roman-Martinez went missing while camping off base. A week after his disappearance, his severed head turned up.’

Some of these deaths or murders seem to have a racial dimension to them, seemingly targeting minority individuals.

Interestingly enough, Fort Bragg is one of the few military bases still named after the Confederacy and steeped in Confederate history. In fact, Trump had only recently vetoed a proposal to change the name of Fort Bragg and certain other locations to remove the Confederate associations.


Is there something going on at Fort Bragg relating to extreme right-wing elements within the military or the intelligence community?


Could a potential – but ultimately (as-yet) unfulfilled – pro-Trump coup have been covertly instigated or encouraged from within somewhere like Fort Bragg?

In addition to the fact that one of the group leaders in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th was Fort Bragg ‘Psy-Ops Officer’ Emily Rainey, we can also take note of this: the right-wing militia, the ‘Oath Keepers’ (previously mentioned in relation to the Republican Senator Paul Gosar), which has been a presence at Trump rallies as well as showing up to stand against BLM protesters, is reported to have links to thousands of military and police veterans.

 Oath Keepers 

Curiously, its leader Stewart Rhodes has said there has been “a flood of special warfare operatives into the Oath Keepers”.

According to a report from October, ‘He cited former navy Seals and special forces personnel from Fort Bragg, the US army garrison in North Carolina‘.

Huh.

Fort Bragg seems to me like just the sort of place where something like the Q-Anon psy-op would be run from. And if, as is claimed, it is awash in extreme right-wing individuals, these would naturally be inclined to be very pro-Trump.

It’s also worth saying that Fort Bragg really does have a strange history, and was, among other things, a major feature in Jon Ronson’s ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’.

Interestingly, Q-Anon is argued by some to take us into the realm of what are being called ‘Alternate Reality Games‘ or ‘ARG’s‘.

And this, it appears, is something the intelligence community and the Pentagon have an interest in. Wired reported back in 2013 that these ‘Alternate Reality Games’ were being studied by the ‘Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’ or ‘IARPA’ at the Pentagon, relating to psychology and social behaviour.

Also of note is that, prior to the unfolding drama at the Capitol, President Trump had gotten rid of his Secretary of Defense and replaced him with a man – a Christopher C. Miller – who, as it happens, was from a predominately special operations forces background, having been a Green Beret: both of which could be suggestive of a Fort Bragg connection. Apparently, one of Miller’s last jobs in the Army was in the office of the ‘Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict‘.

As it happens, President Trump visited Fort Bragg on October 29th. According to Military Times, ‘Trump flew into Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on Thursday for what the White House described as “troop engagement.” It was conducted outside the view of the press corps traveling with him...’

That was days before he fired his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, and replaced him with the above-mentioned former Green Beret Christopher Miller. Interestingly, one of the reasons Trump got rid of Esper was because he was opposed to deploying active-service armed troops onto the streets in American cities.

In terms of Miller’s speciality area, I looked for the definition of ‘Low Intensity Conflict’ and here’s some of what I found: ‘A low-intensity conflict (LIC) is a military conflict, usually localised, between two or more state or non-state groups which is below the intensity of conventional war...’

The description continues (emphasis mine): ‘The role of the armed forces is dependent on the stage of the insurrection, whether it has progressed to armed struggle or is in an early stage of propaganda and protests. In the first stages of insurrection, much of an army’s work is “soft” – working in conjunction with civil authorities in psychological operations, propaganda, counter-organizing…’

And, important to our current subject matter, we’re told that ‘If the operation has been betrayed or compromised, it is usually called off immediately...’


Has all of this been a botched attempt – by an extreme-right cabal in the US, including rogue elements of the military – to establish a dictatorship?


And were the Capitol rioters, and the Q-Anon cultists more generally, simply useful cannon fodder for this cause?

It certainly seems like a possibility.

And yet it wasn’t a very good plan, was it? Was the Capitol Riot really the best they could do? Or is there something more to come? OR – as I argued – was the Capitol Riot or ‘insurrection’ merely the visible part of a larger plan that was ultimately ditched at the last minute?

One involving elements of the military – possibly tracing back to Fort Bragg and Psychological Operations?


Also, what the hell happened in Nashville on Christmas Day?


Everyone appears to have forgotten that incident; but on Christmas Day a bomb went off in Nashville and no one – neither political officials or mainstream media – appeared to know what to make of the incident. Stranger yet was the video footage of a woman’s voice telling people to evacuate the area prior to the blast. The bombing was attributed to an Anthony Quinn Warner – supposedly a lone wolf weirdo – but he didn’t accomplish anything. There were never going to be mass casualties, because he chose Christmas Day and he chose a time of the morning that more or less guaranteed the area would be very quiet.

