This should be a wake up call for anybody who continues to use the 'peaceful protest' label.

Given the size of this group, their organizational skills and the ability to carry to out said plans, should be eye opening to everybody who can think for themselves.

It is worth the watch... seems all nice and cozy, then they head into the park, switch clothing behind a wall of accomplices and using umbrellas as cover, then proceed towards the statue with weapons and using said weapons against the police.


Chicago police release video footage of protests at Columbus statue

https://youtu.be/U1VdhQbfSTY

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
Hey, as if we didn't have enough morons throwing out their chicken chests (a reference my uncle used to use frequently) we now have this...

UN Human rights office decries disproportionate use of force in US protests

I do, too, but the ones doing it are the rioters, not the LEOs.

flashguy

The first night or two when I saw the protests outside the White House I admired the professionalism and restraint of the uniformed Secret Service. The crowd was pushing against the riot shields, throwing bricks and bottles. Then came the firecrackers, and it became immediately obvious that the rioters were simulating gunfire in an effort to spook the officers into shooting back. They wanted rioters to get shot so they can justify the narrative police brutality against "peaceful protesters".

The coordination of all this in multiple cities, with the continuous resupply of bricks, frozen water bottles, fireworks, shields, and other "arms" shows a level of organization and planning that is far greater then I previously thought Atifa or BLM were capable of. But when did they start planning and who is handling the finances? Pallets of bricks have to be paid for and delivered by trucks with lift gates. Frozen bottles of water don't stay frozen very long, and have to be continuously resupplied. Someone is paying for all of this and someone is delivering it and I don't think it would take that much detective work to figure it out, at least for the street level agitators and the people above them. Cutting the supply chain should be the number one priority of local governments and police departments, but that does not appear to be the case.

I don't think this would be happening on this scale if not for the WuFlu shutdown. Massive unemployment, frustration, and cabin fever filled the keg with powder, and like others have said, it was just waiting for a spark. Under normal circumstances, people would be working (and not on unemployment + 600). So you have the unemployed, plus college students on summer break, and public school teachers on break too.

Either this has been in the works for a while, planned to occur sometime before the election to do maximum damage to Trump's campaign (maybe during the Republican convention), and just needed a trigger, and then the WuFlu coincidentally came along and provided the perfect storm, OR the WuFlu provided the opportunity and they worked fast to organize before the reopening, but still needed a trigger. I don't think it's all just spontaneous improvising after George Floyd's death.

The goal is to hold the country hostage under the implicit threat that the riots will not stop until Trump is out of office, and if elected they will get a lot worse. Push the swing voters to slouch toward Biden and pay the vote ransom, with a shrug that says "Biden can't be that bad can he?"

If we could have a normal election, Trump would still likely win. Despite the genuflection of the media, academia, professional sports, and big corporations to BLM, real working people with homes and families do not want this shit in their neighborhoods and will side with law and order, even if they publicly toe the politically correct line and vote for Trump in secret.

But the Democrat Communists are taking a scorched earth approach, and will do anything and everything possible to rig the election. Universal mail-in voting, vote harvesting, you name it. Never before have I been this convinced that an entire political party will be complicit in massive fraud to subvert an election. Sure the urban Democrat strongholds have been stuffing ballot boxes for years, and in some cases they swung the election, most notably with Al Franken getting elected to the Senate, but nothing on this scale before.

And the election will be a clusterfuck that puts the 2000 election to shame. Close races, late counts, "missing" bags of votes suddenly found, more Democrat votes than registered votes, lawsuits, you name it. Then it will be up to the lawyers and the courts to sort out the shitshow and decide who wins. Let's hope McConnell got enough conservative judges confirmed in the right places.

On another train of thought, how the hell did we get here?

I was thinking the other day that Karl Marx - or really just his ideas written into words on paper in a couple books - is responsible for more death than any human in history. Adding up the bodies from the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, and now Venezuela, and you're at least an order of magnitude greater than deaths from all of the facists in history.

