Posts Tagged → legacy
Should individual federal agents be held accountable?
Should individual FBI/DOJ/ATF/DHS agents be held personally accountable for the federal government’s Gestapo war of terror inflicted on innocent Americans over the past four years?
This question has been on my mind daily, for the past four years, because I was a law-abiding J6 peaceful protestor who was nonetheless visited and then interviewed by FBI agents, with all that that portends. These FBI visits and interviews with people like me, who they said up front had done nothing criminal, had committed no crime, were done for the sole purpose of political intimidation, with the intimation that a violent early morning FBI SWAT raid through your front door could be the next outcome (as was done to hundreds of innocent Americans).
Now this question of individual federal agents has become a ripe policy subject, because on Friday the acting DOJ secretary demanded a list of all FBI agents and DOJ staff who “worked” on prosecuting January 6th victims.
Yes, I am using a lot of language here that is probably unfamiliar to a lot of Americans, including people who consider themselves politically involved or at least politically educated on both sides of the spectrum. So here are some important facts that will guide your understanding of where people who share my thinking are coming from:
- January 6th, 2021, was overwhelmingly a peaceful protest that I personally participated in, peacefully, non-violently, non-destructively.
- January 6th’s peaceful protest was eventually marred by some violence that was aggressively instigated by the police, Antifa, and a lot of now known federal agents who have been videotaped and identified.
- Using video footage solely from the West Plaza and a couple doorways, January 6th as a whole, as an entire day start to finish, has been purposefully mis-described by the Democrat Party-owned mainstream media, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, and other Leftist-aligned information outlets and social media companies. The purpose of their deliberate misinformation and censorship of rebuttals was to create a political narrative they could and did use against their political adversaries.
- This false narrative about J6 served as a sort of “Reichstag Fire” moment that the incoming Biden Administration siezed upon to justify its unconstitutional draconian assault on anyone and everyone who was remotely involved with protesting at J6. Including peaceful people like me, who simply happens to hold non-Leftist views about government, governance, etc.
- Much of the DOJ/FBI/DHS/ATF draconian abuse of their American political adversaries involved hyper-violent early morning no-knock raids on families in their homes. These outrageous raids have been widely reported in the non-legacy media, and almost completely censored in the establishment press.
- Over a thousand non-violent Americans were violently scooped up in these dragnets, where dozens of heavily armed federal agents from FBI, DHS, ATF and DOJ would conduct military-style home invasions backed by armored cars and helicopters. Small children, pregnant wives, the targeted husband, grandmas, grandpas, were all handcuffed, taken outside in freezing winter conditions in their pajamas, abused, homes destroyed in unnecessary searches, etc. Families and homes and businesses were turned inside out because some protestor maybe committed a trespass violation.
- The legal justification and basis for literally every one of these cases was one gigantic procedural violation and deprivation of constitutional due process after another after another. Illegal judge shopping, false affidavits, blank search warrants, false accusations, planted evidence, home security cameras turned off… if there was a potential violation of individual rights, the Biden DOJ/ FBI committed it almost as a signal of their lawless impunity and unaccountability.
- Hundreds of innocent J6 political prisoners have languished in prisons and solitary confinement as a result of this lawlessness, including the lawlessness of corrupt federal prosecutors conspiring with political activist judges to deprive these victims of their due process rights.
It is in this context that I ask the question if all of the federal agents who engaged in these violent home invasions should be personally held accountable. After all, they must have known that they were not searching for some drug dealer or violent criminal. And yet they inflicted unbelievable and wildly unconstitutional harm on innocent American citizens.
As we learned at the end of World War Two, the whiny excuse “I was just following orders” doesn’t cut it, doesn’t excuse uniformed police and soldiers from their personal responsibility when committing crimes against unarmed civilians. And I believe there should be no excuse for the many federal agents who carried out these patently illegal raids.
Yesterday I emailed the FBI agent who came to my house in 2022, asking him who at FBI or DOJ had directed him to target me (screen shot of our email chain and his picture at our front door are below). His name, as he represents it on his business card, is Patrick Armor. Patrick and another FBI agent subsequently interviewed me in an attorney’s office. Despite stating up front that they believed I had done nothing criminal on J6, they quickly went for the jugular, trying to get me to say anything or give them pictures or photos that would incriminate me.
It was clear they were trying to get me to say anything they could later purposefully misconstrue as “lying to a federal agent.” Even though I had nothing to lie about and therefore would not lie. It was simply a procedural ruse to catch an innocent person on a “process crime.”