 Nashville Christmas Day Bombing, 2020 

Interestingly, the bomb was reported to have caused widespread communications outages that took down police emergency systems. This power outage involved multiple states.

Could this have been a test-run for something that was being planned or at least conceived of for later down the line? Such as deliberate disruptions to the power and/or communications networks in certain places to accompany some kind of rogue military operations along coup lines?

No one has provided a logical explanation for the Nashville incident.

And even if the supposed perpetrator, Anthony Quinn Warner, was the culprit, who was the woman telling everyone to evacuate – and how did she know? Certainly, at the very least, that implies Warner wasn’t acting alone – and that the narrative we were given (that of a ‘mad’ conspiracy theorist who believed in UFO conspiracies, Reptilians, etc) doesn’t match the event in question.

And I’m not grasping at straws here: because, as it happens, the Q-Anon movement was actually *expecting* power and communications blackouts as part of the ‘plan’ (the ‘plan to save the world’, I guess). In fact, they were expecting it specifically on January 6th: meaning that at least some of those ‘insurrectionists’ who stormed the Capitol were waiting for power blackouts to also unfold.


As the FT reported, ‘QAnon adherents called it “the storm”. At midday on Wednesday, there were supposed to be blackouts across the US, military tribunals led by Donald Trump and the mass execution of Democrats in the streets…’


There’s also this: in April the year before, it was reported that people were furious after sudden power blackouts occurred – which later turned out to be military experiments. It was reported that ‘Reaction to the surprise blackout ranged from ardent support to complaints the outage caused refrigerated foods to spoil in thousands of homes.’

But here’s the thing. Who was responsible for that sudden power outage? Well, what a surprise, it’s our good friends over at Fort Bragg! ‘Fort Bragg officials issued an apology late Thursday, after realizing shutting off power to tens of thousands of post residents created alarm This includes suggestions it was a terrorist attack… or a secret Army experiment that shorted out the power grid for miles…’

A public apology appeared on Fort Bragg’s Facebook page: “We understand the exercise conducted caused concern for many within our community and surrounding areas… For that, we apologize,” it said.

 Fort Bragg: Doctor Evil 

Bizarrely – and this really does make it read like not just a Psy-Op, but actual contempt for the general public – the apology was accompanied by an image of Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies! I mean, what is the deal with these people?

Also, around the same time, a series of Special Forces drills were held across North Carolina. It was reported that ‘Special Forces students will battle it out – with blanks – against soldiers from nearby Fort Bragg…’ Which may be standard practise; but the exercises were said to be causing some alarm in the area, particularly as civilians were apparently involved in them too.


Now let’s come back to a basic question: was there any real possibility of a genuine coup occurring? Or a genuine schism in American government and military, resulting in a blocking of Biden’s inauguration?


Something interesting happened three days before the events of January 6th.

On January 3rd, all of the still-living former Secretaries of Defense published an op-ed in the Washington Times: its purpose being to remind the military that they were sworn by oath to the Constitution.

For those Secretaries of Defense to feel the need to make a joint statement like that seems rather extraordinary, even unprecedented: they must’ve believed – or been told – that there was a genuine danger of a pro-Trump military movement seeking to block Biden’s inauguration and to keep Trump in power. That group or cabal might’ve been small, or even rogue (although how ‘rogue’ can a military group be if its perceived to be acting in the interests of the sitting President of the United States?).

In the end – at least up until now – nothing seemed to unfold regarding the military. But was America close to something of the sort happening? Bear in mind that we don’t know what went on behind closed doors while all of these things were playing out in the public arena.

All kinds of secret investigations, talks or deals might’ve been going on. And, again, for the former Defense Secretaries to take the unprecedented action of reminding the military of its oath to the constitution, they must’ve had some serious concern or inside intimation of trouble on the horizon.

Trump certainly seemed to *think* he wasn’t going to have to concede the election to the Democrats. And then you have even stranger behaviour, like that of Secretary of State, the dubious figure of Mike Pompeo, who said (just days before the Capitol Riot) that “there would be a smooth transition… to a second Trump term”. Bear in mind that he was saying this long after the election had already been declared won by Joe Biden. Would Pompeo have said something as brazen as that if he didn’t genuinely believe – based on whatever information – that the Trump administration was somehow going to remain in power?

Did he think that some kind of plan was in place to keep Trump in office?

Again, I don’t know that we’ll ever know the whole story. But it would be helpful to know just what someone like Mike Pompeo knew – or believed – was happening.

Because it certainly seems possible that, behind the smokescreen of all the public confusion, something was happening: some tug-of-war for control of the United States government. Americans might in fact never know the full truth of just how close the country might’ve come to either an actual coup or a genuine civil war.

