Antifa's influence may be exaggerated, but it's not a mythical Snuffleupagus, either, as they showed in attacking reporter Maranie Staab from our partner News2Share this past weekend.
My go to comment about all things Antifa: You're wearing black shirts and using street violence against your political opponents. Are you sure you're the anti-Fascists?
Plus the Antifa followed the Proud Boy demonstration, baiting at every turn. PB changed locations to avoid them, but they followed. Is it not obvious which side wanted violence? Why is it only one side is allowed to protest? How can anyone think Antifa is actually the good guys?
I grew up in Portland Oregon. It's my hometown. I attended Portland State University in the 80s and the only political violence that ever occurred on campus, was from the left. Never the right. To say otherwise, would be to spew nonsense. The only people who were allowed to speak on campus without issue, were leftist speakers. Anyone on the moderate side of right was always violently shutdown. It's a pattern of conduct for the left that has persisted to this day and is the reason that the Proud Boys were created. They were created exclusively to defend the rights of assembly and free speech for people who tend not to vote Democrat.
Well, you know Antifa are the brown shirts for the Dem party, right? That's how I see it based on everything I've read and seen over the past few years.
Not sure. Actually doubt it. Whatever they are fighting for, it's not the Democratic party except through confluence of interests on some occasions.
The whole streetfighting community is an interesting anthropological study. Hopefully someone is doing it. It was done in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and the way it worked was more like the Ulster conflict, people would have local bars they frequented that were associated with a party, and would go out and fight with their fellows there based upon local agitation and local issues. Each significant party in Germany had its own fighting force - the Reichsbanner for the SPD (Socialists), the Red Front Fighters' League for the Communists (KPD), Stahlhelm, the list goes on. Levels of organization varied. The SA (Brownshirts) only turned into a mass movement with membership cards and such after the Nazis took power, when millions joined. Before that, they weren't even in a majority in many places and probably got their asses kicked more often than not.
Incidentally the effective part of the strategy was making people feel unsafe. They welcomed totalitarian rule for the security of same.
I recall Biden and Harris posted bail for Antifa last year. When you consider a political party supporting a domestic terror Org like Antifa (yeah, people are debating this, but it's my opinion/assessment) then it appears to me they are closly aligned. I appreciate your comment though. It's worth looking further into to determine how best to classify them.
They don't seem anti Fascist at all though. Otherwise, why not go after Apple, Amazon, Google, (the big tech giants), Pfizer, Moderna (Big Pharma), etc... down the line, with more passion. Oh right, can't touch part of the fascist structure in play in the USA.
In 1919 and early 1920's the Freikorps and the Communists were having actual wars with rifles, machine guns, field artillery, and hand grenades. These groups often had first hand combat experience, were absolutely ruthless, and their style, symbols, and culture was ripped off by the later political street brawlers.
Respectfully disagree, HeathN. Antifa belongs to nobody except themselves. Like their right-wing counterparts, they all seem to be in it for the show--the issue is beside the point.
Absolutely. If the media would quit covering these meaningless “protests/counter-protests,” they’d stop. What’re they even protesting? “Fascism”? Where? Fascism in the US? Fascism in Portland? I wasn’t aware that Portland was living under a fascist regime. And what are the counter-protesters counter-protesting? They’re pro-fascism? Anti-anti-fascists? This is some silly shit.
It’s just a bunch of morons getting off on the undeserved media attention. That’s really all it is. It’s like a tiny group of people in fucking Portland, Oregon (I’m talking about both the protesters and the counter-protesters; looked like there were maybe 100 people total in that video) who have no bearing or influence on anybody’s lives, except maybe the people who get stuck in traffic during their protests (although it looked like traffic was flowing pretty freely in that video). Antifa doesn’t affect my life. And the anti-Antifa people don’t affect my life, either. Never have, never will. Why the ridiculous antics of two tiny groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is “news” is beyond me. And I would’ve thought that it’s kind of beneath Matt Taibbi, too. It’s silly, meaningless shit. Sorry that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but why was she even there in the first place? Why are journalists bothering with this? The only reason it’s even being covered is to perpetuate the idea that “We’re all at odds with one another! We all hate each other! It’s chaos!” No, man, it’s really not. Everybody I know couldn’t care less about Antifa. We don’t even talk about them, except in the context of something like,”Did you see that Taibbi wrote an article about Antifa? What a joke… Anyway, you want another beer?”
Thanks for the link! My cousin and her hubby lived thru that. They excitedly moved to Portland in 2004 but escaped back to central CA after Trump was elected. They said the town had gone nuts and was frankly dangerous, no place to raise a family.
If you’re so confident that you call them “absolutely fascists”, then I look forward to you presenting any kind of evidence here to back up that statement. I’m sure you’re not just making a completely baseless assertion, are you?
But, you see, Lily is using "fascist" in the way it has been used since the Comintern decided that fascists were right-wing (rather than left-wing as they saw themselves) as a meaningless pejorative for anyone opposed to the Left's latest utopia du jour. and their being opposed to the utopia du jour, definitionally makes the Proud Boys worse than Antifa, even if Antifa assaults more people and destroys more property (as I suspect is actually the case).
I think both have been so penetrated by government agents that by now they may even have some actors in common. Antifa seems to be much more widespread, and by far the greater nuisance.
The FBI has also largely infiltrated and shut down the Proud Boys. They've seemed to do not a damn thing to Antifa or the left wing groups that burnt many cities throughout 2020.
Why are you accepting that we should have such a thing as a “Proud Boy demonstration” in the first place? Would you meekly tolerate an “ISIS demonstration” in your town? Are we so fucked up that we can’t concede that the ethnic cleansing of North America is not an acceptable political cause to rally around in broad daylight in a major city?
"Meekly" tolerate? Civil liberties may lately take a subordinate position to feelings, but as Skokie, Illinois "tolerated" the neo-Nazi march, we should "tolerate" civil protest....not violence...just the freedom to march. It does not denote approval -- just freedom.
This is the first appearance of “ethnic cleansing” I’ve seen amongst 2021 hysteria. I guess it was only a matter of time, it’s a logical step from “domestic terrorists”
I’m not being hysterical at all. I’m not sure how else you get to the stated far-right goal of having a white ethno-state in some part of North America without ethnic cleansing.
If the ISIS supporters weren't committing crimes during their protest, and they weren't inciting violence (as defined by the actual US legal standard for incitement), then yes, I would tolerate the expression of a set of beliefs I strongly disagree with or even abhor -- that's what it means to be part of a liberal democracy with freedom of speech and expression. Alternatively, one could organize or take part in a *non-violent* counter demonstration. If I weren't willing to tolerate that, I'd move somewhere more repressive. If you desire that state of affairs, there are many countries in the world that are happy to accomodate such a preference.
My point was that counter-protest in such an instance would be assured and probably would not always be pleasant for the prospective ISIS demonstrators, not that the demonstration itself should be illegal. I’d rather leave the controversiality of demonstrations up to communities acting en made than to the police or the national security apparatus, who would be happy if there were no demonstrations at all.
If ISIS doesn't break any laws, then I would have zero issues with them demonstrating in my town. Likewise, if PB or Antifa wants to have peaceful demos in my town (and I am an hour south of Portland) then cool. Make their points, try to convince me. But when they reinact Krystalnacht in Portands the Pearl district, as they did after Trumps election, then they aren't protesting, but rioting. And they did that many times over the last half-dozen years. But, sadly, our gov. will not in any way deal with this issue, and the Portland DA will play catch and release with them.
Nobody has reenacted Krystalnacht in Portland. Who was the targeted group? Don't do that. Broken glass and police passivity does not make a Krystalnacht reenactment. The closest in these United States we've gotten were the mass crimes committed against Black communities in the early 20th century.
Exactly. And the same people obsessed with "law and order" are also the same people stridently opposed to Sharia law. Shouldn't they actually support Sharia law? Isn't more law and order better than less law and order?
I was not aware that law and order came in quantities. Are you saying that if someone supports arresting shoplifters, they should also support stoning gay people and cutting the hands off thieves?
Singapore is very law and order oriented, and also very much officially opposed to any sort of religious extremism. The concepts don’t run counter to each other.
But you're OK with an Antifa occupation? I don't care for Proud Boys but they have the absolute legal freedom to gather in a park that you do not have to attend. Antifa just had to police them, as was obvious from Twitter organization prior to the event.
They both want violence and the PB's have a long track record of starting fights and baiting the other side as well. It's been recorded and several of them have been convicted of starting a riot in the past:
Antifa and the PB's are a Rorschach test for extremist political ideology. The side a person decides to take shows more about them than the group itself.
Baiting? How does "baiting" someone into shooting you work exactly? I somehow can't imagine anyone baiting me into shooting him, if only because I don't own or carry any firearms. But how would something like that even happen?
You don't know much about the human race, do you? People are dared to do stupid things all the time, just pick a few youtube videos of guys doing dumb stunts, mostly for the lulz. Now put that mentality into a political, ideological situation and you get violence. It's pretty damn easy to reason out actually.
The point is that David is somehow blaming Antifas for "baiting" the PBs, but not blaming the PBs for shooting at Antifas. What I was trying to say isn't that this couldn't happen to anyone, but that this couldn't happen without the PBs being at least partially at fault. You know, for shooting people and stuff. A completely peaceful, non-violent and blameless person being "baited" into shooting someone? That's the part that I find hard to believe.
It doesn't matter what side of the spectrum of political views you have. If you're on the street fighting against your opponents, you're an extremist and probably a totalitarian in your own right.
Actually black shirts and street violence are have as much to do with fascism as boots. Fascists wear boots, so do construction workers, and people who ride horses.
Also I don't consider people who want to put me and my family into ovens my "political opponents." They're my existential enemy. It's insane that actual Naziism, including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever.
You can believe anything you want. If you want to be taken seriously, yeah, you do have to give respect to other points of view, even those you find abhorrent.
Do you think someone like Hannah Arendt enjoyed dissecting Eichmann? Perhaps she should have entitled her book "Fuck this dude, he's not worth my time". It would have been a lot less convincing. Would have saved a lot of ink and paper costs, though.
I think we differ on what "respect" means. Of course I want to understand and be informed about Nazis. I'm saying I don't think there's a need for me to dignify them by considering what they believe a legitimate political viewpoint. The phrase "political opponents" bugs me because waters down the reality what these people believe, as if it's a difference between tax rates or trade policy.
Also, we do politics so we don't have to fight - like try to kill each other - over every issue. Show me anywhere in reality where something like a Nazi ever had a chance to gain power since 1945? I mean, like, be real. Trump was no Nazi by any useful definition and your original post had it backwards. Nazis and fringe white supremacists tried to glom onto his movement in hopes of somehow enlarging their own. Without much success, mind you.
As long as you don't have to fight these people with weapons, you need other means of taming them, which is the very point here.
