This will get much worse before it peters out and goes away:
Some groups like the Proud Boys have initiation rituals that include violent hazing and require an oath of fealty to Western culture. Their followers thrive on hyper-masculinity and celebrate when one of their brethren hits a leftist agitator. They mock Islam and purport to be soldiers against a “war on Whites,” while being mindful not to embrace overt white supremacy. Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime associate of Mr. Trump’s, has taken the Proud Boy oath.
The Alt-Knights were initially conceived as a paramilitary wing of the Proud Boys, designed to provide protection for audiences listening to conservative speakers like Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos, whose public events have been canceled because of threats of violence.
The groups openly post on Facebook and Twitter to spout Islamophobic and anti-immigrant speech, recruit new members and mobilize followers to go to demonstrations where violence might erupt, taking advantage of the porous standards that social media companies set for offensive and violent speech.
The internet commerce businesses PayPal and GoFundMe recently blocked Mr. Chapman from accepting money from supporters. He also said he has been barred twice from Facebook, though only temporarily. But his Facebook account, which has about 33,000 followers, remains a source of Islamophobic posts and calls for others to join him at events where clashes are likely.
The left will undoubtedly learn to meet fist with fist. Civil discourse doesn’t have a chance with this president in office.
Sorry to bust your bubble here, Booman, but REALLY? Civil Discourse? I haven’t had a civil political discussion with anyone claiming to be “conservative” since Nov 7, 2000. Of course, I was in the Deep South at the time, but my friends in the Mountain West tell me the same war stories.
There hasn’t been a “civil discourse” for LONG time.
Corey Pein here in Portland is doing a good job of reporting on this. Also heard him on Sam Seder’s Majority Report earlier this week.
https://twitter.com/coreypein/status/870351615416389632
I wonder what you mean by meeting the Alt-Right, first-for-fist. Do you think that we need to take these people on violently? It would be satisfying, I’ll admit, but my faith says otherwise. The tradition of the civil rights movement also is about non-violence.
From John Brown to Stokeley Carmichael, a century of history says ‘Hi’.
I’ve been predicting an upsurge in left-wing violence since the election and even before.
I’m concerned about it.
How other than “black bloc” smashing of windows and counter action rumbles of right-wing boy gangs do you see that happening, given the militarized policing in the US?
My worse case scenario is lefty open carry, which unlike righty open carry, draws a immediate police threat response and kills some lefties. The press goes wild with lefty terrorism hysteria and the suppression comes.
It will not be parity because some police do have their thumbs on the scale, if not membership in some alt-right groups.
I see it borne of frustration that we cannot compete on an even playing field and get power commensurate with our numbers. Lack of faith in the electoral system breeds rioting and violence.
I don’t see it. The mainstreamDemocratic Party base is by nature more compromise driven and go along to get along.
Fringe groups are always, by definition, more prone to veering off in to non-mainstream fever mentalities.
But there is no one in the Democratic Party like Senstor ‘Free Fiire Judicial Zone’ Cornyn who said he could understand people who wanted to murder federal judges.
I think we are safe from liberal/Democratic constituencies growing so unglued it leads to coordinated i irrational violence as long as John L Lewis is considered a national hero.
I think the Democratic Party risks becoming an irrelevant avenue of aspiration for the left, and mostly not through faults of their own making. They just can’t compete.
I think the Democratic Party risks becoming an irrelevant avenue of aspiration for the left, and mostly not through faults of their own making.
I disagree here. It’s 95% the fault of the party itself. They could have clawed back Wall Street bonuses after the crash, among other things. What has the party done in wake of things like Scott Walker’s attack on unions in Wisconsin? We already know that the big money donors to the Democratic Party don’t have the same priorities as the party’s base. If unions are further weakened that chasm will only get worse. If the Democrats regain the WH, and Congress at the same time, are they going to go after the GOP big money boys via RICO and similar laws?
What did you want the WI Democratic party to do? Recall Walker?
They tried that. Unions are weak. They will only get weaker unless people decide to organize. This is not the party’s job. Party’s don’t drive movements. They co-opt them.
Do you really want the government to target GOP funders with RICO laws? Why wouldn’t this be applicable to Democratic groups as well?
The problem here is that you have these grand ideas but no practical way to accomplish them. This is why you are always frustrated.
