The Real Insurrection: It’s from the Left! By Chris Knight (Florida)
With the Biden propaganda, to wage war against conservative Americans, the January 6 peaceful protests were said to be the greatest threat to the nation since the Civil War! All by people with no guns or explosives, only a few personal defence weapons, that were not used, while Deep State agents murdered in cold blood an ex-service woman, Ashli Babbett, who was left to die. The agent’s name was never released. Anyway, there is now some discussion of insurrection by the Left. First, a summary from the Dissent Right:
“There actually is an “insurrection” or “insurgency” being carried out by “domestic violent extremists” that is going on in Joe Biden’s America. It is just not one that Merrick Garland’s Department of Social Justice has any intention of noticing or doing anything about because the insurgents are a bunch of spoiled brats whose mommies and daddies tend to be upper middle class professionals. These people are so privileged that they are free to break the law with impunity, destroy the property of others, lay siege to police stations and even declare themselves to be a sovereign independent nation inside Seattle.” Oh whoa, a bad boy site, best go mainstream:
“After relentless attacks on police and a successful defund movement, police departments across the country are suffering depleted staffing and resources. Radicals are taking advantage.
Weeks into increasingly violent riots and demonstrations, activists in Seattle and Portland are spreading out their "direct actions" as a way to stretch police resources. Some of this is intentional. Secretly recorded video and internal organizing reveal Antifa, Black Lives Matter agitators and other radicals are using the tactic to try and wreak havoc on the Pacific Northwest.
Antifa and other radicals often publicize their riots and demonstrations on Twitter. They target media members who are embedded at events, bullying them or even assaulting them so they don't make recordings of radical lawlessness that police may use to make arrests. Their accounts spread anti-police and anti-capitalist propaganda to recruit new members to their cause.
But these violent activists also monitor police scanners and use Twitter to pass on intel that help agitators on the ground.
Anonymous accounts frequently post details concerning Seattle police staffing and whereabouts during direct actions. One account noted on April 12 that the SPD "are too understaffed tonight. A unit from South is going to West to help with an auto theft."
The tweet included two hashtags that activists follow to get updated information on Seattle activism. Immediately, another active Antifa account used it to alert people on the ground to "take advantage" and spread police resources thin.
In a secretly recorded video after a Friday night march, a group of Antifa radicals and other activists held a debrief. Their direct action did not go as planned, as cops were never overwhelmed by the group.
As they discussed strategy, including reminders to use burner phones and to better incorporate civilian-clothed activists, they wondered if they could have done something different.
"For future reference it might be the case that, hypothetically, we split up and do independent actions in order to split the police," one activist said.
Splitting police resources is a tactic that has been discussed more openly in the last week.
After Friday night "direct action" in Seattle didn't quite go as planned, the radical activists, including Antifa, held a powwow to discuss strategy. Here's secretly recorded video from the session as they warn each other not to discuss what they did or said. pic.twitter.com/FirwdgkLpy
— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) April 18, 2021
In Portland, police were called to deal with an April 12 riot where Antifa and other agitators chanted "Every city. Every town. Burn the precincts to the ground." They tried to do just that.
Portland police confront demonstrators in front of the Federal courthouse on September 26, 2020 in downtown Portland, Oregon. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty
But as the officers' attention was drawn to the Kelly Penumbra Building, which houses offices for the Portland Police Department and Multnomah County Sheriff, suspects did significant damage across town.
The suspects cut through a chain-linked fence to the Portland Police Bureau in North Portland. Police say the suspects broke windows, slashed tires and vandalized police vehicles. They fled before officers arrived.
Griffin Malone, a Portland blogger who cheerleads for Antifa, noted on Twitter that it was "simply a great example of how to use an event as a f**king distraction."
Antifa usually take action in tightly packed groups while dressed in black bloc. It's how they avoid being identified and arrested. Conducting several actions at once would be a new tactic for these radicals. It would make them more vulnerable to arrest, but only if police forces are fully staffed. Neither Seattle nor Portland have police staff ready for this.
I have covered the Seattle police staffing crisis since the mass exodus began in 2018. After the 2020 civil unrest and nonstop vilification by the Seattle city council and activists, officers left in historic numbers. Since then, the city has its lowest level of deployable staff since the 1980s, losing 197 officers in 2020 and 66 more this year. The department is at crisis levels.