Despite this fact, facism is constantly condemned and projected on conservatives, while Communism is constantly romanticized as the answer to all of our problems.

Never mind the fact that facism and communism are the same things in practice - totalitarian control of the economy and the people by the government. The only difference is that facism is honest about its nature while communism denies its nature by claiming it is "for the people".

Everyone under the age of 30 grew up without any real understanding of the Soviet Union and just how bad Soviet Communism was. The Berlin Wall fell before the end of the 80's, and the USSR fell at the beginning of the 90's. They didn't live through the arrival of refugees from Vietnam, or the Cubans who arrived in Florida in anything they could get to float 90 miles. In a vacuum without any negative comparison, Communism always comes back promising equality, fairness, justice. It's like a drug addiction, no matter how long sober, the monkey always wins after enough time.

Nikita Kruschev told us that the Soviets would crush us by subverting our education system and creating a generation of Americans that would freely vote for communism. And teachers unions and universities have become profoundly marxist over the past few decades. That generation he warned us about has arrived in the form of AOC and her squad. And the rest of the Democrats have jumped on board in a staggering showing of mass lunacy because they want to keep their jobs.

BLM are their brownshirts and bolsheviks - avowed communists - but they are hiding under the cover of a cause so politically correct, the MSM, academia, and big business can do nothing but cower in fear of being cancelled. They finally found the key they have been missing all along. Never mind the fact that there is no data supporting any of BLM's assertions, as Heather MacDonald has eloquently shown time and time again. Arrests and convictions for violent crime are directly proportional to the descriptions of the assailants provided by the victims. Frequency of arrests corresponds to the frequency of officer involved deaths of suspects. But data doesn't matter. The propaganda campaign has convinced vast numbers of people of a false narrative.

Are we seeing the actions of anarchists just bent on creating mayhem because they have nothing better to do and it makes them feel important? Yes, that's what some of the useful idiots doing the dirty work believe. But you have to appreciate the irony of a well organized, disciplined, and funded "anarchist" group. They are being used by the communists as yet another diversion. You know, just crazy kids acting out but they are apolitical and will just get tired after a little while and go back home and live with their parents.

As others have said, the destruction of historical artifacts (statues) and the rewriting of history (1619 project) is straight out of the CCP's cultural revolution. Ban the confederate battle flag but not the hammer & sickle and those cool Che Guevara T-shirts). But even the CCP understands that the nuclear family is the basis of stable society and they promote marriage and family, while out-of-wedlock births are both legally and culturally forbidden. The communists we are facing here have used welfare, public housing, and the trans movement to ridicule and destroy the nuclear family. Unwed mothers are much poorer than married women, and children from poor unwed mothers are much more likely to have problems with school, drugs, and crime. And from that higher crime rate among these children, we have more frequent arrests as a function of their population and thus more officer involved suspect deaths. You see how they created the problem, then blamed the logical and statistical outcomes on an effect (police) and not a cause?

But who benefits from all this? Why do democrats constantly implement policies that makes things worse, then double down on more of the same? Some would like to think it's just a self interested and intensely cynical political party looking out for its own interests, and enriching themselves on the backs of the people they claim to represent. But they are also useful idiots because those that will most benefit from the downfall of the US are the governments of the countries that deny freedom and liberty to their people to control them. Freedom and liberty created the most prosperous and powerful country in the history of the world, those other countries just can't have that example staring them in the face forever, or their people sooner or later will demand freedom and liberty for themselves.

Social media was the trojan horse that they needed. The sheer number of foreign actors disseminating propaganda, fake news, and manipulation of Americans by social media is more than anyone would believe.

The revolution has arrived, and it IS being televised. It is up to the ironically "red" US citizens to stop it.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Read up on the Weimar Republic in Germany between the world wars.
Some similarity there with our current situation.

Only superficially. Germany had of course just lost a devastating war it may not have caused, but chose to prosecute attacking previously uninvolved countries, and got saddled with the main blame and massive political and economic consequences widely considered unfair by Germans. That's only very remotely comparable to contemporary American discontent about recent wars and the effects of globalization, which happens to be the result of the largely American-designed global post-WW II order. If anything, the US is a victim of its own success in shaping the world for the last 75 years.

