Does Charging Oath Keepers With “Seditious Conspiracy” Save the “Insurrection” Narrative?

Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Last Thursday, January 13, the U.S. Department of Justice set the Pelosi-Schumer Democrats and their allies in the media industrial complex abuzz with the announcement that Elmer Stewart Rhodes, III, the founder and leader of the organization known as Oath Keepers, along with 10 additional members of his group, has been indicted on charges of “Seditious Conspiracy and Other Offenses Related to U.S. Capitol Breach” of January 6, 2021. This latest DOJ action appears to have been calculated to fill in the conspicuous holes in the ludicrous media-driven conspiracy theory that the Capitol melee involving several hundred protesters was actually an insurrection coup organized by President Donald Trump and his nefarious co-conspirators in Congress.

Although more than 700 people have been arrested and charged with crimes in the Capitol riot, the vast majority of charges have been for misdemeanors, such as trespassing. For months, Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department have been taking flak for failing to be sufficiently aggressive to suit some “progressive” Democrats and leftist activists. Failure to charge high-profile individuals with “sedition,” “conspiracy,” and “insurrection” was threatening to undermine the ridiculously exaggerated claims that the January 6 riot was the worst attack on America since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, or the burning of Washington by the British in the War of 1812.

“Look, either Merrick Garland steps it up or needs to step out,” Representative Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told CNN’s Jim Acosta on January 5. “He is failing right now.” According to Gallego, “there was almost a coup of this country,” but the DOJ’s prosecutions amount to “only slaps on the wrist.” Garland, Gallego said, “is showing true weakness in a moment when we actually need true strength.”

Raskin: “Shut up! It’s a Conspiracy”

That changed with Garland’s indictments of Oath Keepers. Representative Jamin Ben “Jamie” Raskin (D-Md.), a member of Nancy Pelosi’s notorious House January 6 Committee, could barely contain his glee and sense of vindication over the DOJ’s Oath Keeper charges. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Raskin said he hopes the newly filed charges will “shut up those of our colleagues who keep saying, ‘Well if it was a conspiracy, how come there are no conspiracy charges? If it was seditious, how come there were no sedition charges?'” “So, there we go,” he continued. “We’ve got those with, undoubtedly, a lot more to come soon.” As is the case with other members of the January 6 Committee, Representative Raskin is hardly a credible source for exposing and condemning sedition and conspiracy. Like many “red diaper babies” of the 1960s, Raskin has been deeply involved in radical, pro-communist, anti-American activities his entire life, including close involvement with the pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which was founded by his father, the late Marcus Raskin. (Trevor Loudon provides a revealing portrait of Jamie Raskin’s subversive activities in a detailed Keywiki profile here.)

Raskin does know a thing or two about coups and insurrections, since he (along with his wife) worked relentlessly to remove Donald Trump, a legally elected President of the United States, from the White House. In 2020, Raskin’s wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, an Obama appointee to the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department (and a member of the globalist, subversive Council on Foreign Relations) was revealed to be one of the several Obama administration officials to request the “unmasking” of General Michael Flynn, which was the beginning of the political persecution of Flynn and one of the bogus pieces of evidence in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

“White Supremacist Insurrection”

For the past year, the Biden Justice Department and the political chattering classes have breathlessly hyped the alleged “existential threat” that the January 6 “insurrection” posed to the survival of our constitutional republic. Moreover, they insist that this dire threat continues because the “white supremacists,” “white nationalists,” “domestic terrorists,” and “domestic extremists” are endemic among Trump Republicans and must be eradicated. President Biden himself has repeatedly stated that “terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today, not ISIS, not Al Qaeda, white supremacists.”

Black Lives Matter activist Representative Cori Bush (D-Mo.), one of the new stars of Congress, frequently blows the same “white supremacy” dog whistle to incite her fellow Democrats. “If we fail to remove a White supremacist president who incited a white supremacist insurrection, it’s communities like Missouri’s first district that suffer the most,” Bush said during her speech in support of Trump’s impeachment. “The 117th Congress must understand that we have a mandate to legislate in defense of Black lives, the first step in that process is to root out white supremacy starting with impeaching the White supremacist in chief.” The January 6 riot was not just an “insurrection,” you see, it was a “white supremacist insurrection.” And impeaching the “White supremacist in chief” would only be the start.