But it is a political difference. Even the most odious policies remain policies.
You just have emotion wrapped around it. If you can't be dispassionate, you cannot be analytical. I can hate particular things without ruining an analysis by letting it get in the way of arriving at a conclusion.
I also push back against all of the "woke" bullshit, and *especially against any human walking who presumes to tell me how to think, speak, write, or make my own individual choices that affect no one but me.
That's conflating things. I don't think anyone can say with any level of seriousness that there is a holocaust happening in the U.S. today. I know that CNN and MSNBC spent four years saying that Trump is literally Hitler, but when people point to that sad lot with the tiki torches in Charlottesville as an example of how the U.S. is being run by literal Nazis it's hard to take seriously.
Of course the US isn't run by literal Nazis. I said nothing like that. But Unite the Right was organized by a group of white supremacist organizations who have histories of violence including body counts. Their ideology doesn't have to be dominant for them to be a threat. And the president calling them "fine people" (yes, he did) doesn't represent a good trend, politically.
It is certainly reasonable (and necessary) for people to defend themselves against violence. I have seen many instances of hyperbole, though, where people claim to be threatened by someone's viewpoint when there is no threat, implied or otherwise. For instance, when AOC accused Ted Cruz of trying to have her murdered. There is a very clear distinction between someone who is an existential threat and someone who really is just a political opponent, and those two things should never be conflated.
Trump never called them fine people. That has been thoroughly been debunked. Read https://finepeople.org/ which will lay out exactly how you've been mislead.
Me and my dad used to run a barely functioning small business, think Sanford and Son level of competence. I was once told by a college communist that I was a petit-bourgeois kulak and come the revolution I'd be put into a gulag or killed for being an enemy of the proletariat. Rather than clutch my pearls and scream about how I was being threatened I laughed at him and told him to keep dreaming. I suggest you do the same to anyone who ludicrously thinks we're going to start building Holocaust ovens in America.
Yes because antisemitism in America is more akin to spree shootings than they are to pogroms in 19th and early 20th century Europe. They're awful, but very rare and not going to become routine. I lived in post 9/11 America, the fear of jihadist terrorism was greatly overblown and did far more damage than the actual attacks and saying that doesn't minimize the deaths on 9/11 or Pulse Night Club or the like.
"It's insane that actual Naziism [sic], including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever."
What's insane is that you and your "authoritative sources" have conflated and obfuscated so many different issues that you believe that "actual Nazis" pose a serious problem, let alone an "existential" threat in 2021. Meanwhile those same sources work tirelessly to erode the same sorts of freedoms the Nazis despised.
There are probably more Cathars in the world right now than there are Nazis. Unless everyone to the right of Mao Zedong is a Nazi, in which case, yeah, they're everywhere.
I never said actual Nazis pose a serious problem. I said I'm incredulous that many people, including supporters of this site, believe I should sit down and break bread with them and understand where they're coming from. Existential threat and existential enemy are different things. Even one lone crazy guy with a gun who really, really hates Jews is a threat to my existence. Doesn't mean he's got enough people behind him to take over the government.
Anyway I love the [sic], like you're a journalist quoting a source lol. But FYI, since you're affecting as such, I'll school you: putting quotes around a phrase indicates you're quoting someone, and I never used the words "authoritative sources."
Putting quotes around a word is also an indication of irony, and/or oxymoronic expressions like "Military Intelligence", redundancies like "free gift", etc. This is not new usage just among the kids. I am no kid, and I have seen this means of expression "forever". ;-D
Don't try. Just cash the checks Soros sends you. I've made so much trolling MAGAts that I have too much money, so now he just lets me stay on his island in Greece. Saw John Gault there, it was trippy.
I’m just curious: how has Antifa affected your life, specifically? Conversely, have you ever been affected by the anti-Antifa people? And I don’t mean, like, you wake up and read the news and you get pissed off about some article you saw on your phone or something. Has your life ever actually been affected by Antifa/anti-Antifa? I only ask because I’ve never had a run-in with either of them. Both of those groups have zero bearing on my life. Why the media is spending this much time covering two tiny, meaningless groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is beyond me. I can only assume that it’s another desperate attempt on their (the media’s) part to try and convince people that,”Everybody hates each other! It’s chaos! We’re doomed!”
Who gives a fuck about Antifa? They’re not responsible for whether or not I get health care or what my tax rates are gonna be or whether or not I finally find a job. Have you ever wondered why this much time is being spent talking about an entirely meaningless, tiny group of dickheads in Portland, Oregon? Antifa is not the problem, dude. I understand that Matt is pissed that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but ultimately, Antifa and the people who counter-protest Antifa have zero impact on my life. I’m just wondering if they’ve actually had an impact on your life.
I don't live in Portland. In my mid-sized city things are... mostly normal? No riots, Proud Boys, Antifas, etc. I am hard pressed to believe that this is a serious national problem.
I'm guessing from personal experience that any so-called anti-fascist you made that argument to countered with something like "We're trying to stop fascists, so it's justified!" Now, if the only people whom they ever used these methods against were all honest-to-god believers in fascism and if it could be proven that anything less than this approach would result in the Nazi States of America being created, then *maybe* they'd have a point.
But it becomes clearer and clearer with every instance of these assholes getting violent tht their fascist-detectors aren't working properly. They're happy to assault and batter anyone who they think has it coming, and that isn't limited to neo-Nazis or even conservatives.
They almost beat up Michael Tracey, too. You might not like Tracey given some of his more dubious takes, but concluding that he is some kind of threat or the second coming of Joseph Goebbels and therefore is a valid target for violence is absolutely ridiculous.
Also, the days when antifa's supporters could smugly say "White supremacists kill people all the time. Antifa has never killed anyone" came to an end last year. So it could have possibly gone even worse for Maranie.
No one has ever made this joke before. We are in your debt, sir. If you were to tell me you identify as an attack helicopter, comedy as a discipline would be exhausted.
Ah, but that was the Nazis, the Fascists wore black shirts. But, come to think of it, once in power, Hitler got rid of the SA Brownshirts in the Night of the Long Knives, and went with black for the SS.
They're more numerous than one would think and fairly organized though not in any sort of top down vertical way. I went to a few protests in Raleigh, NC simply observing and was shoved immediately for simply standing on the side of the street, in my pink bicycling spandex, and filming their march. I was called a racist white piece of shit, a fascist, a gentrifier etc. The local news affiliate interviewed me due to the physical altercation and I stupidly gave them my name. Since I own my home antifa used my name from WRAL and found my home vandalizing it with the words "cracker" "fuck you die whitey" and "racist narc."
I never did anything to these people other than show up to their protests to observe them in objective manner as our local news didn't seem to be as critical of their tactics often leaving out their more violent acts.
At one point a photog from the N&O the major paper yelled at me, "you're making our job hard" I guess my mere presence causing such angst and vitriol amongst the protestors wasn't the narrative they wanted.
I have voted D my whole life, but the cognitive dissonance surrounding the left and Antifa is astonishing. Extremism of any type, left or right, is dangerous, but from the evidence I've seen leftist extremism is currently causing more damage to society.
Between Obama (and Matt brilliantly spelled him out), the reaction to Trump, and Oregon's harridan of a governor, I left and have not seen a way back. They would have to make serious amends to get me to vote for them at this point.
I too had voted D my whole life. I grew up surrounded by ignorant religious fanatics immune to data and reality.
Now, the Democratic party has allowed itself to be hijacked by ignorant religious fanatics immune to data and reality. (If you don't think wokeism is a quasi-religious ideology, you haven't been paying attention.)
I saw it in the 60's. A certain percentage of "protesters" were simply angry sociopaths who gravitated to whatever scene would give them cover to act out their violent impulses. Nothing they say will ever make sense because it's not about ideas but rather raw rage and a mental/emotional disconnect from society and reality.
I've viewed a lot of "close encounter" footage of antifa and a few strike me as people with deeply damaged psyches, likely acting out the abuse they grew up with--name calling, screaming "get out" like an enraged, abusive parent, etc. The rest are just ordinary shits.
Again, in the 60's, they never attended planning meetings or educational sessions, they just somehow knew to show up at demonstrations wearing black leather and chains and carrying something to bash heads in. They often found each other by instinct but genuine protestors steered clear. Occasionally someone would with sincere principles would attempt to talk them down only to be threatened or attacked. Eventually you just knew to back away and stay out of their sight line. Very sick characters.
Or just young people, mostly men, with adrenaline that needed to be worked off. I'm sure everyone has witnessed fights outside of bars or elsewhere, in which the purpose of the fight was just the fight and nothing else.
I don’t think anyone here is trashing Freud; at least I am not. As Dr. Gaylin pointed out when I took Freudian Thought in 1974 it’s not that people disagree with Freud, but when they start to disagree. Freud’s thought developed over time, and did not appear at once.
For example in the General Introduction (transcribed lectures), he makes a nasty crack at those who take psychoanalysis out of medicine and make it philosophy (ie Jung). With Thanatos and Eros he then proceeded to do the exact same thing.
There is a LOT that is very important in Freud and I am a fan- The Psychotic Dr. Scheiber is extraordinarily insightful. It’s just that I cannot take the world view he developed towards the end as really that accurate.
"Protesters" don't hide their faces. They instead march loudly but peacefully during the daylight, don't generally advocate violence, and welcome the press to cover their activities in order to spread their message.
"Terrorists" hide their faces and prefer to operate under the cover of darkness, commit violent personal assault using the most cowardly and underhanded weapons and methodologies -- including, and especially, against anyone who attempts to film their atrocities. Their "message" is conveyed in the piles of rubble and bodies they leave behind.
And sorry Matt, Trump is absolutely correct. Antifa is an organized and funded nationwide domestic terrorist group. The FBI, etc. has simply chosen to ignore this fact and not only target but infiltrate and subversively support and entice right wing groups. Unfortunately they couldn't find any collective right wing plot behind January 6th.
But really, going out to rumble like youth gangs just looks foolish to me - and evidently to the police, who've decided not to intervene until there are bullets.
On the Other Hand: when the Portland police did intervene, in the past, it was mostly on the side of the far-right demonstrators; that might be why they were told to stand off.
Well and TRULY said. I am former Portlander of 18 years residence. The PPD is almost the local *arm of the Proud Boys. Yes. The optics of their former antics
are now no longer *appreciated by TPTB, but if they can't be seen actually *helping White Supremacists, the next best thing is just to cheer the PB mobsters from the sidelines, and do nothing to *impede their movement.
Or the whole point of 'fa is to create fear in your average citizen. So people keep their heads down, don't go out, don't raise their voices to protest the damage to their communities. Communities like Portland or Seattle or Oakland or Minneapolis or...
Is that because Gno intentionally edits his video's without telling the audience to achieve the affect he desires? Is that how he became part of the politically incorrect club, meaning kicked out of the far right wing site Quillete? Isn't that like Rush Limbaugh being kicked off talk radio for being too right wing?
