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In this episode, we talk about the deep state, J6, and Ray Epps.
Participants: Yassine, Shakesneer.
Links:
Jack Posobiec's Pipe Bomb Allegation (Twitter)
Pipe Bombs in Washington DC (FBI)
'I started a riot for the sitting president': Why Ali Alexander won't go to jail for his role in Jan. 6 (Raw Story)
J6 Select Committee Interview of Ray Epps
Ray Epps Defense Sentencing Memo (Courtlistener)
Proud Boys Sentencing Memos (Courtlistener)
Wishing For Entrapment (Yassine Meskhout)
Recorded 2024-01-19 | Uploaded 2024-01-22
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Notes -
Remind me not to get into a factual argument with a lawyer.
Overall I found the argument that Epps is a federal informant extremely unconvincing. It seems like what was presented in the podcast wasn’t so much evidence that Epps was an informant as it was presenting a narrative that is congruent with Epps being an informant.
If you want to say that Epps got a uniquely easy deal compared to others on the FBI seeking information list, then like… show me. Are those records not public? Couldn’t somebody go through and theoretically demonstrate that he got a light treatment compared to others on the list?
If you want to tell me that Epps being removed from the list is suspicious timing, then I would want to see a timelines of names being removed, of when the FBI talked to Epps, of what the media was saying about him. Based on what I heard it seems just as likely that the FBI didn’t bother updating their list until he became a public figure.
A few random thoughts-
While I don’t see any evidence of govt. efforts making J6 worse, I do concede the idea that just a few individuals can whip up a crowd. I think crowd dynamics are somewhat conformity based- At a given protest every member of the crowd has a particular proclivity to jump a police barrier, for example. As soon as one or two people with little restraint do that, it makes it much more acceptable, leading to more people doing it, compounding the effect. Thats why police fight so hard at these barriers initially. They don’t need to stop the entire crowd from jumping the barrier, just the first few people.
Obviously you still need people willing to do it, I’m not saying this is an excuse. But as it becomes more normal, it makes the actual action less notable. There were plenty of people who ‘trespassed’ on J6 by crossing the police barrier, but aren’t worth prosecuting since at that point the barrier had been basically erased. (I have an aspiring journalist cousin who even climbed the scaffolding to take better pictures. As far as I know he’s never been contacted about that.)
I don’t particularly buy the idea that Epps ‘thought the capital was open’. That does sound like covering his ass after the fact. I think a reasonable guess is that he was simply talking a big talk, and when confronted with actually fighting police, he wises up/chickens out/realizes people will get hurt.
There's videos of Epps encouraging people to go into the capitol since long before it was it was close. There is video of him removing the barricades in preparation to trick people into going on the property. He's seen coordinating with megaphoneman and other key actors. He is also seen repeatedly saying to not hurt anyone (because he's one of the opps). If anyone would have been convicted for multiple years of jail time it should of been him for being one of the main reasons people went into the capitol. The internet identified him day one, including name, job, role, etc. that's why he was top of the wanted list. His FBI contacts had to go and remove him from the list days later. And the internet found the connection where he had previously worked for the government as a snitch. He was being called a Fed agent for trying to get people to break the law long before he broke a single law. He had glowie energy the whole time he was in the city.
Epps sentence was nothing, no punishment. Others who did nothing wrong had gotten months in prison for being there from the same judge. Epps was the most public ring leader and he got zero punishment AND the judge thanked him during his sentencing and apologized for the incident.
These statements deserve some hyperlinks.
I usually have fun trying to find reliable sources myself for ridiculous claims that might turn out to be true or might turn out to be interesting rabbit holes of bad epistemology, but I've got nothing to get a handle on here.
Searching for videos of Epps and barricades gets me to Epps at a barricade being breached, but (at least in the glimpses of him caught on shakycam) he's standing several feet back while others bring the barricade down, or even nudging one of the front-line people away from the barricade briefly, and the barricade is not removed to leave a deceptively open path, it's toppled to leave a climbable obstacle.
Searches for text about Epps being a government informant prior to Jan 6 naturally get me to a million articles about the theory that he was an informant or instigator on Jan 6.
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This is true. The problem is that even if you conclusively establish someone as responsible for whipping up a crowd, that doesn't tell you whether they were an informant or a genuine actor trying to instigate others. In the early days of the 2020 BLM protests/riots, there was the "umbrella man" who went viral for taking a sledgehammer to an Autozone and he's still hasn't been definitively identified. His behavior would be consistent with an earnest Antifa trying to whip the crowd into violence. It also shows how unpredictable crowd dynamics can be. The general reaction to umbrella man at the scene was immediate suspicion and disdain.
I vaguely remember there being a bunch of pro-BLM articles arguing that he was actually a provocateur used by evil right-wing local police commanders to discredit the protests and generate public opposition to them. The existence of these articles, plus the fact that he has never been caught, makes me wonder if he were actually an FBI provocateur who also infiltrated local Antifa groups.