The Washington Post ran an opinion piece by Dana Milbank titled, “On Jan. 6 came the white supremacists. Now comes the whitewash.” The “white supremacist threat” mantra of the Democrats and the media talking heads is a vile effort not merely to demonize fellow Americans who are white, Republican, and conservative, but to criminalize them. It is meant to obscure the fact that President Trump made huge gains for the Republicans among minority voters, and the additional fact that there were many “Blacks for Trump,” “Asian-Americans for Trump,” and “Latinos for Trump” contingents at his January 6 Capitol rally.

However, even with the relentless, year-long media drumbeat, the phony insurrectionist narrative is failing to persuade. Glenn Greenwald described the media coverage of January 6 anniversary as an “orgy of psychodrama” in service of a “ludicrous” insurrection thesis. Greenwald, who is a virulently anti-Trump leftist, nevertheless noted:

That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

Indeed, how many real insurrections are launched by unarmed retirees and soccer moms? Yes, a relatively small subset (several hundred) of the more than 100,000 Trump rally attendees did engage in violence and vandalism at the Capitol, but that does not a revolution or an “insurrection” make. And, no one is defending those criminal actions or saying that those who actually committed these crimes should not be prosecuted. However, it is difficult for many Americans to take seriously the faux outrage of Democrats over the violence of the January 6 Capitol breach when the same politicians either stood mutely by or applauded and encouraged the BLM/Antifa “mostly peaceful protests” that over and over again included riots, violence, arson, looting, death, and mass destruction. Throughout 2020, these “mostly peaceful” riots in more than 140 American cities cost $1.5 to $2 billion in damages, more than 1,000 times the damages reported for the Capitol incursion. And those astronomical costs reflect only the estimated damages covered by insurance, not the much-higher losses sustained by the many under-insured and uninsured minority-owned businesses across the country that were damaged or destroyed. Nor do they include the devastating long-term costs that will continue for decades in the affected communities.

Garland Responds — But Not Really

In an apparent response to continuing jabs from the left-wing commentariat and congressional Democrats, Attorney General Garland delivered a speech on the eve of the January 6 anniversary announcing that the DOJ is methodically pursuing all leads in the Capitol attack.

“The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” he said. “We will follow the facts wherever they lead,” he continued. “But most important, we follow the facts — not an agenda or an assumption.”

However, Merrick Garland has a huge credibility problem. Are he and the DOJ truly “committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law”? All perpetrators, even if they are federal agents provocateurs? Despite media “fact checkers” repeatedly claiming to have debunked claims and suspicions that key individuals taking the lead in many of the acts of violence and vandalism during the Capitol breach are/were/may have been federal agents or assets, there remains considerable evidence pointing in that direction and many questions that remain unanswered. Among those unanswered questions are troubling ones posed to Garland by Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) last October concerning one Ray Epps and other suspected agents provocateurs caught on various videos. Massie pointedly asked Garland if federal agents or assets were involved on January 6 in inciting or agitating the criminal activities of that day.

Garland dodged the questions with the claim that he could not answer them due to the “norms of the rule of law.” Garland’s underlings at the DOJ and FBI have likewise stonewalled similar questions by members of Congress. During a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 11, Matt Olsen, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s National Security Division, and Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch, responded to questions by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) with a maddening litany of “I don’t know” and “I can’t answer that” non-responses regarding the presence of undercover agents/assets in the January 6 crowd.

As new evidence continues to pour out indicating that the January 6 “insurrection” was, in truth, a “Fedsurrection,” the Biden administration and its media accomplices are going to find it ever more difficult to continue maintaining their “white supremacy threat” narrative and covering up their sordid criminal trail.