The staffing crisis is alive and well in Portland, too. Like its sister city Seattle, Portland has its fewest officers since 1992. And thanks to nightly protests eating up staffing resources and attention, it took officers an average of 45 minutes to respond to calls outside the immediate demonstrations and riots.
If this were to happen nationwide, many big cities would be overwhelmed.
Minneapolis saw a surge of police departures heading into 2021, with 100 officers leaving the department and at least 155 taking leave by February. Officers burning vacation and sick time is usually a prelude to leaving the force entirely. New York City saw a 72 percent increase in retirements by the end of 2020. Cincinnati saw the highest number of officer departures since the city started keeping track, and expects that trend to continue into 2022. Citing BLM rhetoric, Chicago officers are retiring in droves, leaving the city in desperate need of officers.
It's possible that Antifa's new strategy has emerged by coincidence. Anecdotally, there's reason to believe newer activists are joining the cause, radicalized by anti-police propaganda they're seeing online and on cable news. New "autonomous" action flyers are being distributed online, inspiring individuals to take up their own demonstrations. These new recruits could show signs of a more alarming risk.
An article in The Conversation argues the "United States is at risk of an armed anti-police insurgency." In it, University of Alberta associate professor Temitope Oriola writes that "Entities operating independently will spring up, but over time, a loose coalition may form to take credit for actions of organizationally disparate groups for maximum effect."
"The various groups will initially seek to avoid civilian casualties, and this may help to garner a level of support among the socially marginal from various backgrounds," Oriola predicts. "The public would be concerned but relatively secure in understanding that only the police are being targeted. Escalation may ensue through copycat attacks."
Antifa agitators already do some version of this. They've tried to murder law enforcement, including by attempting to burn officers alive inside a police precinct in Seattle and torching the Portland police officers' union.
And they've taken notice of the article. Antifa and other radicals are celebrating and amplifying it. Forget, for a moment, a few Antifa actions on any given night. Do you think we're staffed to police an insurgency?”
Here is another publication from the Left:
https://theconversation.com/the-united-states-is-at-risk-of-an-armed-anti-police-ins
“The killings of African Americans at the hands of police officers has continued unabated in the United States. In the past year, the deaths of Breonna Taylor in her bed and George Floyd by public asphyxiation are two of the most egregious.
As the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck was being tried for the killing in court, another officer shot and killed Daunte Wright.
Scholarly research has begun to document the traumatic consequences of police killings on African Americans. One study finds the effects on Black males meet the “criteria for trauma exposure,” based on the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used for psychiatric diagnoses.
Besides police use of force in North America, one of the trajectories of my research focuses on armed insurgency in sub-Saharan Africa. I am beginning to observe in the U.S. some of the social conditions necessary for the maturation and rise of an armed insurgency. The U.S. is at risk of armed insurgencies within the next five years if the current wave of killings of unarmed Black people continues.
Conditions for insurgency
To begin, the armed insurgencies would not have a defined organizational structure. They may look like Mexico’s Zapatista movement or the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta in Nigeria.
Entities operating independently will spring up, but over time, a loose coalition may form to take credit for actions of organizationally disparate groups for maximum effect. There will likely be no single leader to neutralize at the onset. Like U.S. global counter-terrorism efforts, neutralizing leaders will only worsen matters.
Using research and contextual experience from the developing world to make predictions about the U.S. in this regard is apt. There are many interrelated conditions for the rise of an armed insurgency. None of them in and of itself can lead to an armed insurgency, but requires a host of variables within social and political processes.
Transgenerational oppression of an identifiable group is one of the pre-conditions for an armed insurgency, but this is hardly news. What the U.S. has managed to institute on a national and comprehensive scale is what sociologist Jock Young calls “cultural inclusion and structural exclusion.”
A strong sense of injustice, along with significant moments, events and episodes — like the killings of Taylor and Floyd — are also important.
The racialized trauma from police killings adds to the growing sense of alienation and frustration felt by African Americans, but police killings aren’t the only way they experience disproportionate death rates.