The black block has concerned me for years. Possibly heavily infiltrated, or just enough, by police/FBI-trained ag-provs, they all show up with uniforms and bricks and bats to make violence and give the left a bad name. Hard to miss them in their uniforms and weapons of destruction, but I rarely see them being arrested.
In some locales, the authorities — Berkeley city council for instance — enable their mischievous activities with orders to police to remain passively on the sidelines as demonstrators on both sides go at it.
With lefty open carry, we really haven’t seen much of that since the Black Panthers ca 1966, who carried shotguns openly on the grounds of the CA state capitol. Lefty open carry today will probably be one of the last tactics we see before actual left vs right nationwide civil war breaks out.
I think that’s a real possibility in the 2020 time period as we engage in another presidential campaign and the atmosphere gets even more heated. Not hard to imagine Trump and the GOP congress, using local police and the Right’s shock troops of armed RWNJs, acting to completely squelch anti-Trump demonstrations. Doubly possible for a civil war if we experience yet another peculiar election where millions of Dem votes are suppressed.
That is, assuming Trump & Co allow elections to be held …
It could come from the anarchists and thugs.
As well you should. This country has a history of resorting violence to force change.
Well if you don’t have money or influence – what else is left?
http://www.ditext.com/taft/violence1.html
I’m concerned about it too, but you can’t expect people to NOT fight back.
I know some antifa people in Philly (dated one for a while, an utterly brilliant young woman) and in Nashville. They know how to fight, but most are actually very nice people.
The 1A gives these
alt-rightwanna-be Nazi fuckers the right to march and assemble. But that’s it.As long as “left-wing” translates as “college-educated, middle class white people over the age of about 21?” Do not worry overmuch.
People…excepting dedicated criminals…do not generally get violent about living conditions until they are either scuffling so badly that anything would be better or invaded by/otherwise subjected to militarily-enforced rule of law of some sort.
The violent ones on the right? They are mostly the dregs of white society, an admixture of low-level criminals and people whose families have been dumped at the bottom of the genetic ladder for so long that they really cannot hold a job.
The others? Gene-sinkers, by and large.
The last time there was any appreciable “left-wing” violence in the U.S. was at the end of the ’60s as the members of the so-called “youth revolution” began to realize that getting high was not necessarily the best tactic to survive in an Imperial America. And that violence was chaotic, badly organized, badly led and fairly easily discouraged. There is presently no social strata in the U.S. that threatens any real, effective violence against the militarily organized government forces, and you won’t see any until food supplies or other necessities of survival…power outages, fuel and water shortages, sewage and garbage problems, etc…rear their ugly heads.
Until then…with the possible exception of intelligence-supported, wag-the-dog/false flag operations and real terrorist attacks from the usual suspects…”left-wing violence” will be as spares as real “left-wing” U.S.-ians.
Rest in peace, Booman…or might that be better said as rest in pieces?
The so-called “left”has been shattered by the post-factual media era. It doesn’t even know in which direction “left” lies, because the circular reasoning of the media has fucked up the whole moral compass. How can we navigate if there are no directions that can be trusted?
Later…
AG
P.S. I except the rural farmers/ranchers from the above…people whose method of making a decent living is threatened by Federal land grabs/takeovers. They have worked their collective butts off for generations…and taken damned good care of the land while they were at it, most of them…and see no recourse other than armed resistance. It’s been pretty much token resistance, so far…publicity gathering, not corpse-making…to protect their way of life.
Antifa organizations have a long history of physically combating neo-Nazis and fascists in the streets, so there is a faction of an anti-capitalist left that is perfectly comfortably “meeting fist with fist.” Whether otherwise mainstream Democrats should go down that path is another question altogether.
Why are they called antifa instead of antifascist?
B/c txtng.
Also makes for a better hashtag on Twitter & Tumblr than Antifaschistische Aktion. #antifa
Because it’s an abbreviation of the German origin Antifaschistische Aktion .
I am thankful that someone noted this.
Let me see about how the right is treated compared to how the left is treated.
Do the police use Stingray cell phone tracking equipment to track Proud Boys and the Alt-Knight? Police apparently have used surveillance equipment to track left-wing protests for at least six years.
