ExCop
Veteran Member
Link to Video
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W9IFPxnH_M
RT: 12:55
What is happening in response to rise of Violent protests
RT: 12:55
What is happening in response to rise of Violent protests
RACE WAR Armed Militias RISE UP as BLM and ANTIFA Radicals Begin HARASSING SUBURBS!!!
- Thread starter ExCop
- Start date
The David Kilcullen article referenced in the video - strongly suggest serious students follow up by reading it. PDF so no C&P here...
night driver
ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
Kilcullen is something of an acquired taste.
Acquire it.
Or be willfully uninformed.
Acquire it.
Or be willfully uninformed.
If you open it in Acrobat you can c/p.
I can do it later, got to go pick up my cow now.
night driver
ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
See if I got lucky:
Essay is broken for white space and readability, NOT for comprehension.
(As will show, this was written for The Australian.
As I said, He's an acquired taste. Acquire it)
It makes more sense and there are pics at Doz's link. This is just to save folkks the clickif needed.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM
NoCookies | The Australian
Page 1 of 17 Home of the hateful, fearful, heavily armed David Kilcullen May 30, 2020
Protesters in Lansing, Michigan, during a rally earlier this month organised by Michigan United for Liberty to condemn coronavirus pandemic stay-at-home orders. Picture: AFP From Inquirer 15 minute read The rise of militias and armed protesters across the US is sometimes seen Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM
NoCookies | The Australian
Page 2 of 17 as a fringe right-wing issue, but it is much broader. Armed groups have formed across the political spectrum, worsening divisions the coronavirus has exposed in American society. As I write, there are 1.7 million coronavirus cases in the US and more than 100,000 deaths. The little county where I live — only a half-million people, in a part-urban, part-wilderness area of the Rocky Mountains — has a death toll higher than Australia and New Zealand combined. And this is one of the safe places, positively benign compared with hot spots such as New York or New Jersey with deaths in the tens of thousands. Second to its health impact, the economic crisis wrought by governmentimposed lockdowns has grabbed the most attention: 40 million Americans were forced on to the dole in the past 10 weeks. The job market, strong until mid-March, has fallen off a cliff. A flood of bankruptcies is sweeping US business; analysts expect a wave of municipal bankruptcies as tax revenue collapses. Congress has committed $US2 trillion ($3 trillion) in crisis spending, even as public debt nears $US30 trillion, or roughly 120 per cent of gross domestic product. If the first wave of the coronavirus tsunami was its health effect, the second — economic devastation — may be worse. But there is a third wave coming: the possibility of armed conflict towards the end of this year, when the combined health and economic impacts of the crisis will peak amid the most violently contested presidential election in memory. Protesters, some heavily armed, are out in force to demand reopening of the economy. The husband of one leader posted a Facebook video this week expressing his readiness to take up arms against the government to prevent a “new world order” being imposed through lockdowns.
There were already many militias of varying political complexions across Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 3 of 17 America — one pro-militia website lists 361 groups across all 50 states. Membership surged after the 2008 financial crisis, then accelerated as thugs from both political extremes fought each other with baseball bats, - bicycle chains and pepper spray in the streets of Washington, DC, Seattle, Portland and Detroit. The deadly “Unite the Right” rally in the normally sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 brought the danger home to many Americans, but the trend was longstanding. Rioting among groups such as Antifa (on the anarchist left), Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys (on the alt-right) and mass demonstrations by issuemotivated groups such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the Women’s March kicked into high gear after Donald Trump’s election. Far-left militias such as Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club emerged, copying the methods and military-style weapons of right-wing militias while opposing their politics. Both far-right and far-left armed groups were at Charlottesville, with cadres of gun-carrying militants
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 4 of 17 guarding protesters on both sides and a third-party “constitutionalist” militia, the Oath Keepers — composed mainly of military and lawenforcement veterans — standing by as self-appointed umpires. In the west, a separate rural militia movement had already coalesced around “sovereign citizen” groups that rejected federal authority. Despite media portrayals of its leaders as racially motivated, in fact the sovereign citizen ideology is neither left nor right in a traditional sense — it might better be described as a form of militant libertarianism with roots in the self-reliant cowboy culture of the old west.
In April 2014, a dispute over grazing rights in Nevada triggered an armed stand-off between militia and federal agencies including the Bureau of Land Management and the FBI. This dispute — over federal attempts to impound the cattle of a rancher named Cliven Bundy — brought hundreds of militia members from across the country to Nevada where they surrounded federal agents, trained weapons on them and forced them to back down. The 2014 stand-off ended in a bloodless militia victory, but almost two years later Bundy’s son Ammon led an armed occupation of the headquarters of a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon. This time, things went the other way. The occupation prompted a six-week siege by federal and state agencies in January-February 2016. It resulted in the death of LaVoy Finicum, a charismatic Arizona rancher whose killing, captured on government aerial-camera footage that appears to show him with hands raised in surrender before being shot, made him a martyr.