It's news in the same way that the failures in AFPAK are news. If you haven't been paying close attention, you would think everything is fine, antifa are the good guys, and so on. But having the news come out of non-MSM* helps get the message out there.
My brother has lived in Portland, Oregon for more than 25 years. Antifa existed long before BLM or any of the other social movements that have popped up in the last few year, and they've been causing havoc and showing up for events that lead to violence and destruction. My brother would tell me about a riot at a nearby park, which would lead to a march through the city and vandalism of local merchant's places of business. The thing that frustrated him the most, was the lack of coverage by local news organizations, or worse, reporting that the the march's were largely peaceful. Antifa's violence has only escalated since George Floyd's death with no end in site. A good friend of my brother's owned two restaurants in Portland. After Oregon shut down due to the pandemic, his restaurants were struggling to keep afloat. Antifa ended that dream when they came through on one of their "peaceful marches" (at least that's what many news organizations were calling it) and destroyed his restaurant. Needless to say, those restaurants are gone for good. It's a bit of an irony that so many small business owners are gone due to some of the tactics employed by Antifa, but the big corporate businesses had the finances to overcome those riot and in some cases flourish without the competition.
My brother and several of his friends in the Portland area have been taking quick trips to places like Idaho, N. Carolina and Tennessee looking to relocate. It's truly sad to see what happened to such a beautiful city.
The people in these other states watch in despair as good-hearted liberals leave their gutted cities/states to come start the cycle all over again by voting for well-meaning liberal policies in their newly adopted home states.
If this is indeed what's happening (and I keep hearing about it but remain unconvinced that it is), then this is actually great news. Democracy at work? People voting their conscience? This is amazing! I only hope that the elections aren't rigged this time - with America's track record, you never know.
What's wrong with Portland? If you take a look at the list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the US, Portland is so safe that it isn't even on the list.
Interesting what you said about local news coverage of Antifa. I know someone that has lived in Olympia, Washington for the past 3 years. She is an educated young woman that generally tries to stay informed. According to what she has gathered from local and statewide news, the black-clad folks in places like Portland that protest/riot are right-wing extremist. There is a lack of information and an abundance of disinformation.
Antifa, organized or not, is like the Jungian "shadow" assuming animated form and stalking the streets, laughing at the egos struggling to reject the dark side.
The ninjas of disorder, both victims and victimizers. I'd bet that many pull away from it when something unexpectedly good happens to them--they fall in love, they reconcile with lost family and friends, they discover satisfaction in practical work, especially with an aesthetic dimension--anything that draws them to truth and beauty. Others travel a path of suffering without end. Very sad. Because the ego-types reject their own shadow in its live form they remain silent, delegating hate to these shadows who grow more and more aggressive under the burden. And they simply do not know how to reach out effectively, having also rejected in some sort of ideological smuggery the very things that give their own lives order. Those who capitalize on all this pain, knowingly and with often barely concealed glee, are the enemy.
So your brother has lived in Portland and has been a victim of Antifa violence for over 25 years, could during all that time relocate to Idaho, but simply... didn't? And now, 25 years later, he's still a victim of Antifa violence, still not relocating to Idaho, but at least now he's actively thinking about it? Uh, okay. This totally sounds like a totally real brother that totally exists in objective reality.
Prelude to civil war. There are real things, a pervasive system of inequality that cannot be addressed, cannot be changed. AirBnB's war chest to fight 100,000 cities simultaneously in court, while continuously losing money being a major cause of the housing crisis propagating across the Western World. Blackstone buying up real estate only to hold it, empty, so that its portfolio will rise, also causing the housing crisis. Good-hair politicians like Newsom snuffling up to money without regard to the monstrous inhuman effects of certain parts of the Silicon Valley money vacuum machine.
We have passed a tipping point on climate. 118 degress in the high arctic means massive methan surge. This is the predicted self-reinforcing runaway train that is arrive much earlier than anyone predicted. The younger generation is crushed by student loan debt that gets larger and larger as they pay it. Everyone, left and right, sees liars, money grubbing sociopaths and hopelessness. Some react with denial. Some react with despair. A very few, like myself, have the intellectual tools to try to shift things and show people what we must do to deal with it.
We spent trillions on a war for no visible object, with no visible outcome except worsening everything. Stupidity walks the halls of power, arm in arm with decrepit venality, hollowing out the middle and working class for profit.
This frustration, combined with young men wanting to have an excuse to fight, generates this sort of thing. No, @Matt Taibbi, neither side trusts the media, and why should they? That media lies about everything. That media says they don't exist. That's why you, @Matt Taibbi, have a following. You aren't a liar, and you aren't a faithless parrot of party lines, or corporate drivel.
Antifa is mostly wrong-headed, but it is understandable. Equally so are the Proud Boys. They also don't trust the media, and again, @Matt Taibbi, why should they? Those out there on the street are also young men who want to have an excuse to fight. They have found a cause.
So call this what it is. These are seeds of civil war. They are small, they can be averted. But that is what they are. Both sides (these are minor in terms of extremism) are spoiling for a fight.
You, @Matt Taibbi, need to spend more time understanding them and understanding the Proud Boys and what motivates these people. It's like the mask rebellion. It's trivially easy to call the names. It's a stupid man's game to gasp and say it's awful and wring your hands. But the mask rebellion was a rebellion against the economic oppression of lockdowns. While the computer jobs class got an improved life working from home, the working class got shoved into poverty. They aren't intellectual enough to be able to enunciate all that clearly. But you are.
Think more @Matt Taibbi. Don't play the stupid man's game because that greases the road to civil war.
Yes, this kind of street fighting - evidently larger scale - preceded the (real) Nazi takeover in Germany. The Socialists and Communists lost - partly because they insisted on fighting each other.
Still, one monkey don't stop no show, and one parking lot brawl in Portland Oregon does not equate to the opening clash in a civil war.
European countries have been dealing with worse incidents of hooliganism by soccer fans- some with avowed extremist political affiliations- for decades on end, and it isn't framed as an existential threat to the governments of those nations, much less as the opening battle of a civil war. Civil war is serious business, Jack. It's a whole other level. Over 50 years ago, I witnessed cities going up in flames in the US across the country- sometimes with dozens of people dead in the aftermath. But the country didn't stop in its tracks to pivot toward a civil war footing. Even though marginal fractions of extremists on both the left and right lunatic fringe openly expressed their yearning for armed conflict at the time, with rhetoric almost identical to the hyperbole we're hearing today.
Civil war, revolution, terrorism, that was my area. Certainly, at present, we are not having a civil war. But, we are rumbling toward one, and this sort of event is a symptom. We saw another Jan 6, 2021. That was wildly exaggerated by Democratic party hewing media, but it was a distinct symptom. We have structural issues as well, that were visible Jan 6 in that a large number of those people were veterans. We have most of the tip of the spear of our military dominated by people from "flyover country", you know, the saps who bother to join up and go to our wars to die? There is not much representation from the coastal bubble crowd there. We have our police dominated by veterans who are also mostly from that side of the "divide" that this confrontation discussed in Matt's article refers to.
If there is another Jan 6, it will be planned and it will not be pleasant I think. And one "side" will lose.
I have said for quite a while that if I were looking at a foreign country, I would say it was structured for a coup and civil war. That doesn't mean it has to happen. That doesn't mean I want it to happen. But all of these factors should be paid attention to. They are meaningful.
This is a chapter I wrote for a publication from the West Point Counter Terrorism center. I don't know everything. I don't claim to. But let's be clear. Few people think that a civil war or coup is imminent when it starts in most nations. Even if the signs are clear, people stick their heads in the sand. It's just how people are.
I'm counseling for a reasoned sense of historical perspective. I realize that it's difficult to obtain one in the absence of firsthand experience of what it was like in the era when there were 2500 bombings in 18 months in 1970 and 1971.
"We have most of the tip of the spear of our military dominated by people from "flyover country", you know, the saps who bother to join up and go to our wars to die? There is not much representation from the coastal bubble crowd there. We have our police dominated by veterans who are also mostly from that side of the "divide" that this confrontation discussed in Matt's article refers to."
Your framing implies that the polarized right wing mentalities within the military and police in the US outnumber and have more influence than the cooler heads whose primary interest remains the preservation of civil order. I'm skeptical of that narrative; it does, in fact, mirror the story line put forth by the extreme right. I view the principal talent of the American extreme Right to be their ability to propagandize and leverage modern media to create the illusion of a force multiplier; their tactics are similar to the old trick of marching the same troops around a mountain, so that the line appears endless to observers. Their extremism is definitely a threat that needs to be monitored and counteracted, but there's no advantage to be gained from buying into their own militant rhetoric, with its exaggerated turf claims about their appeal. It's similarly counterproductive to imagine that the blunt instrument of censorship on Internet platforms comprises and effective tactic to suppress their appeal; that also plays into their narrative, which is that they possess suppressed truth which comprises the basis for their legitimacy. Censorship attempts also work to support the extreme right framing that they comprise such a threat to the established order that the powers they oppose have been compelled to resort to the desperate tactic of forcibly silencing their views. And the bottom line is that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", an axiom no less true than it was when John Gilmore stated in back in the 1990s. Unless the US wants to go full-on with adopting the pervasive control found in regimes like the PRC, that is.
The whole thing reminds me of the Establishment campaign against the reckless use of dangerous drugs; getting carried away with an insistence on prohibition only ended up stoking their appeal. If you're working from the wrong premise on questions like these, it doesn't matter how big your budget is.
In that regard, you need to step away from considering the challenges of neutralizing and defusing domestic violent extremism through the lens of military responses. I have enormous respect for many aspects of the USMA- my dad was a '50 graduate (and you can guess where he landed, right out of graduation). I have a tough time watching the West Point Christmas show, because the kids are invariably talented enough to be a credit to our culture, if only their mission upon graduation was to be deployed stateside playing and teaching music and singing, instead of being sent halfway around the world by an irresponsible foreign policy elite to fight and die in armed foreign interventions.
But the military standpoint is hampered by a terribly flawed and narrowed perspective: they're trained to be hammers, and to look at everything as a nail. So instead of considering the contemporary American political scene on the basis of dry logistical summaries of terrorist financing, you need to acquaint yourself with a wider range of inquiry- or, at minimum, to refresh your memory in that regard.
This is a case where the extremists and those who they seek to appeal to are our fellow Americans. that allows us to consider relevant aspects of history, sociology, and social psychology from perspectives that share considerable overlap. An enormous advantage over trying to get inside the heads of people whose perspectives are, well, utterly foreign. Yes, I realize that many Americans have taken to insulating themselves in "bubbles" that have even led them to imagine some irreconcilable divide between themselves and their fellow Americans. News flash: that's media hype. In most respects, we aren't THAT different from one another. Americans are recognizable and comprehensible to each other. It's just that too many loudmouth influencers these days are mindlessly reifying the concept of everyone living in separate rooms full of mirrors. That is not the answer. The answer is to find the way out. By smashing the mirrors, if necessary. We need to seek out ways to get our stories together, instead of buying into the facile conceit that the entire Other Side is beyond redemption.
