Haven't finished reading but interesting so far
"One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or “the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”"
Love how the author doesn't know how to pin this guy but as a leftist he makes complete sense.
Yeah I laughed at that part. The mole had more political coherency than the author does lol
But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors [of the Oathkeepers] — he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.
In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.
Apparently if you're a nazi you get misdemeanor assault.
I hope the burning of his cover was worth it. I understand that he had to get out, but good God he was a good asset. I can only wish that he could've had support instead of diving in alone.
It likely was. It will make these guys so fucking paranoid.
Those MFs are armed to the teeth and just itching to go out in a blaze of glory for Wall Street.
I think the left’s best strategy is to instigate some kind of right-wing civil war and just let their own paranoia eat them alive.
This person is such a naive liberal and that's why they didn't get deeper and why this won't have a meaningful impact. Lifestyle anarchist maybe at best. I mean outing themselves to protect a bourgeois reporter who most likely was in no real danger from these cowards and had no particular reason to and immediately blew his cover (that's exactly the thanks you get and why your attitude towards bourgeois press should be "fuck em")? After all that work too. Rookie mistake after being the only one to raise anything about it in a conference.
This guy freaking out and blowing his cover over this is bad, people may die (actually good people, not bourgeois stenographers) because of his decision to unnecessarily reach out to a reporter who didn't even care to protect his attempt to help them. It will only encourage these groups to engage in that kind of testing earlier and more often and perhaps even actually force recruits to kill or maim leftists. Because after all it worked here, it finally outed him.
Also should have sent a copy of the documents to like unicorn riot or some other leftist doxxing group as these "responsible reporters" from Propublica are capitalist, imperialist stenographers who aren't going to actually out any of these people to anyone but their direct supervisors at the FBI meaning there will never be a full uncovering or any kind of even tiny reckoning from this. Not to mention having those names could help operational security for leftist groups immensely as they're absolutely infiltrating DSA and ML parties.
Kind of like how many of those Snowden documents vanished and will never be published because he didn't send copies to better people who might have leaked more or all of it.
Not that institution and fourth estate loving liberals will ever learn but let this be a lesson to folks here, send it first to amenable liberals but schedule another release to an actually left group, include instructions not to release for a few months so your liberal reporter doesn't feel burned and pre-empted but make sure it all gets out soon enough.
“This guy freaking out and blowing his cover over this is bad, people may die (actually good people, not bourgeois stenographers) because of his decision to unnecessarily reach out to a reporter who didn't even care to protect his attempt to help them. It will only encourage these groups to engage in that kind of testing earlier and more often and perhaps even actually force recruits to kill or maim leftists. Because after all it worked here, it finally outed him.”
Very grim but point well taken
Just started reading, but God, these people are so much better organized than us, it's depressing
it's not for lack of trying, but the far right doesn't deal with wreckers and state interference to the same degree the left does.
the left is also less willing to abuse human psychology to get people under the banner.
we can be like them, but we have to start getting left wing sympathetic people on board with things that traditionally the left finds abhorrent in this country.
A lot of little and big rubicons to cross culturally before we can have organizing like that.
specifically about the use of force and discipline around organizing. people need to accept enough hierarchy to be able to take orders, to be willing to do what it takes to keep your movement and your comrades safe.
acceptance that we've been at war for decades now, but haven't been acting like it. It's time to treat this like war and i think a lot of leftists are still not there in the USA w/r/t accepting that.
biggest thing i think is that the state hasn't been murdering and imprisoning right wingers en masse for the best part of a century
state hasn't been murdering and imprisoning right wingers en masse for the best part of a century
This can't be overstated. Compare the treatment of the Black Panther Party to the Sovereign Citizen movement. The BPP created lunch programs, healthcare clinics, tutoring centers, etc. and yet they were completely vilified by the media as a gang of black supremacists. The FBI carried out decades-long campaigns of dismembering the organization with a network of informants and multiple attacks (notably the assassination of Fred Hampton).
Meanwhile, Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unibomber) killed multiple FBI agents. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nicols carried out the largest domestic terrorist attack ever on US soil by blowing up a government building. All three men were part of the Sovereign Citizen movement. Despite this, sovcits were able to take over a town in Oregon and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge HQ in 2016.
So you have a group with a history of violence against the federal government who do an armed takeover of an area, who provide zero community assistance or outreach, and yet it took weeks for the feds to do anything serious. When the BPP protested (while armed) against discrimination in Sacramento on May 2nd. 1967, they were arrested and dispersed that same day, despite breaking no laws.
There continues to be targeted attacks against Black Lives Matter leaders (resulting in the deaths of over a dozen local leaders), while sovcits are free to continue planning mass shootings, bombings, and other forms of terrorism. If you're leftwing in the US and try to help your community or ask maybe the government should give you a trial before they execute you, the state will come down on you with every resource available as swiftly as possible. If you're a rightwing, literal terrorist who vocally advocates for the murder of government officials and violence against the state, you get treated like you parked illegally.
