19 replies on “A venn diagram of instability.”

  1. There are no teabaggers, just Tea Party members. Birthers are part of the general discontent with government, like those who thought the government brought down the Twin Towers. Rosie O’Donnell and birthers, closer than you think.
    President Obama is unique – his name, his travels as a youth. How many of our political leaders have lived for several years as the step-son of a foreigner in his country? It leaves open a sliver of area for conspiracy thoughts to grow.

  2. It is probable that he most vociferous crazies who rant the loudest at those, so-called, tea parties, are just FBI guys and gals trying to incite someone on the right- wing to make a threat, so that the Feds can bust them.

    My chief concern is not for the FBI infiltrators, but there is a remarkable similarity between the hate-filled propaganda being spread by the far-right today, to the rhetoric used by the extremist factions who were funded by Texas billionaires back in 1963.

    In 1963, pamphlets and radio broadcasts funded by men like, H.L. Hunt, hammered away at the public, telling the citizens that Jack Kennedy was leading us to Communism and that he took his orders from the Pope.

    With today’s patriot movement, the danger is not from the true believers; they just want government to stick to the Constitution. However, one of the government agents may unwittingly incite someone who is on the fringe, and who is perhaps less mentally stable, into performing some irrational act.

  3. Tyler, are you telling me that, in this day and age where there is no shortage of skilled, intelligent folks trying to hurt Americans in a wide variety of ways, it is “probable” that the FBI is instead spending its time and resources trying to coax right wing nutjobs into acts of violence?

  4. As the overlap of Birthers and Tea Party protesters increases, the liklihood of being a Ron Paul supporter approaches 1.

    There are plenty of tax protesters that know Obama is a citizen, born in Hawaii, etc. The Birthers probably would be inclined to attend Tea Parties, but I know most Tea Partiers would be appalled if the Birthers made themselves known at a Tea Party.

    FBI infiltrators and instigators? Not likely.

  5. J. Tyler Ballance,

    Seriously? I’m not saying that our government doesn’t do stupid shit like that, but I AM saying that stupid, violent people are a lot more common than government plants, probably by a factor of about 100,000 to 1.

    Seriously, I dare you to take the Pepsi challenge on Tim McVeigh vs. some common Free Republic commenters.

  6. OK, sheeple, time to awaken to reality.

    Our federal security agencies spend millions each year on “domestic surveillance” and infiltration efforts directed at groups seen as harboring dissidents.

    With the end of the cold war, our NSA, CIA, FBI and the various military intelligence agencies had few targets to spy on, so rather than sustain major budget cuts, they created the specter of domestic terrorism as a major threat upon which to make budget justifications.

    During the Clinton Administration, groups that protested abortion clinics were targeted. Under the Bush regime, the patriot groups/militias and even benign groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans were targets of infiltration. The standard procedure used was to use federal undercover agents to agitate targeted groups into doing something prosecutable.

    Remember Michael Chertoff? Before his “big” promotion to DHS, he was Bush’s point man on infiltrating White separatist groups. Just one example of Chertoff’s work:

    A federal agent using the name, Tony Evola (The name is like the Ebola virus; get it? Those feds have such a sense of humor). Anyway, Tony was paired with Matt Hale of the, “World Church of the Creator” a separatist group whose goal was to have some sort of White homeland. Matt was a law school graduate, who was refused admission to the Illinois Bar because he said crazy things like, White people need a country of their own.”

    Isn’t that the same justification Israel used? But I digress.

    In 2000, a leftist group shrewdly claimed the right to the trademark, “World Church of the Creator” and during the ensuing court case, the FBI infiltrator, Tony Evola, (according to published reports) repeatedly baited Matt Hale with inflammatory comments, such as, “That judge needs to be taken out…” Eventually, the feds were able to piece together taped conversations that had Evola saying something like, I’m gonna do that judge…” followed by Matt Hale being heard to say, “You do what you want, but leave me out of it.”

    Based on the Evola conversation, a conversation that would likely have never occurred without the government agent leading the conversation, Matt Hale was convicted of conspiring to kill a federal judge. As far as I know, he remains in federal prison with a FORTY year sentence.

    These separatist groups, including the WCOTC, are magnets for people who are already fired-up about real and perceived injustices. In the above case, no violence was on the menu, and Mr. Hale was content to give speeches and appear at rallies that were typically attended by no more than fifty supporters, accompanied by several hundred protesters. WCOTC was nothing more than Klan wannabes and a political sideshow.

    After the infiltration of WCOTC by the FBI was revealed in Hale’s trial, threats were made against the judge in the case. Pictures were posted of her and her relatives on what some believe to be an FBI funded magnet website, Stormfront. Some leftist groups have subsequently falsely accused WCOTC members of making the post, but the preponderance of evidence points to our own federal agencies.

    It is not clear if the threats posted to websites were from WCOTC members, outside supporters or just some FBI operative hoping to incite WCOTC supporters to do something stupid that would land more of them in jail.

    In February, 2005, US District Judge, Joan H. Lefkow returned home to find her husband and mother shot dead. In March, an electrician, Bart Ross, who had previously had a medical malpractice case heard before Judge Lefkow, committed suicide and left a note claiming to have shot Lefkow’s mother and husband.

    Bart Ross had no connection with WCOTC. Had the FBI not taken the irrational measures in their efforts to egg WCOTC members and supporters into doing something prosecutable, including the posting of Lefkow’s family photos on the web, it is highly likely that neither Ross nor anyone else would have made or carried out threats against Judge Lefkow or her family.

