On the Alleged Assassination Attempt on Baked Alaska

Garrett Smith

2,352 words

The Right-wing internet has been abuzz these last few days after the arrest of antifa terrorist Garrett James Smith, who was caught outside a Florida rally in support of January 6 prisoner Jeremy Brown. Because Baked Alaska was in attendance at this rally, people have been semi-ironically referring to the incident as the “failed assassination of Baked Alaska.”

Garrett Smith, an antifa activist, had moved back to Florida from Portland, where he was presumably radicalized, two months ago. Then, last Thursday, he was caught outside a Right-wing January 6 rally dressed all in black, carrying a backpack full of explosives and antifa uniforms. He supposedly also had antifa literature and a handwritten supply list of things he would need for his mission in his car.

I may be accused of white-knighting for antifa by saying this, but I think I have accumulated enough White Nationalist cred over the years that I can take Nixon to China on this issue: After having reviewed all the available evidence and statements from the police, it looks as if Garrett James Smith was the patsy in an FBI setup.

I’m not saying that Smith wasn’t antifa. I’m not saying that he did not go to the event with the intent to carry out an act of terrorism. I’m not saying antifa is not our enemy. What I am saying is that the FBI is also our enemy, and you should not allow your hatred of antifa to impair your ability to look at this incident in a cool and level-headed way. If you do, it’s hard not to conclude that Garrett Smith is the victim of a fed op.

I’ll give the tl/dr about what I think happened up front, and then make my case for it later. I think Garrett Smith was in contact with feds who told him to be at the January 6 event. Law enforcement knew Smith was going to be there. Smith figured out at the last minute that he was being set up and tried to escape (he was caught running away from the rally and back to his car). The police then came up with a pretext to arrest him.

First, the background. Jeremy Brown is a 47-year-old member of the Oath Keepers, and thus quite likely a victim of fed shenanigans himself. After all, the Oath Keepers are led by one Stuart Rhodes, who from 2009-2010 was a section chief for the FBI. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that Rhodes is merely an ex-FBI agent whose love of freedom is surpassed only by his hatred of the establishment. Or, it could be that Rhodes is presently an FBI agent and the Oath Keepers are a honeypot.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

Jeremy Brown entered the Capitol on January 6 dressed in full military camo and left without incident. For this, Brown was charged with entering a restricted building and disorderly conduct in a restricted building. After being visited by the feds, Brown placed a handwritten sign outside his house that read: “Dear FBI/DHS/USMS/HCSO, Re-read your oath. You are being used as a pawn by enemies of this Republic and your liberties.” A completely true statement, by the way. He should have left it at that.

But that wasn’t all. Brown ended the message by telling the feds to “bring a bigger tactical package” should they ever come back. This is technically not illegal but strategically unwise, as that little boast would eventually be used against Brown as evidence that he is a “danger to his community.”

Don’t do the tough-guy shtick with the feds, kids. Threaten to sue them if they come back. Tell them you have a friend who works for the ACLU or something, but it’s probably not a good idea to imply that you intend to reenact the ending of Scarface should they ever return.

What really put Brown in a jam was when another Oath Keeper defendant claimed that he had visited Brown’s house on January 4 in order to plan an invasion of the Capitol. This roped Brown into a wider inter-state conspiracy and gave the feds the excuse they needed to get a search warrant for Brown’s house, which was executed on September 30. The feds found some illegal weapons and a couple of grenades. Brown has been sitting in a Florida jail since October.

Don’t join LARP groups, kids.

Jeremy Brown reportedly joined the Oath Keepers immediately after the election in November 2020. He has since appeared on podcasts where he has expressed his suspicion that the Oath Keepers are in fact compromised. Did that play a role in what happened? Did some fed inside the Oath Keepers say, “This Jeremy Brown guy is asking too many questions, let’s take him out before he blows the lid off this op”?  I’ll leave that to you to decide.

This is a very truncated version of the story, since ultimately, this article is about Garrett Smith. Do your own research on Brown and make up your mind.

The video above is the press conference about the arrest that was given by the Pinellas County Sherriff’s Department. Watch this video with a skeptical mind and I think you will see what I mean.

The first problem is how they caught him: namely, running away from the rally and back to his car. Is running a crime? Not as far as I know. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said they arrested him because Smith was running “as if fleeing something.” He’s an antifa activist at a Right-wing rally. It’s possible he was running to keep from getting his ass kicked. Maybe his car alarm went off. Maybe his parking meter was about to run out. There were a lot of possible reasons for why he was running.

This is the first big red flag that something odd is going on here. If what the Sheriff is saying is true, they arrested Smith and searched him without any reason to believe that he had committed a crime.

“Something caused him to want to get out of there quickly, but I don’t know what it is,” the Sheriff said. Well, we know what it wasn’t: “The sheriff states that no bomb was ever found at the rally site.”

Thus, Smith did not place a bomb and then started running to make his getaway before it exploded. That was what I initially thought they were going to say, but then they said that no other bombs were found on the scene.

The Sheriff also said, “We’re fortunate in this situation that something caused Smith to flee before he ignited the explosive device and that deputies were able to apprehend him.” At this point, you might be thinking that perhaps Smith went to the rally with the intention of committing terrorism and then chickened out. He recognized his common humanity with his potential victims upon seeing them and couldn’t go through with it. That’s theoretically possible, but if that was the case, then there would have been no reason for him to run back to his car. He could have just walked. It would have been less conspicuous. Likewise, if he had backed down because there were too many cops and he didn’t think he could get away with it, he wouldn’t start drawing attention to himself by sprinting away.