Though Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of America’s toxic polarisation, the passions he inspires among friend and foe alike have exacerbated it: during the 2016 election campaign, Arizona militias mounted armed patrols to support his border wall. In response, Redneck Revolt held a heavily armed show of force in Phoenix, Arizona, later posting a YouTube
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 5 of 17 video showing members shooting semiautomatic rifles at targets displaying alt-right symbols. A few months later, Antifa convened an “anti-colonial anti-fascist community defence gathering” near Flagstaff, Arizona, that included weapons training and coaching in anti-police tactics. Today, farleft and far-right groups operate within close striking distance of each other in several border states and in “contested zones” including the Pacific Northwest, parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas. A Youtube still of Neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division training outside Seattle. The pandemic — and the grievances inspired by heavy-handed responses to it — have brought these tensions to a head. Camouflage-clad militia sporting semiautomatic rifles and body armour and riding in military-surplus trucks joined an armed protest against the governor of Pennsylvania in April. Similar protests took place in Ohio and North Dakota. A week later demonstrators, some carrying AK-47 rifles, swarmed into the state capital in Lansing, Michigan, to confront politicians.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 6 of 17 A racial edge also emerged: a week after the Lansing incident a group of African-Americans, armed with AR-15 rifles and automatic pistols, mounted a show of force outside the Michigan State Capitol building to support a black member of the legislature. Class inequities, which track closely with racial disparities here, have prompted socialist groups — notably Antifa but also traditionally nonviolent Trotskyist and anarchist networks — to arm themselves for an incipient revolutionary moment. Mass protests on the rise
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 7 of 17 +15 In Minneapolis, the killing by white police officers of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, brought thousands of protesters on to the streets for several
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 8 of 17 nights of rioting, with multiple buildings and cars burned and shopping malls and restaurants looted. By Thursday, militarised police were on the streets firing tear gas and rubber bullets against vociferous opposition. At least one person has been killed in the riots and the Minnesota National Guard is expected to join the police in attempting to restore order. Thus, far from being a purely right-wing phenomenon, rifts within US society that are most stressed by the coronavirus — urban versus rural interests, racial and class tensions, state overreach versus anti-government militancy, far left against alt-right, “collectivist” coastal elites versus rugged individualists in “flyover country” — align with pre-existing grievances. And heavily armed actors across the spectrum are poised to exploit them. One reason for the overemphasis on right-wing extremism, I believe, is that analysts often mischaracterise armed actors as “hate groups”. It is absolutely true that the intense hatred from right-wing extremists dwarfs most other groups. But the focus on hate is a misunderstanding of what drives violence in internal conflicts.
As Stathis Kalyvas demonstrated a decade ago in The Logic of Violence in Civil War, the worst atrocities are driven not by hate but by fear. Fear of other groups, encroachment of those groups into one’s territory and collapse of confidence in government’s ability to impartially keep the peace are the key factors that provoke communal violence. Hate follows and rationalises fear, not the other way around. And fear of the coronavirus, alongside the demonstrable inability of government to keep people safe, is driving today’s growth in armed militancy.
Like Iraq, like Somalia To me, current conditions feel disturbingly similar to things I have seen in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Colombia. Indeed, the theory of guerrilla
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 9 of 17 and unconventional warfare fits today’s situation all too well. If we visualise an armed movement as a pyramid, then the thousands of protesters on the street (and the tens of thousands who support and sympathise with them but stay home) represent the mass base. A smaller group of organisers and support networks (physical and virtual) plays an auxiliary role further up the pyramid. The armed, gun-toting element is smaller still, but higher in skill, weaponry, organisation and motivation. It’s worth remembering that almost three million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan, coming home familiar with urban and rural guerrilla warfare to a country where 41 per cent of people own a gun or live with someone who does.
A militia group with no political affiliation from Michigan stands in front of the Governor’s office after protesters occupied the state capitol building on April 30. The US has no national firearms register, so only estimates are possible, but analysts believe around 100 million firearms are in private hands in the US,
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 10 of 17 and hundreds of billions of rounds of ammunition. Given widespread combat experience from the war on terror, this reservoir of military potential sets the US apart from any other Western democracy. The pandemic has seen a surge in gun purchases, with background checks spiking to their highest number. Many of these are first-time buyers from the progressive end of politics, who traditionally shun firearms and have little knowledge of weapon safety.
Racial war, class war More worrying, on left and right, are underground groups including socalled “accelerationists”. These tend to be small, secretive and far more violent than the militias or mass movements. They follow a decentralised command-and-control philosophy known as “leaderless resistance” that was pioneered by far-right groups in the 1980s but has since been taken up by terrorists across the political spectrum, including jihadists. Their goal is to accelerate the collapse of a social order they see as doomed, by bringing on a racial war, a class war or both. Underground networks operate using a clandestine cell structure, and communicate via the deep web and tools such as Telegram or RocketChat, secure-messaging apps that have become havens for extremists as more open channels, including chat rooms such as the neo-Nazi forum Iron March, have been shut down. Language policing on social media has not only pushed accelerationist groups underground; it has created a whole new language. The term “Boogaloo” is widely used for the coming civil war. Variants — coined to avoid Twitter censors — include “The Big Igloo” or “The Big Luau”, the last explaining why Hawaiian shirts are popular among militias.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 11 of 17 Memes from television (“Winter is Coming”, “Cowabunga”) are popular, as are meme-based references such as “Spicy Time” or acronyms such as BAMN (“by any means necessary”) and BFYTW (“because f..k you, that’s why”). Some call the urban guerrilla aspect of the Boogaloo “Minecrafting”: Twitter threads seeming to discuss the game may actually refer to the coming conflict — context is everything. Some discussion hides in plain sight on social media: more open, practical and gruesome conversations are left to the deep web, Telegram or neo-Nazi sites such as Daily Stormer, which resides on the orphaned former Soviet “.su” internet domain as a way to avoid censorship. Doctoral dissertations could be written on the kaleidoscope of visual symbols used by groups, left and right, to signal allegiances. Accelerationism has a long history on the Marxist left and among environmental activists such as Earth Liberation Front or Earth First! It has since been embraced by right-wing extremists including 2019 Christchurch killer Brenton Tarrant, whose manifesto included environmentalist ideology and was celebrated by neo-Nazi ecoterrorist group Green Brigade.
