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For more than a year, America’s ruling regime has been desperate to drive Congressman Matt Gaetz off TV, out of Congress, and out of Washington. They have failed in humiliating fashion, and America is better for it. Gaetz has continued to distinguish himself as one of the Republican Party’s genuine anti-war leaders, and one of the most effective critics of President Biden’s calamitous immigration “policies.”

Unsurprisingly, the same leadership class that gave us Iraq and Afghanistan are unable to adjust their strategy or learn from their mistakes. Having failed to destroy Matt Gaetz, America’s failing elites are trying instead to destroy another Republican rising star: Madison Cawthorn. And they are using the same sinister, East German-style tactics to take him out.

Back in the spring of 2021, Revolver described the Deep State’s efforts to defame and ruin Rep. Gaetz. It was no ordinary smear campaign. Instead, the approach strongly resembled the tactics of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. In the later decades of the Cold War, Communist government were loathe to simply arrest and execute dissidents as they had during the Stalinist era. So instead, their goal was to discredit and personally destroy the opposition. The means: Zersetzung, a German word translating as “disruption” or “distintegration.” A 1976 Stasi directive describes disintegration tactics as follows:

a systematic degradation of reputation, image, and prestige on the basis of true, verifiable and discrediting information together with untrue, credible, irrefutable, and thus also discrediting information; a systematic engineering of social and professional failures to undermine the self-confidence of individuals; … engendering of doubts regarding future prospects; engendering of mistrust and mutual suspicion within groups …; interrupting respectively impeding the mutual relations within a group in space or time …, for example by … assigning geographically distant workplaces.

[Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Siegfried Suckut, Thomas Großbölting (Hrsg.): Anatomie der Staatssicherheit: Geschichte, Struktur und Methoden. MfS-Handbuch.]

The purpose of zersetzung wasn’t to win an election. After all, like most radical left governments so often do, East Germany rigged its elections. Instead, the purpose was to personally annihilate a designated enemy, to destroy their career, their reputation, their friendships, their family, even their sanity. The end goal was to render the target utterly incapable of effective dissent or resistance to the regime.

For the past year, America’s regime has hit Rep. Gaetz with one of the most powerful disintegration efforts ever, repeatedly tarring him as a human trafficker. Gaetz has never been charged with anything. His own claim that the mess stems from a blackmail effort against his family was first ridiculed, then proven completely true. 

The smear efforts have continued into 2022. Grand jury deliberations are supposed to be secret, but last January someone anonymously leaked that Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend had testified to a grand jury. Once again, Gaetz has not been criminally charge or even faced an allegation of wrongdoing. Only innuendo meant to hurt the target while making a response impossible has been bandies about.

Why? It’s obvious the regime isn’t expressing a genuine concern or even outrage over anything in Gaetz’s private life.

Now, the same actors are trying to use the same disintegration strategy on North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The attack started with a flailing and unprecedented effort to simply bar Cawthorn from office entirely. Cawthorn’s enemies sued him in federal court, claiming that his political positions make him a criminal insurrectionist and disqualify him from office.

A group of North Carolina voters maintain that state election officials can and should find that Cawthorn, 26, is disqualified under a portion of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War to bar those who violated their oaths through “insurrection” from returning to office.

“Challengers have reasonable suspicion that Representative Cawthorn was involved in planning efforts to intimidate Congress and the Vice President into rejecting valid electoral votes and subvert the essential constitutional function of an orderly and peaceful transition of power,” their attorneys wrote.

Cawthorn spoke at the rally that proceeded the storming of the Capitol building, saying the crowd of Trump supporters had “some fight in it.” According to Rolling Stone, his office also engaged in conversations with rally organizers before the event, which he promoted with a tweet saying, “the future of this Republic hinges on the actions of a solitary few … It’s time to fight.”

[Washington Post]

But with this legal gambit unlikely to succeed, the same sinister cabal has lobbed further attacks on Cawthorn that have become very personal in nature. For the past three weeks, the regime press has unleashed a blizzard of hit pieces against the Congressman. All of them have only two things in common: They have nothing to do with his political message, and they are simultaneously sensational yet contain not a single drop of actual wrongdoing.

The first blow was Politico’s “scoop” of old photos showing Cawthorn loosely wearing lingerie while hanging out with a group of women. According to Cawthorn, the photos are from a cruise predating his run for Congress. But frankly, it wouldn’t matter if the photos were taken the night before the story ran, because the photos were private, and they reveal no illegal behavior. It’s frathouse cosplay. To act like such old photos, stripped out of context, reflect negatively on the Rep. Cawthorn of today is disingenuous.