All in support of the establishment’s false J6 political narrative, to help them implement a full takedown of America.
These FBI agents were willfully, knowingly, aggressively trying to entrap innocent Americans like myself, so they could deprive us of our liberty, and then take away much, much more from us. Over the past four years many other FBI agents around America raided bank deposit boxes and private precious metals caches, pocketed the valuables, and rode off into the sunset, with no accountability. These public employees have been the tip of the spear aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions and norms, our rule of law.
For four years thousands of Americans like myself sat waiting for our front door to be blasted open in the middle of the night, our homes to be violently raided, over at most a trespassing charge.
This unchecked lawlessness is pure evil, and it must be held to account. The people who both enabled and implemented this evil must be held accountable. Every single federal agent who was involved in hunting down J6 protestors must be investigated, prosecuted, and held accountable through the criminal law process. Same for their bosses and the judges who signed off on dubious warrants.
America has just endured four years of a sort of Rwanda, albeit I grant you not yet involving the outright mass butchery and genocide that the full Rwanda experience involved. But America was being set up for that to happen next, because the political enemies of the Democrat Party – concerned parents of school children, conservative Latin Mass-only Catholics, critics of transgender ideology, conservative Christians, political conservatives and constitutionalists and patriots and US military veterans…were all deemed to be “deplorable” and demonized and targeted.
So that our eventual liquidation would be acceptable and normal to everyone else.
In August 2022 I wrote here that America was going to need a truth and reconciliation commission. Well, we are hopefully about to begin that process. Holding the lawless and violent individual federal agents fully accountable will be just the beginning.
And one final thought: Every American should reject the Gestapo fascism that was being inflicted upon at least half of the country these past four years. While America’s borders were being purposefully left wide open and an illegal invasion was under way. And billions of taxpayer dollars were granted to American organizations aggressively and treasonsously trying to destroy America from within. If you are not mad about this, then you either are not paying attention, or you are part of the problem.
FBI Agent Patrick Armor speaking with my wife and daughter, at our home’s front door, June 2022
a thousand points of light, a thousand glorious small cuts
Watching a boat sinking out on the water because it was deliberately holed by its occupants is a curious thing.
Watching the people in the sinking boat then continue to deliberately punch more holes into the ruptured hull, even as water is being taken on, which expedites the boat’s failure as a floating refuge on water, is more than curious. Now, we are pretty certain that the self-destructive people in the boat either are stupid, suicidal, or do not even realize what they are doing.
They might think that adding more holes in the boat actually lets the water out…?
Thus is the recent statement by political activist George Stephanopoulos that media personalities having live interviews on TV with President Donald Trump is “journalistic malpractice“ perfectly framed.
George Stephanopoulos is the longtime political director for ABC “News.” As a former extremely politically partisan political activist employed by President Bill Clinton, Stephanopulous somehow seamlessly glided into the awkward and disbelievable role of “news reporter” and “journalist” at ABC. You know, as the kind of news reporter and journalist that is supposed to be accurate, fair, balanced, fact-based, truth-seeking no matter where it takes him. Ideally, and probably much more so in America’s distant past, journalism is done by fair-minded arbiters of truth and accuracy, not political activists.
These two roles are mutually exclusive: Political activists are by definition not fair minded arbiters of truth and accuracy, and so they cannot possibly communicate anything but one-sided political propaganda, narrative, and self-serving lies to their viewers and audiences. Which is what George Stephanopoulos does…speaking of journalistic malpractice.
George Stephanopoulos is not a journalist, he is an aggressive political activist masquerading as a journalist. And the reason he wants to prevent President Trump from having live interviews on mainstream media outlets is that George Stephanopoulos wants to deprive American audiences of having an honest and unfiltered view of Trump. Because Americans seeing and hearing Trump in his own words, as his own self, is going to be completely at odds with the lies, propaganda, falsehoods, and partisan political narrative that political activists like George Stephanopoulos try to paint Trump with all the time.
George Stephanopoulos is actually a censor, the opposite of a journalist. He is someone who tries to stop, limit, or blunt the dissemination of inconvenient facts or truths that undermine the political goals of the censor. Censorship runs totally at odds with the spirit and intent of America’s First Amendment, as well as the open and sometimes raucous format for all of our political discourse since our founding.
