I ran across this article back at the end of September and it laid fallow in my Draft queue since. At the time, Antifa/Black Lives Matter riots were growing in intensity and quantity in what seemed to be in advance of the Nov 3rd election. Many on the Right opined that this was a Democrat brownshirt tactic to force some people to vote their way – intimidation on the idea that the beatings would get worse if the election didn’t throw Trump out of office. So FAR, that seems to have held true – Biden appears to have won (but not until ALL of the legal wrangling, ballot reviews, electors elected, and the Electoral College does its vote, and that is certified.
And because this is 2020, the Craziest of Years, who knows what Black Swan event may happen (here’s a guess – SCOTUS orders a recount in one, several, all the battleground, or ALL the States because of too many irregularities. Just spitballin’ here…)
Anyways, if that Black Swan event (forgot one – Congress gets involved and the final determination would probably result in a Trump victory because of the majority of the States represented in the US House are Republican majorities (and the process says each State delegation picks ONE person to cast a vote which probably result in a Trump victory…but spitballing again) happens, the violence and wanton destruction of Private Property would redouble. Most Left of Center group would join in…resulting in….?
Anyways, as Sun Tzu held, know your enemy. How do they work? What are their logistics? Tactics? Communications? And most of all, philosophy? Here’s an article from the New York Times that outlines a bit of that; reformatted (emphasis mine):
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Opinion: The Truth About Today’s Anarchists
By Farah Stockman
On the last Sunday in May, Jeremy Lee Quinn, a furloughed photographer in Santa Monica, Calif., was snapping photos of suburban moms kneeling at a Black Lives Matter protest when a friend alerted him to a more dramatic subject: looting at a shoe store about a mile away. He arrived to find young people pouring out of the store, shoeboxes under their arms. But there was something odd about the scene. A group of men, dressed entirely in black, milled around nearby, like supervisors. One wore a creepy rubber Halloween mask.
The next day, Mr. Quinn took pictures of another store being looted. Again, he noticed something strange. A white man, clad in black, had broken the window with a crowbar, but walked away without taking a thing. Mr. Quinn began studying footage of looting from around the country and saw the same black outfits and, in some cases, the same masks. He decided to go to a protest dressed like that himself, to figure out what was really going on. He expected to find white supremacists who wanted to help re-elect President Trump by stoking fear of Black people. What he discovered instead were true believers in “insurrectionary anarchism.”
To better understand them, Mr. Quinn, a 40-something theater student who worked at Univision until the pandemic, has spent the past four months marching with “black bloc” anarchists in half a dozen cities across the country, chronicling the experience on his website, Public Report [Here on Facebook- requires setting up an account. Website here. -Skip].
He says he respects the idealistic goal of a hierarchy-free society that anarchists embrace, but grew increasingly uncomfortable with the tactics used by some anarchists, which he feared would set off a backlash that could help get President Trump re-elected. In Portland, Ore., he marched with people who shot fireworks at the federal court building. In Washington, he marched with protesters who harassed diners. Mr. Quinn discovered a thorny truth about the mayhem that unfolded in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. It wasn’t mayhem at all.
While talking heads on television routinely described it as a spontaneous eruption of anger at racial injustice, it was strategically planned, facilitated and advertised on social media by anarchists who believed that their actions advanced the cause of racial justice. In some cities, they were a fringe element, quickly expelled by peaceful organizers. But in Washington, Portland and Seattle they have attracted a “cultlike energy,” Mr. Quinn told me.
Don’t take just Mr. Quinn’s word for it. Take the word of the anarchists themselves, who lay out the strategy in Crimethinc, an anarchist publication: Black-clad figures break windows, set fires, vandalize police cars, then melt back into the crowd of peaceful protesters. When the police respond by brutalizing innocent demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets and rough arrests, the public’s disdain for law enforcement grows. It’s Asymmetric Warfare 101.
An anarchist podcast called “The Ex-Worker” explains that while some anarchists believe in pacifist civil disobedience inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, others advocate using crimes like arson and shoplifting to wear down the capitalist system. According to “The Ex-Worker,” the term “insurrectionary anarchist” dates back at least to the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, when opponents of the fascist leader Francisco Franco took “direct action” against his regime, including assassinating policemen and robbing banks.