African Americans have the second highest per capita death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic: 179.8 deaths per 100,000 (second only to Indigenous Americans with 256.0 deaths per 100,000). They are also at a higher risk of death from cancer, for example. The pandemic has compounded these deaths, adding to the disproportionately high unemployment rate and the impact of layoffs during the pandemic.
Potential insurgents
There is another, related variable: The availability of people willing and able to participate in such insurgency. The U.S. has potential candidates in abundance. Criminal records — sometimes for relatively minor offences — that mar Black males for life, have taken care of this critical supply. One study estimates that while eight per cent of the U.S. general population has felony convictions, the figure is 33 per cent among African American males.
Some of these men may gradually be reaching the point where they believe they have nothing to lose. Some will join for revenge, others for the thrill of it and many for the dignity of the people they feel have been trampled on for too long. Although 93 per cent of protest against police brutality is peaceful and involves no major harm to people and property, there is no guarantee that future protests about new police killings will remain peaceful.
The legitimacy of grievances of Black Americans among their fellow citizens is also an important variable. Their grievances appear to have found strong resonance and increasing sympathy within the broader population. Many Latino, Native American and white people see the injustices against Black people and are appalled. Black Lives Matter protests are now major multicultural events, particularly among young adults.
A sense that there are no legitimate channels to address the grievances or that those channels have been exhausted is also crucial. This is evident in the failure to convict or even try police officers involved in several of the incidents. A grand jury could not indict the officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner, despite video evidence. Such cases have led to a troubling loss of trust in the criminal justice system.
Mode of operation
Any anti-police insurgency in the U.S. will likely start as an urban-based guerrilla-style movement. Attacks may be carried out on sites and symbols of law enforcement. Small arms and improvised explosive devices will likely be weapons of choice, which are relatively easy to acquire and build, respectively. The U.S. has the highest number of civilian firearms in the world with 120.5 guns per 100 persons or more than 393 million guns.
Critical infrastructure and government buildings may be targeted after business hours. The various groups will initially seek to avoid civilian casualties, and this may help to garner a level of support among the socially marginal from various backgrounds. The public would be concerned but relatively secure in understanding that only the police are being targeted. Escalation may ensue through copycat attacks.
The U.S. government will seem to have a handle on the insurgency at first but will gradually come to recognize that this is different. African American leaders will likely be helpless to stop the insurgency. Anyone who strongly denounces it in public may lose credibility among the people. Authenticity would mean developing a way to accommodate the insurgents in public rhetoric while condemning them in private.
Moving forward
I am often amazed that many people appear unaware that Nelson Mandela was co-founder of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the violent youth wing of the African National Congress, which carried out bombings in South Africa. The rationale provided in court by Mandela regarding his use of violence is instructive. Mandela told a South African court in 1963:
“I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people…. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.”
To predict that an armed insurgency may happen in the U.S. is not the same as wishing for it to happen: It is not inevitable, and it can and should be avoided.
Police reform is a first step. A comprehensive criminal justice overhaul is overdue, including addressing the flaws inherent in trial by jury, which tends to produce mind-boggling results in cases involving police killings. Finally, the judgment in the trial of Derek Chauvin for George Floyd’s death will have an impact on the trajectory of any possible future events.”
This material from the Left is instructive, as it shows the mentality of the Left, of eternal victimhood. It assumes that the police killings were racially based, that the Blacks killed, were agentless and not criminals, and ignores the proportionately greater number of whites killed by cops. It accepts, uncritically, much of the ideology of BLM.
In general, American liberals and the harder Left, will effectively allow this insurrection of the Left to continue, since it is a seen as an extension of the heady uni days of 1960s protests, that there is some moral basis for it, rather than seeing it as a path of communist revolution. I wonder what conservative Americans will do, if anything? Will law and order people, who let an election get stolen without a legal mass protest, all hosed down by their traitorous leader Trump, resist the nation being torn apart? Well, these good men did nothing in 2020 and 2021, and by this I mean, legal mass counter-protests, so I expect so. When I was a young bloke I was involved in an anti-immigration party. In about 1996, the leader spoke a meeting of a conservative group of ageing good men and women, and charted what would happen to the country, just about now. He appealed for support to man polling booths. Not a single hand went up. That is who we are fighting for.
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