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Regime Propaganda, Ray Epps, and the New York Times
American Greatness ^ | 16 Jul, 2022 | Roger Kimball

Posted on 07/17/2022 5:02:03 AM PDT by MtnClimber

In order to understand what the Times is up to, one needs to approach its stories as one would approach those emitted by the Soviet Union or other totalitarian regimes.

Is the New York Times playing four-dimensional chess?

Or is it only tic-tac-toe with a three-year-old?

I ask because I cannot quite fathom the Times’ latest intervention into the January 6 miniseries, its aromatic aria bewailing the fate of Ray Epps.

Who is Ray Epps?

We don’t really know—not yet.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 jamboree, he was on the Stasi’s—er, the FBI’s—list of most wanted “domestic extremists,” “insurrectionists,” etc.

He was also a star of several videos, a right-out-of-central-casting, MAGA-hat-wearing Trump nut telling anyone who would listen on the evening of January 5 that the next day they had to go “into the Capitol, into the Capitol.”

Into the Capitol, not “to” the Capitol. You see the difference.

Back in January 2021, the entire regime propaganda machine was indiscriminately fanning the line that “Trump sparked an insurrection, an attempted coup, an effort to overturn the 2020 election.” Glenn Greenwald, no friend of Trump’s, was an early skeptic about that overblown hysteria. “Condemning that riot,” Greenwald noted, “does not allow, let alone require, echoing false claims in order to render the event more menacing and serious than it actually was.”

But that is precisely what the regime media did: twist, exaggerate, lie, and manufacture out of whole cloth a narrative whose sole purpose was to destroy Donald Trump and the populist movement he gave voice to.

The New York Times, of course, was Johnny-on-the-spot. It was the Times that early on circulated the made-up story that Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer, had been bludgeoned to death by a crazed Trump supporter wielding a fire extinguisher. That was shouted from the rooftops for a few days by the same sort of people who screamed that Nick Sandmann, the so-called “Covington kid,” was guilty of taunting a noble Native American when he was doing nothing of the kind.

Sicknick, as it happens, died of a stroke at home the day after January 6. The Times eventually admitted its error, sotto voce, but only after the damage had been done.

Then, just a few days ago, the Times published another piece in which Ray Epps features prominently. The column, written by Alan Feuer, is titled “A Trump Backer’s Downfall as the Target of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory.” It is the sort of column the Times fabricates when it enters damage-control mode and wants to salvage someone’s reputation in order to score political points. Back in January 2021, Epps was an enemy, a public face of a supposed “insurrection” that was going to overturn the 2020 election and install Donald Trump as dictator for life.

But in the succeeding months, the Narrative had changed. The preposterous show trials of the “select” January 6 committee, Loopy Liz Cheney presiding, is not getting the traction it was supposed to get. People who work for CNN, MSNBC, or kindred outlets are all behind Cheney in her mad vendetta against Trump. But the mass of people across the country do not care one whit about the “findings” of the committee. Most people can recognize a partisan witch hunt when they see one, and this Star Chamber performance has done more to engender disgust at Congress than it has to turn people against Trump.

Moreover, with every passing week, evidence that the entire January 6 protest was planned and abetted not by Donald Trump and his nefarious agents but rather by elements of the anti-Trump regime has been piling up. Julie Kelly here at American Greatness and Darren Beattie at Revolver News have been at the forefront of the effort to uncover the truth behind the Wizard-of-Oz-like spectacle of January 6. Now the regime seems to be panicking.

Hence the Times is willing to transform Ray Epps from perpetrator into victim in order to influence the Narrative. Their proximate goal is signaled in the subtitle to their maudlin valentine: “Ray Epps became the unwitting face of an attempt by pro-Trump forces to promote the baseless idea that the F.B.I. was behind the attack on the Capitol.”

Ah. The “baseless” idea, you see.

Yes, even in that video taken on January 5, 2021, when Epps tells the crowd that the next day they must go “into the Capitol, into the Capitol,” members of the crowd start chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed.” They knew.

Granted, there is no evidence—not yet, anyway—that Epps was working for the FBI. But that agency is only one of the dozens of deep state, anti-Trump agencies in Washington, D.C. Eventually, I’d wager, it will emerge that Epps was in the employ of one or another anti-Trump government organization. How else can we explain that he went from being on the FBI’s most wanted list to victim-of-the-week for the New York Times? More to the point, how else can we explain why he has not been indicted and tossed into jail with the hundreds upon hundreds of poor slobs who had the misfortune to find themselves in or around the Capitol that fateful day?