    Matt Hale has had his life ruined and Judge Lefkow had her family brutally murdered, as a direct result of botched infiltration and entrapment efforts by our FBI, under Michael Chertoff’s direction.

    Some of you will never believe that our government is capable of such reckless, malicious and incompetent acts, but be assured that, especially during the Bush regime, our federal security agencies were conducting open warfare on our own citizens and our domestic organizations. So far, President Obama has refused to conduct an investigation of the most recent epidemic of domestic spying and infiltration programs.

  7. Does the “J.” stand for “Jones. Alex Jones.”? Because it just got all kinds of crazy up in here. Yowzas.

    Ewe don’t even know me, how can you call me a sheeple (sheeperson?… What IS the singular of sheeple?)?

  8. “As the overlap of Birthers and Tea Party protesters increases, the liklihood of being a Ron Paul supporter approaches 1.”

    +1. LOL

  9. OK, sheeple

    No, fuck you.

    Seriously, show some damn respect if you want me to read your wall of text.

  10. The only time the word “sheeple” is appropriate is when making (good-natured) fun of the cover of a colleague of mine’s book, which features a horde of sheep standing on two legs.

    It is a night-mare inducing cover, but I digress. Sheeple? Have you ever considered that maybe, the federal agents are actually not infiltrating anything, but instead, are using the Internet to spread rumors that they are infiltrating organizations as you say, to distract all those who would ordinarily be non-sheeple into becoming paranoid conspiracy theorist sheeple who run around telling everyone that they’ve got a grip on what reality is, when in truth, the feds are using the conspiracy theory sheeple to create a distraction from that which they are actually doing, which is, um, Scary Secret Things, thereby preventing those who would ordinarily be non-sheeple but are now distracted by the federal rumor mongering that they believe to be their own ingenious uncovering of Scary Secret Things except it’s really just another layer of lies, and have thus become sheeple, from spreading the truth about what the feds are actually up to in the ultimate reality?* Thereby making you, oh, sweet irony, a tool of the vast shadow federal government conspiracy?

    Dude, I live in Philadelphia. It’s gonna take a lot more than what you’ve got to out-crazy me.

    * Whew!

  11. If you want to figure out how long the birth certificate kooks will last, look at the Gore Won Florida crowd from 2000 and add 8 years. Similar fundamental goal (denial of the President’s legitimacy to hold the office), similar levels of rationality, similar ability within their party to obstruct productive discussion and distract from efforts to win midterms and challenge the President four years later.

    The Tea Party folks… some of them are/were probably rational, but the more the Paulistas get involved, the less influential they will be within conservatism as a whole. They seem pretty harmless overall, though. The most bothersome thing that’s come out of that movement to me is the mainstreaming of a graphic anti-gay slur as a purportedly respectable reference to an opposing political movement.

  12. OK then, back to your slumber. Pretend that Bush was your benevolent protector and his agents never did anything to harm Americans. Never mind the citizens left to rot in jail, or the dead bodies.

    When faced with information that doesn’t fit your paradigm, don’t bother to read more on the subject, just claim that the source is insane and a conspiracy theorist.

    Just ignore any information that doesn’t fit into a Tweet.

    Pretend that we still live in a free republic.

  13. J. Tyler Ballance,

    You sure have me pegged, believing Bush was my benevolent protector, etc., etc.

    The must ridiculous thing about people who use the term “sheeple” is that it’s such a stupid, unoriginal, unthinking appropriation of a dumb meme. The irony of these people’s unquestioning acceptance of outlandish claims (I find the term more popular amongst Ron Paul supporters and Truthers) would be funny if it weren’t so blindingly dumb.

  14. The most bothersome thing that’s come out of that movement to me is the mainstreaming of a graphic anti-gay slur as a purportedly respectable reference to an opposing political movement.

    “Anti-gay”? Not at all! And it’s not just opposition—just last night I was on a website run by one such group that self-identified as “Teabaggers.” (The URL escapes me at the moment.)

  15. J. Tyler’s big wall of text was too long for me to even consider actually reading in a comments section. However, he is correct about government agencies having a history of infiltrating such groups. Mike Levine (former DEA) and Mike German (former FBI) have both spoken in interviews about infiltrating white supremacist groups. In both cases, I recall them saying that they quickly rose to actual leadership positions within those organizations. Mike Levine said that if he’d wanted to, he could literally have become the head of the whole national group within the year.

    Which kind of makes sense. Most of the people who belong to such groups are just plain stupid. If somebody walks into one of those groups and demonstrates some level of rudimentary intelligence and ability to organize, he is going to rise to the top and become influential within the group very quickly.

    Maybe things are better organized than they used to be, but in the late 90’s and early 2000’s it was a classic situation to have a bunch of people from different state and federal agencies all infiltrating the same group without knowing anything about each other. Especially if any kind of drug trade was suspected. They’d be in meetings where half the people in the room later turned out to be undercover law enforcement, all cluelessly egging each other on.

  16. Man, sometimes I miss the Cold War. Back then people were familiar enough with the idea of an “agent provacateur” enough that the idea could be expressed in two words rather than twelve paragraphs, and no one looked down on you just because those two words happened to be French.

    Incidentally, Jack, I used to go to church with an FBI special agent who spent a year infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan, and he said largely the same thing. He was going mainly to keep tabs on activities and flesh out profiles on a few personalities they were interested in, but it’s the sort of thing where if you have a good attendance record that will set you ahead of the pack. Even the vast majority of racists in the US look down on the KKK enough that they won’t risk being associated with them by regularly attending meetings.

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