False Flagging: An Example
A "False Flag" campaign is provocateering written large, and provocateering slides over the line from "incitement to crime", to "solicitation of crime", and outright "entrapment".
In finer detail, "incitement" is some politician or mullah standing up in public and howling "kill the Jews!" (or whoever) -- and it's considered a crime only if someone in his audience really does go out and kill some Jews. "Solicitation" is some Mafia don telling his consigliere, "Eh Luigi, ten thousand clams to send Giuseppi to sleep with the fishes", and a corpse named Giuseppi really does wash up on the shore a couple days later. "Entrapment" is a cop nudging and hinting to some not-too-bright street punk to go commit a crime that the punk wouldn't have thought of for himself so that the cop can then arrest him. All of these are one step outside the legal protections of the First Amendment, and are unlawful to varying degrees.
Illegal or not, you'll find government agents -- usually undercover police -- practicing "entrapment" by provocateering. They usually do it under the excuse that the punks involved really would have thought of the crime anyway, and the provocateer was only nudging them a little bit down a path they'd already chosen for themselves. To prove this, the provocateer must produce some statement by the targeted punks -- witnessed, recorded or written -- which could be construed, by a sufficiently paranoid judge, at least, as intent to commit a crime. Such statements can be as little as a chanted slogan of "Off the Pigs", or a drunken complaint of "somebody oughtta shoot that Democrat S.O.B.". After all, the individual or group had to have said something, sometime, that brought them to the attention of the police in the first place. The provocateer can be a single agent within a small group, or a collection of them within a large group. In any case, the aim of the provocateer is to get the individual, or group, to do something -- or at least appear in public to do something -- that can get them arrested, or at least publicly vilified and shunned, and all their possible political associates with them. This is especially useful when police budget-reviews or general elections are coming up.
Police usually target an individual -- or more often, a group -- for provocateering for political reasons, no matter what the direction of the individual's or group's politics may be. Those of us who remember marching in the streets to protest various wars can also remember that, in any group big enough to need more than a single living-room for meetings, there was always somebody -- who had joined the group well after its inception and first activities -- who seemed just a little bit "off": just a little too eager, too imaginative, too questioning, too friendly, too willing to come up with activities that pushed the boundaries of the law, and who always had plenty of money for beer and pizzas. We can also remember that in any protest or picket-line there was always somebody who was a little too provocative toward the police, willing to literally push other marchers at the police in order to get a violent response. We can also remember the large marches in which knots of "weirdos" showed up, literally carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, to quote John Lennon, who tried to capture the attention of the media cameras so as to make all the marchers look like foaming Communists by association. Those were the days before the fall of the USSR, when communism was considered a serious threat.
Nowadays, when nobody even mentions the word "communist" except possibly in connection with the Chinese government, "Socialism" has become respectable enough that major candidates of major political parties happily label themselves with it. Of course, this means that they must brand their political opponents as "right-wingers", "White Supremacists", and "Neo-Nazis", regardless of the facts, and their media and police agents have adjusted their aim accordingly.
One advantage of this modern era of massive electronic media and communications is that the agents provocateur don't necessarily have to find an already existing group of political opponents to entrap; they can create one whole-cloth and use it as if it were real.
For example -- I'll name no names -- there was a group of college students (majoring in Computer Science, IIRC) who invented what they considered a "right-wing nut group" out of nothing but a website they established as a joke. On this website they posted classic Nazi quotes and slogans and propaganda cartoons, slightly updated for modern tastes, aimed at modern political figures and groups, and of course adoring President Trump. Eventually they began getting responses, apparently from real right-wing nuts.
Realizing that they were onto something here, the students notified the police -- particularly the FBI -- handed the website over to them, and thoroughly disassociated themselves from it, leaving the police to make use of the site and its followers. At this point the joke became a full-fledged False Flag operation. Soon the media began to notice the "right-wing group" and sound alarms about it. Once the media were sufficiently excited they went after Trump, demanding that he denounce his "right-wing extremist" followers. Trump, admitting that he didn't know anything about the group, denounced extremists of all stripes. This didn't satisfy the media, who demanded more, whereupon Trump made his much-copied statement: "If you really are listening to me, then stand down and stand back". Democrat political pundits claimed that this meant Trump really did command the group, and what he'd really told them was to stand by for further actions.
When no "actions" happened, the website exhorted its followers to go to a pro-Trump rally to "show support for Trump" and to "protect Americans" from expected Antifa and BLM protesters. The police then prepared for a jolly brawl at the rally, planning to round up all the "right-wing extremists" in a big showy bust. Preparations included having lots of undercover agents in the crowd, dressed to look like possible "extremists" so as to blend with the expected crowd.
Well, the only "confrontation" was caused by the Antifa/BLM protesters, whom the local police quickly rounded up. The "right-wing extremist" crowd was remarkably small, and when the police swooped down on the supposed Nazis they found one -- exactly one -- admitted member of the group, and he was a certified schizophrenic who had gone off his meds. All the rest of the supposed "right-wing extremists" were undercover cops. Every last one. The lone psycho was gently escorted to the nearest hospital, and the whole incident was quietly buried by the media.
This is the drawback to using invented opposition groups for "False Flag" operations; when pushed to action, they just might collapse like a soap-bubble, leaving nobody to arrest or use as a scarecrow. Actually existing political groups can be exaggerated and slandered with better results, and not just by local police and politicians but even by foreign agents -- unless the group's members are smart enough to see what's happening and fight back.
A classic example of this is the case of the "Proud Boys", a group of moderate-right Republicans who were annoyed by the antics of Antifa/BLM, and made a point of counter-protesting Antifa/BLM protests by, if you please, getting proper permits and then sitting down in the streets and praying. When asked by the police to get up and move, they would obligingly get up and move. This made it difficult for police to arrest them, or for the media to get videos that would make them look dangerous. Nonetheless, the media advertised the group as "right-wing extremists" and of course "White supremacists". This claim was partly punctured on the Internet, where it was revealed that the "Proud Boys" are multi-racial, and their president/founder is a Black ex-Cuban.
Nonetheless, a group of foreign hackers with no love for Trump decided to make use of the Proud Boys. The hackers obtained names, addresses, and email addresses of voters in a largely Democrat-registered neighborhood -- no great feat, since voter registration rolls are public records anyway -- and sent them mass-produced letters, threatening them with mayhem if they didn't vote for Trump, in the name of the Proud Boys organization. Of course the media picked up the story and responded with the expected outrage. This trick, a classic False Flag tactic, was intended to panic other voters into casting their ballots against Trump and his supposed "right-wing extremist base"
Ah, but the Proud Boys, unlike a lot of right-trending groups, were no fools. As soon as they learned what was happening, they got copies of those emails and went hollering to every federal police-force they could reach -- election tampering being a federal crime -- insisted that they had nothing to do with this, they were being slandered, and the cops should go catch the real criminals. The FBI, DOJ and State Department took them seriously, and investigated promptly. What they discovered was that the emails originated with a bunch of government-sanctioned hackers -- in Iran.
With all the uproar, and all those federal agencies involved, the story couldn't be smothered. The Proud Boys were publicly exonerated -- though a few die-hard Democrats kept insisting that the PBs simply had to be some sort of "right-wing extremists" -- and the voters saw that Iran doesn't want Trump re-elected, and that they shouldn't be too quick to believe political scandal stories without verification. The trick backfired, and the term "False Flag" has become commonly known.
This is all to the good, since a cynical electorate is not so easy to fool. Let's see what the final effect is when the votes are counted, since the only poll that really matters is the one where people vote.
--Leslie <;)))>< Fish