Two books: 1) The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, by Richard Drake. It's mostly about the Red Brigades, but Drake also includes a trenchant and insightful chapter on the neofascist Right. 1970s Italy makes for an interesting comparison and contrast with the US in that regard. Italians are foreign, but not that foreign. It's easy to find relevant overlaps.
2) The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, by Robin Morgan. Terrorism and militarism exposed in its essential character as adolescent masculinist self-gratification and personal obsessions of power and status, whatever the particular scrim of ideology and rhetorical idealism that happens to mask it. A Great, Unending Game of Bros before Hos, and Thanatos over Eros. Thereby valorized and exalted over every other sporting competition. The Ultimate Game. (Famed CIA operative William Harvey's voice, in a dream fantasia from Norman Mailer's tour de force of historical fiction, Harlot's Ghost: "All that matters is The Game!")
Time to re-read them, and refresh your acquaintance with their insights...every diligent scholar of terrorism has already read them both, no?
You should re-read my post. FWIW - My interpretation of yours is that you frame a form of denial that enables collectively ignoring the extreme economic problems that we have today. A level of inequality unmatched in our history. Rampant profiteering in violation of laws all over the country (Uber, Lyft, AriBnB) that is destructive to our society. Colonization of the young, starting with student loans to make them lifelong serfs.
People go on thinking that until the roofs caves in. It is very rare they do not. That is what made the Rwanda massacres possible - a dominant population of "haves" studiously ignoring the signs, ignoring the rhetoric, ignoring the anger of the "have nots" and assuming that Tutsi domination, their contempt for "those people", would just keep on tomorrow as it was yesterday.
We are in an early stage. But what surprised me about Jan 6, was how peaceful it was. Yes, those people were not trying to accomplish revolution. They were radicalized however - many of them.
I agree. Virtual reality amplifies everything. It isn't nearly at those levels. But the culture is rotting in such a way that it is more possible by the year.
No, because at THAT time, circa 1968, the U.S. had its hands full with an ILLEGAL war on an *international (not civil) basis. Besides, the Fed decided that it was mostly black areas of large cities that were ablaze over the MLK Assassination, so the decision was consciously made to simply *ignore the burning.
Absolutely accurate there, but foot draggin' was the order of the day in many other cities ! I was still in the military at the time, but relatives would share with me the *expressed opinion of many of the various City Officials was that those residents set their OWN neighborhoods on fire. They should have to put it out themselves. But, of course, human beings of all stripes were *SO much less sensitive and "woke" in those days ! ;-D
"You, @Matt Taibbi, need to spend more time understanding them and understanding the Proud Boys and what motivates these people."
I liked this comment for its dense and pithy content, but I think this is unfair to Matt -- he and e.g. Angela Nagle have been poking into these dark corners for years. As a journalist, he's hardly a surgeon for the body politic -- a nurse practitioner, if that. "Uh... you might have a potential health problem here if it goes unaddressed."
Matt, it is not atrocious behavior, it is criminal behavior which should be prosecuted. As should the attacks on Andy Ngo. He used to cover these demonstrations but it is too dangerous for him.
Antifa are primarily upper-middle class white kids who are angry at their lot in their world, probably hate their fathers, and are looking for a reason to belong. Their movement has little to do with with "fighting fascism". If it did, they should probably decamp from Portland and head to China, where they are actually putting people into concentration camps.
But they won't, because fighting actual oppression is dangerous and hard, and usually comes with terrible 5G service for your iPhone. So in the meantime, they will co-opt every and all protest movements for their own critique against capitalism, America, and the emptiness in their lives.
I'd take exception to the comment that Antifa is not dangerous. I'd say 100+ straight days and nights of violence in Portland last year by Antifa and BLM would put them in the camp of dangerous. They are also heavily involved in the tragedy that is now Seattle, Oakland, LA and others. They value violence and excuse themselves because their left wing cause is just. If you don't take that threat seriously, then you haven't spent much time out west.
Matt, this reads like you just woke up from a protracted progressive slumber. Antifa isn't really progressive after all? The mainstream media isn't covering this issue fairly? Shocking!! Where's the Marquess de Queensbury to organize riots fairly? How about doing a DEEP dive on Antifa?
There's nothing "progressive" about these street criminals. They profess anarchy as a creed while their "anti-fascist" credentials are made more ridiculous with each passing incident in which they terrorize the Portland streets. They are a disgrace to our city and especially to our incompetent mayor and city council who either overlook or justify their violence with the typical racial memes. Meanwhile in what used to be a reasonable and fairly calm urban center, citizens are now hiring private security to patrol their streets since the police are entirely undermanned and not answering calls for "common" crimes. Enough was enough a year ago in Portland but I'm glad Matt that you're adding your voice.
Progressive Portland voters (read ALL Portland voters) are getting what they asked for at the ballot box—good and hard. Sorry Don Hynes...you are just as responsible for this as those smelly thugs in your streets.
You presume I voted for those now running the city and you'd be wrong. Not ALL Portland voters are "progressive" or in favor of the current governance and we've had little to choose from for more than a few years. The Repub party is in shambles and the independents are usually hard left.
If Dex B. Park is correct about antifa being the modern incarnation of COINTELPRO, that was the FBI, and the rest of the Three Alphabet groups in the Intel community, who were coming after antiwar protesters during the Vietnam War, and putting them in prison on any bogus charge they could think of . If this antifa really IS committing violent crimes, and just "Walking" on all charges, I must at least in spirit agree with Dex B. Park's comment above.
The pure gaslighting lying about these dipshits is the worst part. Even Glorious Leader Biden stuttered something incoherent about "Antifa" being a concept, not an organization during the protests and riots of last summer.
Why can't the American mind process a mildly complicated thought anymore?
In fairness, Glorious Leader Biden is incoherent about most issues these days. Invisible elephant in the room apparently, except that i did see Harris called "Biden's Assassination Insurance" somewhere recently.
I too have several close friends who also believe that "Antifa" is either just an idea, or 100% right wing "false flags." There was almost zero honest coverage of the wild (almost literally) Quixotic nightly attacks on federal buildings in Portland last year.
Why can't we democratic-aligned media apparatchiks admit that authoritarian, quasi-fascist activists are engaging in brain-dead violence in the name of "the left."
I should note that I'm a leftist, and I don't think these people are leftists in any way, shape or form. I don't really think there's much difference between any of these phony protestor street fight clubs, no matter what they call themselves.
I recall reading accounts of Occupy protesters saying their movement was doing well until the black bloc started showing up and engaging in property destruction.
Yeah, I don't see what's happening now as being even related to the Occupy movement anymore.
We have kids who either: 1. Think that the goal is tearing the entire system down, which in their fantasies means it will be replaced with an egalitarian socialist utopia (when violent warlords/ongoing civil war is a more likely outcome), or 2. Are violently agitating for knowingly unattainable goals (#abolish) so they can protest forever, or a larger over-educated, bureaucratic status quo of NGO and middle management office jobs to avoid actually being part of the working class.
I agree with a lot of this—and your voyage doesn't sound unfamiliar to me—but I still think that the Republican Party is as bad, or worse. The Democrats are getting more and more awful daily, but the Republicans haven't provided a reasonable alternative.
We—the US, and the world—need a reasonable alternative.
My go to comment about all things Antifa: You're wearing black shirts and using street violence against your political opponents. Are you sure you're the anti-Fascists?
Plus the Antifa followed the Proud Boy demonstration, baiting at every turn. PB changed locations to avoid them, but they followed. Is it not obvious which side wanted violence? Why is it only one side is allowed to protest? How can anyone think Antifa is actually the good guys?
I grew up in Portland Oregon. It's my hometown. I attended Portland State University in the 80s and the only political violence that ever occurred on campus, was from the left. Never the right. To say otherwise, would be to spew nonsense. The only people who were allowed to speak on campus without issue, were leftist speakers. Anyone on the moderate side of right was always violently shutdown. It's a pattern of conduct for the left that has persisted to this day and is the reason that the Proud Boys were created. They were created exclusively to defend the rights of assembly and free speech for people who tend not to vote Democrat.
Thanks for the link. Incredibly insightful article.
Well, you know Antifa are the brown shirts for the Dem party, right? That's how I see it based on everything I've read and seen over the past few years.
Not sure. Actually doubt it. Whatever they are fighting for, it's not the Democratic party except through confluence of interests on some occasions.
The whole streetfighting community is an interesting anthropological study. Hopefully someone is doing it. It was done in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and the way it worked was more like the Ulster conflict, people would have local bars they frequented that were associated with a party, and would go out and fight with their fellows there based upon local agitation and local issues. Each significant party in Germany had its own fighting force - the Reichsbanner for the SPD (Socialists), the Red Front Fighters' League for the Communists (KPD), Stahlhelm, the list goes on. Levels of organization varied. The SA (Brownshirts) only turned into a mass movement with membership cards and such after the Nazis took power, when millions joined. Before that, they weren't even in a majority in many places and probably got their asses kicked more often than not.
Incidentally the effective part of the strategy was making people feel unsafe. They welcomed totalitarian rule for the security of same.
I recall Biden and Harris posted bail for Antifa last year. When you consider a political party supporting a domestic terror Org like Antifa (yeah, people are debating this, but it's my opinion/assessment) then it appears to me they are closly aligned. I appreciate your comment though. It's worth looking further into to determine how best to classify them.
They don't seem anti Fascist at all though. Otherwise, why not go after Apple, Amazon, Google, (the big tech giants), Pfizer, Moderna (Big Pharma), etc... down the line, with more passion. Oh right, can't touch part of the fascist structure in play in the USA.
In 1919 and early 1920's the Freikorps and the Communists were having actual wars with rifles, machine guns, field artillery, and hand grenades. These groups often had first hand combat experience, were absolutely ruthless, and their style, symbols, and culture was ripped off by the later political street brawlers.
Very well said!
Yes, it is though the left somehow decided that peace and love is for suckers.
This left is not the left you’re thinking of, it’s the “successor ideology”.
Respectfully disagree, HeathN. Antifa belongs to nobody except themselves. Like their right-wing counterparts, they all seem to be in it for the show--the issue is beside the point.
Absolutely. If the media would quit covering these meaningless “protests/counter-protests,” they’d stop. What’re they even protesting? “Fascism”? Where? Fascism in the US? Fascism in Portland? I wasn’t aware that Portland was living under a fascist regime. And what are the counter-protesters counter-protesting? They’re pro-fascism? Anti-anti-fascists? This is some silly shit.
