Horseshoe Theory keeps coming true, Tankies regurgitating altright conspiracies: "the Proud Boys were revealed to be basically an FBI op based on how much of the leadership were informants."
Yeah, they don't seem to understand what informant means.
My understanding of this is that he was a real alt-right Nazi who lead a legitimately fascist organization. He wasn't an FBI agent who started an organization to catch alt-right folks. He was a Nazi who was happy to snitch to save his own ass.
I think the implication isn't that the FBI started the Proud Boys, it's that they had enough informants in place to arrest the seditionists before the insurrection happened. Like the last paragraph in the screenshot says- they're accusing the FBI of allowing the insurrection to happen because they were too busy using the Proud Boys as a honeypot to bother shutting it down. Obviously the Proud Boys are still a problem, but it may recontextualize things to have the extra info about the FBi's extensive foreknowledge of the attacks.
So is lumping Tankies in with the left.
Tankies are authoritarians who pretend to be leftist. They are often anti-progress, as much so as right-wingers (because they secretly are, they just root for a different authoritarian)
Authoritarianism is basically apolitical. I've read it boiled down to state/regime monopoly over industry, how you get there, left or right, is almost just a detail once you're there.
The origins of the terms left and right were explicitly authoritarian vs democratic.
The split dates to the summer of 1789, when members of the French National Assembly met to begin drafting a constitution. The delegates were deeply divided over the issue of how much authority King Louis XVI should have, and as the debate raged, the two main factions each staked out territory in the assembly hall. The anti-royalist revolutionaries seated themselves to the presiding officer’s left, while the more conservative, aristocratic supporters of the monarchy gathered to the right.
The right has spent the centuries since trying to pretend that the left can also be authoritarian and still be the left.
Hell, the economic left, communism, was only relegated to the left, because it was a democratization of the economy. The goal of every man being truly equal. You labor, but you also partially own the factories you labor in.
Lenin took this dream, and betrayed it. He turned communism from a force of equalization into a new feudalism. You labor for the good of the state and own little to nothing of it. Stalin then stepped in as a new despotic king.
This makes the communism of Lenin and Stalin a very right-wing thing. Both of them actually snuffed out true communist movements, first Lenin in Ukraine, and then Stalin in Hungary, Which is how the term Tankie was born, the Tankies supported the soviets sending in tanks to put down the communist uprising in Hungary. The people just wanted to be able to vote, which is key to actual communism.
Then you had Mao. He was not as petty and cruel as Stalin, but made up for it with gross incompetence. His brain-dead orders caused millions to starve, all while he never had an empty stomach. Because while all animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others.
Mao also put down actual communist movements as a threat to his power.
Proud Boys leaders breaking and giving up information to lessen their own jail time, ie becoming an informant, doesn't mean they're an FBI plant as claimed by the morons there.
They really are just the left version of Qanon, huh?
An informant in this context is someone who was providing the information to the FBI during the conspiracy, not as part of a plea agreement.
Like the last paragraph in the screenshot says- they're accusing the FBI of allowing the insurrection to happen because they were too busy using the Proud Boys as a honeypot to bother shutting it down. Obviously the Proud Boys are still a problem, but it may recontextualize things to have the extra info about the FBi's extensive foreknowledge of the attacks.
Yeah man, famous alt right publication Reuters here claiming the proud boys were lead by an FBI informant.
So what you are saying is that not only was the leader not an FBI employee, but a rat, but also that he was an unwilling rat at that. You just defeated your own argument.
What argument do you think I’m making?
He was working toward the goals the FBI directed him to because the alternative was jail time. I don’t really care about wether he was on the payroll or not.
That's a funny way of saying he chose to relay info instead of going to jail. The fbi didn't force him to do anything. They gave him a choice.
Yes! We agree on this. It’s not some crazy conspiracy that a leader of the proud boys was working with the FBI, whether by choice or not isn’t really important.
The issue is that you want to insinuate, that Jan 6th was in a not insignificant way influenced by the FBI, when all that was really said was, that the leader was forced to snitch on his own people.
The same thing that happens to drug dealers who refuse to cooperate when caught. Or any other criminal who doesn't take a plea deal.
Informants are often just given a little more rope to hang themselves with before the arrest.
Do you think that maybe the threat of imprisonment is better than a paycheck to motivate people to do as you ask?
There are twisted incentives, and the FBI and police have been known to send low level offenders into dangerous situations on threat of extreme jail sentences, but that's not what happened here.
The proud boys are a domestic terrorist organization, and always have been. Their membership handbook lays out how to advance in the organization, and one of the steps is to go out and get into a fight with people who the proud boys consider "enemies". Just go out into the streets and bodily attack someone, and possibly get arrested for doing so.
I guess the final step is to turn informant and squeal like a stuck piggy.
I'm confused. I honestly can't tell what side you're on. Your tone appears to be in support of the conspiracy, but your comments actual content appears to be otherwise. I can't tell if this is miscommunication or what.
I’m saying that there were, factually people working with the FBI in high ranking positions of the Proud Boys and it’s not really conspiracy to say so. You can read as much or as little into that as you want.
The side I’m on is that Proud Boys, whatever their origin or how many of their leaders were FBI stooges, all belong in fucking jail.
