The events of this weekend make it pretty clear that, in addition to the Marxists and boutique Anarchists who were already up in the planning/execution OODA loop of these protests, there are now a bunch of new -- and newly deputized -- Feds escalating the violence and heightening the contradictions.
Trained Marxists are a competent, nuts-and-bolts bunch who truly do "Hate America," in any realistic sense, but at least aren't suicidally stupid. They view the bulk of people at protests as potential converts and their relationship with the flock is mostly quite benevolent, even though they see themselves as a beleagured vanguard. I don't like them but I hardly hate 'em. Like so many activists, they will mostly devour each other if left to their own devices, it's just important to keep them away from
funding.
Networked, dedicated Anarchists (I hesitate to call their recruitment pipelines or rites of passage "training") are a much dumber lot, although often
much better writers despite that. They view the bulk of people at protests as cover, as human capital, as a means to an end -- a neat inversion of the neoliberal corporate America they hate so much. They're happy to provoke violence and then flee to let wine moms and cool dads and vaguely political college kids take the tear gas, pellets and batons for them. This is the whole of their parasite praxis.
In the aftermath of Minneapolis, Anarchists at Crimethinc (link above) protested that writing off all their violence as the work of police provocateurs was an insult to their agency. This is quite so. I don't mean to imply that every moron dicknose with a gun at these Black Lives Matter protests is there under a false flag -- there are many thousands of angry young men and women who truly believe that this time, this time, is truly the revolution. Few of them have any idea how to operate firearms safely, or indeed at all.
But the incident in Provo, Utah back at the end of June pointed towards where July is ending up, and inevitably, what August will be.
Mass shootings at these protests will become numblingly, boringly common, as normal as shutting down interstates or swarming private homes. Just like
the point of parading Greta Thunberg around the globe is creating a platform to spotlight the screeching hatred of adult men who get triggered by that grumpy elf of doom, just like
the point of huge Black Lives Matter murals and street art is to invite vandalism and publicize those "hate crimes,"
the point of shutting down roads and highways is creating a platform to spotlight vehicular violence against the bodies of the protesters, to create new outrages and new martyrs. These are calculated steps, not organic, emergent strategies.
Keep marching, by all means, but remember that neither the organizers nor the opposition have your best interests in mind. You're just meat in the street. Being surprised by violence at this point is deliberately naive.
With all this in mind, though, it's worth revisiting the paper
"Subversion of Social Movements by Adversarial Agents." It was basically a "lessons learned" primer on how #OCCUPY got neutralized, from the perspective of the Federal and military law enforcement. There was a whole other paper the could have been written on that subject from the POV of unions, the DNC and MoveOn organizers, who were equally integral to destroying that momentum.
To be clear, while media hysterics are keen to frame the LEO response to PDX unrest as "Trump's Secret Police," Trump is quite disengaged from this, as with everything else in his administration. Only his brand, his image, means anything to that fat fuck. That's DHS running on autopilot, and another part of that tactical toolkit is the infiltrators and agitators who are already there, cheerleading more spectacular violence, more militant resistance.
Black Lives Matter needs to co-opted and controlled no matter who wins in November 2020, and it's getting there already, with celebrities speaking up over the voices of activists, with billion dollar brands taking over the messaging and the dialog, and the revolution against systemic racism being reduced to a jobs program and an "anti-racist education" industry. This is just how our system works, here in America.
So in service of all that, the street protests need to be rolled back, especially before the next wave of evictions and layoffs come and all this "community organizing" starts growing into a more generalized economic justice movement. The organic basis for all this is harder to control than the media coverage and the coordinated corporate support. It's far better to have
whiteness as the enemy, and dangerous to have the focus turn to banks, oligarchs and the politicians who enable it all.
Turning marches into shooting galleries is a pretty effective means to those ends. Again, it's not all PMC operators and Fed assets doing the shooting. But it ain't all organically grown morons, either. We're going to see some shooting incidents -- possibly this week, too -- that smell just as strange as the George Floyd incident that started all this off in the first place.