Darren Beattie speculates that the “hidden agenda” behind the Times’ earlobe-licking puff piece on Epps is an effort to “make any unsanctioned ideas about Epps too toxic and dangerous to print.” He may be right. In the course of Feuer’s piece, the idea that Epps might sue Revolver News, Tucker Carlson, and others is floated. Epps’ family is “searching for a lawyer to help them file a defamation lawsuit,” the Times reports. “Regime janitors like Feuer,” Beattie writes, “specialize in mopping up Fed dirty work.” They will now “go into overdrive as more embarrassing information about Ray Epps and the initial breach comes out.”

Unfortunately for those foot soldiers for Leviathan, it is too late. There are too many people onto their game.

Feuer’s embarrassing piece in the Times at first seemed inexplicable. Why would the Times seek to exonerate, or at least to drum up sympathy for, someone who was caught on video urging the crowd to break into the Capitol? The whole thing seemed like a higher-order hermeneutical conundrum. Until, that is, one recognizes that Epps might just be a sort of double agent, an agent provocateur, laboring not on behalf of Trump’s supporters but his enemies. Then it all begins to make sense.

To understand what the Times is up to, one needs to approach its stories as one would approach those emitted by the Soviet Union or other totalitarian regimes. One needs to engage in what Powerline’s Scott Johnson, taking a page from Matt Taibbi, calls a “Kremlinological reading” of the story. Feuer and other Times apparatchiks like Adam Goldman, Johnson suggests, are really part of the “public relations arm of the national security establishment.” Indeed.

The Kremlinological reading is breathtaking. Anyone standing behind such a reading will surely be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist” or worse. To all such accusations, however, I adduce both Delmore Schwartz, who pointed out that even paranoids have enemies, and William of Occam, whose famous tip for epistemological tidiness comes in handy on occasions such as this. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, Occam wrote, which we might translate as “If it smells like a rat, looks like a rat, and behaves like a rat, it is overwhelmingly likely that it is a rat.”


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: 200101; 20210105; 20210106; 20210107; agentprovocateur; capitolriot; communism; epps; fed; guyreffitt; incitement; j6; mediabias; nytimes; palmer; rayepps; reffitt; robertpalmer
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1 posted on 07/17/2022 5:02:03 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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To: MtnClimber

If there is a lawsuit, then the discovery would be interesting.


2 posted on 07/17/2022 5:02:19 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

BTTT


3 posted on 07/17/2022 5:09:34 AM PDT by nopardons
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To: MtnClimber

The closer you get to January, and a Republican-controlled House...I think Ray will get antsy and just disappear (maybe to Costa Rica or Panama).


4 posted on 07/17/2022 5:23:26 AM PDT by pepsionice
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To: MtnClimber
I'm not too clear how Ray Epps has became a focal point. I get that he is on tape urging people to storm the Capitol - but he's no unicorn in that respect.

Here's Guy Reffitt who also incited the mob.

Or Robert Palmer.

The list goes on and on. What makes Ray Epps special? It just seems like an attempt to make believe that there wasn't really a limited number of violent MAGA people out there on 1/6. Which is silly. Out of 70M Trump voters, maybe 1-2,000 stormed the Capitol. That means a tiny fraction of Trump voters, or more properly, people with mental problems, were involved.

Instead of coming up with outlandish conspiracies, better to just state the obvious - that they are a tiny fraction and don't represent the movement.
5 posted on 07/17/2022 5:41:20 AM PDT by Observator
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To: MtnClimber

They don’t want people to believe their own eyes and ears. “Believe only what we tell you is true, and trust only us.” That should be the motto of the NYT.


6 posted on 07/17/2022 6:04:51 AM PDT by euram
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To: MtnClimber

Someone on another thread, made a long list of all the LIES, that the New York Times has been giving us. The long list of 52 FBI and CIA agents that swore there was NO Hunter Biden Laptop, or that NO FRAUD occurred the night with Joe Bidens psuedo win.
Now I have had to go way back in my files, and wonder how many OTHER things they have told us, we actually believed. I am starting to wonder if the Earth is Round, as now they publish that a man CAN have a baby. They probably made up things about the JFK execution, as well as the TWA 800 flight. Or the moon landing, or even the Twin Towers.
We are in a HAZE, in a FOG. We need accurate reporting and it SURE isn;t the New York Times.


7 posted on 07/17/2022 6:20:25 AM PDT by rovenstinez
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To: pepsionice
The closer you get to January, and a Republican-controlled House...I think Ray will get antsy and just disappear (maybe to Costa Rica or Panama).

More likely, IMHO, that he'll get disappeared, as in arkancided.