It’s just a bunch of morons getting off on the undeserved media attention. That’s really all it is. It’s like a tiny group of people in fucking Portland, Oregon (I’m talking about both the protesters and the counter-protesters; looked like there were maybe 100 people total in that video) who have no bearing or influence on anybody’s lives, except maybe the people who get stuck in traffic during their protests (although it looked like traffic was flowing pretty freely in that video). Antifa doesn’t affect my life. And the anti-Antifa people don’t affect my life, either. Never have, never will. Why the ridiculous antics of two tiny groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is “news” is beyond me. And I would’ve thought that it’s kind of beneath Matt Taibbi, too. It’s silly, meaningless shit. Sorry that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but why was she even there in the first place? Why are journalists bothering with this? The only reason it’s even being covered is to perpetuate the idea that “We’re all at odds with one another! We all hate each other! It’s chaos!” No, man, it’s really not. Everybody I know couldn’t care less about Antifa. We don’t even talk about them, except in the context of something like,”Did you see that Taibbi wrote an article about Antifa? What a joke… Anyway, you want another beer?”
Choose any wrong opinion and you'll find some deluded idiot who believes in it. Some people still think the Soviet Union had an efficient economy.
That would be AOC
please. she's fully steeped into the "New Democrat", NAFTA culture now.
Like the designers of Obamacare
Good read on Portland: https://reason.com/2021/03/22/the-dream-of-the-90s-died-in-portland/
Thanks for the link! My cousin and her hubby lived thru that. They excitedly moved to Portland in 2004 but escaped back to central CA after Trump was elected. They said the town had gone nuts and was frankly dangerous, no place to raise a family.
I didn't know the PBs changed location and that Antifa followed. Significant.
The Proud Boys are absolutely fascists and are absolutely worse than Antifa.
How many acts of arson have the Proud Boys committed? I think they are silly in general, but they are not destructive nihilist wack jobs.
If you’re so confident that you call them “absolutely fascists”, then I look forward to you presenting any kind of evidence here to back up that statement. I’m sure you’re not just making a completely baseless assertion, are you?
But, you see, Lily is using "fascist" in the way it has been used since the Comintern decided that fascists were right-wing (rather than left-wing as they saw themselves) as a meaningless pejorative for anyone opposed to the Left's latest utopia du jour. and their being opposed to the utopia du jour, definitionally makes the Proud Boys worse than Antifa, even if Antifa assaults more people and destroys more property (as I suspect is actually the case).
She posted the definitive explanation of fascism, and the Proud Boys fit nicely into it.
I think both have been so penetrated by government agents that by now they may even have some actors in common. Antifa seems to be much more widespread, and by far the greater nuisance.
"I think both have been so penetrated by government agents that by now they may even have some actors in common"
I speculate that it's like le Carré's THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD.
"I thought Fiedler was our guy."
"Wrongo. Mundt is our guy."
Just my opinion, but at this point I think it's wise not to be out on the street.
Thank$ for $haring.
PB embrace every single one of these points: https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
Dare you to offer this take on fascism to a World War II veteran.
The FBI has also largely infiltrated and shut down the Proud Boys. They've seemed to do not a damn thing to Antifa or the left wing groups that burnt many cities throughout 2020.
Why are you accepting that we should have such a thing as a “Proud Boy demonstration” in the first place? Would you meekly tolerate an “ISIS demonstration” in your town? Are we so fucked up that we can’t concede that the ethnic cleansing of North America is not an acceptable political cause to rally around in broad daylight in a major city?
"Meekly" tolerate? Civil liberties may lately take a subordinate position to feelings, but as Skokie, Illinois "tolerated" the neo-Nazi march, we should "tolerate" civil protest....not violence...just the freedom to march. It does not denote approval -- just freedom.
You can still show up and yell at them. Counterprotest is also protected speech. Seems preferable to outsourcing the matter to the NSA/FBI/CIA et al
Sean, if you are equating the Proud Boys to ISIS, you are either spastic or a moron.
Meh, he seems pretty capable of both ....
This is the first appearance of “ethnic cleansing” I’ve seen amongst 2021 hysteria. I guess it was only a matter of time, it’s a logical step from “domestic terrorists”
One of them is literally on video saying "we should have a holocaust"
I’m not being hysterical at all. I’m not sure how else you get to the stated far-right goal of having a white ethno-state in some part of North America without ethnic cleansing.
If the ISIS supporters weren't committing crimes during their protest, and they weren't inciting violence (as defined by the actual US legal standard for incitement), then yes, I would tolerate the expression of a set of beliefs I strongly disagree with or even abhor -- that's what it means to be part of a liberal democracy with freedom of speech and expression. Alternatively, one could organize or take part in a *non-violent* counter demonstration. If I weren't willing to tolerate that, I'd move somewhere more repressive. If you desire that state of affairs, there are many countries in the world that are happy to accomodate such a preference.
My point was that counter-protest in such an instance would be assured and probably would not always be pleasant for the prospective ISIS demonstrators, not that the demonstration itself should be illegal. I’d rather leave the controversiality of demonstrations up to communities acting en made than to the police or the national security apparatus, who would be happy if there were no demonstrations at all.
If ISIS doesn't break any laws, then I would have zero issues with them demonstrating in my town. Likewise, if PB or Antifa wants to have peaceful demos in my town (and I am an hour south of Portland) then cool. Make their points, try to convince me. But when they reinact Krystalnacht in Portands the Pearl district, as they did after Trumps election, then they aren't protesting, but rioting. And they did that many times over the last half-dozen years. But, sadly, our gov. will not in any way deal with this issue, and the Portland DA will play catch and release with them.
Nobody has reenacted Krystalnacht in Portland. Who was the targeted group? Don't do that. Broken glass and police passivity does not make a Krystalnacht reenactment. The closest in these United States we've gotten were the mass crimes committed against Black communities in the early 20th century.
Exactly. And the same people obsessed with "law and order" are also the same people stridently opposed to Sharia law. Shouldn't they actually support Sharia law? Isn't more law and order better than less law and order?
I was not aware that law and order came in quantities. Are you saying that if someone supports arresting shoplifters, they should also support stoning gay people and cutting the hands off thieves?
Singapore is very law and order oriented, and also very much officially opposed to any sort of religious extremism. The concepts don’t run counter to each other.
But you're OK with an Antifa occupation? I don't care for Proud Boys but they have the absolute legal freedom to gather in a park that you do not have to attend. Antifa just had to police them, as was obvious from Twitter organization prior to the event.
They both want violence and the PB's have a long track record of starting fights and baiting the other side as well. It's been recorded and several of them have been convicted of starting a riot in the past:
https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2019/08/26/27039560/undercover-in-patriot-prayer-insights-from-a-vancouver-democrat-whos-been-working-against-the-far-right-group-from-the-inside
Antifa and the PB's are a Rorschach test for extremist political ideology. The side a person decides to take shows more about them than the group itself.
Baiting? How does "baiting" someone into shooting you work exactly? I somehow can't imagine anyone baiting me into shooting him, if only because I don't own or carry any firearms. But how would something like that even happen?
Now if someone was 'bating... that's a different story. Different "shoot" too.
top comment
You don't know much about the human race, do you? People are dared to do stupid things all the time, just pick a few youtube videos of guys doing dumb stunts, mostly for the lulz. Now put that mentality into a political, ideological situation and you get violence. It's pretty damn easy to reason out actually.
The point is that David is somehow blaming Antifas for "baiting" the PBs, but not blaming the PBs for shooting at Antifas. What I was trying to say isn't that this couldn't happen to anyone, but that this couldn't happen without the PBs being at least partially at fault. You know, for shooting people and stuff. A completely peaceful, non-violent and blameless person being "baited" into shooting someone? That's the part that I find hard to believe.
It doesn't matter what side of the spectrum of political views you have. If you're on the street fighting against your opponents, you're an extremist and probably a totalitarian in your own right.
Actually black shirts and street violence are have as much to do with fascism as boots. Fascists wear boots, so do construction workers, and people who ride horses.
Also I don't consider people who want to put me and my family into ovens my "political opponents." They're my existential enemy. It's insane that actual Naziism, including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever.
You can believe anything you want. If you want to be taken seriously, yeah, you do have to give respect to other points of view, even those you find abhorrent.
Do you think someone like Hannah Arendt enjoyed dissecting Eichmann? Perhaps she should have entitled her book "Fuck this dude, he's not worth my time". It would have been a lot less convincing. Would have saved a lot of ink and paper costs, though.
I think we differ on what "respect" means. Of course I want to understand and be informed about Nazis. I'm saying I don't think there's a need for me to dignify them by considering what they believe a legitimate political viewpoint. The phrase "political opponents" bugs me because waters down the reality what these people believe, as if it's a difference between tax rates or trade policy.
Also, we do politics so we don't have to fight - like try to kill each other - over every issue. Show me anywhere in reality where something like a Nazi ever had a chance to gain power since 1945? I mean, like, be real. Trump was no Nazi by any useful definition and your original post had it backwards. Nazis and fringe white supremacists tried to glom onto his movement in hopes of somehow enlarging their own. Without much success, mind you.
As long as you don't have to fight these people with weapons, you need other means of taming them, which is the very point here.
But it is a political difference. Even the most odious policies remain policies.
You just have emotion wrapped around it. If you can't be dispassionate, you cannot be analytical. I can hate particular things without ruining an analysis by letting it get in the way of arriving at a conclusion.
... because you "dignifying" them has any kind of significance outside your solipsism.
@Telgram Sam
I also push back against all of the "woke" bullshit, and *especially against any human walking who presumes to tell me how to think, speak, write, or make my own individual choices that affect no one but me.
To quote Walter from the greatest piece of film philosophy ever “ Say what you want about National Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos”.
@HBI
"Catchy title, tho, no ? ;-D
That's conflating things. I don't think anyone can say with any level of seriousness that there is a holocaust happening in the U.S. today. I know that CNN and MSNBC spent four years saying that Trump is literally Hitler, but when people point to that sad lot with the tiki torches in Charlottesville as an example of how the U.S. is being run by literal Nazis it's hard to take seriously.
Of course the US isn't run by literal Nazis. I said nothing like that. But Unite the Right was organized by a group of white supremacist organizations who have histories of violence including body counts. Their ideology doesn't have to be dominant for them to be a threat. And the president calling them "fine people" (yes, he did) doesn't represent a good trend, politically.
It is certainly reasonable (and necessary) for people to defend themselves against violence. I have seen many instances of hyperbole, though, where people claim to be threatened by someone's viewpoint when there is no threat, implied or otherwise. For instance, when AOC accused Ted Cruz of trying to have her murdered. There is a very clear distinction between someone who is an existential threat and someone who really is just a political opponent, and those two things should never be conflated.
Trump never called them fine people. That has been thoroughly been debunked. Read https://finepeople.org/ which will lay out exactly how you've been mislead.
You’re lying of course because you’re a liar.