Other right-wing accelerationist groups include Atomwaffen Division (which has a presence in Australia) and The Base, a white-supremacist group founded in mid-2018 whose name is a play on al-Qa’ida (“the base” in Arabic). FBI agents targeted The Base after its members allegedly sought to attack a massive pro-gun rally outside the Virginia State Capitol building in Richmond in January. In a classic accelerationist move, they planned to infiltrate the rally, start shooting both protesters and law enforcement officers, provoke a massacre and thereby convert a peaceful (albeit armed) demonstration into a militant uprising.
Essay is broken for white space and readability, NOT for comprehension.
(As will show, this was written for The Australian.
As I said, He's an acquired taste. Acquire it)
It makes more sense and there are pics at Doz's link. This is just to save folkks the clickif needed.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM
NoCookies | The Australian
Page 1 of 17 Home of the hateful, fearful, heavily armed David Kilcullen May 30, 2020
Protesters in Lansing, Michigan, during a rally earlier this month organised by Michigan United for Liberty to condemn coronavirus pandemic stay-at-home orders. Picture: AFP From Inquirer 15 minute read The rise of militias and armed protesters across the US is sometimes seen Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM
NoCookies | The Australian
Page 2 of 17 as a fringe right-wing issue, but it is much broader. Armed groups have formed across the political spectrum, worsening divisions the coronavirus has exposed in American society. As I write, there are 1.7 million coronavirus cases in the US and more than 100,000 deaths. The little county where I live — only a half-million people, in a part-urban, part-wilderness area of the Rocky Mountains — has a death toll higher than Australia and New Zealand combined. And this is one of the safe places, positively benign compared with hot spots such as New York or New Jersey with deaths in the tens of thousands. Second to its health impact, the economic crisis wrought by governmentimposed lockdowns has grabbed the most attention: 40 million Americans were forced on to the dole in the past 10 weeks. The job market, strong until mid-March, has fallen off a cliff. A flood of bankruptcies is sweeping US business; analysts expect a wave of municipal bankruptcies as tax revenue collapses. Congress has committed $US2 trillion ($3 trillion) in crisis spending, even as public debt nears $US30 trillion, or roughly 120 per cent of gross domestic product. If the first wave of the coronavirus tsunami was its health effect, the second — economic devastation — may be worse. But there is a third wave coming: the possibility of armed conflict towards the end of this year, when the combined health and economic impacts of the crisis will peak amid the most violently contested presidential election in memory. Protesters, some heavily armed, are out in force to demand reopening of the economy. The husband of one leader posted a Facebook video this week expressing his readiness to take up arms against the government to prevent a “new world order” being imposed through lockdowns.
There were already many militias of varying political complexions across Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 3 of 17 America — one pro-militia website lists 361 groups across all 50 states. Membership surged after the 2008 financial crisis, then accelerated as thugs from both political extremes fought each other with baseball bats, - bicycle chains and pepper spray in the streets of Washington, DC, Seattle, Portland and Detroit. The deadly “Unite the Right” rally in the normally sleepy university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 brought the danger home to many Americans, but the trend was longstanding. Rioting among groups such as Antifa (on the anarchist left), Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys (on the alt-right) and mass demonstrations by issuemotivated groups such as Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the Women’s March kicked into high gear after Donald Trump’s election. Far-left militias such as Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club emerged, copying the methods and military-style weapons of right-wing militias while opposing their politics. Both far-right and far-left armed groups were at Charlottesville, with cadres of gun-carrying militants
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 4 of 17 guarding protesters on both sides and a third-party “constitutionalist” militia, the Oath Keepers — composed mainly of military and lawenforcement veterans — standing by as self-appointed umpires. In the west, a separate rural militia movement had already coalesced around “sovereign citizen” groups that rejected federal authority. Despite media portrayals of its leaders as racially motivated, in fact the sovereign citizen ideology is neither left nor right in a traditional sense — it might better be described as a form of militant libertarianism with roots in the self-reliant cowboy culture of the old west.
In April 2014, a dispute over grazing rights in Nevada triggered an armed stand-off between militia and federal agencies including the Bureau of Land Management and the FBI. This dispute — over federal attempts to impound the cattle of a rancher named Cliven Bundy — brought hundreds of militia members from across the country to Nevada where they surrounded federal agents, trained weapons on them and forced them to back down. The 2014 stand-off ended in a bloodless militia victory, but almost two years later Bundy’s son Ammon led an armed occupation of the headquarters of a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon. This time, things went the other way. The occupation prompted a six-week siege by federal and state agencies in January-February 2016. It resulted in the death of LaVoy Finicum, a charismatic Arizona rancher whose killing, captured on government aerial-camera footage that appears to show him with hands raised in surrender before being shot, made him a martyr.
