Bart Stinson
A Brief History of Agents Provocateurs
I moved back to Alaska in 2010, the year that incumbent U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski and her primary challenger both pledged to support the Republican nominee, no matter which of them won, in the general election that Fall. “TEA Party” insurgent Joe Miller trailed Murkowski by about 20 points.
But when Miller shocked the world – and Murkowski – by winning that primary election and becoming the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Murkowski reneged on her promise and ran an independent general election campaign against Miller and the Democrat in the Fall.
Swamp Republicans were aghast at the TEA Party conservatives’ effrontery, and went to work undermining the nominee’s chances. Senate Republican campaign pros under the guidance of Mitch McConnell funded negative advertising against the Democrat, but none against Murkowski. The effect was to unify the anti-Miller vote as a Murkowski vote, including Democrats.
TEA Party insider Bill Fulton stayed close to Miller beginning the night he won the primary, frequently advised him of violence risks, and prevailed on him to wear Fulton’s own bulletproof vest. He urged Miller to accept his offer of a protective security team during the campaign, but Miller didn’t want it.
Then the Anchorage school district required security as a condition of using a middle school for a campaign gathering. Miller campaign staff asked Fulton to provide it. The candidate learned of the security team only after he arrived at the event.
Shortly after the get-together ended, Fulton detained a well-known Alaskan journalist and placed him in handcuffs. The handcuffed reporter was in public view, and his indignant colleagues from other media photographed him in captivity.
Miller didn’t witness the incident, as he had moved on to the next event across town. But it was electrifying political theater, and it made voters’ blood run cold as their worst suspicions were confirmed about an authoritarian right-winger who felt emboldened to manhandle his critics.
A Miller campaign official recalls hearing a young man remark to another at the school that “this could not have gone any better for us.” Miller’s lead evaporated, and Murkowski won re-election to her Senate seat by a plurality of 39 percent to Miller’s 35 percent.
Scarcely two years later, the Los Angeles Times reported that Fulton was an FBI informant at the time of his involvement in Miller’s and other ill-fated conservative Alaskan political campaigns. Interviewed by the progressive Huffington Post, he came out of the closet as a committed Liberal who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
“I was working for you, you sons of [profanity omitted],” he told the Liberal media, “and nobody knew it.”
But was Fulton working for Liberal Democrats and RINOs broadly, or was he deployed specifically by the Obama FBI? The FBI had a well-documented history of using undercover agents to discredit and disrupt the Civil Rights-era Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan by provocative acts and persuasion.
In light of Operation Fast and Furious, the plan to release guns illegally to straw buyers for the Mexican cartels, it’s fairly clear that Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, had the requisite moral fiber to use agents and informants politically. His exoneration of Lois Lerner at the Internal Revenue Service proved that Holder and Obama were comfortable using the coercive, invasive powers of the government against their political adversaries. They have yet to disavow Fulton.
The use of agents provocateurs to discredit opponents is hardly an FBI invention. Their tactical deployment in modern times was systematized in the early 1800s by Eugene Francois Vidocq, founding Director of the French National Police. In late-19th and early-20th Century America, they were used against labor organizers and striking workers.
Most recently, the Reuters news wire service revealed that right-wing Proud Boys spokesman Enrique “Henry” Tarrio was an FBI informant. Various Proud Boys members were identified in the destructive January 6 rampage through the U.S. Capitol. Tarrio wasn’t there because he was intercepted by Washington police before the rally, supposedly, and banished from the city by a Superior Court judge until June.
The Other Fake Insurrection
There’s more than one way for agents provocateurs to discredit opponents. Sometimes there can be entrapment, when the target is enticed or exhorted to commit criminal acts. Sometimes it’s just disastrous publicity, when the target is blamed for some outrageous act. In 1933 Germany, it was the burning of the Reichstag, which was their national parliament.
It’s difficult to say whether, as alleged, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels masterminded a scheme to send 10 arsonists through a tunnel from Hermann Goring’s official residence to set the blazes. It’s utterly implausible, however, that fall guy Marinus van der Lubbe was able to ignite all the blazes that converged to gut the large building.
Goring, who was president of the Reichstag, oversaw the official investigation and quickly assigned guilt to the Nazis’ principal enemies at the time.
February 27 is the anniversary of that arson, which provided Hitler a pretext to seize absolute power. Until then, Hitler was merely an appointed Chancellor over a divided German government. The majority of his Cabinet wasn’t Nazi, and his party had only won 18 percent in the previous parliamentary election.
But the fire turned German public opinion against the Nazis’ opponents, and Hitler convinced 85-year-old President Paul von Hindenberg to declare the fateful “Decree for the Protection of the People and the State.” The decree was badly misnamed. It stripped the German people of their rights of free speech, free press and the right to assemble. It stripped them of their property rights.