You’re even lying about whst Trump said on video, where he condemned white supremacists explicitly, because you’re a liar. Paid to lie. Liar. Whore.
Me and my dad used to run a barely functioning small business, think Sanford and Son level of competence. I was once told by a college communist that I was a petit-bourgeois kulak and come the revolution I'd be put into a gulag or killed for being an enemy of the proletariat. Rather than clutch my pearls and scream about how I was being threatened I laughed at him and told him to keep dreaming. I suggest you do the same to anyone who ludicrously thinks we're going to start building Holocaust ovens in America.
Ok I guess unless Anti-Semitism rises to the level of a Final Solution I should laugh it off.
More Anti-Semitism on the left than the right, these days, unless the Semites in question are Muslim.
Yes because antisemitism in America is more akin to spree shootings than they are to pogroms in 19th and early 20th century Europe. They're awful, but very rare and not going to become routine. I lived in post 9/11 America, the fear of jihadist terrorism was greatly overblown and did far more damage than the actual attacks and saying that doesn't minimize the deaths on 9/11 or Pulse Night Club or the like.
You know that there is, maybe, just maybe, some middle ground between those two extremes.
"It's insane that actual Naziism [sic], including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever."
What's insane is that you and your "authoritative sources" have conflated and obfuscated so many different issues that you believe that "actual Nazis" pose a serious problem, let alone an "existential" threat in 2021. Meanwhile those same sources work tirelessly to erode the same sorts of freedoms the Nazis despised.
There are probably more Cathars in the world right now than there are Nazis. Unless everyone to the right of Mao Zedong is a Nazi, in which case, yeah, they're everywhere.
I never said actual Nazis pose a serious problem. I said I'm incredulous that many people, including supporters of this site, believe I should sit down and break bread with them and understand where they're coming from. Existential threat and existential enemy are different things. Even one lone crazy guy with a gun who really, really hates Jews is a threat to my existence. Doesn't mean he's got enough people behind him to take over the government.
Anyway I love the [sic], like you're a journalist quoting a source lol. But FYI, since you're affecting as such, I'll school you: putting quotes around a phrase indicates you're quoting someone, and I never used the words "authoritative sources."
@Telegram Sam
Putting quotes around a word is also an indication of irony, and/or oxymoronic expressions like "Military Intelligence", redundancies like "free gift", etc. This is not new usage just among the kids. I am no kid, and I have seen this means of expression "forever". ;-D
Not a journalist, just a pedantic asshole. :)
You have no sense of irony, evidently.
Or you have a dull sense of humor and make dumb observations.
What’$ in$ane is that paid po$ter$ have completely overrun every comment $ection.
How do I convince you I'm not paid? Seriously. Or like most conspiracies, is yours air-tight?
Don't try. Just cash the checks Soros sends you. I've made so much trolling MAGAts that I have too much money, so now he just lets me stay on his island in Greece. Saw John Gault there, it was trippy.
I’m just curious: how has Antifa affected your life, specifically? Conversely, have you ever been affected by the anti-Antifa people? And I don’t mean, like, you wake up and read the news and you get pissed off about some article you saw on your phone or something. Has your life ever actually been affected by Antifa/anti-Antifa? I only ask because I’ve never had a run-in with either of them. Both of those groups have zero bearing on my life. Why the media is spending this much time covering two tiny, meaningless groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is beyond me. I can only assume that it’s another desperate attempt on their (the media’s) part to try and convince people that,”Everybody hates each other! It’s chaos! We’re doomed!”
Who gives a fuck about Antifa? They’re not responsible for whether or not I get health care or what my tax rates are gonna be or whether or not I finally find a job. Have you ever wondered why this much time is being spent talking about an entirely meaningless, tiny group of dickheads in Portland, Oregon? Antifa is not the problem, dude. I understand that Matt is pissed that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but ultimately, Antifa and the people who counter-protest Antifa have zero impact on my life. I’m just wondering if they’ve actually had an impact on your life.
Hear hear.
I don't live in Portland. In my mid-sized city things are... mostly normal? No riots, Proud Boys, Antifas, etc. I am hard pressed to believe that this is a serious national problem.
The freaks get the focus.
It's not even a serious problem in Portland. People here go to work, walk their dogs, pick up their children after school.
If you live in Portland as I do, you watch all this stuff on Youtube like the people in Peoria, IL and think, "man, what city is that happening in?"
I'm guessing from personal experience that any so-called anti-fascist you made that argument to countered with something like "We're trying to stop fascists, so it's justified!" Now, if the only people whom they ever used these methods against were all honest-to-god believers in fascism and if it could be proven that anything less than this approach would result in the Nazi States of America being created, then *maybe* they'd have a point.
But it becomes clearer and clearer with every instance of these assholes getting violent tht their fascist-detectors aren't working properly. They're happy to assault and batter anyone who they think has it coming, and that isn't limited to neo-Nazis or even conservatives.
They almost beat up Michael Tracey, too. You might not like Tracey given some of his more dubious takes, but concluding that he is some kind of threat or the second coming of Joseph Goebbels and therefore is a valid target for violence is absolutely ridiculous.
Also, the days when antifa's supporters could smugly say "White supremacists kill people all the time. Antifa has never killed anyone" came to an end last year. So it could have possibly gone even worse for Maranie.
No one has ever made this joke before. We are in your debt, sir. If you were to tell me you identify as an attack helicopter, comedy as a discipline would be exhausted.
I mean, they’re not brown shirts!
Ah, but that was the Nazis, the Fascists wore black shirts. But, come to think of it, once in power, Hitler got rid of the SA Brownshirts in the Night of the Long Knives, and went with black for the SS.
This right here is one of the reasons reading comments on TK News is one of the few places I read comments. Brilliant.
https://americanmind.org/essays/the-real-history-of-antifa/
This should be on a t-shirt
They're more numerous than one would think and fairly organized though not in any sort of top down vertical way. I went to a few protests in Raleigh, NC simply observing and was shoved immediately for simply standing on the side of the street, in my pink bicycling spandex, and filming their march. I was called a racist white piece of shit, a fascist, a gentrifier etc. The local news affiliate interviewed me due to the physical altercation and I stupidly gave them my name. Since I own my home antifa used my name from WRAL and found my home vandalizing it with the words "cracker" "fuck you die whitey" and "racist narc."
I never did anything to these people other than show up to their protests to observe them in objective manner as our local news didn't seem to be as critical of their tactics often leaving out their more violent acts.
At one point a photog from the N&O the major paper yelled at me, "you're making our job hard" I guess my mere presence causing such angst and vitriol amongst the protestors wasn't the narrative they wanted.
I have voted D my whole life, but the cognitive dissonance surrounding the left and Antifa is astonishing. Extremism of any type, left or right, is dangerous, but from the evidence I've seen leftist extremism is currently causing more damage to society.
Yes. I used to be left as well but no longer vote Democrat. They encourage it when it suits them.
Between Obama (and Matt brilliantly spelled him out), the reaction to Trump, and Oregon's harridan of a governor, I left and have not seen a way back. They would have to make serious amends to get me to vote for them at this point.
I too had voted D my whole life. I grew up surrounded by ignorant religious fanatics immune to data and reality.
Now, the Democratic party has allowed itself to be hijacked by ignorant religious fanatics immune to data and reality. (If you don't think wokeism is a quasi-religious ideology, you haven't been paying attention.)
I will vote accordingly.
"I have voted D my whole life."
What sets us apart from the lower species is the promise of redemption.
Thanks for being honest.
The word "kutta" means dog, and it should be the feminine, kutti. I wasn't aware this word was being used now?
This video was so stressful to watch. I don't live in the U.S. anymore, and it is bewildering to me how extreme divisions have become.
I saw it in the 60's. A certain percentage of "protesters" were simply angry sociopaths who gravitated to whatever scene would give them cover to act out their violent impulses. Nothing they say will ever make sense because it's not about ideas but rather raw rage and a mental/emotional disconnect from society and reality.
I've viewed a lot of "close encounter" footage of antifa and a few strike me as people with deeply damaged psyches, likely acting out the abuse they grew up with--name calling, screaming "get out" like an enraged, abusive parent, etc. The rest are just ordinary shits.
Again, in the 60's, they never attended planning meetings or educational sessions, they just somehow knew to show up at demonstrations wearing black leather and chains and carrying something to bash heads in. They often found each other by instinct but genuine protestors steered clear. Occasionally someone would with sincere principles would attempt to talk them down only to be threatened or attacked. Eventually you just knew to back away and stay out of their sight line. Very sick characters.
Or just young people, mostly men, with adrenaline that needed to be worked off. I'm sure everyone has witnessed fights outside of bars or elsewhere, in which the purpose of the fight was just the fight and nothing else.
like I said...revenge for their poor pathetic lives
and revenge for some slight they have felt.
I am not a huge fan, but there is some sense in Civilization and It’s Discontents.
Not a huge fan either, but I agree that there's a measure of validity in Freud's book.
However, there's even more insight on this phenomenon to be found in Robin Morgan's book The Demon Lover: the Roots of Terrorism.
I'm a huge fan. When did it become fashionable in academia to shit on Freud? 1970s maybe?
I don’t think anyone here is trashing Freud; at least I am not. As Dr. Gaylin pointed out when I took Freudian Thought in 1974 it’s not that people disagree with Freud, but when they start to disagree. Freud’s thought developed over time, and did not appear at once.
For example in the General Introduction (transcribed lectures), he makes a nasty crack at those who take psychoanalysis out of medicine and make it philosophy (ie Jung). With Thanatos and Eros he then proceeded to do the exact same thing.
There is a LOT that is very important in Freud and I am a fan- The Psychotic Dr. Scheiber is extraordinarily insightful. It’s just that I cannot take the world view he developed towards the end as really that accurate.
I've been told that in Italy there are two kinds of fascists 1) fascists and 2) anti-fascists.
"Protesters" don't hide their faces. They instead march loudly but peacefully during the daylight, don't generally advocate violence, and welcome the press to cover their activities in order to spread their message.
"Terrorists" hide their faces and prefer to operate under the cover of darkness, commit violent personal assault using the most cowardly and underhanded weapons and methodologies -- including, and especially, against anyone who attempts to film their atrocities. Their "message" is conveyed in the piles of rubble and bodies they leave behind.
And sorry Matt, Trump is absolutely correct. Antifa is an organized and funded nationwide domestic terrorist group. The FBI, etc. has simply chosen to ignore this fact and not only target but infiltrate and subversively support and entice right wing groups. Unfortunately they couldn't find any collective right wing plot behind January 6th.
If they were organized, I doubt they'd be doing stupid shit like the above. As you say, getting on the news is the main point of demonstrations.
Or maybe they really are fascists operating under a "false flag."
But really, going out to rumble like youth gangs just looks foolish to me - and evidently to the police, who've decided not to intervene until there are bullets.
