From economic statistics to crime, war, immigration and even the weather, everything they say should be assumed to be a lie.
Justin Glawe
After a gunman opened fire at a ICE facility in Dallas, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took to X to decry the
shooting as yet another attack on federal law enforcement — one made possible
by “far-left” rhetoric.
“The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who
are simply enforcing the law must stop,” Noem said of ICE agents and other
federal law enforcement. “We are praying for the victims and their families.”
But the victims in the attack weren’t ICE agents; they were
immigrants. Three migrant detainees were shot by the shooter. One is dead while
the other two were seriously injured. No members of law enforcement were
harmed.
Still, the narrative had been set: the shooter in Dallas was
a far-left radical intent on killing cops.
FBI Director Patel said the shooter had left
handwritten notes containing the line, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents
real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?’” (“AP”
may be an abbreviation for “armor-piercing.”) Some of the shooter’s friends say
he leaned libertarian but was mostly apolitical. His attack may have been a
result of his nihilistic, edgelord behavior online, Ken Klippenstein reports.
At a press conference, local FBI
officials said the shooter “wanted to cause terror; he wanted to harm ICE
personnel.” But officials did not allude to a left-wing ideological motive
and said the
shooter appears to have acted alone.
FBI special agent Joseph Rothrock declined to say whether
messages were present on bullets the shooter that were fired, saying that
information was part of an ongoing investigation — even though Patel already
posted a photo of unspent shell casings with “ANTI-ICE” written on one of them.
Despite the Trump administration’s claims that the attack in
Dallas was a cut-and-dry instance of left-wing violence, officials had a hard
time keeping their stories straight right from the jump.
Vice President JD Vance initially claimed the shooter was a
“far-left radical,” but in the next breath appeared to confirm he targeted
immigrants.
“Look, just because we don’t support illegal aliens, we
don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political
violence,” Vance said at
an event Wednesday afternoon in Concord, New Hampshire.
In press appearances, ICE director Todd Lyons repeatedly
stuck to the
narrative that the attack “wasn’t directed at detainees. It wasn’t
directed at civilians on the street. It was a definite attack on law
enforcement.”
Meanwhile, ICE spokesperson Madison Sheahan said that the shooter “chose to come in and kill these detainees while they were
being processed.”
By the time Noem appeared on CNN, she
still couldn’t
identify the immigrant who was killed or even say whether her agency
had reached the person’s family. Given an opportunity to reiterate her
statement from earlier Wednesday that the shooting was a “wake-up call to the
far left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences,” she waffled.
Noem did not definitively say the shooter was a left-wing
ideologue intent on harming ICE agents. Instead, she resorted to vague language
about the shooter “being opposed” to the agency.
Whether a result of incompetence, a misunderstanding of
ironic edgelord gamer culture, or purposeful lying, these contradictory
statements and the haste to label the shooter as motivated by left-wing
ideology make it imperative that the investigation into this event be conducted
as independently as possible. But Patel’s FBI, Bondi’s DOJ, and Noem’s DHS have
proven that their agencies are not capable of conducting investigations based
on anything other than Trump’s political objectives.
Simply put: the federal government can no longer be trusted,
and the Trump administration only has itself to blame.
Professional liars
In the first eight months of Trump’s second presidency,
federal agencies have been caught lying or twisting the truth to fit various
White House narratives over and over again.
In California, DHS section chief Greg Bovino lied about
protesters assaulting immigration agents — at
least twice — in addition to saying his agents were only targeting
migrants with criminal records during a raid in which 77
of the 78 people arrested had no prior record. (Protests and alleged
attacks against ICE agents in Los Angeles were used as justification to send in
the National Guard and Marines. A federal judge in California ruled that this
was a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.)
Meanwhile, federal officials appear to be exaggerating
claims of a coordinated attack on immigration agents elsewhere in Texas.
Federal prosecutors in the case of a July attack on law enforcement at an ICE
facility in Prairieland have changed
their description of events there.
The initial press release from ICE claimed that “nearly a
dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons” carried out
the attack in Prairieland. But on Wednesday, Patel himself referenced only a
lone “individual” involved in the attack. Still, more than a dozen people
remain in jail awaiting trial for their alleged involvement in the case.