It’s difficult to imagine that the exhausted old president sought any consultation or gave any serious deliberation to the measure that he signed the very next day after the arson. He just signed whatever the young, vigorous Hitler urged on him.
The timing could not have been any better for the Nazis. Parliamentary elections followed less than a week after the burning of the Reichstag. The Nazis took 44 percent this time, still not a majority, but they were now the largest party in Germany, able to form an alliance that put them over the top and this put them in control of the government.
Menaced by Nazi S.A. street muscle, the parliament surrendered its powers to the (executive-branch) Cabinet under Hitler. The Nazi regime sent its own governors out to take authority over the states, and eventually the states were abolished altogether.
Heinrich Himmler turned the Bavarian police into a politically reliable Nazi asset; Goring transformed the Prussian state police into the Gestapo. When the ancient president finally died, Hitler combined the power of both Chancellor and President. When he assumed personal command of all three branches of the German military, no checks and balances remained. The German regime was totalitarian.
It’s not always true that hindsight is 20/20. We think of Germans in that era as perfect candidates for savagery and bloodthirsty military adventurism, as genocidal barbarians just waiting to happen. But they weren’t. Germans were possibly the wisest, most refined, most civilized, most accomplished people on the planet before their descent into barbarism in the 20th Century.
They were so tolerant and inclusive that the membership of some German cultural organizations in the U.S. were majority Jewish. The foremost advocates of German philosophy and music on U.S. college faculties were often Jewish. We shouldn’t delude ourselves that we are too tolerant and humane to ever resemble the Nazis.
In Germany, simply stated, the good people lost and the worst people won. Nazis assassinated the Catholic Bishop of Munich. They eventually executed Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Christian conscience was hushed, not only by violent state-sponsored thugs, but by fellow believers who didn’t want to make waves, didn’t want to be resented.
The decent Germans brought a knife to the gunfight. They permitted their pre-Nazi leadership to stampede them into self-disarmament after some frightening street violence in their cities. Those who complied with gun registration and who submitted to annual renewal of gun permits found themselves gradually disarmed by Nazi clerks. Within a few years, they were entirely at the mercy of the Gestapo.
The Nazis must have noticed how easy it was, in the wake of news hysteria, to herd compliant Germans into lines to turn in their firearms, or to register them, and to let a clerk decide whether they should be armed or not. They found the same strategy dependable in the burning of the Reichstag. Instead of firearms, the citizens surrendered their checks and balances, their property rights, their Constitutional liberties and their reliance on individual conscience.
It seemed like a smart deal at the time, but it eventually cost them their sons drafted for bloody military disasters, their cities bombed into oblivion, and many of their daughters and wives gang-raped by Soviet avengers.
Manufactured hysteria has enjoyed an encore in 21st-Century America.
I flew into Washington DC on the afternoon of January 6. I missed Donald Trump’s speech, and MAGA people were already at the Capitol when I arrived. Public transportation to the Capitol area was already suspended by District of Columbia municipal officials, so I rode their subway to a different location and navigated back through neighborhoods to the Capitol.
You Call This an Insurrection?
The first MAGA hat I saw in Washington was on a fellow subway passenger, about my age, who was carrying a cheap aluminum-frame lawn chair, the kind you bring to a picnic or a grandchild’s soccer match. At our age, an insurrectionist has got to know his limits.
Constitution Avenue was closed to vehicles, but there were a great many pedestrians coming back my way as I walked toward the Capitol. They came in waves. There were an awful lot of large U.S. flags and some Trump flags. I guessed they had made their point, and were going home.
What I witnessed when I arrived at the Northwest side of the Capitol: a mostly middle-aged and older crowd waving flags, singing and chanting. They sang the national anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and America the Beautiful. There was a call-and-response chant of “Whose House? Our House!” I saw no sign of police except for their fleet of vehicles arrayed along our flank. I heard no chants to hang Mike Pence.
I saw no property destruction, although people in front of us did remove portable crowd control stanchions and leaned them against low walls to serve as step ladders to the next higher terrace. We’re citizens, not cattle. We’re not going to be fenced and herded.
Let’s be clear about something: we do not profane the Capitol by our mere presence. There is nothing disgraceful or unsavory about the people assembling at their legislature to petition for the redress of grievances. These are, in fact, two explicit Constitutional rights.
The Capitol exists for our representation and empowerment, not to subdue us. It belongs to us. When you hear high and mighty politicians speak of us “desecrating” the Capitol by being there, you know that they not only wish we would go away, but that they feel entitled to our apathy and silence.
Arlene of North Carolina asked to borrow a cell phone after hers went dead, so she could contact her companions and coordinate rides back to their Virginia hotel. Unfortunately and mysteriously, my phone also went dead although my battery wasn’t low.
Soon we learned that rioters had entered the South entrance, and rampaged inside. MAGA patriots at the Northwest side learned of this from news broadcasts, and from phone calls they received from friends inside. They passed the word about an unarmed young woman being shot by Capitol Police, and provided some gruesome details.
