kontextmaschine:

Now, as a political tactic, underdiscussed precedents regarding punching Richard Spencer in the face include the SPLC’s approach of defunding disliked rightist groups by filing claims in friendly courts seeking damages for targeted violence that their ideological programs inspired in their audience.

And that Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps was a civil rights lawyer who used the Westboro Baptist Church as a profit-generator by seeking damages for attempts to suppress their unpopular expression.

Which, using the court system to shake down a deeper-pocketed NGO with antifa sympathies, literally a police-enforced imperative to be nice to white nationalists, you’ve got the question of who else in the ecosystem says “Damn the courts, we’ll stir up violence against who we want” – becoming suppressable in normie-friendly idiom – and who demoralizingly splits solidarity and adds WN-positivity to their HR sessions and social media policy.

Course you need a martyr to even start that questline

And that’s just civil justice, as far as criminal goes, with Sessions at AG and loyalty from the cops who make up the Deep City everywhere… Before you even get to antiterrorism or whatever Palmer/COINTELPRO black bag shit they dream up, you’ve got the concept of criminal conspiracy, that if you’re working together with people towards some criminal end - and the police were making riot charges at the inauguration, observers were surprised, say they haven’t seen that in a while - you can individually be charged and punished for the act of any other.

Hell, RICO, that came out of the RFK-Mafia wars specifically as a way for an attorney general to dig out people embedded in their communities - respected “clean hands” types, hooked up with the local political machine - and send them away based on what the disposable street muscle did. NOW v. Scheidler establishes that political causes aren’t exempt; you could maybe hang a predicate on let’s see, extortion, kidnapping, arson, hopefully not murder. Ooh, obstruction of justice, witness tampering - people already leaning on each other not to identify Black Bloc-ers, that’s got potential. You wouldn’t even need punches, or for the underlying investigation to be any good, for that one.

Now, the Kennedys had a kind of Nixon-goes-to-China thing, the Mob couldn’t well pull their trick of squalling out in the name of Catholic Democrats. The Tension meter has a few clicks yet before Jeff Sessions unlocks the ability to jail community organizers for postmature antifascism.

Still the folk mythology may go that any attempt to suppress anything going under cloak of political protest will register as repression and further intensify resistance, but I assure you, there are workaday already-legitimated law-n-order countermeasures to “let’s publicly build a movement around punching our opponents in the head”.

(The “leaderless resistance” thing, untouchably pristine allies hosting online target lists for lone wolves to pick from, with a “points” system to assure them people were inaudibly cheering for them, that might have potential. The eco-terrorists and anti-abortionists were running that in the ‘90s, Anders Brevik suggested it for the “Knights Templar” in his 2083 manifesto and I’m not sure what the countermeasure is to that. That’s probably when you get to counterterrorism, tho also that was back when you hosted sites off of towers in your own closet, today they’d probably just lean on the hosts or something.)