Though Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of America’s toxic polarisation, the passions he inspires among friend and foe alike have exacerbated it: during the 2016 election campaign, Arizona militias mounted armed patrols to support his border wall. In response, Redneck Revolt held a heavily armed show of force in Phoenix, Arizona, later posting a YouTube
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 5 of 17 video showing members shooting semiautomatic rifles at targets displaying alt-right symbols. A few months later, Antifa convened an “anti-colonial anti-fascist community defence gathering” near Flagstaff, Arizona, that included weapons training and coaching in anti-police tactics. Today, farleft and far-right groups operate within close striking distance of each other in several border states and in “contested zones” including the Pacific Northwest, parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas. A Youtube still of Neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division training outside Seattle. The pandemic — and the grievances inspired by heavy-handed responses to it — have brought these tensions to a head. Camouflage-clad militia sporting semiautomatic rifles and body armour and riding in military-surplus trucks joined an armed protest against the governor of Pennsylvania in April. Similar protests took place in Ohio and North Dakota. A week later demonstrators, some carrying AK-47 rifles, swarmed into the state capital in Lansing, Michigan, to confront politicians.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 6 of 17 A racial edge also emerged: a week after the Lansing incident a group of African-Americans, armed with AR-15 rifles and automatic pistols, mounted a show of force outside the Michigan State Capitol building to support a black member of the legislature. Class inequities, which track closely with racial disparities here, have prompted socialist groups — notably Antifa but also traditionally nonviolent Trotskyist and anarchist networks — to arm themselves for an incipient revolutionary moment. Mass protests on the rise
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 7 of 17 +15 In Minneapolis, the killing by white police officers of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, brought thousands of protesters on to the streets for several
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 8 of 17 nights of rioting, with multiple buildings and cars burned and shopping malls and restaurants looted. By Thursday, militarised police were on the streets firing tear gas and rubber bullets against vociferous opposition. At least one person has been killed in the riots and the Minnesota National Guard is expected to join the police in attempting to restore order. Thus, far from being a purely right-wing phenomenon, rifts within US society that are most stressed by the coronavirus — urban versus rural interests, racial and class tensions, state overreach versus anti-government militancy, far left against alt-right, “collectivist” coastal elites versus rugged individualists in “flyover country” — align with pre-existing grievances. And heavily armed actors across the spectrum are poised to exploit them. One reason for the overemphasis on right-wing extremism, I believe, is that analysts often mischaracterise armed actors as “hate groups”. It is absolutely true that the intense hatred from right-wing extremists dwarfs most other groups. But the focus on hate is a misunderstanding of what drives violence in internal conflicts.
As Stathis Kalyvas demonstrated a decade ago in The Logic of Violence in Civil War, the worst atrocities are driven not by hate but by fear. Fear of other groups, encroachment of those groups into one’s territory and collapse of confidence in government’s ability to impartially keep the peace are the key factors that provoke communal violence. Hate follows and rationalises fear, not the other way around. And fear of the coronavirus, alongside the demonstrable inability of government to keep people safe, is driving today’s growth in armed militancy.
Like Iraq, like Somalia To me, current conditions feel disturbingly similar to things I have seen in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Colombia. Indeed, the theory of guerrilla
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 9 of 17 and unconventional warfare fits today’s situation all too well. If we visualise an armed movement as a pyramid, then the thousands of protesters on the street (and the tens of thousands who support and sympathise with them but stay home) represent the mass base. A smaller group of organisers and support networks (physical and virtual) plays an auxiliary role further up the pyramid. The armed, gun-toting element is smaller still, but higher in skill, weaponry, organisation and motivation. It’s worth remembering that almost three million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan, coming home familiar with urban and rural guerrilla warfare to a country where 41 per cent of people own a gun or live with someone who does.
A militia group with no political affiliation from Michigan stands in front of the Governor’s office after protesters occupied the state capitol building on April 30. The US has no national firearms register, so only estimates are possible, but analysts believe around 100 million firearms are in private hands in the US,
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 10 of 17 and hundreds of billions of rounds of ammunition. Given widespread combat experience from the war on terror, this reservoir of military potential sets the US apart from any other Western democracy. The pandemic has seen a surge in gun purchases, with background checks spiking to their highest number. Many of these are first-time buyers from the progressive end of politics, who traditionally shun firearms and have little knowledge of weapon safety.
Racial war, class war More worrying, on left and right, are underground groups including socalled “accelerationists”. These tend to be small, secretive and far more violent than the militias or mass movements. They follow a decentralised command-and-control philosophy known as “leaderless resistance” that was pioneered by far-right groups in the 1980s but has since been taken up by terrorists across the political spectrum, including jihadists. Their goal is to accelerate the collapse of a social order they see as doomed, by bringing on a racial war, a class war or both. Underground networks operate using a clandestine cell structure, and communicate via the deep web and tools such as Telegram or RocketChat, secure-messaging apps that have become havens for extremists as more open channels, including chat rooms such as the neo-Nazi forum Iron March, have been shut down. Language policing on social media has not only pushed accelerationist groups underground; it has created a whole new language. The term “Boogaloo” is widely used for the coming civil war. Variants — coined to avoid Twitter censors — include “The Big Igloo” or “The Big Luau”, the last explaining why Hawaiian shirts are popular among militias.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 11 of 17 Memes from television (“Winter is Coming”, “Cowabunga”) are popular, as are meme-based references such as “Spicy Time” or acronyms such as BAMN (“by any means necessary”) and BFYTW (“because f..k you, that’s why”). Some call the urban guerrilla aspect of the Boogaloo “Minecrafting”: Twitter threads seeming to discuss the game may actually refer to the coming conflict — context is everything. Some discussion hides in plain sight on social media: more open, practical and gruesome conversations are left to the deep web, Telegram or neo-Nazi sites such as Daily Stormer, which resides on the orphaned former Soviet “.su” internet domain as a way to avoid censorship. Doctoral dissertations could be written on the kaleidoscope of visual symbols used by groups, left and right, to signal allegiances. Accelerationism has a long history on the Marxist left and among environmental activists such as Earth Liberation Front or Earth First! It has since been embraced by right-wing extremists including 2019 Christchurch killer Brenton Tarrant, whose manifesto included environmentalist ideology and was celebrated by neo-Nazi ecoterrorist group Green Brigade.