We didn’t know yet that she was going to die, but one fiftyish lady knew who she was. She said her son had served in the Air Force with her, and knew her to be an ardent patriot, not Antifa. The young woman was a rioter, of course. I’m not sure she deserved to be shot dead, but it’s rarely a good idea to frighten an armed police officer.
I heard modest muffled explosions spaced about twenty minutes apart, but I couldn’t tell what direction the sound came from. They got louder, more frequent, and closer until I realized they were coming from inside the Capitol building. Then I recognized the explosions as the sound of tear gas canisters.
Police emerged from the Capitol building, and popped gas overhead. So far as I could tell, it was unprovoked. Now the somber crowd got angry. It was the only time I heard chants of “traitor!” and it was directed at police skirmishers, not Mike Pence. There was also some angry profanity from the younger guys as police continued to drive the assembled MAGA crowd off the upper flanks of the Capitol.
I don’t know how long all that lasted, because I had a flight to catch. I made my way back to the airport and flew out ahead of silly curfews in the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia. After I got to television sets in the airport gates, I got a look at the people who rioted inside the Capitol.
Antifa people don’t have bar codes on their foreheads. I don’t know how many of them were inside with the MAGA people. Bug-eyed Salt Lake City Antifa adventurer Jon Sullivan was there. When he was interviewed on television, he came off as an earnest citizen journalist. But he’s on tape exhorting the rioters to burn it all down.
Sullivan later picked up two $35,000 checks from television news networks for his interview and film footage from inside the riot. It was a nifty payday for a rent-a-riot that might have amazed Eugene Francois Vidocq himself.
I don’t pretend that I can always pick out MAGA people on sight. We don’t all look alike. But some of the freaks I saw in that televised riot stuck out like sore thumbs. The bare-chested guy with horns and face paint? That’s not a MAGA look. I read that he’s been seen at climate protests previously. Yet the mainstream media stubbornly identify him as a pro-Trump insurrectionist, thus smearing us with his crimes.
Whoever committed crimes of violence or property destruction inside the Capitol on January 6 should be prosecuted, regardless of their politics. But a troubling pattern is emerging from the criminal investigation: FBI and prosecutors lean on the defendant, plea-bargaining until he denounces Trump. Somebody calls media contacts and the next thing you know, the attention-seeking hooligan is being quoted sympathetically as a sadder, wiser, former Trump supporter. This is politics, not law enforcement.
Riddle me this: if Trump’s speech ended at 1:15 pm and if it’s about a 30-minute walk from the site of that speech to the Capitol, how could Trump’s speech incite a riot that began around 12:50 pm? Trump has surprised me a lot over 
the past four years. I stopped betting against Trump at least a couple of years ago. But I still don’t think he could spark an insurrection retroactively.
The House and Senate have their own security apparatus at the Capitol. On whose orders were unmarked vehicles admitted past the barricades to disgorge civilians at the entrance, and who told Capitol Police to let them inside? It’s difficult to believe that decision was casual, or that a low-level police officer made that call. Who were those civilians, and what was their role in the riot?
A Tyrannical Harvest
The Insurrection narrative has provided cover for a power grab unhindered by public debate, examination or oversight. Like Hindenberg, a frail Joe Biden appears to be signing everything his eager young usurpers push across his desk, whether it’s opening military enlistment and its medical benefits to nondeployable transgenders, or committing us to the Paris climate treaty without seeking Constitutionally required two-thirds Senate ratification.
His pace of executive orders overtook Franklin Roosevelt just two weeks into his administration. He and his appointee over the Department of Defense continue to speak darkly and vaguely of white supremacy among police officers, active military and veterans. In a tone that the Bavarian and Prussian State Police of 1933 would recognize, it is an ominous prelude to a wide-ranging purge of conservative patriots.
Democratic threats to pack the Supreme Court have had their intended effect. The Court recently decided not to review Pennsylvania election fraud allegations. It’s unlikely that this decision will buy a reprieve for the Court, as totalitarians simply cannot tolerate independent adjudication or review. By turning a blind eye to the illegal election fraud of 2020, the 6-3 majority’s appeasement has probably ensured that it will be packed by Democrats. If not, they will be on a short leash subject to jerking by Harris Democrats at any moment.
Senate Democrats are moving to strip Sen. Josh Hawley of committee assignments and perhaps expel him from the Senate altogether because he objected to the certification of certain states’ fraudulent vote counts. They might 
ultimately settle for a vote of censure, but either gesture makes it clear to all current and future patriots that conscientious opposition to the new regime will not be tolerated.
If Capitol Hill Democrats, Nevertrump Republicans, mainstream media gatekeepers and social media tycoons fail to lift their finest stemware in a private toast to Joseph Goebbels and the Reichstag blueprint this Sunday, it will be a case of ingratitude.