Recall that American politicians used to give a “stump speech” literally standing on a fresh tree stump surrounded by interested citizens, such was the nature of America’s rapidly expanding frontier and European settlement. So, a so-called “journalist” trying to prevent a politician from giving his live “stump speech” is actually doing the opposite of journalism: He is conducting censorship, at war with America.
All censors will tell you they are blocking you from having access to the truth, the facts, a certain point of view, for your own good. But they are never really doing this for your own good, or for mine. Like George Stephanopoulos, all censors throughout history engage in censorship for their own good. Whether it is personal monetary rewards or a political outcome favorable to a censor’s political views, censorship is conducted purely for the benefit of the censor.
Censorship is evil, and so-called journalists who are actually censors, like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, are evil people. Censorship is un-American. Don’t be a censor, don’t support censors, don’t engage in censorship.
Here is an interesting very brief little video of President Trump at a small town hall, with an audience of Americans who had not heard him in person before. The audience members are stunned by the difference between President Trump in person, the actual President Trump, versus the false and heavily filtered/censored image of President Trump they had been fed by the mainstream media, like ABC “News” and George Stephanopoulos.
Here is why censorious political activists like George Stephanopoulos are becoming so bold about their political efforts under guise of “journalism,” which in the past would have itself been a headline: Totally partisan and politicized fake news legacy mainstream media outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, MSDNC, NPR, PBS, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. are being engulfed in a maelstrom of alternative information outlets, and they are becoming desperate.
Hence shameless George Stephanopuslous in effect knocking holes in his own boat in full public view, destroying his own credibility as a “journalist” and as an American, when he openly admits that he has no other defense against President Trump than artificially filtering Trump, censoring him, stopping the public from viewing him as he really is, and outright lying about Trump.
A thousand points of light (to beneficially borrow a phrase from one of the worst, most corrupt establishment politicians in modern history) are shedding unceasing light on the lies of George Stephanopoulos et al. A thousand small, independent alternative information outlets have sprung up across the internet and anywhere else they are not artificially repressed, censored, or suppressed. They exist because of the truth vaccuum left by George Stephanopoulos and his ilk, and the marketplace of ideas abhors a vaccuum.
Sites like www.breitbart.com, www.thegatewaypundit.com, www.zerohedge.com, www.dailycaller.com, www.rebelnews.com, and a million small websites like this one at www.joshfirst.com, not to mention an incredibly diverse, rich, and interesting constellation of independent political commentary and analysis at www.rumble.com, are each making a tiny cut into the corpulant, stagnant, odiferous, and pus-filled rotting meat that is the body of mainstream media.
This thousand points of light alternative news sources is making it impossible for liars like George Stephanopoulos to get away with his lies any longer. And this thousand tiny cuts of alternative information sources is slowly bleeding out the lying mainstream media, exposing them, weakening them.
Of course every information and news outlet has its own flair, its own bend, its own flavor and goals. This goes without saying. But when I read someone actually bragging about getting their news and information from MSNBC, NPR, and CNN, I wonder how anyone could be so incurious about the wider universe or galaxy they live in. If you are addicted to fake news, like NPR, ABC and George Stephanopoulos, you owe it to yourself to at least add a little cream to your coffee, and see what other people are reporting about the same whatever subject that ABC-NBC-CBS-NPR-ProPublica-CNN happens to be talking about at the moment.
Only censors try to blot out the light that other people need to be able to see clearly. Only fearful, close-minded, incurious, purposefully ignorant people steadfastly choose to support censors and remain behind their own artificial curtain.
Let the sun shine in, America.
UPDATE: Goodness gracious, I was in such a rush to get this essay up that I neglected to include all of the amazing podcasts that Amerians are dialing into every day. There are a whole bunch of podcasts and interactive radio/internet shows, too, that are a blend of Libertarian/freedom/ constitutional/ just askin’ that are just smokin‘ the mainstream media. Shows like Joe Rogan (who I disagree with about 45% of the time, and who has occasionally said some racist stuff that leaves me shaking my head, but who nonetheless addresses important issues head-0n), Dan Bongino, whose uncensored balls-to-the-wall New Yawk accented bare knuckle bulldozer of a daily show is one of the highest rated in America for good reason, can be found on Apple and on Rumble. Dinesh D’Souza is my favorite faux felon, who is incredibly smart, quick, witty, and insightful. Ace interviewer Jan Jekeliek has the most incredible people from all walks of life on his American Thought Leaders podcast. Russell Brand has grown on me over the years, and while he is in no way a conservative, he is a witty, quick, and funny advocate for transparency, accountability, and honesty, which are all good and necessary things in any government, and especially in a government of, by, and for The People like ours. Russell Brand’s mocking of the corrupt FBI agents stealing people’s gold watches is hilarious and cutting.
