This is a tale of a number of people and organizations that started out doing important work in this world, only to deteriorate into crackpot espousers of overheated sensationalisms.
It starts with Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson's participation in a Senate hearing yesterday:
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) read a report blaming “agent provocateurs” and people who “obviously didn’t fit in” for the attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 — concluding that they “probably planned this.”
The senator read experts from a report by J Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center of Security Policy, entitled I Saw Provocateurs At The Capitol Riot On Jan. 6 and published by The Federalist.
“At about 11:30, I walked from near Union Station … and noticed a small number of Capitol Police dressed in full riot gear, with shin guards and shoulder guards,” he read, adding that he then saw a “positive and festive” crowd leaving Trump’s “Save America” to walk down Constitution Avenue.
Johnson went on to read that Waller had noticed four types of people that “stood out” in the MAGA crowd, adding that they “obviously didn’t fit in” with the families in attendance or with those in “pro-police shirts”
“Although the crowd represented a broad cross-section of Americans, mostly working-class by their appearance and manner of speech, some people stood out,” he read. “A very few didn’t share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.”
He went on to describe the four groups he noticed stood out: “Plainclothes militants, agents provocateurs, fake Trump protesters, and then disciplined, uniformed column of attackers.”
“I think these are the people that probably planned this,” Johnson said.
Johnson continued to read the report, which noted that D.C. Metropolitan Police seemed to be acting normally on that day, but also claimed there was no law enforcement at the Capitol.
“Several marchers expressed surprise,” Johnson read, adding, “The openness seemed like a courtesy gesture from Congress, which controls security.”
The claim that Antifa or outside provocateurs were responsible for the riot has been repeatedly fact-checked, especially after The Washington Times published a report that falsely claimed a facial recognition firm said Antifa infiltrated and posed as pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol.
Senator Johnson at one time had his head on straight, but that's all over now:
Johnson, who came to the Senate by upsetting the chronically underfunded Russ Feingold in 2010 and then beating him again in a 2016 rematch, used to come across as boring and unoriginal. Not any more, notes veteran Wisconsin journalist Bruce Murphy:
It’s remarkable to see the transformation of Johnson, who ran as a businessman concerned about the federal deficit and was consumed by the issue in his early years. He has gradually transformed into a collector of crackpot theories and conspiracies and one of the strangest senators serving today.
And The Federalist's descent from a venue solidly in the mainstream of conservatism into a Trumpist organ has been saddening to watch. Even long-timers who once did great work such as Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway have imbibed the Kool-Aid.
J. Michael Waller, the author of the Federalist piece cited by Johnson, was an invaluable source for the details about the Marxist-Leninist nature of Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front and El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front throughout the 1980s, when Central America was the staging ground of one of the last proxy conflicts of the Cold War.
Looking back on his style of presentation, I can now see that his intended audience was people who were ate up with geo-strategic concerns. I certainly fit that bill at the time. As I've recounted before, an appearance by a guy from the local "peace fellowship" at the Unitarian fellowship I was attending who'd recently returned from a "fact-finding" mission to the region was the catalyst for my conversion experience by which I became a conservative. This peace-fellowship guy was feeding the congregation a lot of hooey about Reagan foreign policy supporting bad guys and I'd been reading some books that set the record straight, starting with New York Times reporter Shirley Christian's Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, and including monographs Waller had written for the Council for Inter-American Security. I was pretty well versed on the players and the roots of the situation, guys like Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borge tracts like the 72-Hour Document and Communist front organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.
But Waller's one of those guys who remained overheated about the world-stage stakes even after the Cold War was over, and had so much invested in his career as a deep diver that he felt compelled to keep at it.
The Federalist piece, and Johnson's reading from it, are an embarrassment. It's all speculation. People seeming to fall into four categories. The first category being "jovial." Unsubstantiated inference about leftist groups being at the core of the violence.
The whole thing is a case study in how agendas can cloud people's views of actual reality. There are so many people still striving to fit facts into a Trumpist narrative that they flush their reputations down the toilet.
The most unfortunate thing about that is that each time it happens, it makes it that much more difficult for remaining conservatives to articulate our worldview convincingly. The public's view that anyone right of center is a crank gets reinforced.
Thanks for nothin', Ron.
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