Because, on the surface of it, all we really saw were those chaotic scenes at the Capitol and Trump’s public statements refusing to concede the election: but the surface only ever shows us part of what’s going on.

Here’s another point though: when the National Guard and military was eventually called into Washington and the Capitol – which set the bleak tone for the days that led into Biden’s very grim-feeling inauguration – was it actually to act as a warning against any pro-Trump military plotters?

 Troops in Washington for Biden Inauguration 

Was it a show of force not to deter ‘rioters’, but to deter actual opposition military elements?

It certainly led to a rather Dystopian inauguration of Joe Biden: as the new president was sworn in surrounded by armed troops looking on. I mean, I thought Trump’s inauguration had been both bleak and bizarre: but this one was even odder.

It’s entirely possible that moves were underway in some quarters of the military – ‘rogue’ or otherwise – to subvert the election and keep the sitting President in power: but that the plotters either backed out at the last minute (from anxiety or fear of where it would lead) or that some behind-closed-doors talks or negotiations resulted in the plans being vetoed late in the day.

In that context, we have to go back to what we covered earlier in regard to the Pentagon’s descriptions of ‘Low Intensity Conflict’ (which was in the job description of special operations specialist Christopher Miller’s last army position – Miller being Trump’s very late appointment as Defense Secretary): ‘The role of the armed forces is dependent on the stage of the insurrection, whether it has progressed to armed struggle or is in an early stage of propaganda and protests…’

And, crucially: ‘If the operation has been betrayed or compromised, it is usually called off immediately...’

Given everything we’ve established here – the power blackouts, the Fort Bragg connections, the military and law-enforcement connections to the ‘Oath Keepers’ (and the Oath Keepers connection to Republican Senator Paul Gosar, for example), as well as the unprecedented warning issued to the military by all of the former Secretaries of Defense – it seems entirely plausible to suggest that a rogue military operation was originally planned to follow or accompany the street-level mob’s ‘storming of the Capitol’.


But that it – and other possible related plans – were called off late in the game: and all we were left with, as far as our perception of the situation is concerned, was that rag-tag angry mob in Q-Anon t-shirts and funny hats.


This is mostly speculation, of course: but it is speculation based on available information and evident connections.

The only part that is crystal clear – and SHOULD’VE been crystal clear to any intelligent person all along – is that Q-Anon was a Psy-Op. It was probably designed to create or to maximise a mass populist movement or mob to attack the political establishment with perceived ‘people power’ when the time came: utilising the expendable mob as cannon fodder to see what would happen.

It’s possible that the hypothetical military or rogue military action was dependent on what first happened with the mob Storming the Capitol: that they were waiting to see how it went or what happened to both the elected officials and the pawns themselves.

Or, again, it’s also possible that behind-the-scenes interventions or activities prevented the plan from being fully realised.

If we really stretch things here, it might even be possible that even certain Democrat or Democrat-aligned insiders (Nancy Pelosi?) knew about such plans and decided to stage-manage or at least allow the Capitol Riot to unfold – knowing that the broader plan wasn’t going to materialise, but that they could use the chaos for their own propaganda victory.

I’m not sure we’ll ever really know the whole truth.

No investigation can be trusted to be non-partisan or non-biased at this point: and it’s difficult to know how much information would be omitted anyway, for various reasons (including national security or even just protecting the public image of the military).


But again, watching the footage of the Capitol Riot, the one thing you have to wonder is… what WAS the plan?


And what would’ve happened if those rioters had gotten all the way inside and been able to directly confront the Senators and Congress men and women? Would they have physically attacked them? Would some of them have even been killed? Certainly ‘Q-Anon’ has promised, over and over again, mass executions of Democrats and of even some Republican officials: and many of those in the mob were self-proclaimed members of the cult; as were some Republican officials in the actual building. And someone like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had already received regular death threats.

Some accuse AOC of having ‘made up’ her account of the events; again, I have no way of knowing whether accounts of the events are entirely accurate or not, but AOC’s personal account of her experience is very distressing. According to her, she was scared that certain Republicans (one would assume, specifically the Q-Anon supporting ones) were going to give up her location to the mob.

Remember, some of those cultists had erected a mock gallows and chanted that they wanted to hang Mike Pence. And, again, why would the panic buttons have been removed if someone on the inside didn’t want a maximum threat level to certain elected officials?

 US Capitpl Rioters erect gallows 

What would’ve happened then? Would it have incited a Civil War scenario? And from that basis, could martial law have been imposed – and a dictatorship brought about?


You might think this is all too far-fetched. But let’s look at an interesting item of historical precedent. Let’s rewind 80 years or so and remember the case of the Retired Marine General Smedley Butler.


Butler uncovered a plot by American businessmen and bankers – inspired by the Italian fascists and the Nazis in Germany – to seize power in the United States and install a fascist government.

