Where Are the "Sedition Hunters" When We Need Them?

Our Amateur Stasi Had No Interest in Sedition Other Than to Promote It

While Antifa rampages through select American cities with their identities masked, this would seem a good time for the so-called “Sedition Hunters” to step up and lend their services once again to the FBI.

On their website, they described themselves as “a global community of open-source intelligence investigators (OSINT) working together to assist the U.S. FBI and Washington D.C. Capitol Police in finding people who allegedly committed crimes in the January 6 capitol riots.” As an added bonus, they were “able to identify other crimes and pass that information along to law enforcement officers.” Those “other crimes” apparently do not include genuine acts of sedition such as storming ICE facilities, attacking journalists, or assassinating political leaders.

Following the events of January 6, 2021, the Biden DOJ was hell bent on arresting as many protestors as possible. By itself, the FBI could not begin to keep up with the demand for heads, but the Bureau had help. Much the way the Castro regime relied on local “rapid response brigades” to sniff out the suspicious activities of their neighbors, the Biden regime came to rely on its own citizen snoops, none better organized than the Sedition Hunters.

The media loved the Sedition Hunters. A wonderfully revealing episode of NPR’s “Morning Edition” captured the Jacobin mindset as of January 5, 2022, a year after the “insurrection.” In the opening segment reporter Rob Stein scolded the CDC for loosening its mask guidelines. Recall, this was two years after the introduction of COVID-19 to America’s shores.

In the second segment, reporter Odette Yousef interviewed Forrest Rogers, the Sedition Hunter’s most public face. That “a German American living in Switzerland” was hunting everyday Americans did not even strike Yousef as curious. In the segment Rogers, who worked for Switzerland’s leading German language newspaper, boasted about how and he and his group combed through social media sites until they identified seditionists. He cited as an example their identification of “of a ringleader in a premeditated campaign to invade the Capitol.”

That ringleader was Rachel Powell, “a very granola, very crunchy” mom from Pennsylvania unconnected to any group, let alone militia. “They sent that information to the FBI,” said an approving Yousef, “and Powell was arrested a few weeks later.” Yousef failed to mention that Powell was a mother of eight, almost all of them still at home. Powell would be sentenced to 4 and 1/2 years in prison for clearing the glass out of a broken window. As to Rogers, he has spent the last year or so running cover for Hamas and its American proxies.

In the liberal imagination, those who rooted out sedition—Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon—represented a greater threat to democracy than those who engaged in it. And by sedition we are not talking grandmas taking selfies in the Capitol rotunda. We are talking genuine traitors—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—Soviet agents who conspired to share vital national security secrets with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The progressive media have forgotten what they once stood for. The Sedition Hunters’ chief propagandist was NBC reporter, Ryan J. Reilly. In the fourth chapter of his book, Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System, he acknowledges having once worked as a data analyst for the FBI. No surprise there. Although Reilly still reports for NBC, he has no presence on X, an odd retreat from reality.

“Walk Away” founder Brandon Sraka has a particular beef with Reilly. “Ryan didn’t just write untrue stories about J6 defendants. He took pleasure in taunting us,” wrote Straka. “In one instance, I sent an email to my subscribers telling them I was excited about a big new announcement I had coming the next day related to my work with #WalkAway. For no reason at all, Ryan ran a new story through NBC that day, recycling a lie that he helped create that I was a snitch who was turning people in to DOJ- and when he posted the article he wrote, “Can’t wait for your big announcement tomorrow, Brandon!””

Straka continued, “It is not hyperbolic to say that Ryan bears significant responsibility for the numerous suicides of J6 defendants, and for creating the false narratives that led to hundreds of people being wrongfully convicted, stalked, harassed, mass banned and destroyed. And through all of it- he thought it was funny.”

With the help of the Seditions Hunters and reporters like Reilly, the FBI arrested more than 1600 protestors and incarcerated nearly half of them, hundreds of those on a charge so spurious that the Supreme Court promptly threw it out. Some 52 of these defendants had been convicted of no other felony.

Speaking of betraying its historic mission, no outfit could match the ACLU. On the first anniversary of January 6, for instance, all fifty-one ACLU chapters signed on to the kind of letter the ACLU chapter of ancient Rome might have written about the Vandals or the Visigoths.

It read as follows, “On January 6 of last year, the residents of D.C. were traumatized as an insurrectionist mob roamed our streets, harassed our neighbors, and violently broke into the Capitol Building, killing at least five people –– all in an attempt to overthrow the counting of American citizens’ votes.” The only thing the ACLU got right in this letter was the date.

Today, as real insurrectionist mobs roam the streets of Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago and other American cities, the ACLU defends the insurrectionists, the media pretend they don’t exist, and Forrest Rogers eats chocolates in Zurich. So much for our progressive heritage.

Coming soon: Empire of Lies: Big Media’s 30-Year War on Truth, 1994-2024.