In Washington DC, former Fox News host turned US Attorney
Jeanine Pirro has dropped
11 of her own cases against people accused of assaulting law
enforcement because the evidence didn’t add up. In at least one case, Pirro’s
office admitted it had reviewed evidence against a defendant accused of
injuring a DHS agent only to find the man had never committed the crime for
which he was charged.
Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics for reporting jobs numbers that showed a weakening economy. Trump’s
replacement was the “utterly
unqualified” EJ Antoni, who is expected to provide Americans with numbers
that are favorable to Trump but not necessarily true. Economists on both the
left and the right now say that labor numbers coming from Antoni’s agency can’t be trusted.
Meanwhile, the US military has now carried out multiple attacks on civilian vessels in international waters, killing dozens. The
White House says the military is killing drug traffickers, but one former
federal law enforcement official told
the New York Times that those on board were more likely to be migrants
trying to make it to the United States.
Then, Trump announced in a lie-filled press
conference that pregnant women shouldn’t take Tylenol because it contributes to
autism, going against decades of research and advice from medical experts.
Trump’s announcement conflicted
with a statement from the FDA on the same day that noted “a causal
relationship” between taking Tylenol and autism “has not been established.”
Trump has also mobilized the entire federal government to
justify his incessant lies about elections, which now threaten the viability of
next year’s midterms.
The president has continued to lie about the integrity of
voting machines and mail-in voting, threatening to do away with both despite
not having the constitutional power to do so. Lies about widespread illegal
voting by undocumented immigrants are at the heart of Justice Department’s
demands for lists of registered voters in more than 30 states. The DOJ’s Voting
Rights Section has been turned on its head and is now conducting investigations
based not on protecting Americans’ right to vote, but on Trump’s election lies.
And then there’s Patel, who is just two weeks removed from a
disastrous performance in which he claimed the FBI had arrested Charlie Kirk’s
killer only to reverse it hours later. Patel was out front again on Wednesday,
posting the aforementioned photo of bullets allegedly tied to the Dallas
shooter, one with the phrase “ANTI-ICE” written on it in what appears to be
ink.
Friends of the shooter say this was probably for the
lulz, and that, like other apparently nihilistic shooters, the attack in
Dallas has less to do with specific politics as it did a young man who just
didn’t care anymore and wanted to go out with a bang. But the FBI director
wasn’t about to let facts get in the way of his narrative.
Selective evidence, broad conspiracies
Dallas police are investigating alongside Patel’s FBI.
Hopefully this means that Americans will be able to get a second opinion on the
alleged motivation of the shooter.
That’s because there’s evidence that Patel may be
selectively releasing information on the Dallas shooter to support the Trump
administration’s narrative of out-of-control left-wing extremism. At no point did Patel or any other administration official discuss a map taped
to the rear of the passenger side of the shooter’s car. The map
showed radioactive fallout patterns from nuclear weapons testing
conducted in the 1950s, and comes from an obscure 1999 book titled “Under
the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing.”
“Under the Cloud” was written by Richard Miller, an
industrial hygienist who claims to have worked for OSHA. Miller has written two
other books on radioactive contamination in the United States, one of which
bears a version of the map found on the Dallas shooter’s car on the book’s
cover.
During her CNN appearance, Noem confirmed
the vehicle in question did belong to the shooter but didn’t discuss the map.
Those with interest in the United States’ nuclear weapons
program and conspiracies surrounding it don’t always fit into neat ideological
boxes. If the Dallas shooter was familiar with material as relatively obscure
as cancer rates in US populations living “downwind” of nuclear
test sites — one of the subjects of Miller’s work — it could
allude to a much more incoherent political ideology than is being portrayed by
Patel and others.
Similarly, Charlie Kirk’s killer appears to have had a more
complicated worldview than that portrayed by law enforcement’s assessment of
the carvings on his bullets. Kirk’s killer had an online footprint that
included a right-wing Pepe the Frog meme, a Trump costume, and furry references
among other dripped-in-irony
edgelord behavior.
But the killer’s relationship with a trans roommate is being
pointed to by Patel’s FBI and local officials as the primary motivating factor
for the killing of Kirk, who frequently criticized trans Americans and
advocated for traditional gender roles.
In both the Kirk killing and the Dallas shooting, the FBI
has proven it can’t be trusted to provide narrative-free evidence to the
public. This is par for the course for the rest of the federal government under
Trump, which can’t be trusted on really anything, because everything in this
government exists to serve Dear Leader — not the American people.
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