While there are similar political narratives being pushed - the far right peddling theories about the country being treated unfairly on the international stage and domestic traitors stabbing it in the back, and the far left promoting revolutionary system change - any resemblance to Weimar ends there. Even with recent economic crises, comparatively unequal wealth distribution and lack of social security by Western standards, the US is far from the economic hardships of the early 30s, let alone post-WW I Germany. That includes the effects of COVID; per just-released quarterly numbers, everybody in the West got hit about the same by that, so the US doesn't stand out.

Most of all, the Weimar Republic had no German democratic tradition worth mentioning to fall back on, with little loyality to elected governments even in the public services. The US has had a quarter millenium of such tradition, even if mated to a somewhat violent national culture for historical reasons (self-reliance over trust in government, conquest of the West, lingering issues from slavery and Jim Crow, tensions between various immigrant groups, etc.). Its constitutional foundations are not an easy pushover.

Which doesn't mean it's not in trouble, however. Outsider's view:

1. The US effectively has a two-party system, mostly due to first-past-the-post voting. Such systems tend to polarize along the binary choices voters have. Partisan acrymony has always been high between the opposing camps, including their affiliated media; one just needs to read historic newspaper articles and minutes of Congressional debates. The country has of course experienced a civil war and several high-profile political assassinations, including of presidents.

2. It's not an accident that the escalation of the American cultural war since about 1990 has coincided with the emergence of the internet. It has been said that the net has exposed everyone to the common stupidity of people; folks that would never have been heard outside their immediate social circle in earlier times now have a global audience. The outrageous is shared the most, and the most loony opinions get depicted as representative for all of the opposing camp in the respective filter bubbles.

3. Partisan affiliation has increasingly superseded all other divisional lines like income, race or religion. Those traditional issues still exist, but are subsumed as political items in the fight between the two opposing camps. I've seen studies suggesting that there is even a trend of physical segregation between the camps replacing previous identifiers of neighborhoods; more and more, they don't live and work in the same places, don't attend the same churches and schools.

4. Both camps have convinced themselves that they are locked in an existential battle. Fears about the administration of the day creating a police state, declaring martial law, abandoning elections and sending dissidents to the camps are peddled by the respective current opposition, with polarity reversing about every eight years. Since this is a fight for survival, all means are permitted, as the other side will use them anyway. In their own perception, both camps are fighting "back" and think it's high time they finally played hardball like the other.

5. Classical ideological platforms and long-held political values no longer play a role. If one camp is for something, the other must by necessity be against it, irrespective of facts, importance or yesterday's own beliefs. Increasingly, the aim seems to be not even furthering your own goals, just stunting and pissing off the other side.

6. There is a sense of entitlement on both sides that they have a right to things being like they want them to be in either an idealized past or idealized future, and a lack to accept responsibility. Any crisis event is quickly identified as being the fault of the other camp, and therefore "not our problem to solve". Any setback is never your own fault but because of a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, George Soros, Russian meddling or the Deep State.

I'm neither in the place nor do I have an idea for an easy solution to this. In large part, it's the result of American history meeting the modern world. I've always been dismissive of people who have hopefully predicted the imminent downfall of the US for the last 50 years. For a couple months, I've been not so sure now. Less because of the BLM riots rather than the politization of the COVID crisis, which basically makes all my points above - rather than effectively fighting it, American politics chose to make it a partisan issue. And increasingly, the domestic fighting is detrimental to America's role in the world.

I don't think the US will just collapse or become irrelevant anytime soon. But it's come to the point where I'm thinking about how to keep the American cultural war from continuing to spill over to the rest of the Western world - which it has always done to some degree - and drag it down with it. We even got some BLM protests over here, and I'm not sure what I find weirder: the white types who attend protests over the killing of a guy on the other side of the Atlantic to feel good about doing something for the cause célèbre du jour, and probably some more-or-less mild anti-Americanism; or the ones who claim there's no difference between the US and Germany at all when it comes to race and policing.