If that is not enough to convince you that there’s a method to the madness, check out the new report by Rutgers researchers that documents the “systematic, online mobilization of violence that was planned, coordinated (in real time) and celebrated by explicitly violent anarcho-socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peaceful protest,” according to its co-author Pamela Paresky. She said some anarchist social media accounts had grown 300-fold since May, to hundreds of thousands of followers.
“The ability to continue to spread and to eventually bring more violence, including a violent insurgency, relies on the ability to hide in plain sight — to be confused with legitimate protests, and for media and the public to minimize the threat,” Dr. Paresky told me. Her report will almost certainly catch the attention of conservative media and William Barr’s Department of Justice, which recently declared New York, Portland and Seattle “anarchist jurisdictions,” a widely mocked designation accompanied by the threat of withholding federal funds.
Sidenote: they learned by watching the other insurgencies – from the Viet Cong who could melt into crowds after attacks, in Iraq and Afganistan as well. Not all enemies garb up in uniforms as called by the Geneva Convention. The Westfalia Convention, warfare by legal constrictions, is dead. -Skip
There’s an even thornier truth that few people seem to want to talk about: Anarchy got results.
Don’t get me wrong. My heart broke for the people in Minneapolis who lost buildings to arson and looting. Migizi, a Native American nonprofit in Minneapolis, raised more than $1 million to buy and renovate a place where Native American teenagers could learn about their culture — only to watch it go up in flames, alongside dozens of others, including a police station. It can take years to build a building — and only one night to burn it down. And yet, I had to admit that the scale of destruction caught the media’s attention in a way that peaceful protests hadn’t. How many articles would I have written about a peaceful march? How many months would Mr. Quinn have spent investigating suburban moms kneeling? That’s on us.
While I feared that the looting and arson would derail the urgent demands for racial justice and bring condemnation, I was wrong, at least in the short term. Support for Black Lives Matter soared. Corporations opened their wallets. It was as if the nation rallied behind peaceful Black organizers after it saw the alternative, like whites who flocked to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after they got a glimpse of Malcolm X. But as the protests continue, support has flagged. The percentage of people who say they support the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped from 67 percent in June to 55 percent, according to a recent Pew poll.
Sidenote: Support soared – until it didn’t. Starting mid to late summer, the Media figured out that these riots were bad press to the majority of voters and support was plummeting. So, the mouthpieces of Democrat Party, including the New York Times, turned off the reporting valves. Seriously, who remembers the last of the big riots since then? Sure, there are scattered ones by the TRUE Believers that won’t be dissuaded by the political types who may be aligned with them. However, the interests are not aligned – “winning” has two different definitions for the two groups. But while the Democrats did take a political beating on the State and local levels, you have to admit they may have won the big prize.
“Insurrectionary anarchy” brings diminishing returns, especially as anarchists complicate life for those working within the system to halt police violence.
In Louisville, Ky., Attica Scott, a Black state representative who sponsored a police reform bill, was arrested last week and charged with felony rioting after someone threw a road flare inside a library. In Portland, Jo Ann Hardesty, an activist turned city councilor, has pushed for the creation of a pilot program of unarmed street responders to handle mental illness and homelessness, a practical step to help protect populations that experience violence at the hands of police. Yet Ms. Hardesty is shouted down at protests by anarchists who want to abolish the police, not merely reform or defund them. “As a Black woman who has been working on this for 30 years, to have young white activists who have just discovered that Black lives Matter yelling at me that I’m not doing enough for Black people — it’s kind of ironic, is what it is,” Ms. Hardesty told me.
In Seattle, Andrè Taylor, a Black man who lost his brother to police violence in 2016, helped change state law that made it nearly impossible to prosecute officers for killing civilians. But he has been branded a “pig cop” by young anarchists because his nonprofit organization receives funds from the city, and because he cooperates with the police. “When they say, ‘You are working with the police,’ I say, ‘I have worked with police and I will continue to work for reform,’” Mr. Taylor told me. “Remember, I lost a brother.”
Black people get shot for doing ordinary law-abiding things. They don’t have the luxury of anarchy, he told me.
That’s the thing about “insurrectionary anarchists.” They make fickle allies. If they help you get into power, they will try to oust you the following day, since power is what they are against. Many of them don’t even vote. They are experts at unraveling an old order but considerably less skilled at building a new one. That’s why, even after more than 100 days of protest in Portland, activists do not agree on a set of common policy goals.