Other right-wing accelerationist groups include Atomwaffen Division (which has a presence in Australia) and The Base, a white-supremacist group founded in mid-2018 whose name is a play on al-Qa’ida (“the base” in Arabic). FBI agents targeted The Base after its members allegedly sought to attack a massive pro-gun rally outside the Virginia State Capitol building in Richmond in January. In a classic accelerationist move, they planned to infiltrate the rally, start shooting both protesters and law enforcement officers, provoke a massacre and thereby convert a peaceful (albeit armed) demonstration into a militant uprising.
night driver
ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
Part 2:
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 12 of 17 A heavily-armed young man poses for a photo with his assault rifle during the protest at the State Capitol in Salem, Oregon on May 2. The group’s leader, until recently known by his nom de guerre “Norman Spear”, was unmasked in January as Rinaldo Nazzaro, a New Jersey native based in St Petersburg, Russia, from where he directed cells in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. There is no public evidence of any relationship between Nazzaro and Russian intelligence, though his presence in Russia triggered speculation in the media and within The Base itself. But this highlights another risk factor for 2020: the possibility of foreign interference astride the upcoming presidential election.
A new cold war The US and China are fast descending into a new cold war, as recriminations over the pandemic heighten conflicts that were already acute. Each is seeking to improve its military position against the other: the Chinese navy has ramped up activity in the South China Sea, for example,
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 13 of 17 while US forces mounted more incursions into the area in the past three months than in all of last year. China’s history of sponsoring agents of influence in the US and other Western countries (including Australia) and its track record of cyber-espionage and technology theft make it a reasonable assumption that some (with or without official backing) may be considering ways to exploit America’s internal tensions. Indeed, it would be intelligence malpractice if they were not.
Likewise, Iran — which lost Qassem Soleimani, head of its Revolutionary Guards covert action arm, the Quds Force, to a US drone strike in January — has been on a path of military confrontation with the US for years. A - series of incidents in the Middle East and the increasing pain of US economic sanctions motivate Tehran to create internal distractions for the US, relieving pressure on itself. The regime has a history of sponsoring lethal covert action inside the US — most recently in 2011, when Quds Force members recruited a criminal gang in an attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by bombing an upscale Washington, DC, restaurant. Again, there is no public evidence of such activity at present, but Iranian operatives watching the US today would be remiss not to consider it.
If interference does occur, US armed groups probably would not know it. Just as members of The Base were dismayed to discover their leader living in Russia, militant groups in the US — many of which are patriotic, albeit opposed to the current character of government — would likely spurn any overt foreign approach. But anonymous funding, amplification of online messaging, offers of training or equipment through “cut-outs” such as tactical training companies or non-government organisations, or “false flag” operations (where agents of one organisation pretend to belong to another) would allow hostile foreign actors to inflame tensions.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 14 of 17 It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty whether significant violence will occur this year. All we can conclude from the available evidence is that the risk is real and growing. We can also make some judgments about where and when violence might break out and what form it might take. Given the pandemic health crisis, widespread economic disruption over the northern summer, then a predicted second wave of infection in OctoberNovember, peak compound impact — when the combined health, economic and security effects of the coronavirus will be at their worst — will likely run from late October until March-April next year, astride the next election and transition to the next presidential term. Even without the virus, the election was already set to be a flashpoint; the combined health, economic and security effects of the pandemic could make it far worse. If Trump is re-elected, mass protests are a given, while factions within the militant left might undertake what they term “direct action”. As The Base’s targeting of January’s Richmond rally showed, street protests are fertile ground for provocations. If Trump is defeated, elements of the militia movement or street protesters might also engage in violence. In “contested areas” — where the territories of left and right-wing militants overlap — we can expect violence irrespective of the outcome.
Whether it spreads will depend on level-headed political leadership — and today’s hyper-partisan coronavirus debate offers little hope of that. If violence does spread, it will not be a re-run of the American Civil War. Rather, given the multiplicity of groups involved, their geographical overlap and loose structure, we can expect something much more diffuse.
Remember Colombia Perhaps the best analogy is Colombia, which saw 10 years of amorphous conflict from 1948 to 1958, a decade known as La Violencia. Starting as
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 15 of 17 rioting in Bogota — driven by pre-existing urban-rural, left-right, class and racial divisions — violence spread to the countryside as the two main political parties, the Colombian Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, mobilised rural supporters to attack each other’s communities. Local governments weaponised police to kill or expel political opponents. Extremists joined in and “conflict entrepreneurs” emerged to prolong and profit from the violence. In the end 200,000 people were killed, two million were displaced and the Colombian Army — after initially staying out of the conflict — eventually stepped in to end the violence, seizing control in a coup in 1953. External actors, including the Cold War superpowers, also interfered. Colombia is not the only precedent. Last month marked the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history. The bomber, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, claimed to be enraged by government overreactions at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco, Texas (1993), which between them saw law enforcement kill 78 civilians including 26 children. He bombed a building that housed the federal agencies he blamed, along with a childcare centre. His comment after his trial — that the 19 children killed, of 168 dead and 680 injured, were “collateral damage” — highlighted his military mindset and intent to trigger an anti-government uprising. There was indeed a huge rise in militia activity. But the callousness of McVeigh’s attack made most militias condemn him, and — by tarnishing the self-perceived righteousness of their anti-government cause — undermined the movement he hoped to inspire. He was executed a few months before 9/11.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 16 of 17 Protestors try to enter the Michigan House of Representative chamber. In retrospect, the risk that Ruby Ridge and Waco would trigger a terrorist backlash seems obvious. Analysts warned this year that extremism poses as much risk today as it did in 1995. Ahead of time, McVeigh’s attack was far harder to foresee and its specifics impossible to predict. But far from a fringe issue of neo-Nazi nut cases, the pandemic has made the risk of - violence in 2020 far more widespread, larger in scale and more militarily serious than we might imagine. America may well be in a “pre-McVeigh moment”. 404 Comments You can now update the display or screen name associated with your Subscriber account. Click here for details and guidelines. Reader comments on this site are moderated before publication to promote lively, but civil and respectful debate. We encourage your comments but
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Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 12 of 17 A heavily-armed young man poses for a photo with his assault rifle during the protest at the State Capitol in Salem, Oregon on May 2. The group’s leader, until recently known by his nom de guerre “Norman Spear”, was unmasked in January as Rinaldo Nazzaro, a New Jersey native based in St Petersburg, Russia, from where he directed cells in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. There is no public evidence of any relationship between Nazzaro and Russian intelligence, though his presence in Russia triggered speculation in the media and within The Base itself. But this highlights another risk factor for 2020: the possibility of foreign interference astride the upcoming presidential election.