On the Other Hand: when the Portland police did intervene, in the past, it was mostly on the side of the far-right demonstrators; that might be why they were told to stand off.
"Kenosha Police Refuse to Comment on Cops Encouraging ‘Militia’, Justify Giving Alleged Shooter Bottle of Water"
https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/kenosha-police-refuse-to-comment-on-cops-encouraging-militia-justify-giving-alleged-shooter-bottle-of-water/#wrap
@Areslent
YES ! Just LIKE Portland. Thanks for the URL that the Right won't read ! (It will put blisters on their fingers ! ;-D )
@Oregoncharles
Well and TRULY said. I am former Portlander of 18 years residence. The PPD is almost the local *arm of the Proud Boys. Yes. The optics of their former antics
are now no longer *appreciated by TPTB, but if they can't be seen actually *helping White Supremacists, the next best thing is just to cheer the PB mobsters from the sidelines, and do nothing to *impede their movement.
Or the whole point of 'fa is to create fear in your average citizen. So people keep their heads down, don't go out, don't raise their voices to protest the damage to their communities. Communities like Portland or Seattle or Oakland or Minneapolis or...
Seems to me that they've been doing stuff like this to Andy Ngo for years. How is this news?
It’s only news if you are a member of a politically correct club. Ngo is not a member of a politically correct club.
Is that because Gno intentionally edits his video's without telling the audience to achieve the affect he desires? Is that how he became part of the politically incorrect club, meaning kicked out of the far right wing site Quillete? Isn't that like Rush Limbaugh being kicked off talk radio for being too right wing?
https://nextshark.com/andy-ngo-conservative-leaves-job/
So they don't like someone's pov or tactics so they kick his ass? That's ok, though?
I mean if that's how we are going to roll, fine, but I don't think anyone likes that ultimate outcome.
It's news in the same way that the failures in AFPAK are news. If you haven't been paying close attention, you would think everything is fine, antifa are the good guys, and so on. But having the news come out of non-MSM* helps get the message out there.
*stupid term, but I am not sure what is better.
"Independent." Like Matt.
My brother has lived in Portland, Oregon for more than 25 years. Antifa existed long before BLM or any of the other social movements that have popped up in the last few year, and they've been causing havoc and showing up for events that lead to violence and destruction. My brother would tell me about a riot at a nearby park, which would lead to a march through the city and vandalism of local merchant's places of business. The thing that frustrated him the most, was the lack of coverage by local news organizations, or worse, reporting that the the march's were largely peaceful. Antifa's violence has only escalated since George Floyd's death with no end in site. A good friend of my brother's owned two restaurants in Portland. After Oregon shut down due to the pandemic, his restaurants were struggling to keep afloat. Antifa ended that dream when they came through on one of their "peaceful marches" (at least that's what many news organizations were calling it) and destroyed his restaurant. Needless to say, those restaurants are gone for good. It's a bit of an irony that so many small business owners are gone due to some of the tactics employed by Antifa, but the big corporate businesses had the finances to overcome those riot and in some cases flourish without the competition.
My brother and several of his friends in the Portland area have been taking quick trips to places like Idaho, N. Carolina and Tennessee looking to relocate. It's truly sad to see what happened to such a beautiful city.
The people in these other states watch in despair as good-hearted liberals leave their gutted cities/states to come start the cycle all over again by voting for well-meaning liberal policies in their newly adopted home states.
If this is indeed what's happening (and I keep hearing about it but remain unconvinced that it is), then this is actually great news. Democracy at work? People voting their conscience? This is amazing! I only hope that the elections aren't rigged this time - with America's track record, you never know.
Yay, more cities turning into Portland or Detroit!
Jackass.
What's wrong with Portland? If you take a look at the list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the US, Portland is so safe that it isn't even on the list.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-most-dangerous-cities-in-america/
Interesting what you said about local news coverage of Antifa. I know someone that has lived in Olympia, Washington for the past 3 years. She is an educated young woman that generally tries to stay informed. According to what she has gathered from local and statewide news, the black-clad folks in places like Portland that protest/riot are right-wing extremist. There is a lack of information and an abundance of disinformation.
Antifa, organized or not, is like the Jungian "shadow" assuming animated form and stalking the streets, laughing at the egos struggling to reject the dark side.
The ninjas of disorder, both victims and victimizers. I'd bet that many pull away from it when something unexpectedly good happens to them--they fall in love, they reconcile with lost family and friends, they discover satisfaction in practical work, especially with an aesthetic dimension--anything that draws them to truth and beauty. Others travel a path of suffering without end. Very sad. Because the ego-types reject their own shadow in its live form they remain silent, delegating hate to these shadows who grow more and more aggressive under the burden. And they simply do not know how to reach out effectively, having also rejected in some sort of ideological smuggery the very things that give their own lives order. Those who capitalize on all this pain, knowingly and with often barely concealed glee, are the enemy.
And you believe that? Seriously, you are deciding on anecdote, not verifiable evidence. Thus you create confusion rather than reduce it.
Do I believe what?
What? What you wrote. I’m not sure I can spell it out any more clearly.
So your brother has lived in Portland and has been a victim of Antifa violence for over 25 years, could during all that time relocate to Idaho, but simply... didn't? And now, 25 years later, he's still a victim of Antifa violence, still not relocating to Idaho, but at least now he's actively thinking about it? Uh, okay. This totally sounds like a totally real brother that totally exists in objective reality.
Prelude to civil war. There are real things, a pervasive system of inequality that cannot be addressed, cannot be changed. AirBnB's war chest to fight 100,000 cities simultaneously in court, while continuously losing money being a major cause of the housing crisis propagating across the Western World. Blackstone buying up real estate only to hold it, empty, so that its portfolio will rise, also causing the housing crisis. Good-hair politicians like Newsom snuffling up to money without regard to the monstrous inhuman effects of certain parts of the Silicon Valley money vacuum machine.
We have passed a tipping point on climate. 118 degress in the high arctic means massive methan surge. This is the predicted self-reinforcing runaway train that is arrive much earlier than anyone predicted. The younger generation is crushed by student loan debt that gets larger and larger as they pay it. Everyone, left and right, sees liars, money grubbing sociopaths and hopelessness. Some react with denial. Some react with despair. A very few, like myself, have the intellectual tools to try to shift things and show people what we must do to deal with it.
We spent trillions on a war for no visible object, with no visible outcome except worsening everything. Stupidity walks the halls of power, arm in arm with decrepit venality, hollowing out the middle and working class for profit.
This frustration, combined with young men wanting to have an excuse to fight, generates this sort of thing. No, @Matt Taibbi, neither side trusts the media, and why should they? That media lies about everything. That media says they don't exist. That's why you, @Matt Taibbi, have a following. You aren't a liar, and you aren't a faithless parrot of party lines, or corporate drivel.
Antifa is mostly wrong-headed, but it is understandable. Equally so are the Proud Boys. They also don't trust the media, and again, @Matt Taibbi, why should they? Those out there on the street are also young men who want to have an excuse to fight. They have found a cause.
So call this what it is. These are seeds of civil war. They are small, they can be averted. But that is what they are. Both sides (these are minor in terms of extremism) are spoiling for a fight.
You, @Matt Taibbi, need to spend more time understanding them and understanding the Proud Boys and what motivates these people. It's like the mask rebellion. It's trivially easy to call the names. It's a stupid man's game to gasp and say it's awful and wring your hands. But the mask rebellion was a rebellion against the economic oppression of lockdowns. While the computer jobs class got an improved life working from home, the working class got shoved into poverty. They aren't intellectual enough to be able to enunciate all that clearly. But you are.
Think more @Matt Taibbi. Don't play the stupid man's game because that greases the road to civil war.
A chaotic, sectarian civil war, it seems. Who knows if it will happen, but we are certainly more and more in the pit of that particular hell.
Yes, this kind of street fighting - evidently larger scale - preceded the (real) Nazi takeover in Germany. The Socialists and Communists lost - partly because they insisted on fighting each other.
As far as I can tell right now, it is almost all rhetoric and very little credible policy.
You've raised some valid concerns.
Still, one monkey don't stop no show, and one parking lot brawl in Portland Oregon does not equate to the opening clash in a civil war.
European countries have been dealing with worse incidents of hooliganism by soccer fans- some with avowed extremist political affiliations- for decades on end, and it isn't framed as an existential threat to the governments of those nations, much less as the opening battle of a civil war. Civil war is serious business, Jack. It's a whole other level. Over 50 years ago, I witnessed cities going up in flames in the US across the country- sometimes with dozens of people dead in the aftermath. But the country didn't stop in its tracks to pivot toward a civil war footing. Even though marginal fractions of extremists on both the left and right lunatic fringe openly expressed their yearning for armed conflict at the time, with rhetoric almost identical to the hyperbole we're hearing today.
Civil war, revolution, terrorism, that was my area. Certainly, at present, we are not having a civil war. But, we are rumbling toward one, and this sort of event is a symptom. We saw another Jan 6, 2021. That was wildly exaggerated by Democratic party hewing media, but it was a distinct symptom. We have structural issues as well, that were visible Jan 6 in that a large number of those people were veterans. We have most of the tip of the spear of our military dominated by people from "flyover country", you know, the saps who bother to join up and go to our wars to die? There is not much representation from the coastal bubble crowd there. We have our police dominated by veterans who are also mostly from that side of the "divide" that this confrontation discussed in Matt's article refers to.
If there is another Jan 6, it will be planned and it will not be pleasant I think. And one "side" will lose.
I have said for quite a while that if I were looking at a foreign country, I would say it was structured for a coup and civil war. That doesn't mean it has to happen. That doesn't mean I want it to happen. But all of these factors should be paid attention to. They are meaningful.
This is a chapter I wrote for a publication from the West Point Counter Terrorism center. I don't know everything. I don't claim to. But let's be clear. Few people think that a civil war or coup is imminent when it starts in most nations. Even if the signs are clear, people stick their heads in the sand. It's just how people are.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200112463_Understanding_and_Countering_the_Motives_and_Methods_of_Warlords
Well said.
I'm counseling for a reasoned sense of historical perspective. I realize that it's difficult to obtain one in the absence of firsthand experience of what it was like in the era when there were 2500 bombings in 18 months in 1970 and 1971.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/remembering-left-wing-terrorism-1970s/
https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/28/opinions/bergen-1970s-terrorism/index.html
"We have most of the tip of the spear of our military dominated by people from "flyover country", you know, the saps who bother to join up and go to our wars to die? There is not much representation from the coastal bubble crowd there. We have our police dominated by veterans who are also mostly from that side of the "divide" that this confrontation discussed in Matt's article refers to."