I could go on and on, and in the interest of time, this short list is a “starter pack” for intelligent, curious, open minded, patriotic Americans. Give these folks a whirl or two and see if you aren’t hooked. Each has a different style and really different content, and yet each of these independent-minded people is providing a life-saving end-run around the rotten and corrupt establishment media complex like ABCNPRCNN…this is the thousand points of light exposing the lying mainstream media and the resulting thousand glorious small cuts bleeding out the fake news media.
The Joe Paterno Empire Strikes Back
The family of late Penn State University football coach, icon, leader, and hero Joe Paterno has struck back at the “investigative” report by former US FBI director Louis Freeh.
Releasing an analysis of Freeh’s report that is similar to one posted on this blog last year (https://joshfirst.com/blog/2012/08/16/the-sandusky-disaster-kids-lose-penn-state-loses-ncaa-loses-theres-still-no-lesson-here/), the Paternos have taken an important step in regaining lost ground.
Lost ground was rapidly created by an uncritical press, willing to serve up maudlin caricatures of what may have happened around convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky, rather than carefully scrutinize the facts and evidence we have in front of us, and then wait for the facts and evidence that we do not have but yet expect to see come out in the upcoming trials of Spanier, Curley, and Shultz.
A rush to judgment has never been so well documented, and then so well defended by a sea of armchair quarterbacks using 20/20 hindsight. Analyzing the comments on internet sites, like Forbes, ESPN, and any other reporting or opinion venue, you’d think that Joe Paterno was the real culprit, and not Sandusky.
Freeh’s report is as bad as a report can get. It is more representative of a Kremlin kangaroo court than the best America has to offer. After a career-start seven-year stint in Washington, DC, spent writing federal policy and law, my take on the Freeh report is that it is outrageously flawed.
Its worst defect is its use of wild conjecture (e.g. relying on hearsay in one email from Tim Curley to Graham Spanier and Gary Shultz about an unnamed “coach”). Nowhere does it say “While key facts are lacking or presently unknown, it is prudent to await casting judgment….” Rather, Freeh’s report is judge, jury, and executioner all at once, and it clearly aimed to destroy one person: Joe Paterno.
Importantly, Freeh’s report exonerated the sitting PSU trustees, most of whom had sat idly by and never challenged Spanier, even when one or two trustees began to ask him hard questions. Were those lazy trustees culpable? Why not?
Most important, Freeh was used by PSU and the NCAA to lower the standards bar, to decrease expectations in college football, rather than to elevate them. By arguing that Joe Paterno was deeply flawed and a hypocrite, Freeh made the classic morally relative argument that we are all pathetic losers, that there are no real heroes, that there are no really good men, and that no one should expect any to show up anytime soon.
Finally, if the PSU trustees fell down on the job and used the Freeh report to cover up their failings, one cannot escape the sense that at least some of the Paterno family members do not grasp the positive way that Joe Paterno is still viewed by many of us Nittany Nation members.
Last year, while communicating with one of the Paterno kids, I was struck by his inability or unwillingness to recognize the breadth of Joe’s legacy. That is, if Joe Paterno left a legacy, then it is beyond the family to solely claim, because it is carried by his believers. Joe’s legacy belongs to all of us, because he was representative of all of our values, hopes, and expectations, and our support is not about the family, but about the symbol that was Joe Paterno.
To that end, wouldn’t it be refreshing to see the family rally the troops, rather than look so deeply inward. Casting the Freeh report as a culture war attack on rare core values, rather than on a person, would more accurately frame this subject.
Unlike the vast majority of people with an opinion on this subject, I have actually read the Freeh report. It sucks. It is unprofessional. It is unworthy of Louis Freeh’s name, and it is unworthy of Penn State University’s name. It is nearly useless in understanding all of what happened with Jerry Sandusky, and how he continued to molest and rape little boys when some adults around him either suspected or had been told he was a pedophile. Shedding light on 33% of an issue raises more questions than it answers. Truth is not what was sought, but it is what is at stake. Bigger truths, like traditional core values that are under attack everywhere, suffer from this.
So, it is my hope that the Paterno family, and former governor and US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, will continue their efforts, and also expand them to encompass the bigger picture. Good luck, folks, we are standing with you.