Up until not so long ago it was possible to argue that the political divide in America was over means rather than ends. Both sides had the same general goal, but they disagreed upon the course needed to get there. Alternatively, the debate was over the best possible end, which is an extension of the same debate. The fights that ensued were over the facts and the interpretation of the facts. Somewhere along the way, that changed and the debate is now centered on propaganda.

A good current example is the Breonna Taylor issue in Louisville. For the longest time, the mass media has claimed that cops murdered her for no reason. They executed a “no-knock warrant” and just opened fire, killing her in the process. This led to riots in Louisville and contributed to the summer of mayhem. It turns out that none of that was true and the Breonna Taylor story was a complete lie. The only thing true about it was the names of the people involved.

This is a familiar pattern in these cases. First, we get the incident, which often goes unnoticed by the mass media. Then sometime later the story bursts on the scene with an official narrative and a media kit, which always includes images of the victim from when they were young. In an instant, every hair-hat in the media is chanting the same lines over top the same canned video. A mob is then ginned up wherever it happened and the authorities then rush to jail some white guy.

Go back to the Trayvon Martin story and you see the same operation. First there was the well-orchestrated media campaign. Then we got protests followed by famous blacks showing solidarity by wearing hoodies. The famous blacks are heralded by the media for their courage. Then we learned that Trayvon Martin was not a boy, but a man who was bashing the head of George Zimmerman against the curb. The whole thing was a carefully choreographed propaganda campaign.

The thing about patterns is they usually indicate some common agent upstream from the observable pattern. In this case, it is becoming clear that a well-financed group is working in the shadows to create these incidents. Before the grand jury announcement in the Breonna Taylor case, someone shot video of a U-Haul truck full of riot accessories being unloaded in Louisville. The renter was easily identified by the identification numbers on the side of the truck.

It has been clear for some time that left-wing groups were involved in the civil unrest going on around the country. Groups like Antifa started showing up at Black Lives Matter protests in Portland and Seattle. The assumption has been that various left-wing groups have been drawn to these incidents, looking to take advantage of the situation in order to push their agenda. In other words, you get the incident, then the unrest and then the left-wing groups flooding the zone.

In reality, the order is reversed. It is increasingly clear that well-financed agitators are creating the incidents. They prepare the media kits, organize the mobs and then supply them with riot equipment. Then they use the media coverage, which is all based on the media kits, to rope in support from famous rich people. A century ago, bourgeois radicals joined the communist party in order to feel special. Today they provide bail money to rioters. The useful idiot is a constant.

There are two important take-a-ways from this bit of reality. One is the people behind this stuff are playing a long game. It takes years to build out the infrastructure to orchestrate something like this. It is impossible to do this in every city, which is why it has been the far-left strongholds hit with these riots. The one exception is Louisville, but maybe that was targeted for other reasons. Regardless, this has been a long-term project orchestrated by sophisticated players.

The second take-a-way is that the authorities are either compromised and unwilling to dig into these networks or incapable of doing it. The top of the country’s domestic intelligence pyramid is obsessed with right-wing extremism, a thing that is about as real as leprechauns riding unicorns. Maybe this is deliberate or maybe the people at the top are so disconnected from reality they think it is real. Either way, this has flowed down through the system. No one is looking behind these riots.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the fact that internet sleuths are better at finding and identifying radicals caught on video than the police and FBI is important. This tubby women behind the U-Haul truck caper is a great example. Surely the cops see this stuff and report it to their superiors. Detectives could discover who owns or rented the vehicle without leaving their desk. Yet, time after time, it is internet detectives who locate the people behind some incident caught on video.

Where we find ourselves now is in a world where well-organized and financed domestic terror groups are operating with impunity in major cities. The government at all levels is either unable or unwilling to confront it. Again, it is not as if there is a mystery as to who is writing the checks to these radical networks. In cases where it is murky, a search warrant would clear it up. If the people in charge wanted to put an end to the unrest, they could do so tomorrow.

That is another clue. There’s no doubt that just as the Soviet Union was able to compromise swaths of the Western ruling class, these radical actors have been able to co-opt segments of the American Left. That means internal resistance within the ruling class to looking at who is behind this stuff. The Soviets had agents all the way into the White House in the FDR years. It is not unreasonable to think that radical actors and fellow travelers operate within the administrative state.

There may also be a mix of naivete and stupidity. What has happened this year is right out of the handbook on psychological warfare. There are the hundreds of little lies seeded in the popular culture, which in turn make the big lies more plausible, but more outrageous when they are discovered. The point of these operations is to destroy social trust and trust in the ruling class. Someone or a collection of someones is waging a psychological warfare and our rulers don’t see it.

Alternatively, instead of the political class being the pawns, it is the American people being used as pawns in some great game among the ruling class. The rioters are just useful idiots, used as stage props in a media campaign. That’s certainly possible, but does anyone think these people are that clever? Even if these people are just pawns themselves, it still leads back to the same place. We are in the midst of a psychological war on the country and no one is fighting back.

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