If he was involved with the FBI, I don't see why the FBI would resuscitate the issue with a new call for information more than two years after the fact. If the theory is that this is them just assuaging suspicion then it's an unfalsifiable theory.
For me there's several theories that fit the facts more-or-less equally: 1) genuine but potentially inexperienced Antifa dude thinking this is how you start revolutionary mayhem 2) anti-BLM guy who wanted to discredit the protests or was hoping to whip the crowd into a riot or 3) someone who wanted to be at the forefront of a riot in order to take advantage of prime looting opportunities.
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I've been thinking about these dynamics lately, though not in the specific context of crowds. More in the context of social norms.
There is a team of engineers who work on a product and they're all genuinely invested in bettering the project. Then one engineer (or manager) joins and everyone can kind of tell his priority is his career. He oversells and self-credits a bit too much. Then he gets promoted and somebody else decides he's going to start prioritizing his own career over the project. And now there is a cascade.
One can imagine a similar dynamic in academic honesty, charity for one's outgroup, cheating on taxes, not paying for the subway, bribes, etc.
The million dollar question is: in what situations is the state stable, and in what situations is there a cascade?
Consider f(x) -> y, where x is the percent of people currently defecting and y is the percent of people who would see nothing wrong with defecting if at least x% of other people were defecting.
Here the answer is immediately clear: when f(x) > x the group will tend towards defecting and when f(x) < x the group will tend towards cooperating.
This model leads us to the conclusion that the groups whose norms are the most affected by a small group of defectors are groups where f(x) is roughly equal to x. In fact, when f(x)=x exactly, an arbitrarily small shift can cause the group to cascade to either extreme!
Groups where f(x) is typically far from x will automatically tend to one of the extremes and will tend to be more stable (for better or for worse).
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... kinda? I tried doing that as a conversation with ymeskhout separately, but it's hard to overstate how much of a mess the available data is, and how much information either isn't publicly available or may never have been gathered to start with, and how much what is available depends on interpretation and value assessments that likely aren't shared. Some of the best documents are ones brought by plea bargainers during their sentencing request, which also means that they're out-of-date at time of publication, and possibly introduce errors.
((Though given the number of typos and miscites I've found on the DC DA's site, maybe not more error.))
There are only about 40 of the 720+ sentences published by the DoJ which contain probation-only sentences of the same or lesser length; only a dozen are shorter terms of probation than what Epps got. Sometimes that reflects a judge with a softer hand, like in Cudd's case where McFadden seemed generally skeptical of sentencing comparisons brought by the DoJ; others, such as the Kulas brothers, probably fall to what are euphemistically described as "serious physical and mental health issues" (and presumably one of the brothers caring for the other). Some of them are weird: Blauser seems like a combination of his extreme age, clear attempts to physically restrain a particularly nutty protestor that seems like she dragged him to the Capitol, long military service, and ... reading between the lines, probably a lot of health stuff. Bratjan's seems a mix of the above, though imo the court seems to take his claims of a past traumatic neurological injury as more justification for a short sentence than I would consider ideal.
Lower 5% of sentences is still a pretty big gap, though, so you have to start digging into the details, and then you end up with a giant hairball of forking paths. How serious were Epps' calls to go into the Capitol? How long was he at the Capitol grounds, even if he didn't enter the building (a matter often cited for longer probation sentences for people who did not spend long in the Capitol building itself)? How much Were his manhandling of a big metal-framed sign trying to slow other protestors down, or a threat to officers nearby? How credibly do you take Epps' claims of confusion about the Capital access -- you point out it's ass-covering, but perhaps that at least indicates knowing there's an arse to be covered? Should Epps be getting unusual credit even compared to other remorseful defendants given his Congressional testimony, even if that puts him into a class of one? What if one or two of the other cases are just badly-decided, like Bratjan's?
What about the signals that we might just not have for other cases? I can show where bringing heavy-duty first aid kit was treated as suspicious in other cases, but I can't show cases where someone brought it and no one cared to mention them. I can show cases where other people who never entered the capitol building nor committed violence themselves and received longer probation or (generally weeks of) incarceration; I have no clue how many people did not enter the building and were never charged, and even a lot of the defendants awaiting trial don't have great info quality.
But even with a lot of OCR and some carefully-written scripts, this isn't the sort of thing you can readily do off-the-cuff, or present verbally during a discussion. It's a massive gish gallop of (literally) almost a thousand Bleemer and Gorpman; worse, one that even people taking this position don't find interesting.
And it wouldn't even have been fair to ymeskhout's perspective had someone done it during the podcast; compare the two's reaction to the comparably well-known Vaughn/Mackey case -- there's a lot to be said about it, but without serious prep and focus it turns into a mess (this amici is one of the more in-depth pieces I've found, and it probably post-dates the initial recording here, and it's an hour-long discussion of its own.
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