A new cold war The US and China are fast descending into a new cold war, as recriminations over the pandemic heighten conflicts that were already acute. Each is seeking to improve its military position against the other: the Chinese navy has ramped up activity in the South China Sea, for example,
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 13 of 17 while US forces mounted more incursions into the area in the past three months than in all of last year. China’s history of sponsoring agents of influence in the US and other Western countries (including Australia) and its track record of cyber-espionage and technology theft make it a reasonable assumption that some (with or without official backing) may be considering ways to exploit America’s internal tensions. Indeed, it would be intelligence malpractice if they were not.
Likewise, Iran — which lost Qassem Soleimani, head of its Revolutionary Guards covert action arm, the Quds Force, to a US drone strike in January — has been on a path of military confrontation with the US for years. A - series of incidents in the Middle East and the increasing pain of US economic sanctions motivate Tehran to create internal distractions for the US, relieving pressure on itself. The regime has a history of sponsoring lethal covert action inside the US — most recently in 2011, when Quds Force members recruited a criminal gang in an attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by bombing an upscale Washington, DC, restaurant. Again, there is no public evidence of such activity at present, but Iranian operatives watching the US today would be remiss not to consider it.
If interference does occur, US armed groups probably would not know it. Just as members of The Base were dismayed to discover their leader living in Russia, militant groups in the US — many of which are patriotic, albeit opposed to the current character of government — would likely spurn any overt foreign approach. But anonymous funding, amplification of online messaging, offers of training or equipment through “cut-outs” such as tactical training companies or non-government organisations, or “false flag” operations (where agents of one organisation pretend to belong to another) would allow hostile foreign actors to inflame tensions.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 14 of 17 It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty whether significant violence will occur this year. All we can conclude from the available evidence is that the risk is real and growing. We can also make some judgments about where and when violence might break out and what form it might take. Given the pandemic health crisis, widespread economic disruption over the northern summer, then a predicted second wave of infection in OctoberNovember, peak compound impact — when the combined health, economic and security effects of the coronavirus will be at their worst — will likely run from late October until March-April next year, astride the next election and transition to the next presidential term. Even without the virus, the election was already set to be a flashpoint; the combined health, economic and security effects of the pandemic could make it far worse. If Trump is re-elected, mass protests are a given, while factions within the militant left might undertake what they term “direct action”. As The Base’s targeting of January’s Richmond rally showed, street protests are fertile ground for provocations. If Trump is defeated, elements of the militia movement or street protesters might also engage in violence. In “contested areas” — where the territories of left and right-wing militants overlap — we can expect violence irrespective of the outcome.
Whether it spreads will depend on level-headed political leadership — and today’s hyper-partisan coronavirus debate offers little hope of that. If violence does spread, it will not be a re-run of the American Civil War. Rather, given the multiplicity of groups involved, their geographical overlap and loose structure, we can expect something much more diffuse.
Remember Colombia Perhaps the best analogy is Colombia, which saw 10 years of amorphous conflict from 1948 to 1958, a decade known as La Violencia. Starting as
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 15 of 17 rioting in Bogota — driven by pre-existing urban-rural, left-right, class and racial divisions — violence spread to the countryside as the two main political parties, the Colombian Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, mobilised rural supporters to attack each other’s communities. Local governments weaponised police to kill or expel political opponents. Extremists joined in and “conflict entrepreneurs” emerged to prolong and profit from the violence. In the end 200,000 people were killed, two million were displaced and the Colombian Army — after initially staying out of the conflict — eventually stepped in to end the violence, seizing control in a coup in 1953. External actors, including the Cold War superpowers, also interfered. Colombia is not the only precedent. Last month marked the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history. The bomber, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh, claimed to be enraged by government overreactions at Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco, Texas (1993), which between them saw law enforcement kill 78 civilians including 26 children. He bombed a building that housed the federal agencies he blamed, along with a childcare centre. His comment after his trial — that the 19 children killed, of 168 dead and 680 injured, were “collateral damage” — highlighted his military mindset and intent to trigger an anti-government uprising. There was indeed a huge rise in militia activity. But the callousness of McVeigh’s attack made most militias condemn him, and — by tarnishing the self-perceived righteousness of their anti-government cause — undermined the movement he hoped to inspire. He was executed a few months before 9/11.
