Siege Notes, Portland July 9: Witch Hunters Go to Salem

Well into the second month of BLM's siege of Portland, the ACLU, antifa and their allies in the state legislature are taking the fight to the state capitol.

A special legislative session to address Covid has been taken over, like everything else, by the mania. The ACLU faction has established the Joint Committee On Transparent Policing and Use of Force Reform and are working up a bill to codify into law the BLM narrative:

[HB 2401A] Proclaims that Black Lives Matter and details current and historic experiences of Black and other Persons of Color interactions with law enforcement officers...

Their purpose long-term is to replace Oregon's current law regarding police homicides, where one police force investigates cases against another, turning it over to politicians--them.

Requires law enforcement agency to notify Attorney General when police officer uses physical force resulting in death or qualifying physical injury. Requires Attorney General to appoint special investigator to lead investigation upon receipt of notification. Directs Attorney General to prosecute violations of law related to use of physical force. Directs Attorney General to release reports from investigation if criminal proceedings are not initiated.

Declares emergency, effective on passage. 

Routing whatever trust citizens have retained in their police in the face of the coup's agitprop is one means to this goal. Another is obscuring the nature of antifa.

Michael German of the Brennan Institute is a former FBI "whistle-blower" who's made a career campaigning against white nationalist infiltration of law enforcement. He became a darling of some after writing about the "Islamophobia" of the FBI in shifting its focus to Islamic terrorism after 9/11--and stranding his career going after white nationalist groups. One suspects the professional anguish of having one's work, including going undercover, plays some role in his anti-white zeal (“The idea of using the law to protect the most vulnerable in society is what drew me to the FBI” he would tell the credulous Intercept).

German's role was to raise the specter of white nationalist infiltration of police.

Obviously, only a tiny percentage of law enforcement officials are likely to be active members of white supremacist groups. But one doesn’t need access to secretive intelligence gathered in FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of overt and explicit racism within law enforcement...

He goes on to list instances of police racism, including cops posting wrongthink on social media. He also regurgitates BLM boilerplate:

It is important to acknowledge that our nation was founded on white supremacy. It was the driving ideology that motivated European colonization of North America, the subjugation of Native Americans, and the enslavement of kidnapped Africans and their descendants. Slave patrols were among the first public police organizations formed in the American colonies.

Put simply, white supremacy was the law these earliest public officials were sworn to enforce. Slave patrols were among the first public police organizations formed in the American colonies. Put simply, white supremacy was the law these earliest public officials were sworn to enforce.

If a few cases of police brutality (in a country of over 300 million) and all those mean tweets don't convince you, just refer back to "policing is white supremacy". It's a catch-all.

We can see one explicit goal is to purge suspect white men (and they are all suspect) from police departments:

While progress in removing bias from law enforcement has clearly been made since the civil rights era, as Georgetown University law professor Vida B. Johnson argues, “the system can never achieve its purported goal of fairness while white supremacists continue to hide within police departments.” The indifferent law enforcement response to racist violence and hate crimes, and the laissez-faire approach to white supremacist riots in cities across the U.S. over the last several years,leave many Americans concerned that racist bias among law enforcement is persistent, if not pervasive.

I've never seen a white supremacist riot. No doubt he would cite Charlottesville as such. He might also cite Portland's series of Patriot Prayer/antifa standoffs, which I've witnessed myself. The same pattern played out in both cases--right wing demonstrators peacefully march and are attacked by antifa.

Those actions and the true nature of BLM and antifa must then be downplayed, obviously. That job fell to University of Wisconsin sociology professor Stanislav Vyostsky:

Vyostsky said he has researched extensively as a sociologist on “antifa activism,” though interviews, field work and observations. One main point he made about antifa, which is an abbreviation for “anti fascists,” is that there is no centralized, coordinated antifa organization, but rather some formal groups and networks as well as informal groups.

Antifa is decentralized on the ground--it has become as much a culture as anything else--but that fact doesn't mean it can't be, or isn't, a tool of the powerful who've set it loose upon the land. The levers of machination are visible, in the media's bias and in the cadres of apologists like Vyostsky.

Though some individuals associated with antifa may engage in “militant activities” that are intentionally confrontational, and even violent, the vast majority of the tactics that antifascists engage in, including those who consider themselves militant, are non-militant activities, Vyostsky said. Their main focus is on “information gathering and dissemination through education or public shaming campaigns.”

As a countermovement, the strategic goal of antifascist activism is the demobilization of the fascist movement in the form a cessation of its activities. In order to achieve this, activists utilize a variety of tactics that I classify as non-militant and militant. Non-militant tactics consist of those types of activities that are considered to be conventional and acceptable forms of social movement behavior. By contrast, militant activities are intentionally confrontational and frequently fall outside the bounds of what is deemed acceptable. These provocative, and at times violent, tactics are frequently associated with the antifa label.

However, the vast majority of the tactics that antifascists engage in, including those who consider themselves militants, are in fact non-militant activities ...

Mostly peaceful!

As you can see, antifa activism is a complex social movement phenomenon.

It's complicated!

It takes on many forms and a variety of approaches. However, there is one consistency – the opposition to fascist activity. Antifascist activism increases in conjunction with increased mobilization and activism by fascists, and similarly decreases when that movement demobilizes. If one is interested in decreasing antifascist activism, then the surest means to achieve that is to ensure that the fascist movement is unable to mobilize. The one consistency among antifa members is their opposition to “fascist activity,” Vyostsky said.

Meanwhile, we are experiencing the same spike in crime as places like New York, who also disbanded their gun/gang unit.

Last night's gathering around the wrecked Elk statue was relatively subdued. The highlight of the evening came when a group in a car pulled up to the demonstration, exchanged words with antifa and then drove off, firing a gun into the air. Who they were is not clear, but judging from antifa's Twitter communications they almost certainly weren't white anti-antifa, but black thugs.

They're fine with compromising their anti-law enforcement posture by calling police on whites committing real or imagined crimes, but when confronted with black thuggery they agonize over the decision to snitch.

No police were on scene.