Earworm for today:

"Won't Get Fooled Again"

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they are flown in the last war

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
No, no!

I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
Oh I know that the hypnotized never lie
Do ya?

There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by the bye
And a parting on the left
Is now a parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Anyone that cannot see that this is a clear GLOBALIST attack on the United States and all that it represents is a fool. There are CLEARLY advocates on both sides of the aisle in cahoots with trying to oust our president, who happens not to come from their demented 2 party control practice. If the DemocRATS manage to steal the election, this country is in serious jeopardy.

I just want my country back.

So in nine pages ,
all of the problems have been identified at least twice.

But now for this thread to evolve, there needs to be information about

A. Who will provide a solution
B. Who will fund said solution.
C. Who will carry out the solution.
D. How the solution will be funded going forward.

All good questions Bendable.

I've thought a lot about this for a while. No, I don't have any answers. Conservatives need to band together and support each other in ways they aren't used to.

The subversion of our educational system cannot be understated. From kindergarten through university socialist ideals have been planted and cultured. History and it's lessons have been watered down and doctored. I've witnessed it happening and as an army of one have managed to make an insignificant difference in the lives of but a few. The battle for hearts and minds has been largely lost over the last 30 years at least. It only takes one generation to cause serious damage and frankly conservatives have been asleep at the switch on this.

The turn around will take more sacrifice and pain than most are willing to accept.

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
So in nine pages ,
all of the problems have been identified at least twice.

But now for this thread to evolve, there needs to be information about

A. Who will provide a solution
B. Who will fund said solution.
C. Who will carry out the solution.
D. How the solution will be funded going forward.

Who needs to fund what? A, B, and D are all the same thing. C is normal people, which most of us are.

So. I'm curious about something. I'm in a city that had some anti-police and anti-establishment violence. It was right after the guy died in Minneapolis, and it was confined to, basically, the center of the city with the Police station being one of the targets of vandalism.

That being said, 99% of the rest of the area, and suburbs, is peaceful and everyone gets up and goes to work every day. Everyone waves to each other on the street. People talk to their neighbors, and people with BLM signs stand on the sidewalk talking to neighbors without the signs. Everyone is generally friendly and is living life as though this were, what seems to be, confined to larger cities where the Antifa and Soros-backed organizations know they'll get something of a free pass by the mayors and governors.

I guess I have some lingering questions, and I honestly don't mean to sound obtuse, or coy:

Yes, this is a shit show, and yes, you can clearly see that they're trying to foment unrest, but with the media as a bullhorn are they actually making any headway?

How do I either wake people out of their stupor, or engage them in a way that doesn't immediately turn me into "right-winger-Sean-Hannity"? There are people in my neighborhood that have BLM signs in their yard, but I know them. They might be Democrats, but they would never support the shit that the BLM organization is being used for. How am I supposed to get them to see what their virtuously-ignorant feelings-based altruism has wrought?

The Chicago Police video is disturbing, specifically in the planning and tactics that the people used. Don't we have any kind of agency at the Federal level, that is tasked with breaking down or breaking into these types of organizations? How can we take all of the power and technology of the Federal Government, and bring it to a focus on a political candidate, but not have any kind of mitigating power against the (very clearly organized) communist animals ripping apart some of these cities?

If you have not read Kurt Schlichter's book you need to, some of the writing is over the top but most is spot on ...regarding what is happening and might happen in the US.

Study the former Yugoslavia and what happen in Ukraine, Georgia and the Arab Spring...all sponsored by the same people.

More light reading, studies written for SOC.mil
https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/arisbooks.html

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
A. Who will provide a solution
B. Who will fund said solution.
C. Who will carry out the solution.
D. How the solution will be funded going forward.

and

quote:

Originally posted by Veeper:
1) So. I'm curious about something. I'm in a city that had some anti-police and anti-establishment violence.