Your framing implies that the polarized right wing mentalities within the military and police in the US outnumber and have more influence than the cooler heads whose primary interest remains the preservation of civil order. I'm skeptical of that narrative; it does, in fact, mirror the story line put forth by the extreme right. I view the principal talent of the American extreme Right to be their ability to propagandize and leverage modern media to create the illusion of a force multiplier; their tactics are similar to the old trick of marching the same troops around a mountain, so that the line appears endless to observers. Their extremism is definitely a threat that needs to be monitored and counteracted, but there's no advantage to be gained from buying into their own militant rhetoric, with its exaggerated turf claims about their appeal. It's similarly counterproductive to imagine that the blunt instrument of censorship on Internet platforms comprises and effective tactic to suppress their appeal; that also plays into their narrative, which is that they possess suppressed truth which comprises the basis for their legitimacy. Censorship attempts also work to support the extreme right framing that they comprise such a threat to the established order that the powers they oppose have been compelled to resort to the desperate tactic of forcibly silencing their views. And the bottom line is that "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", an axiom no less true than it was when John Gilmore stated in back in the 1990s. Unless the US wants to go full-on with adopting the pervasive control found in regimes like the PRC, that is.
The whole thing reminds me of the Establishment campaign against the reckless use of dangerous drugs; getting carried away with an insistence on prohibition only ended up stoking their appeal. If you're working from the wrong premise on questions like these, it doesn't matter how big your budget is.
In that regard, you need to step away from considering the challenges of neutralizing and defusing domestic violent extremism through the lens of military responses. I have enormous respect for many aspects of the USMA- my dad was a '50 graduate (and you can guess where he landed, right out of graduation). I have a tough time watching the West Point Christmas show, because the kids are invariably talented enough to be a credit to our culture, if only their mission upon graduation was to be deployed stateside playing and teaching music and singing, instead of being sent halfway around the world by an irresponsible foreign policy elite to fight and die in armed foreign interventions.
But the military standpoint is hampered by a terribly flawed and narrowed perspective: they're trained to be hammers, and to look at everything as a nail. So instead of considering the contemporary American political scene on the basis of dry logistical summaries of terrorist financing, you need to acquaint yourself with a wider range of inquiry- or, at minimum, to refresh your memory in that regard.
This is a case where the extremists and those who they seek to appeal to are our fellow Americans. that allows us to consider relevant aspects of history, sociology, and social psychology from perspectives that share considerable overlap. An enormous advantage over trying to get inside the heads of people whose perspectives are, well, utterly foreign. Yes, I realize that many Americans have taken to insulating themselves in "bubbles" that have even led them to imagine some irreconcilable divide between themselves and their fellow Americans. News flash: that's media hype. In most respects, we aren't THAT different from one another. Americans are recognizable and comprehensible to each other. It's just that too many loudmouth influencers these days are mindlessly reifying the concept of everyone living in separate rooms full of mirrors. That is not the answer. The answer is to find the way out. By smashing the mirrors, if necessary. We need to seek out ways to get our stories together, instead of buying into the facile conceit that the entire Other Side is beyond redemption.
Two books: 1) The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, by Richard Drake. It's mostly about the Red Brigades, but Drake also includes a trenchant and insightful chapter on the neofascist Right. 1970s Italy makes for an interesting comparison and contrast with the US in that regard. Italians are foreign, but not that foreign. It's easy to find relevant overlaps.
2) The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, by Robin Morgan. Terrorism and militarism exposed in its essential character as adolescent masculinist self-gratification and personal obsessions of power and status, whatever the particular scrim of ideology and rhetorical idealism that happens to mask it. A Great, Unending Game of Bros before Hos, and Thanatos over Eros. Thereby valorized and exalted over every other sporting competition. The Ultimate Game. (Famed CIA operative William Harvey's voice, in a dream fantasia from Norman Mailer's tour de force of historical fiction, Harlot's Ghost: "All that matters is The Game!")
Time to re-read them, and refresh your acquaintance with their insights...every diligent scholar of terrorism has already read them both, no?
You should re-read my post. FWIW - My interpretation of yours is that you frame a form of denial that enables collectively ignoring the extreme economic problems that we have today. A level of inequality unmatched in our history. Rampant profiteering in violation of laws all over the country (Uber, Lyft, AriBnB) that is destructive to our society. Colonization of the young, starting with student loans to make them lifelong serfs.
People go on thinking that until the roofs caves in. It is very rare they do not. That is what made the Rwanda massacres possible - a dominant population of "haves" studiously ignoring the signs, ignoring the rhetoric, ignoring the anger of the "have nots" and assuming that Tutsi domination, their contempt for "those people", would just keep on tomorrow as it was yesterday.
We are in an early stage. But what surprised me about Jan 6, was how peaceful it was. Yes, those people were not trying to accomplish revolution. They were radicalized however - many of them.
I agree. Virtual reality amplifies everything. It isn't nearly at those levels. But the culture is rotting in such a way that it is more possible by the year.
@Mascot
No, because at THAT time, circa 1968, the U.S. had its hands full with an ILLEGAL war on an *international (not civil) basis. Besides, the Fed decided that it was mostly black areas of large cities that were ablaze over the MLK Assassination, so the decision was consciously made to simply *ignore the burning.
The burning was not "ignored." The National Guard was called out in several different cities to restore order, with martial laws and curfews.
@Mascot
Absolutely accurate there, but foot draggin' was the order of the day in many other cities ! I was still in the military at the time, but relatives would share with me the *expressed opinion of many of the various City Officials was that those residents set their OWN neighborhoods on fire. They should have to put it out themselves. But, of course, human beings of all stripes were *SO much less sensitive and "woke" in those days ! ;-D
"You, @Matt Taibbi, need to spend more time understanding them and understanding the Proud Boys and what motivates these people."
I liked this comment for its dense and pithy content, but I think this is unfair to Matt -- he and e.g. Angela Nagle have been poking into these dark corners for years. As a journalist, he's hardly a surgeon for the body politic -- a nurse practitioner, if that. "Uh... you might have a potential health problem here if it goes unaddressed."
Matt, it is not atrocious behavior, it is criminal behavior which should be prosecuted. As should the attacks on Andy Ngo. He used to cover these demonstrations but it is too dangerous for him.
In America no one is held accountable for anything except those scary disorderly tourists.
Antifa are primarily upper-middle class white kids who are angry at their lot in their world, probably hate their fathers, and are looking for a reason to belong. Their movement has little to do with with "fighting fascism". If it did, they should probably decamp from Portland and head to China, where they are actually putting people into concentration camps.
But they won't, because fighting actual oppression is dangerous and hard, and usually comes with terrible 5G service for your iPhone. So in the meantime, they will co-opt every and all protest movements for their own critique against capitalism, America, and the emptiness in their lives.
I'd take exception to the comment that Antifa is not dangerous. I'd say 100+ straight days and nights of violence in Portland last year by Antifa and BLM would put them in the camp of dangerous. They are also heavily involved in the tragedy that is now Seattle, Oakland, LA and others. They value violence and excuse themselves because their left wing cause is just. If you don't take that threat seriously, then you haven't spent much time out west.
Annoying and ludicrous they call themselves “antifa”. They seem to easily appropriate fascist techniques.
Matt, this reads like you just woke up from a protracted progressive slumber. Antifa isn't really progressive after all? The mainstream media isn't covering this issue fairly? Shocking!! Where's the Marquess de Queensbury to organize riots fairly? How about doing a DEEP dive on Antifa?
Yeah, i can't even find a hackle to raise at some antifa dude calling a reporter a slut. And i'm female.
There's nothing "progressive" about these street criminals. They profess anarchy as a creed while their "anti-fascist" credentials are made more ridiculous with each passing incident in which they terrorize the Portland streets. They are a disgrace to our city and especially to our incompetent mayor and city council who either overlook or justify their violence with the typical racial memes. Meanwhile in what used to be a reasonable and fairly calm urban center, citizens are now hiring private security to patrol their streets since the police are entirely undermanned and not answering calls for "common" crimes. Enough was enough a year ago in Portland but I'm glad Matt that you're adding your voice.
Liberal governance has destroyed the cities
Progressive Portland voters (read ALL Portland voters) are getting what they asked for at the ballot box—good and hard. Sorry Don Hynes...you are just as responsible for this as those smelly thugs in your streets.
You presume I voted for those now running the city and you'd be wrong. Not ALL Portland voters are "progressive" or in favor of the current governance and we've had little to choose from for more than a few years. The Repub party is in shambles and the independents are usually hard left.
Sounds like there’re the fascists.
@Marilyn
If Dex B. Park is correct about antifa being the modern incarnation of COINTELPRO, that was the FBI, and the rest of the Three Alphabet groups in the Intel community, who were coming after antiwar protesters during the Vietnam War, and putting them in prison on any bogus charge they could think of . If this antifa really IS committing violent crimes, and just "Walking" on all charges, I must at least in spirit agree with Dex B. Park's comment above.
The pure gaslighting lying about these dipshits is the worst part. Even Glorious Leader Biden stuttered something incoherent about "Antifa" being a concept, not an organization during the protests and riots of last summer.
Why can't the American mind process a mildly complicated thought anymore?
In fairness, Glorious Leader Biden is incoherent about most issues these days. Invisible elephant in the room apparently, except that i did see Harris called "Biden's Assassination Insurance" somewhere recently.
There's a longish history of "Assassination Insurance" VPs, previously mostly Republican. EG, Dan Quayle.
Good point. Biden might have been one himself.
@Oregonchales
Ah, potatoe, patahtoe ! ;-D
@John
Or at LEAST be able to hold at least TWO thoughts in their heads at the same *time !
I too have several close friends who also believe that "Antifa" is either just an idea, or 100% right wing "false flags." There was almost zero honest coverage of the wild (almost literally) Quixotic nightly attacks on federal buildings in Portland last year.
Why can't we democratic-aligned media apparatchiks admit that authoritarian, quasi-fascist activists are engaging in brain-dead violence in the name of "the left."
I should note that I'm a leftist, and I don't think these people are leftists in any way, shape or form. I don't really think there's much difference between any of these phony protestor street fight clubs, no matter what they call themselves.
I recall reading accounts of Occupy protesters saying their movement was doing well until the black bloc started showing up and engaging in property destruction.
Yeah, I don't see what's happening now as being even related to the Occupy movement anymore.
We have kids who either: 1. Think that the goal is tearing the entire system down, which in their fantasies means it will be replaced with an egalitarian socialist utopia (when violent warlords/ongoing civil war is a more likely outcome), or 2. Are violently agitating for knowingly unattainable goals (#abolish) so they can protest forever, or a larger over-educated, bureaucratic status quo of NGO and middle management office jobs to avoid actually being part of the working class.
(And that "we" democratic-aligned media... is a typo. I'm not part of what I'm decrying. I wish we could edit these comments.)
I agree with a lot of this—and your voyage doesn't sound unfamiliar to me—but I still think that the Republican Party is as bad, or worse. The Democrats are getting more and more awful daily, but the Republicans haven't provided a reasonable alternative.
We—the US, and the world—need a reasonable alternative.