Was in a bar the other day and overheard someone like “you see all the Iron Front arrows on [local boulevard] , that’s ours now, we should tell sex workers we can protect them here”

And friend

This is how it goes

“Oh, our militant brotherhood claimed this territory? Let’s use it to operate prostitutes!”

“We protect us”, La Cosa Nostra can credibly claim to have started as an underdog defense force, the Bloods were founded to protect from Crips.

Y'all ACAB fuckers know the police started and legitimate themselves as community defense.

This Sean Kealiher death raises my hairs. “Someone ran this guy down outside our gang clubhouse! And then people shot at the car and drove him to the hospital and won’t talk to cops! But oh it’s not political JUST SHUT UP about it!”

and uhhhhhhhh

FBI, Homeland Security warn of more ‘antifa’ attacks

It wasn’t just lefties griping or working the refs, it really was striking that a bunch of power-adjacent media outlets ran anti-antifa pieces last week, after the issue had been relegated to millennial sites and millennial beats (and their sympathetic millennial authors) for so long.

Maybe latter-day aggression tripped some flag, I did hear sniffs on Twitter about them going after photographers (the media’s #1 topic of concern being itself). But I suspected other causes, and I count this article as confirmation.

Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.

Oh man, I’m sure Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a guy halls-of-power enough to know how to build elite consensus before launching initiatives, is furious these auxiliary apparatchiks managed to obtain those interviews and confidential law enforcement documents.

It’s like I’d been saying, there are well-established countermeasures to “let’s publicly build a movement around punching our opponents in the head”, and with a bit of care in lining things up and trading on tensions, authorities can unlock a fierce response within existing law.

I told you about the Multnomah County Republican Party, here in Portland, how they were kinda sympathetic, drawing threats and menacing for doing some really Norman Rockwell-type local politicking, and not getting backed up by civic institutions in the hands of a rival party.

(Portland recently replaced its police chief in part off of activist anger at the last one for cracking down too hard on black-clad marchers getting rowdy in the street)

Well, in recent interviews MultCoGOP officials have been mentioning that picnic rally and parade I did, but also saying that they feel intimidated from doing voter registration tabling at public events, and I don’t know if anyone else notices but that is a loud, CLANGING bell. Because of the way history played out, the protection of voter registration drives is absolutely central to the same body of American civil rights law that Jeff Sessions has been salivating to deploy on behalf of Republican constituencies for a change.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Well, this is thematically coherent and strategically batshit

Like, “a social license to operate from Vox-reading types” is antifa’s biggest asset right now, “a unified high-low, streets-suites coalition based in gentrifying major cities” is the only thing checking the right at all right now

This is going on now; the antifa are outside chanting against the evil of “white babies” while inside, the YIMBYs smugly comfort themselves that as good liberals they share the same goals and values, just unlike the protestors (or anyone else, at all, who doesn’t play with GIS and R for fun) THEY are qualified to realize them

2017!

kontextmaschine:

Well, this is thematically coherent and strategically batshit

Like, “a social license to operate from Vox-reading types” is antifa’s biggest asset right now, “a unified high-low, streets-suites coalition based in gentrifying major cities” is the only thing checking the right at all right now