2) That being said, 99% of the rest of the area, and suburbs, is peaceful and everyone gets up and goes to work every day.
...
Everyone is generally friendly and is living life as though this were, what seems to be, confined to larger cities where the Antifa and Soros-backed organizations know they'll get something of a free pass by the mayors and governors.

3) How do I either wake people out of their stupor, or engage them in a way that doesn't immediately turn me into "right-winger-Sean-Hannity"? There are people in my neighborhood that have BLM signs in their yard, but I know them. They might be Democrats, but they would never support the shit that the BLM organization is being used for. How am I supposed to get them to see what their virtuously-ignorant feelings-based altruism has wrought?

4) The Chicago Police video is disturbing, specifically in the planning and tactics that the people used. Don't we have any kind of agency at the Federal level, that is tasked with breaking down or breaking into these types of organizations? How can we take all of the power and technology of the Federal Government, and bring it to a focus on a political candidate, but not have any kind of mitigating power against the (very clearly organized) communist animals ripping apart some of these cities?

Bendable and Veeper, please pardon my selective editing of your posts, I did so to address things in an orderly fashion.

Using FM 3-24, the Army manual I linked to on page 3 of this thread, I believe the answers to your questions derive from the following facts on insurgencies.

From paragraph 1-3: Insurgency in the most basic form is a struggle for control and influence, generally from a position of relative weakness, outside existing state institutions.

So, the goal of the insurgents is to de-legitimize the US government. We, the people, must resist this attempt by supporting the government, and not legitimizing the insurgents. How? Do not accept their narrative. Do not call them "peaceful protesters" but refer to them as criminals. One of the video links posted in this thread had an interview with the US Attorney for OR, and the back-and-forth between the DA and the interviewer focused on just this rhetoric.

Veeper, point 1) This is perfect, that is the population not giving in to the insurgency. This must continue and happen across the country. BTW, notice that, while the mayor of Portland refuses to stop the violence, the Democratic Governor of Oregon did sign an agreement with DHS to have the Oregon State Police take over security, so the Federal officers can leave. This is a classic Counterinsurgency tactic that aligns with FM 3-25 paragraph 1-6:

Ideally, the host nation is the primary actor in defeating an insurgency. Even in an insurgency that occurs in a country with a nonfunctioning central government or after a major conflict, the host nation must eventually provide a solution that is culturally acceptable to its society and meets U.S. policy goals. The conclusion of any counterinsurgency effort is primarily dependent on the host nation and the people who reside in that nation. Ultimately, every society has to provide solutions to its own problems. As such, one of the Army and Marine Corps’ primary roles in counterinsurgency is to enable the host nation.

In the above, recognize this this is not the US being involved with a foreign country, but within our own country. So, substitute "host state" or "host city" for "host nation" above, and it applies to the current activity.

Veeper, point 2) Again, this is the population refusing to give in to the insurgency, and living thier lives normally. This is a disaster to the insurgents. If they have no "problem that must be solved," then the population has no reason to have the insurgents "solve it for them."

Veeper, point 3)Here is where the real value that all of us can play. We must find common ground with other decent folks. We ned to recognize that, even though we may have political differences of opinion that leads of to be Republicans or Democrats, there is still common ground for us to agree upon and work from. I believe the majority of Democrats are appalled by the violence they are seeing, even if they initially supported protests in the wake of Floyd. I have talked to a number of Democrats, and they are very uncomfortable with what they see happening. It is important not to try to get them to see that they are "wrong." Better to build common ground, and discuss how to move forward to bring law and order back to our society. They want a stable economy with growing opportunities, and they understand that can't happen wit hte protests. The time to argue about our traditional differences is later, after we have defeated the insurgency.

Veeper, point 4) A legitimate government has the job of providing law and order. We the citizens need to support their efforts. The pro-police demonstrations, ad hoc local resistance to the insurgents, etc. is all part of the population rejecting the legitimacy of the insurgents and accepting, or in our case re-affirming, legitimacy of our government. The Justice Department has the job of fighting crime, which is what the insurgeny is, a criminal attempt to over throw the US government. It is too lengthy to post here, but studying the FM 3-24, I have noticed a number of actions taken by the Administration that leads me to believe they fully inderstand they are fighting a domestic insurgency, and thus are no doubt using the tools available to them to fight it.