The planned coup was foiled by Butler’s actions when the plotters sought to recruit him – mistakenly thinking that he would be in favor of the conspiracy.

Butler was one of the most decorated war heroes of his era: despite this, both the media and most of the public refused to believe his claims at the time, calling it a hoax. Referred to as the “White House Coup”, the “Wall Street Putsch” or the “Business Plot”, it was claimed to have originated with powerful business elites, including the DuPont family and Prescott Bush, among others (including links to the JP Morgan family): but the committee that was set up to investigate the plot did not make its findings public, thus protecting the identity of the plotters and helping cover up the reality of the plot.

 New York Times, 1934: Smedley Butler exposes fascist plot 

It wasn’t until recent years that the findings were made public, validating Butler’s claims of a conspiracy.

There are some similarities between that (failed) coup of 1934 and the events of January 2021.

For example, Butler claimed he was told he’d have ‘an army of 500,000 men and financial backing from an assortment of rich businessmen, so long as he would be willing to lead a peaceful march on the White House to displace Roosevelt.

To be perfectly fair to Mr. MacGuire,” Butler later said of one of the chief conspirators, “He didn’t seem bloodthirsty. He felt that such a show of force in Washington would probably result in a peaceful overthrow of government.”

What has never been clear – due, no doubt, to the cover-up and the refusal to make the official investigation’s findings public – was how close the 1930s fascist coup came to succeeding. Would it have worked if Butler hadn’t gotten in the way?

Or was it a badly conceived plot that had no real hope of coming to fruition?

War History Online says in its article on the subject, ‘It seems most likely that the Business Coup plot… was carried out by incompetent schemers and never had a real shot at success.’

Could something similar be said of the so-called ‘coup’ or ‘insurrection’ of January 6th? A real plan, perhaps, but one carried out by incompetent schemers and never having a real shot at success?

And was that why the full plan – including blackouts and military action – never materialised? Did the conspirators simply come to realise the whole thing was never going to work – and was no longer worth the major crisis it would’ve sparked off?

Again, we might never know.


Or perhaps, as with the case of Smedley Butler and the 1930s plot, the truth might only come out many decades from now.


 

S. Awan

Independent journalist. Pariah. Believer in human rights, human dignity and liberty. Musician. Substandard Jedi. All-round failure. And future ghost.

0 Comments

  1. This is a great article, thanks. I’ve been following Scott Creighton and most on his blogroll from the beginning, but was somehow unaware of your blog.

    With regard to the Business Plot, Miles Mathis has his own take on it, which I believe is ultimately relevant to the Capitol event. I encourage you to look around on Mathis’ site. The thing about psychological operations is they have the same impact whether the events they depict actually happened, or whether people only believe they happened.

    I recently read an article about the War of the Worlds event. The gist was, at the time of the broadcast, few to none actually *believed* there was an alien invasion. The psyop itself was in the days that followed, and the ensuing use of the news media to *convince* the country that many people believed there was an actual alien invasion. The majority are convinced they are in the minority, and that they are surrounded by idiots. I believe this is also the main thrust of the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments. It quickly became apparent to the study subjects that the situation was absurd, and that no one was receiving shocks, but in reporting on the experiments, the public is convinced that human nature is darker and more savage than previously believed.

    http://mileswmathis.com/butler.pdf
    http://mileswmathis.com/butler2.pdf

    Miles’ style of research is similar to yours in that it’s not bogged down with minutia, but uses undisputed anchor points to arrive at the most coherent and plausible conclusion.

    Anyway, I’m glad your site is back up, and you’re in my bookmarks now.

    • Thanks so much. And it’s great to read your comment. I actually followed Creighton’s old blog, American Everyman, before it got deleted by the Internet Police – before my site got deleted too. I’ll definitely read the Mathis links, thanks. The War of the Worlds thing is fascinating in itself too, both as a social study – and also because I’m a big Orson Welles fan. Welles, I believe, later claimed that the degree of ‘panic’ or hysteria was nothing like as widespread as was claimed. Thanks for commenting; I hope to hear from you further.

  2. So glad you are back!! Woohoo!! Yes, there was an attempt3d Autogolpe, but thrpe reason the military did not back it is because Flump burned his bridges with the brass after his trashings of Kelly and Mattis years earlier. Flump may have had a core group of grunts and other assorted military flunkies as a fifth column, but they have shown to be dupes in a Confederacy of Dunces.

    • Thanks Ed. Actually I wonder how things would’ve played out with Mattis still around. That being said, I imagine he might’ve jumped ship as the madness escalated anyway.

  3. That was a terrific read, thanks Burning Blogger. Your return is very pleasing. Shame on the tyrannical scum who found your old site too threatening to remain on their platform. Welcome back!

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