Thomas McInerney, Lt Gen, USAF (Ret) is an odd case. A man that rose to the rank of a three-star general and then made a career of acting as a talking head on cable news, descended, sometime around 2017 into increasing absurdity. Most of us dismiss such cases, ‘he is old now, perhaps losing some faculties’, etc., these are our explanations.
However, as MJ is beginning to expose, McInerney is simply not an old general that perhaps ought to stay close to the house and play more cribbage. There is a network around him, folks that boost and highlight his words, use his image and rank, and spin further tales based upon that assumed credibility. McInerney is not the center of the universe that MJ is exposing, he is not the master-mind. But he has been important, for two reasons, his words, actions, and association with things that increasingly appear nefarious and deceptive have had a measurable effect, a couple of effects in fact.
It would seem, that in the aggregate, the effects of these deceptions have 1) made arguments about election fraud in 2020 look absurd to moderate, normalized bias people. 2) believers and followers of these deceptions have drifted further and further toward an extreme of incoherence, incapable of making solid arguments because so much poison has entered the reservoir they draw from.
There is no space here to dissect McInerney’s descent from talking head to what he has become, but two key points are relevant. Early on in the 2020 election saga, McInerney made claims that 1) “a raid on servers occurred in Germany” [1] [2] and 2) that the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion was somehow involved perhaps in that raid and was certainly involved in sorting out the election mess. (Twitter was quick to spot this nonsense and those that never wanted to consider election fraud held it as proof of their position.)
The 305th claim originated, it seems, from things McInerney was told by Sydney Powell or by folks associated with her claims. Powell based her knowledge on a “whistleblower” known as ‘Spyder”. There are two major problems with these claims, problems that a Lieutenant General ought to have seen immediately, it matters not that he is old and was Air Force, this is basic stuff.
First, despite the flashy name, the 305th is a TRADOC unit. It is designed for and tasked with training people. TRADOC units in the US Army are not designed to conduct operations, they do not have the right personnel nor structure. These sorts of units generally do not even have access to the latest technology. The schoolhouse is often years behind the field, particularly since the initiation of the GWOT. McInerney could have and should have known this in an instance.
Second, “Spyder” appears to not even be an intelligence soldier at all, rather a mechanic.
I argued with people, some D-list influencers, at the time that were boosting this story that it was not just wrong, but absurdly wrong, so absurd that it smelled of something else. For my efforts, I received only chastisement and blocks on social media. It seems there was a reason for circling the wagons.
Make no mistake, this sort of chicanery has effects. Innumerable Americans associate claims of election fraud with crackpot theories. As MJ pointed out in her initial piece on their story, as early as 2 November 2020 some outlets in this circle were spinning up their explanation for why the election debacle occurred (two days before the election). They already had a story in place before it happened!
Many regular Americans and decision-makers in state government and on local election boards have simply refused to consider the matter because it was tainted so badly early. The left uses this as a tool to paint everyone talking of the issue as a wingnut. There was a definite effect.
One could also argue that the claims of ‘white-hats’ in the government fighting for us, and the ‘military is going to save us’ were not that much different than many things the QAnnon community said and believed. The deceptive narrative released and boosted by the circle MJ is now exposing played up that connection. They reached out to an audience that had been conditioned to expect these sorts of actions. It would not be a large leap to argue that some of those involved in the events of January 6th were in no small part motivated and influenced by these lies.
Related Articles:
- Brannon Howse and Absolute Sabotage
- McInerney’s Role
- Money, Sex, Power, and Influence
- Who Let the Hammer Out
- Unmasking the Conspiracy Theory Club
- Who is Mary Fanning Part I ---removed
- Who is Mary Fanning: Part II
- A Ten-Year Conspiracy
- Absolute Sabotage Series Summary