One final thing responding to Bendable:

It is absolutely time for each individual to be prepared to defend themselves, and potentially fight a local conflict (e.g. like what happened to McCloskey's in St. Louis). The real battle must be fought by the Fed law enforcement in attacking the funding sources, the organization and training of the insurgents.

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
It's not wholesale shooting or stabbing 'yet', but it certainly is an escalation.

Then, despite saying otherwise, you do understand my response. We are not yet anywhere near a nationwide armed conflict.

quote:

Originally posted by nosticks:
I just want my country back.

Well, what are the chances that the leftist and anarchists will come to their senses? There's no chance of that, of course. So, to what place shall we come, inevitably?

quote:

The Chicago Police video is disturbing, specifically in the planning and tactics that the people used. Don't we have any kind of agency at the Federal level, that is tasked with breaking down or breaking into these types of organizations? How can we take all of the power and technology of the Federal Government, and bring it to a focus on a political candidate, but not have any kind of mitigating power against the (very clearly organized) communist animals ripping apart some of these cities?

To me, what's disturbing is that these police were left to fend for themselves with what? A night stick and maybe some body armor? The command was taken by surprise? I doubt it, they were left for dead, don't want to hurt anyone's feelings and protect your own. 49 police officers were injured.. WTF???

Our leftist mayor is arresting officers for doing their job and having them charges by her corrupt DA. She is allowing lawlessness while the murder rate in Atlanta has skyrocketed. She has been openly beligerant with the conservative Governor about him sending in the NG to protect the Federal buildings.

There are mobs of "bottle boys" wandering through downtown traffic extorting drivers to purchase water or else. Many are armed and brandishing at drivers and around 10 years old. Mayor Bottoms calls them "entrepreneurs".

We have our own little no-go zone which is no longer being reported on in the news after a mob of "BLM justice enforcers®"(my name for them) killed a 8 year old child in a hail of rifle fire through her parent's car. Yep, nowhere near as bad as police when some neighborhood bullies murder your family over a parking spot.

This was hours after a mob of miscreants marched in Stone Mountain demanding Texas.

However, this is only in small pockets of the city. Where I work has been quiet. The movie studios have been empty since May though. There is no way they will be filming downtown with no police presence to keep order.

I don't think the chaos is coming to the burbs because the burbs have leadership that won't put up with it.

The mob numbers are small, but the media is inflating their relevance. All of this bullshit could be ended with a strong response from the federal government with riot control. Water trucks, passive riot equipment and the arrest of the most violent of the insurrectionists. Heavy charges for those who have harmed law enforcement with IED or focused energy weapons.

Funny how mandatory mask mandates in leftist cities make it difficult to identify insurrectionists.

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
there is violence occurring all around the country in the name of this movement. It's not wholesale shooting or stabbing 'yet', but it certainly is an escalation.

As one who is in the dark in regards to the daily news, I do understand there are sporadic episodes of killings and such.

But when it gets to the point similar to Walter Cronkite's broadcasts in the 1960s, reporting daily on guerrilla warfare; 13 deaths here, 21 injured in a gun battle there, 7 killed, 18 injured over there, then you'll know the reality of "civil war".

And as posted earlier, the only comparison of our times is North vs. South in the nineteenth century.

As Veeper said, and I think that's what happening across the country - that outside of the downtown hotspots in certain liberal strongholds, it's mostly peaceful, even downtown. I drove around Austin, ate at several restaurants (Cooper's, etc) on Friday's and other weekend's nights, and it's been peaceful, no protesters in sight, no traffic blocking, etc. Yes I've been lucky but it's been business as usual (with the masks).

Out in the 'burbs where I live, few people holding signs on one or two street corners, otherwise, we're all busy with working from home, grocery runs, etc.

I just don't see a shooting war anytime soon yet.