The exact same goes for clips of Cawthorn goofing around with his staffer by whispering exaggerated gay innuendos, or the crude clip of him mock thrusting into a man in a bed they are sharing. It’s extremely inappropriate and immoral to publicize such old and juvenile private peccadilloes in a cheap attempt to score points.

But Revolver doesn’t need to bother with defending or excusing every attack on Cawthorn.

None of this is coming out because the behavior itself matters. It doesn’t. Nobody is actually offended by anything Cawthorn has done. Longtime Democratic Rep. Barney Frank let his boyfriend run a brothel out of his house; he enjoyed a full Congressional career and liberals just gleefully released a new graphic novel celebrating his life. Now, we’re supposed to believe Democrats are upset about someone feigning gay behavior as a joke?

Ridiculous. As is the case with all zersetzung attacks, the real purpose is to simply, in bad faith, grab anything that can be used to smear the target and then hurt them as much as possible. As Revolver wrote on the Gaetz case a year ago in a piece entitled, “The New York Times Goes Full-Blown ‘East German Stasi’ to Destroy Matt Gaetz”:

What must be understood about such political prosecutions is that the charges are always beside the point. The Deep State authorities of the national security state don’t care about prostitution, they care about people who pose a threat to their power. That is Gaetz’s real crime and that is why this conversation is taking place at all.

In just four years in Washington, Gaetz has distinguished himself as one of the most effective proponents of Donald Trump’s ideological realignment. While most of the GOP continues to embrace unlimited military spending and disastrous foreign interventions, Gaetz has been one of the most outspoken antiwar, anti-intervention Republicans.

…

Matt Gaetz has been one of the most steadfast Republicans in refusing to submit to left-wing moral imperialism. Other Republicans might condemn cancel culture, but Gaetz took actual risks to resist it.

…

Gaetz, in short, is a rising Republican star, and a valuable asset in Washington. It makes perfect sense that the press would want him not only gone from office, but gone from public life.

READ THE REST…

Just like Gaetz, Cawthorn is a rising star in a new political faction that rejects the America-last, “designated loser” position Republicans have happily occupied for decades. All of this dirt on Cawthorn is being dumped now not because Cawthorn is weak or embarrassing or deficient, but because he is effective. It’s happening because Cawthorn has openly called the 2020 election “rigged,” and warned of the dire long-term consequences if American election security isn’t shored up. It’s happening because Cawthorn called Ukraine’s prime minister a “thug” because he was charging his enemies with treason and banning opposition TV networks well before Russia invaded. It’s happening because Cawthorn wants a real America-first foreign policy.

But most of all, it’s because Cawthorn has made himself as irritating to establishment Republicans as he is to Democrats. The all-out campaign to destroy Cawthorn is a bipartisan operation: An alliance between Republicans who want the party as it was in 2006, and left-wing media allies happy to help them fight an intra-party civil war.

As explained by the Daily Beast:

Few in politics have seen anything like the ever-worsening public relations trainwreck that has consumed the political career of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC). The unrelenting pile-up of damaging stories, insiders say, is the clear handiwork of political players determined to take out the 26-year old MAGA hero in the May 17 primary election.

With a field of hungry Republican primary opponents eyeing the divisive freshman’s seat, the sources of the coordinated stories seem clear: the attacks are coming from inside the house.

“It’s definitely a hit job that I’m happy to be a party to,” a veteran North Carolina operative involved in the race told The Daily Beast.

“Most of the GOP universe has come around to align against this guy,” he added. “You’re seeing a full-court, state-based, establishment pushback against him. Get this guy out. Take him out. We’re gonna see if we can pull it off in eight days.”

[The Daily Beast]

The leader of the anti-Cawthorn movement is North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, whose Super PAC is spending vast sums targeting Cawthorn in North Carolina’s upcoming primary. Tillis has played a direct role in the zersetzung attack, demanding a full investigation of an incredibly flimsy allegation of “insider trading” stemming from Cawthorn promoting a memecoin.

Tillis, indisputably one of the most repulsive RINOs still in Congress, is well aware of the usefulness of bogus investigations. He was one of the strongest GOP backers of the Mueller probe, which derailed the critical first two years of President Trump’s term.  Tillis was eager to oppose Trump because he may be the most eager Republican in Congress to act as a handmaiden in the replacement of his own voters. In 2017, Tillis blocked Trump’s nominee to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services until Trump agreed to let more H-2B guest workers into the country. He opposed emergency funding for Trump’s border wall, then lamely tried to claim he was a supporter after the party base overwhelmingly backed the president.

Unlike Tillis, Madison Cawthorn is the real deal. So Tillis and North Carolina establishment want him purged.

The American people won’t be fooled.

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