Monday, April 19, 2010

A False Flag Operation: On the Lie of Tea Party Tolerance, White Supremacists, and Liberal "Infiltrators"



The Right wing media and the Tea Parties are playing chess while the Left and the mainstream media are playing checkers.

While they can be disparaged as being narrow minded ideologues possessed of an authoritarian personality, Conservatives in the U.S.--and the extreme Right wing that has now become the center of the GOP--have long been masters of using emotional and moral appeals to motivate their public. While the Democrats are hamstrung by an issues based approach to politics, Conservatives have mastered the art of creating an alternate world of political facts and reason (enabled by the Right wing media echo chamber) where the reality based community need not tread.

This week the note being struck is that liberal infiltrators (in the guise of "agent provocateurs") are targeting the Tea Parties in order to smear and discredit them. Without any factual substantiation (and ignoring the racist, bigoted, and violent rhetoric that is common at the Tea Party gatherings) the Right has succeeded in reframing the narrative which surrounds the tea baggers. Now, freed from any responsibility for their own actions, the Tea Parties can point to some imagined villain as being responsible for all things disruptive and violent at their protests.

This is a brilliant move because it frees the tea baggers from any measure of responsibility for their deeds. Consider the simple genius at work here: if someone has a racist sign he/she is an infiltrator; if someone spits on a black congressman "they aren't really one of us" (or alternatively John Lewis was not spat upon because there is no "proof" save for eye witness accounts); if someone incites violence "he isn't a tea bagger, it must be a crazy progressive." Not surprisingly, rather than expose this quackery, most in the media are repeating these narratives without critical intervention or comment.

My claim is not that provocation by liberal instigators is an impossibility. No, the rebuttal should be "so what?" With all of the evidence of how central white racial animus and hostility are to the Tea Party movement, what else could the infiltrators possibly do? What other bad behavior--short of bombings, shootings, and other wanton acts of violence--could they possibly provoke the tea baggers into committing?

An appeal to the liberals as infiltrators strategy is also doubly effective because it inverts the political landscape by making the Tea Parties into victims of Jim Crow 2.0 and Barack Obama's America--those liberals whom despise "the patriots" and the good white folk who only want to exercise their first amendment rights against an "oppressive" and "tyrannical" regime that practices "reverse discrimination" and "pays too much attention" to black people's needs.

The Right has upped the ante. Not content with displacing responsibility onto "liberals" and "progressives" for the brigands in their midst, the Tea Parties are now trying to take the moral high ground as the party of diversity and tolerance. To that end, the tea baggers and their Right wing media arm have been circulating a video of a confrontation between a Tea Party member and an alleged white supremacist. Here the tea bagger confronts the white supremacist and condemns him. While doing so, the Tea Party activist is sticking to a clear script: "the Tea Parties are not racist," that "racism has no place with the Tea Parties," and "that the Tea Party does not concern itself with race." In one 2 minute clip, the Tea Party has created a counter-narrative, one with compelling soundbites, that runs explicitly counter to the popular understanding that the tea baggers are racist xenophobes. This is poetry in motion.

It is also a classic false flag operation. In intelligence and military circles these tactics involve the use of subterfuge and trickery (thus the allusion to a ship flying a "false flag") to create a pretext for military intervention or regime change, for framing events in the service of your own agenda, or more simply for making the public believe that "X" is occurring when it is in reality "Y."

In keeping with this strategy, the "white supremacist" in question (and there will be other videos of similar events released soon...you can mark my words) is a Tea Party activist. He is playing the role of the devil in their midst, a cancer to be conveniently exorcised as a way for the Tea Parties to demonstrate their love of diversity and colorblind politics. It is ironic then that the Tea Parties and the Right are sounding an alarm regarding the use of dirty tricks by the Left (Conservatives such as Beck and Limbaugh assert that the Progressives are masters of subterfuge and disruption) where in the United States the truth has been that through programs such as Cointelpro, the forces of elite power and Conservatism have spied on, disrupted, discredited, harassed and even killed members of Left-leaning organizations.

The repackaging of the Tea Parties as tolerant and inclusive political organizations is happening as we speak. It will continue from its own momentum regardless of the facts on the ground. In much the same way that Dr. King has been reimagined by conservatives to be a Republican (notice how Glenn Beck, the Pied Piper for the Tea Parties, is increasingly appropriating both the language and symbolism of The Civil Rights Movement), the tea baggers will be depicted as forces of American virtue and pluralism. As this false flag operation continues to develop, here are a few things to watch for in the upcoming weeks:

  1. More coverage of the "racial diversity" of the Tea Parties. Expect to see the same talking heads and black and brown apologists trotted out on the major networks;
  2. The discussion of agent provocateurs will take on the weight of fact as opposed to speculation;
  3. There will be more videos of white supremacists, nativists, and overt "Birthers" being thrown out of Tea Party rallies;
  4. Simultaneously, there will be a great deal of attention paid to "incidents" where Palin supporters and tea baggers are assaulted by "anti-Tea Party" forces and "agents of the Obama regime";
  5. The Right wing media frame will continue to emphasize their long standing narrative that Conservatives and "real Americans" are "victims" of the Left and Progressives;
  6. Similar to what happened with the ACORN pimp and prostitute scandal (a fraud staged by Breitbart and company), the efforts to "infiltrate" the Tea Parties will be exposed as events planned by the Right;
  7. Loose lips sink ships: one of the "white supremacist" or other "agent provocateurs" will give up the fact that they are on the payroll of someone semi-connected (for reasons of plausible deniability) to the Right wing media and/or political establishment.
Your predictions and thoughts? Pray tell what does your crystal ball reveal for these coming weeks?

7 comments:

annum natalem said...

Criswell don't need any predictions from his crystal ball, because this crap is already happening. Already I've got one of my friends (a conservative of color, someone with whom I try to keep communications open because I think more of her than I do her politics) trying to tell me that Democrats are just as "racist" as the teabaggers (which of course, get a free ride for being racists because, according to her, they have no "real power", unlike Democrats... wtf?) and that my association with them is as damning as her association with them. Which I call bullshit on, of course.

My main argument to her was that the teabaggers burned up valuable air time not bringing up real economic grievances (the bank bailouts while people go without jobs and/or unemployment insurance, and other issues such as this) and instead waste it on parading around with a picture of Obama dressed as a witchdoctor. I told her that I didn't trust those people, and I don't trust people who would willingly stand with those people, regardless of whether they were of color or not. In fact, I'd go a bit farther and say that any black conservative that somehow doesn't find a problem with hanging with these nutjobs is someone I'd distrust doubly.

I already lost a friendship with a white English guy over having voted for Obama... he said my vote was only because he was black. He didn't seem to mind that I couldn't, in all conscience, vote for McCain.

I'm glad I voted for him, now. All the arguments in which I've participated ever since have revealed to me that I need to be a little more careful in who I consider a friend. It's not a lesson I wanted to take away, but there it is.

Violette said...

Whenever the cameras pan out to the audience during a Tea Party rally, all I see is a sea of white, angry faces. I never see any Asians, Hispanics, or Arabs. At best, maybe a black person or two.

The Tea Party can trot out all black and brown apologists they want, but the cameras don't lie.

Kit (Keep It Trill) said...

The guy in the video reminds me a Black Water operative.

This Tea Party thing is getting weirder and weirder. I watched Glenn Beck early this evening to see what he was talking about it.

You'll never guess who's in it: the niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. Her name is Dr. Alveda King.

She said next to rock musician Ted Nugent, and they got along great.

You know what their beef is? Government corruption with Wall Street.

Hard to argue with that.

This is going to be another interesting chapter in the drama of American politics.

Anonymous said...

Hi, My understanding is that the current re-birth of the "Boston tea party" is related to "The Boston 911 Truth Tea Party of 12/16 2006". The action involved was to reject the Official 911 Commission Report by symbolically tossing it into the harbour.
The role of the "security state" is to create confusion in order to divide and conquer and take effective control of any and all organizations.
Just on a personal aesthetic note the use of the derogatory term tea baggers serves this purpose. Its use only provokes division or derisive (self satisfied) smirking.

Lady Zora, Chauncey DeVega, and Gordon Gartrelle said...

@Fictional--Those folks who play the black people voted for Obama card are a low lot. How do they explain all of the many many times (for lack of options) we have voted for white candidates? And God forbid could black folks actually have some reasoning behind voting for a candidate beyond racial solidarity? Yikes

@Violette--You didn't know they
were "diverse"...yes you can count the number of people who are not white in their crowds but they seem immune to it..or maybe it is a comfortable number?

@Kit--I need to see that clip so I can throwup in my mouth. Sad.

@Anon--the tea baggers named themselves that. I try to let folk have the dignity of their own naming practices.

cd

Anonymous said...

Hi, Thanks for addressing my comments.
I must question the idea that any group selected such a name for themselves. It is not the end of the world if we have different understandings about this.
In any event the purpose of my posting was to point to the events of 911 and how belief in the official 911 lie is central to the security state setting the agenda. What I am saying is that the "security state" gained effective control over a movement started by people who are awake to the official 911 lie.

Minister Farrakhan has recently commented on 911.

http://www.m911t.blogspot.com/

Most of the minister's points are encapsulated in the book
Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 911 by David Ray Griffin.

cheers bc

What one doesn't know about 911 kills people.

Lady Zora, Chauncey DeVega, and Gordon Gartrelle said...

@Anon,

Good points. I do think there is something to be said for the people fighting with each other over crumbs, while the corporateocracy and the big fish sit back and smile.

This has been an old story, but ought we still not engage our ideological foes on whatever battlefield we find them?

cd