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 16 of 17 Protestors try to enter the Michigan House of Representative chamber. In retrospect, the risk that Ruby Ridge and Waco would trigger a terrorist backlash seems obvious. Analysts warned this year that extremism poses as much risk today as it did in 1995. Ahead of time, McVeigh’s attack was far harder to foresee and its specifics impossible to predict. But far from a fringe issue of neo-Nazi nut cases, the pandemic has made the risk of - violence in 2020 far more widespread, larger in scale and more militarily serious than we might imagine. America may well be in a “pre-McVeigh moment”. 404 Comments You can now update the display or screen name associated with your Subscriber account. Click here for details and guidelines. Reader comments on this site are moderated before publication to promote lively, but civil and respectful debate. We encourage your comments but
Land of the fearful, home of the heavily armed and hateful 5/30/20, 5:45 AM NoCookies | The Australian
Page 17 of 17 submitting one does not guarantee publication. You can read our comment guidelines here. If you believe a comment has been rejected in error, email comments@theaustralian.com.au and we'll investigate. Please ensure you include the email address you use to log in so we can locate your comment.
Meadowlark
Has No Life - Lives on TB
And the SPLC and the FBI will be all over them like a polyester suit on a hot day. 
Freeholder
This too shall pass.
That was an interesting article. I think he's a little off-base in talking about extreme hatred as primarily a right-wing motivation, though. Sure do see a lot of hate from the left-wing 'protesters.'
Kathleen
Kathleen
vector7
Dot Collector
Right?!
Speaking of McVeigh, lets not forget Mr. Fast & Furious...
Attorney General Holder Tied to OKC Bombers
December 16, 2011
By The Staff at AFP
Eric Holder, current attorney general of the United States, managed an FBI operation that provided explosives to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols just prior to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, according to official documents released during the ongoing investigation into government foreknowledge of the supposed terrorist attack.
According to the documentation provided in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought against the Department of Justice by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, the Oklahoma City bombing had aspects of being an FBI sting operation that went out of control. Holder had authorized the FBI to provide explosives to Nichols and McVeigh, then lost track of both the explosives and their targets. McVeigh went on to detonate some of the explosives outside the federal building, an act that was designed to help anti-terrorism legislation pass Congress. But an additional case of explosives was unaccounted for.
After the bombing, when the FBI learned the location of the explosives, Holder reportedly sent emails to FBI agents ordering them to recover the explosives before they could be found by some other branch of the government. FBI agents failed to spot the additional, unexploded explosives during an initial search of Nichols’s home and offered to spare him the death penalty if he would help them recover them.
The case of explosives was, however, recovered by another law enforcement agency and was later determined to have the incriminating fingerprints of two FBI agents, as well as fingerprints of McVeigh and Nichols.
Shortly after the bombing, Kenneth Trentadue, a government informant, was murdered in his prison cell. His family has been pursuing legal action against the federal government ever since.
In 2001, in a bid to avoid a full release of documents, the Federal Bureau of Prisons paid a settlement of $1.1 million to several members of Trentadue’s family, but his brother refused to drop the investigation and filed a FOIA lawsuit for the missing documents. That suit has been ongoing in the Salt Lake City federal courthouse.
And the SPLC and the FBI will be all over them like a polyester suit on a hot day.
Sound's familiar...
Did Eric Holder Cover Up FBI’s Role In ’95 OKC Bomb Plot?
December 31, 2011
By Pat Shannan
In 2005, just ahead of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recovered a box of Kinestik explosives from the home of Terry Nichols, the convicted co-conspirator of Tim McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. An affidavit from Oklahoma City conspirator Nichols about the explosives should have sent out shockwaves when it was filed in November of 2007:
I was asked to . . . disclose the location of the box of explosives . . . that I had taken from Roger Moore’s home in Arkansas. This was the same box of explosives recently discovered at my Herington, Kan. home and seized by the FBI. McVeigh had used this Kinestik as a detonator for his bomb. McVeigh said that when Moore furnished the Kinestiks, Moore had told McVeigh that he knew McVeigh “would put them to good use.” I responded by telling Mr. Selby [Michael Selby, an attorney for the government—Ed.] that I could “give” him Roger Moore. Mr. Selby’s reaction to my offer, however, was not what I had expected. Mr. Selby essentially said “no deal.” Mr. Selby told me that Roger Moore was “untouchable.”
Attached to that affidavit was a “302” (FBI witness statement) filed by Selby, who came to Nichols that day in the Florence, Colorado prison in 2005 on an “off the-books mission” authorized by the highest levels of the Department of Justice.
Moore was the Arkansas gun dealer and FBI informant who worked with Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) informant Andreas Strassmeier, the man widely believed to have originally given McVeigh the idea of bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Both were handled by FBI agent Larry Potts, a senior FBI official who had allegedly personally ordered the murder of members of the Randy Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
Moore was being “run” by two FBI agents—known as Ross and Hayes—from the Hot Springs, Arkansas office. But the Elohim City operation was not a two-bit FBI sting; it was authorized by top Justice officials.
At the time of the bombing, our current United States Attorney General, Eric Holder, was managing FBI sting operations as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia —and sitting in line to take over as deputy attorney general, which he did in 1997. One of Holder’s first jobs was to cover up the FBI’s role in the bombing.
“I think they put together this harebrained idea . . . to lure in all these militia groups under the pretense of teaching them how to . . . attack the federal government, and I think they planned to catch them in the act,” stated Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney who has been investigating the OKC bombing through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
But the operation went terribly wrong when the explosives that the FBI authorized Moore to provide to McVeigh ended up being used in the actual bombing. The fingerprints of the two agents running the Elohim City operation were later found on the explosives discovered in 2005 at Nichols’s home.
“The Department of Justice, through the FBI and ATF informants, was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing,” said Trentadue.