The left (the real left) in America can't use violence not because it is unwilling, but because it doesn't have a state apparatus to do so. We have to get a critical mass of people to the point where reactionaries will be unable to simply send in a SWAT team and run a smear campaign on the evening news. A leftwing, American revolution will essentially require entire cities and counties to come under leftwing control before it even thinks about using violence against the state.
And life is too comfortable here for leftists to seriously pick up arms or do anything more than organizing book clubs and mutual aid. I'll take it over nothing but let's not fool ourselves.
But fascism is the false solution to class conflict. By this logic, why are right-wing groups proliferating?
I think in addition to what MayoPete said there isn't really any media to speak of out there telling people shit is bad and it's because of marxist explanation. Instead we have a right wing media that tells people shit is bad because of immigrants and the elites and a liberal media that tells people things are fine stop worrying so much. Unions are basically non-existant and third places no longer exist so unless you actually go looking for it and actually do some reading the closest thing to class consciousness you're going to land on is fascism because it's the most readily available in life.
A few possibilities:
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The kinds of people who radicalize on the right seem to be more rural, less smart about money, and more fearful of economic and cultural changes hurting their way of life. Rising gas prices and inflation hurts the person with a $800/month payment on a truck that gets 10 miles per gallon, on top of keep a gun hobby that costs thousands of dollars for all the latest parts and ammo. We think "time to cut back on meat and finally pull the trigger on that hybrid/EV". They think "Soros wants illegals to replace our jobs and make us eat bugs." No, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to.
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These folks may be class conscious in a sense that they see "elites" as the ones holding them back, but they don't recognize the bourgeois on the right. They love Elon Musk and Trump and hate Soros and anyone from LA or Hollywood. They may also see this as "a few bad ones" or "not real Capitalism" and fall into the same mental trap Democrats do that if we just get rid of X everything will be fine.
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They think their "culture" is under attack, and they think they are losing some Culture War. Every time a major TV show, movie, or video game has non-white characters or anything LGBT or anyone this isn't white and Republican like them they call it "woke" and freak out. These are not people that can simply "not watch" because to them they need control over ALL media. They can't tolerate some media catering to people besides them!
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Just started reading, but God, these people are so much better organized than us, it's depressing
it's not for lack of trying, but the far right doesn't deal with wreckers and state interference to the same degree the left does.
It's not just that. These people simply take the prevailing ideology pounded into everyone with omnipresent propaganda to one of its logical conclusions.
You can get a lot of people that way, you have a big pool. By contrast to become an organized member of a left-wing political movement you must reject everything you've been taught, the entire mainstream media, the dominant entertainment narrative and begin entertaining explanations for things that leave you alienated from liberals and conservatives if voiced too loudly and openly while these reactionaries can get more and more cooked and extreme and still retain normie Republican friends and relations after expressing all but their most direct agitation for violence type opinions. Simply holding to normal Americans that the US is a force for bad things, does imperialism, shouldn't be supported is a sure-fire way to be cast out as an extremist by co-workers, friends, family, etc. On the other hand the simple reactionary contention that the US government is too woke, that uh they're infringing on individual rights and liberties, that we need some sort of mass reactionary movement to take back our rights will be nodded along by or shrugged off by most Americans.
Add on that most self-aware members of the left are much less likely to have ever been cops or joined the military and the years of experience and network effects of being former either of those don't exist for the left either meaning it's stray individuals who took the time to train or radicalized after leaving the military who have to find each other.
The consequences are also lesser. You won't have any kind of mass movement to free leftists imprisoned on trumped up charges and they'll be gleefully condemned and distanced by liberals and the Democrats who falsely pass themselves off as something resembling left in the US, meanwhile the wider right will immediately rally around anyone but an open neo-Nazi and proclaim the government did them dirty. The feds and local cops see these militias as mostly lost sheep, they have similar politics after all they just think these people take it a bit too far, but at the end of the day they like them are reactionaries at heart so there's less interest in pressure there.
the left is also less willing to abuse human psychology to get people under the banner.
What is ISO, what is the RCP, what is Black Hammer, to name a few? I think it's an inherent feature of fascist ideology to be psychologically manipulative, but the material conditions are there in any high-discipline, persecuted, and heterodox organization.
The thing is, these dorks love role-playing as military in everything they do, so things like hierarchies and orders and taking Everything Very Seriously is what they'd be doing even if they weren't into militias. Those kind of things, conformity and discipline, are the things that cool leftists avoid.
They organize by being insufferable dorks who believe they alone stand between civilization and removed. We are cool and nice and people like us and that's why they're drawn to us and that's where we start to organize
We are cool and nice and people like us
based on the average american's reaction to the word ''communism'', i don't think this is working too well
“When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because violence did solve quite a bit.’”
We honestly have a lot to learn from right-wing organizers
Not really, this is a very basic statement.
It's funny because it took this cop so long to realize that the state uses violence to solve its problems when he was literally the violence.
No I don't mean that state violence is why the state persists, but simply that peaceful protests and voting will never change anything.
Ah, yeah, but that is a very common refrain on the left
Okay I finished it. It is definitely worth the read.
There is a John Brown shoutout at the end too lol