The fact that Smith was running away from the rally rather suggests that he believed he was in immediate danger. Thus, my theory is that Garrett Smith was put up to this by feds. He got to the event, something tipped him off that he was being set up, and he ran.

Maybe Smith had been told he would be meeting up with a team of others to carry out the attack, and when he got there and found out he was the only one, and noticed there were cops everywhere and perhaps someone with binoculars who was more interested in him than in the rally, he figured it out. Or maybe he tried to call his contact and no one answered — or like Big Boss in Metal Gear, his contact started sending sketchy messages like, “Meet me in the black van with tinted windows right in front of you.”

Whatever it was that tipped him off, he figured it out and started running. Then the cops were left with the problem of coming up with a pretext to stop him, since he hadn’t committed a crime yet. In the end, they charged him with “loitering” — one of the least-enforced laws — and “prowling,” a crime I’d never heard of until now.

The law says that law enforcement has to have a reason to believe — and not just a hunch — that a crime has taken place to justify a stop-and-search. A cop is allowed to stop someone and ask why he is running, but for a search, he must have a reason to believe a crime has taken place that he can prove.  Thus, “loitering” and “prowling” sound like bullshit charges to justify an illegal search after the fact. After all, the police say Smith came to their attention when he started running, not when he started loitering.

The Sheriff has made a lot of the fact that Smith was wearing all black and had his face covered. But we’re in the midst of the “Covid pandemic,” and so everyone is covering their face these days; even Right-wingers are masking up at rallies for operational security.

All of this together make me strongly suspect that law enforcement already knew what they were going to find in Garrett Smith’s backpack when they stopped him.

“Smith refused to give any information, he refused to talk to deputies, so we really have no idea as to what his political leanings are and whether he supported or opposed the protestors at the jail,” the Sheriff said. This one is really weird. Smith had a handwritten “Direct Action” (an antifa term) checklist. He was wearing a helmet bearing antifa insignias. If he’s not antifa, he certainly wanted people to think he was — yet the police say they do not know if he was Right- or Left-wing. To make matters more confusing, Smith apparently had zero social media presence that anyone can find.

The only thing law enforcement claims to know for sure is that Smith is a terrorist. The Sheriff kept referring to Smith as a “sleeper”: “Smith is what we call a sleeper, and these are the most concerning individuals because there are no opportunities to intervene and thwart their criminal activity before they actually act,” Gualtieri said.

Sleeper? Sleeper for whom? And if you don’t know, then how do you know he’s a sleeper?

It’s funny that when Muslims commit obvious acts of terrorism, the media always denies knowing whether it was an act of terrorism and insists on “waiting for the facts.” But in this case, terrorism is the only thing that they haven’t ruled out. They don’t know if he is a MAGA terrorist or an antifa terrorist; they just know he is a terrorist.

So why would the feds run an operation like this? It is popularly believed on the Right that antifa are the foot soldiers of the establishment and that they are used as an extra-judicial paramilitary force. But with Trump gone, I believe antifa have outlived their usefulness. They have become an embarrassment to the Democrats and an effective propaganda boogeyman for the Right. They are bad optics. Several Democrat strategists claim that antifa’s “defund the police” rhetoric nearly lost them the 2020 election. They are now a liability to the post-Trump establishment.

Joe Biden ran on an appeal that he would turn the clock back to 2014. That means no Nazis or antifa. An antifa crackdown would be very popular with voters and would give Biden the appearance of being even-handed. He opposes all forms of extremism, whether it is from the Left or the Right.

I believe the establishment would love for antifa to commit a terrorist attack — or perhaps they will stage one themselves and attribute it to them — so they will have an excuse to crack down. There have already been signs that they are intending to do so. Last month, Twitter changed their terms of service to prohibit certain kinds of doxing, and banned many antifa accounts as a result.

A lot of those antifa were able to cry to the mainstream media about it, however, and generated some backlash. NPR did a big sob story about heroic Nazi-hunting online vigilantes getting banned. There is a segment of the Democrat base who doesn’t care about electoral strategy, and believes that antifa are necessary to stave off a White Nationalist takeover.

If the establishment could get one or two high-profile mass casualty antifa terrorist attacks, however, it would shut the critics up and they could get on with their business. No one is going to defend terrorists, after all.

On top of this is the fact that antifa terrorism would also mean more funding for the FBI. If they have to open a whole new wing dedicated to Left-wing terrorism, they’re going to need even more money.

I don’t know if Smith was ever supposed to actually blow up the rally, or if “thwarting the attack” was the plan all along. It could be that they planned to thwart the attack quietly and flip Smith into being a snitch, but that fell apart when he started running away. “Thwarted” terrorist attacks are nearly as useful for increasing the FBI counter-terrorism budget as those that are successful — arguably more so.

All of this needs to be taken into consideration, especially in light of Nick Fuentes suggesting that people might need to start “carrying” at future Right-wing rallies. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but my gut instinct says no. Even if you never draw the weapon, possessing a gun can make other charges much more severe in tandem.

This is just my opinion, but this is a debate that need to be had in light of this incident. But we definitely should take into consideration the strong possibility that this particular incident was a fed op.

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