After Holder’s appointment as deputy attorney general in 1997, he met directly with members of Congress, including Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and persuaded them not to look into the string of suspicious deaths of those in custody connected with the Oklahoma City investigation. At the time, Holder knew that the FBI had provided the explosives used by McVeigh. He also knew that the FBI had failed to locate the portion of the explosives that had not been used. The fact that Holder knew this in 1997, and that the FBI went searching specifically for the explosives in 1995, proves that the FBI knew that the explosives had been provided and also that an amount of them had not been used.
“When you look at these documents, that this was being monitored, this search for the box of explosives at the highest levels within the Department of Justice, right up to and including the White House I think, I mean, this wasn’t your local FBI office handling this,” said Trentadue. “This was being run right out of the Justice [Department] in Washington, D.C.”
Trentadue’s brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue, was tortured to death in the Oklahoma City Transfer Center because he resembled a man named Richard Lee Guthrie, a bank robber believed to have assisted Moore, McVeigh and Nichols. Guthrie was murdered in his prison cell the day before he was scheduled to tell federal law enforcement officers of his role in the bombing, which was financed by a string of bank robberies that were conducted with the knowledge, assent and involvement of the FBI and the SPLC of the notorious Morris Dees. And a prison mate of Kenneth Trentadue, convicted serial killer Alden Baker, who gave a deposition stating he saw prison guards torture and murder Trentadue, similarly died just days before he was scheduled to testify.
“[There was] a wide-ranging and cynical scheme, run directly by Mr. Holder, to quash my family’s efforts to have my brother’s murder investigated,” said Trentadue. Court records indicate that scheme included murder of those who “knew too much.”
Intestinal Fortitude
Have Faith
XLNT
Hmmm! I thought McVeigh used a truckload of nitrate fertilizer laced with nitro-methane set off by a stick of dynamite. Seems you would not need the FBI to procure that stuff.
Did something similar when I was in the brown shoe army although we used fuel oil instead of nitro-methane. Low speed explosive-cratering charge. Made a big hole.
Did something similar when I was in the brown shoe army although we used fuel oil instead of nitro-methane. Low speed explosive-cratering charge. Made a big hole.
packyderms_wife
Neither here nor there.
Agreed and in spades. That said in a fiber arts group on FB about two or three weekends ago now one of the members there posted a customers piece she did of Trump and was looking for advice on a seam issue, and the leftists there tore her to shreds, well they tried to anyway.
Be still my dark little heart to see these same leftists bitching two weeks later that they had lost their lucrative teaching and design contracts with some pretty big corporations. And get this... the idiots blamed it on Trump.
These people are ****ing insane... and they want us dead!
doctor_fungcool
TB Fanatic
Yes....you are correct.
Turret Buster
Gruntpa
Seems applicable these days......
Skeletons of Society
Slayer
Minutes seem like days
Since fire ruled the sky
The rich became the beggars
And the fools became the wise
Memories linger in my brain
Of burning from the acid rain
A pain I never have won
Nothing here remains
No future and no past
No one could foresee
The end that came so fast
Hear the prophet make his guess
That paradise lies to the west
So join his quest for the sun
Shades of death are all I see
Fragments of what used to be
The world slowly decays
Destruction fills my eyes
Harboring the image
Of a spiraling demise
Burning winds release their fury
Simulating judge and jury
Drifting flurries of pain
Deafening silence reigns
As twilight fills the sky
Eventual supremacy
Daylight waits to die
Darkness always calls my name
A pawn in this recurring game
Humanity going insane
Shades of death are all I see
Fragments of what used to be
Minutes seem like days
Corrosion fills the sky
Morbid dreams of anarchy
Brought judgment in disguise
Memories linger in my brain
Life with nothing more to gain
Perpetual madness remains
Shades of death are all I see
Skeletons of society
Fragments of what used to be
Skeletons of society
For non-commercial use only.
Skeletons of Society
Slayer
Minutes seem like days
Since fire ruled the sky
The rich became the beggars
And the fools became the wise
Memories linger in my brain
Of burning from the acid rain
A pain I never have won
Nothing here remains
No future and no past
No one could foresee
The end that came so fast
Hear the prophet make his guess
That paradise lies to the west
So join his quest for the sun
Shades of death are all I see
Fragments of what used to be
The world slowly decays
Destruction fills my eyes
Harboring the image
Of a spiraling demise
Burning winds release their fury
Simulating judge and jury
Drifting flurries of pain
Deafening silence reigns
As twilight fills the sky
Eventual supremacy
Daylight waits to die
Darkness always calls my name
A pawn in this recurring game
Humanity going insane
Shades of death are all I see
Fragments of what used to be
Minutes seem like days
Corrosion fills the sky
Morbid dreams of anarchy
Brought judgment in disguise
Memories linger in my brain
Life with nothing more to gain
Perpetual madness remains
Shades of death are all I see
Skeletons of society
Fragments of what used to be
Skeletons of society
For non-commercial use only.
Shadow
Swift, Silent,...Sleepy
Oddly enough the building across from the Murrah building was lightly damaged. It was closer to the truck causing explosives experts to dig into what actually happened.
Shadow
night driver
ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
GOOD friend of mine is a forensic chemist and he got drafted to work on the "Immaculate axle" from that truck.
His comment to me was that there were a LOT of things going on chemically in that truck that had VERY little to do with ANFO.
About a year later he was involved in another "situation" where the explosives had YET to cook off. Seems there was some weird system involved in the "situation" where dry ice and a couple of other ephemeral chems were keeping it from moseying off to high order status. Commented he'd seen some of this sort of crap before. Refused to say where, with a wink. (Nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse, sort of wink)
night driver
ESFP adrift in INTJ sea
Kilcullen wasn't going to scare the rubes.