Left wing groups generally don’t start their protests with offensive and violent speech. But even without that speech, police suppress left-wing groups. Will police suppress Proud Boys and Alt-Knights on the same hair-trigger, dressing in riot gear, zip-tying protesters for minor infractions, and holding the leaders on trumped-up felony charges?
What other frat-boy hazing things to these groups to to initiates? Do they go all Skull-and-Bones? What sorts of misogynist challenges do they present to initiates? What sort of hyper-masculinity?
Who are the women’s auxiliary for these hyper-masculine conservatives?
Do these guys open carry as a matter of policy?
The left is very diverse. And the left know who the police will come after.
Some anonymous black-hooded assailant punched Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi white supremacist, in the eye during the protest march on Inauguration Day. Spencer acted like all bullies punched in the face; he ran for shelter.
What has exposed these groups is the slashing attack in Portland OR.
Civil discourse died with Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Fox News. The illness was beginning to be visible with The McLaughlin Group in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The pretense that civil discourse still existed as political speech across the partisan divide has been an illusion for more than a decade.
Trump is the tombstone, not the cause, of the death of civil discourse.
Not challenging the role of Limbaugh, Coulter et al., but I recall a lot of uncivil discourse during the 50’s (McCarthy Era), and 60’s and 70’s (Vietnam War and Civil Rights).
You have a point there. But in the 1950s, you eventually had Edward R. Murrow and then McCarthy flamed out with the Army hearings. In the 1960s and 1970s, you had network news setting a common debateable fact base, with smaller audience magazines (I think of say Ramparts) stirring up controversy with investigative reporting. And you had the very polite LifeLines leaflet of H. L. Hunt being mailed to Chamber of Commerce types and being the backchannel news of the conservative movement.
But yes, assassination does qualify as uncivil discourse.
Without getting too gooey (because I prefer myself pugnacious) I admire people like you TarheelDem for “You have a point there.” That, in and of itself is CIVIL DISCOURSE! We would be hard pressed to witness that on a Fox News Screech FestTM, a common tater admitting that the other person has a point that is valid.
Let’s not forget the early GOP shock troops led by “B-1” Bob Dornan and Newt Gingrich, both arriving in the House in the late 70s. Dornan in particular was quite a tightly-wound, confrontational piece of extremist work, as with this incident (per wiki)
I tend to agree with Tarheel. These mothrrfuckers have needed a good ass-kicking for years. I will not shed a single tear when they get their richly deserved, and yes violent, comeuppance.
That’s a different issue.
I doubt that law enforcement will allow them to get the the ass-kicking that you think they deserve.
But more likely some of their type will get their ass-kickings when they bullying appears in elementary and middle school, something these bullies seem to have been protected from.
Not sure that the left is well served to meet fist with fist.
It will probably end like the Weimar Republic in Germany: even though the left as a whole was much less violent than the right, they earned all the death sentences (10 for 22 murders), whereas the right usually got slaps on the wrist, if that (0 death sentences for 354 murders). Good summary of that in the book by Emil Gumbel, otherwise known for a mathematical distribution (unfortunately only available in German).
Gandhi was better served by non-violence – and that was against a rather brutal empire.
Totally agree with your assessment of the street clashes in pre-war Germany which illustrates a question I raised recently; what would your prudent advice be to a German citizen of that time opposed to or threatened by Nazism? Conventional wisdom, which is often more conventional than wise, says simply, “Flee”. But this is an unpalatable conclusion when one’s own homeland is so encumbered. We may have cause to consider this problem more deeply in the fullness of time.
Your other point regarding Gandhi and the Raj, however, seems questionable on the grounds that in spite of demonstrable brutality the British Empire of Gandhi’s time retained a cultural ethos of fairness and egalitarianism which Gandhi intentionally exploited. Not sure Gandhi’s strategy plays well in other contexts where this cultural leverage was absent or opposite. A failure to accurately assess these distinctions might result in tragic miscalculations by a resistance movement.
followed one link, could not tell where the guy is located. is he a suburban isolate who at some point decides to go to a movie theater etc etc? important to know the context. and yes, those suburban isolates situation are dangerous but doesn’t depend on any cause other than internal distress
Here’s how it goes down.
And this is how it goes down.
And this is how it winds down:
In other states, this becomes the basis of a later felony charge the next time they are at a protest.