Even some anarchists admit as much.
“We are not sure if the socialist, communist, democratic or even anarchist utopia is possible,” a voice on “The Ex-Worker” podcast intones. “Rather, some insurrectionary anarchists believe that the meaning of being an anarchist lies in the struggle itself and what that struggle reveals.”
In other words, it’s not really about George Floyd or Black lives, but insurrection for insurrection’s sake.
(H/T: NYT)
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“We are not sure if the socialist, communist, democratic or even anarchist utopia is possible” – They may be socialistic or communistic – they certainly are anarchist. But “The Ex-Worker” certainly is correct about one thing – any attempt by any one to “force a Utopia” on anyone or any group of people (or as the Progressives have and will continue to try, to make America into their own version of Utopia regardless of what the rest of us want.
Especially those of us, while recognizing that our nation is not perfect, it still is the best country in history and that we are still trying to reach the aspirations of our Founders (regardless of “Blame America Firsters”, like Bruce Currie, believe). But we don’t need anything FORCED upon us – and that’s what Progressives either can’t recognize or don’t want to recognize or don’t care what we think of what they are trying to do (or a combo of all three in varying degrees).
You know, I’ve said “The Left has set the rules, we’re just starting to live by them”. That’s a revealing statement; the first part, in just a few quick ways:
- The Left hates America as it is and is trying to change the Norms that traditional America has lived by for centuries
- The Left is trying to change our common language out from underneath us to support their Agenda away from Freedom and Capitalism
- The Left has undermined our Educational system a la what the Goebbels said: We don’t need you – we have your children
- The lockdowns aren’t just ruining our economic system – it is a tool of isolation leading to despair; we are social animals (at least most folks – I’m an introvert at heart but I realize I’m an exception) and NEED and REQUIRE that social contact.
And the second:
- We discovered how the Left was manipulating us (and they continue to do so) using Alinsky’s Ruled for Radicals. We on the Right adopted them – the Left complains about it
- The Left is shocked that what they have been handing out as “punishment tactics” are now being adopted by the Right – and the Left is TICKED (e.g., ballot harvesting in CA that helped to flip a number of US House seats from Democrat to Republican).
- The Left has been Silencing the Right on social media – the Left is OUTRAGED that the Right isn’t going to take it anymore and are moving to “Free Speech” platforms – but remaining on Twitter and FB and taunting the Left.
- You want boycotts? We’ll do the Buycotts (like for Goya and Chick-fil-a)
- You want the never ending campaigns – well, the Right is finally learning that lesson too.
- You took over the Media – and Conservative Talk Radio rose up. The Left admits that it has nothing to counter Breitbart (How Andrew, who I met a couple of time, would be proud of that). Ditto the Conservatarian media sites; we took away their monopoly. Fox News met the needs of half the country – now One News America and Newsmax is stealing their lunch money as they moved Leftward.
The main problem for me is this – what is the Right’s answer to Antifa? Is it “needed”? Certainly it was clear that they were out for mayhem. But as the months went on, it was, as the article outlines, a political movement wrapped up in mayhem. The Democrats that controlled those cities / urban areas, allowed that mayhem and allowed that chaos – setting up the conditions for more political changes and changes to the Social Norms.
And as Brietbart said, and the Left embraces, politics is downstream from culture – and Antifa was/is all about social change with the Democrats trying to co-opt that force.
But if Antifa is a tool that can be co-opted (as much as anarchists can be controlled), even if just a little, what is the counterbalancing force on the Right? And what is that tipping point at which the hand tools (bats, poles, knuckledusters, pepper spray, et al) wielded by them are replaced by more lethal munitions and tactics?
Over the last few decades, politics has seen a huge ratcheting up of the means and wherewithal. Von Clausewitz said that Politics is War by other means. Up to know, American politics has been rather peaceful compared to most other countries.
After this past summer, I’m not convinced of that anymore – a taboo has been broken.
“The Left has set the rules, we’re just starting to live by them”.
We’ve had the opportunity to watch other countries go through this civil war scenario in the last 50 years (and make no doubt – it IS what we are going through even if it hasn’t gone “hot”) and each one has been “no holds barred” with respect to mayhem, violence, death, and upheaval. Yet, IMHO, the Left is playing with those scenarios.
As the Headmaster at my high school said every morning over the P.A. system: “forwarned is forearmed”.
And your response will be?