8 posted on 07/17/2022 6:26:01 AM PDT by Perseverando (Antifa, BLM, RINOs, Islamonazis, Marxists, Commucrats, DemoKKKrats: It's a Godlessness disorder!)
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To: Observator
“maybe 1-2,000 stormed the Capitol”

I think it was far fewer than that. Maybe 100-200 that pushed through the barricades and climbed the facade. Everyone else just walked in like tourists.

9 posted on 07/17/2022 6:29:09 AM PDT by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)
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To: rovenstinez
Someone on another thread, made a long list of all the LIES, that the New York Times has been giving us. The long list of 52 FBI and CIA agents that swore there was NO Hunter Biden Laptop, or that NO FRAUD occurred the night with Joe Bidens psuedo win.

If you run across that list again, can you repost it and copy me, or just pm me. I would love to have it to share with some friends. Thanks!

10 posted on 07/17/2022 6:31:08 AM PDT by Perseverando (Antifa, BLM, RINOs, Islamonazis, Marxists, Commucrats, DemoKKKrats: It's a Godlessness disorder!)
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To: Observator

Welcome to the forums.


11 posted on 07/17/2022 6:37:46 AM PDT by healy61
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To: Observator

Instead of coming up with outlandish conspiracies

Like Epps on video encouraging people to storm the capital but is not rotting in jail. What, is he a fellow agent?


12 posted on 07/17/2022 6:45:56 AM PDT by cp124 (80% of everything is fake or a lie.)
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To: MtnClimber

Bttt.

5.56mm


13 posted on 07/17/2022 6:47:14 AM PDT by M Kehoe (Quid Pro Joe and the Ho got to go.)
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To: MtnClimber
If there is a lawsuit, then the discovery would be interesting.

Would love to see Ashley Babbitt’s family attorney figure out a lawsuit to file against him for instigating her death…

14 posted on 07/17/2022 6:56:51 AM PDT by Magnatron
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To: Observator

I suggest actually reading the posted article, several times if you are still “unclear”.

Some of us are extremely unhappy at the thought that our own government, or political operatives in a parallel orbit, uses provocateurs to create crime. This has been shown repeatedly to be a government methodology of choice. When applied to politics, it makes a mockery of Democracy and threatens whatever is left of our Republic.

“Going into the Capitol” is the basis for calling Jan 6th an “insurrection” and thus for holding a show trial. Ray Epps is well documented inciting the J6 mob to “Go into the Capitol”, i.e., to pass the protections of legal “protest” to enter the realm of “crime”, in this case potentially very serious crime.

When someone inciting criminal behavior that subequently takes place is neither arrested, nor questioned, and his “most-wanted” pics are erased from FBI websites, and Congressional Inquisitors have zero interest in him, do you suspect that individual just a little bit?

How does the presence of other agitators give Ray Epps a pass? There were possibly many agitators, some working together, some with no knowledge of each other, and some at cross purposes. By all means get to the bottom of what all of them were up to, and who put them up to it.

How exactly would fully explaining the activities and connections of Ray Epps change the known quantity of those who rioted or entered the Capitol?


15 posted on 07/17/2022 6:57:08 AM PDT by Chewbarkah
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To: MtnClimber

“aromatic aria” BKMRK


16 posted on 07/17/2022 7:02:05 AM PDT by Sirius Lee (They intend to murder us. Prep if you want to live and live like you are prepping for eternal life)
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To: Observator

what’s your pay grade?


17 posted on 07/17/2022 7:49:40 AM PDT by thinden (buckle up.....)
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To: MtnClimber

Theories that postulate a Conspiracy are sometimes plausible and sometimes not. It’s not plausible that Trump was conspiring to overthrow the capital. It is plausible that Leftists conspired to slander him about it.


18 posted on 07/17/2022 8:32:42 AM PDT by AndyTheBear
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To: Observator

There is more than Ray Epps that suggests that it was in part a setup. There was refusal to provide adequate security. The video showing protesters intentionally let into the building by capital guards. The video of the murder of Ashli Babit and the breathless reports in media in its wake that the protesters were armed and shooting. There was the later absurd exhoneration of the officer who murdered her. There were the lies about the guard killed by the fire extinguisher. There was the video of the beat down of a woman on the ground with sticks in an apparent attempt to provoke protesters into a confrontation to protect her. There was the recent exposed FBI plot to convince a militia group to kidnap a Govenor.


19 posted on 07/17/2022 8:50:52 AM PDT by AndyTheBear
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To: thinden
what’s your pay grade?

LOL - just goes to show how different reality is from person to person. I have to say that the vast majority of people who are even semi-informed would think that trying to pin the Capitol riot on some low-level guy named Ray Epps is the one who should be receiving pay for propaganda.
20 posted on 07/17/2022 10:12:47 AM PDT by Observator
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