Are Ferguson Riots a Planned Event?

A day after the Nov. 24 Ferguson riots, Washington Post published a fascinating article by the Post‘s senior editor Marc Fisher and Wesley Lowery on how the riots had an inorganic staged character. In their words:

The unseemly buildup to the announcement of the grand jury’s conclusion that no crime was committed in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown has produced an expectation of ugliness. What occurred Monday night — and may continue in the days ahead — is rioting as planned event, so pervasively predicted, so extensively prepared for as to obscure the power and meaning of the protests.

A news media obsessed with predicting the next step, a security apparatus equipped to put down almost any uprising, and a political power structure apparently seeking to head off violence by predicting it have combined to produce an unprecedented sense of inevitability, reducing what has historically been an explosion of frustration to a kind of staged performance. […] Monday night’s violence became on-demand programming for a nation that flits from one blockbuster event to the next.

If you read the entire article, you’d know that Fisher and Lowery did not mean the riots were really “planned” and “staged” events, orchestrated like some theatrical performance. But Fisher and Lowery inadvertently may have come closer to the truth than they realized.

St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch

To begin, why did St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch schedule his announcement of the grand jury’s decision for 8 p.m. central time? Anyone with half a brain knows that the night provides just the perfect cover of darkness for looters, vandals, and arsonists to commit mayhem, which was precisely what happened.

Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse asks that and other questions, as well as points out ten oddities about the night of Nov. 24, 2014:

1. Federal, state and local law enforcement authorities had more than three months to prepare for the violence that would follow the announcement of the grand jury decision. The mainstream media endlessly hyped this controversy and everyone knew that trouble would be brewing. But despite an enormous amount of time to prepare, very little was actually done to prevent any violence from happening.

2. Anyone involved in law enforcement knows that crowd control is far more difficult after dark. But prosecutor McCulloch made the decision to make the public announcement about the grand jury decision in the evening. This also ensured that instead of being tied up with work or school, a maximum number of protesters would be able to be involved in the violence.

3. The announcement of the grand jury decision was perfectly timed to provide the largest possible number of prime time viewers for the big news networks.

4. Just like back in August, no law enforcement authorities of any kind responded while dozens of businesses were vandalized, looted and set on fire.

5. Ferguson Mayor James Knowles says National Guard troops were purposely held back from intervening in the rioting that was unleashed when the grand jury decision was made known to the public. The troops had been readied a week before by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, but as gunshots rang out in the night and looters torched buildings, they were nowhere to be seen. In a press conference, Knowles said the Guard troops were available but were not deployed when city officials asked.

6. Instead of being deployed for crowd- and riot-control, the Daily Mail reports that the heavily armed National Guard troops were limited to “keeping the peace at a courthouse, patrolling the outskirts of town and preventing disturbances in other suburbs” as violence raged in the heart of Ferguson on Monday night.

7. Missouri Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder has accused Missouri Governor Jay Nixon of holding back the National Guard troops because of pressure from the Obama administration. Kinder told Fox News:

“Is the reason that the National Guard was not in there because the Obama Administration and the Holder Justice Department leaned on you to keep them out? I cannot imagine any other reason why the governor who mobilized the National Guard would not have them in there to stop this.”

8. According to the Washington Post, a Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Attorney General Eric Holder had expressed to Governor Nixon “displeasure and frustration” about Nixon’s activation of the National Guard because doing so “escalated” the situation in Ferguson.

9. Firefighters in Ferguson did not immediately respond to calls to put out the multiple fires that were set by protesters. As a result, many businesses burned to the ground. (See “Ferguson: Before and After the Riots”)

10. In the worst of the “war zones,” journalists with cameras and microphones were crawling all over the place, but hardly any police was seen.

Snyder concludes by asking:

How is it possible that law enforcement could have failed so badly? Could it be possible that this was orchestrated on purpose?

All of which brings us to this video of St. Louis County police officer Dan Page (who was a Green Beret and sergeant major in the U.S. Army) who gave an extraordinary speech to the Oathkeepers of St. Louis and St. Charles in 2012:

Here’s a transcript:

“Contractors are going to come in, maybe me. People like me who don’t have a side; they’re gonna kill you. You’re going to start seeing people — that person sitting right next to you, a few years from now will not be sitting here ’cause they’ll be gone. Somebody like me’s gonna come in and kill you….”

[Page passes out copies of what he calls “a proposed Constitution” that’s been drafted, ordered under George W. Bush] “The new Constitution is all ready to go. They only need the right incident to bring it down, and they’re working on that right now. We’re not very far away from an event that’s gonna bring what you call martial law, but that term will never be used by the way, “Emergency Police Powers” will be.“

“I know that there’s a big target on my back… I still carry a secret clearance…I get briefed every six months, I still do. You’re going to start seeing more, the news media will start banging on something, could be Ukraine, could be we don’t know. That’s how psychological warfare works: they talk about this, and this is happening over there [gesturing to his left]. It’s called a distraction….

“So number one is there’s gonna be an emphasis upon an international event, the news media’s gonna pound it, pound it. The second thing is you’re gonna start to see a group or a person guilty of racism or something along those lines. They’re gonna start pounding on that. They want your attention over here [gesturing to his right]. The third thing you’re gonna start seeing is people being arrested for domestic terrorism. The fourth thing you’re gonna see is…what I call ‘ancient hates, ancient madness, ancient revenge.’ When these things start to happen, people are gonna start rioting, the EBT cards are gonna shut down. Can you imagine what’s gonna happen in our St. Louis County when the EBT cards go down, when the ATM machines don’t work… Think about what’s gonna happen when the inner cities start to ignite, people are gonna start killing people they don’t know….”

[At the 3:23 mark] “Do you know how the Muslims take care of you? They cut your head off. Obama is allowing hundreds of thousands come in every week…. Muslims are passive until they gain parity with you or they exceed you in numbers, and they will kill you. I told my commander I’m not gonna obey an undocumented president [referring to Obama not being constitutionally eligible to be president]. And I left — I took two years early retirement.”

In other words, in 2012, many months before Ukraine (and Crimea) became an international crisis in which the Obama administration has locked the United States in opposition to the Soviet Union, Dan Page had already predicted that the U.S. news media would “pound on” Ukraine.

In 2012, two years before Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown and so ignited racial riots in Ferguson and St. Louis and protests across America, Officer Dan Page had already predicted that “a group or a person” would be accused of racism, which would arouse “ancient hates” and “people are gonna start rioting.”

In the August riots in Ferguson, Officer Page made the news when CNN reporter Don Lemon complained to the police department that Page had shoved him.

On August 23, 2014, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that a day before, on August 22, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar announced that “officer Dan Page, a 35-year veteran of the department, has been suspended pending a review by the internal affairs unit” after Lemon brought the video of Page’s “incendiary” 2012 speech to the attention of Belmar.

Belmar told the Post-Dispatch that Page’s comments defaming President Barack Obama, the U.S. Supreme Court, Muslims and various sexual orientations, and especially his self-description as “an indiscriminate killer” were “beyond the scope of acceptable police conduct.”