In the wake of several false alarms during which the Biden intelligence community flagged potential right-wing extremism only to have nothing result, the FBI again torqued up hysteria over its favorite boogeyman, QAnon, for a special report requested by Senate Democrats.
The unclassified report shockingly revealed that the FBI’s past success in exposing and discrediting the dangerous QAnon ring could lead impatient online conspirators to shift their frustration from the World Wide Web into the real world.
“We assess that some [domestic violent extremist] adherents of QAnon likely will begin to believe they can no longer ‘trust the plan’ referenced in QAnon posts,” claimed the FBI report, “and that they have an obligation to change from serving as ‘digital soldiers’ towards engaging in real world violence—including harming perceived members of the ‘cabal’ such as Democrats and other political opposition—instead of continually awaiting Q’s promised actions which have not occurred.”
That, undoubtedly, will require the congressional allocation of additional FBI resources to monitor and assess the escalating situation.
Some speculate that “Q”—the enigmatic, anonymous leader of the forum—may have been invented by the FBI to neutralize right-wing chatter in public forums, such as Reddit and Facebook, by misdirecting legitimate criticism of government corruption—much of it involving the intelligence community itself—into more outlandish discussions.
Nonetheless, the agency will still need to pay analysts to monitor conservative outlets like Parler and Gab “following QAnon adherents’ migration to these platforms after large scale removals of QAnon content from mainstream sites,” the report noted.
The FBI’s two-page analysis has been roughly seven months in the making. A month before the Jan. 6 pro-MAGA revolt at the US Capitol, then-Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-NY, had asked the agency for its public assessment of the risks posed by QAnon.
After the Capitol uprising, the Justice Department pounced into action to justify its partisan efforts by arresting more than 400 pro-Trump dissidents—at least 20 of whom, the FBI report claimed, were “self–identified QAnon adherents.”
Meanwhile, left-wing operatives seized on the occasion to craft a new midterm-election strategy.
Using cutesy labels such as “GQP,” Democrats attempted to link the online chat community, now largely defunct, to conservative rivals in Congress, in order to smear them as violent extremists and unhinged conspiracy theorists.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy defends Marjorie Taylor Greene:
“Denouncing Q-on, I don’t know if I say it right, I don’t even know what it is– any from the shootings, she said she knew nothing about lasers” pic.twitter.com/R49WoE9TvL
— The Recount (@therecount) February 4, 2021
But Republicans, for the most part, shrugged off the desperate talking-points since the ploy had little bearing on anything but Democrats’ effort to distract and deflect from their own widespread support for real-life domestic terrorism groups like Antifa.
That, in turn, forced Democrats to double-down by leveraging mainstream media and other allies in the federal bureaucracy to hype QAnon incessantly and raise public exposure of it—at the risk of recruiting new adherents to it—in order to sell it as a viable, growing threat.
Trying to rehab his agency’s standing after the Russia collusion hoax and a series of inspector-general reports that revealed systemic abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, embattled FBI director Christopher Wray leaned into the leftist claims.
Wray has regularly parsed his words during appearances before Congress to lump so-called right-wing extremism together with pro-anarchist and other unaffiliated anti-government groups—characterizing them, collectively, as the greatest threat that the country currently faces.
The new FBI report broadly characterized QAnon followers as those who believe “that a corrupt cabal of ‘global elites’ and ‘deep state’ actors run a Satan–worshiping international child sex trafficking ring, and engaged in plots to conduct a coup against a former President of the United States while he was in office.”
But given the radical Left’s increasing reliance on the “QAnon” label to describe broad swaths of the country that remain skeptical of—and politically opposed to—its propagandist gaslighting, the FBI report also suggested that QAnon conspiracies were evolving into more conventional territory.
“QAnon narratives are constantly expanding to include false information about current events—including alleged election fraud, the COVID–19 pandemic, and the dangers of 5G technology—that are then woven into the QAnon master–narrative,” claimed the report.
At the same time as the FBI milked the imaginary QAnon threat against Democrats, it attempted to downplay a 2017 left-wing extremist attack targeting Republicans, which left then-Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., critically injured.
Only under intense pressure by Scalise and others did the agency revise its bogus assessment that James Hodgkinson, a crazed Bernie Sanders supporter with a long history of social-media rants, had been politically motivated and had not just traveled from his Illinois home to Arlington, Va., in order to commit ‘suicide by cops.’
“It seems very odd that the FBI reports would come to that conclusion when everybody else that looked at it clearly recognized that it was an act of domestic terrorism,” Scalise said in an interview last month with Fox News.
