Know Your Terrorists

Well, the predictable “False Flag” excuse has been raised by the predictable apologists for the entirely predictable violence of Trump’s and the Republicans Far Right Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN or Voluntary Militia for National Security, commonly called Blackshirts) and Sturmabteilung (SA or Storm Detachment, commonly called Brownshirts Fascists.

They hang their hat on the fact nobody died. Well, you sure killed Heather Heyer didn’t you?

Don’t Ask How It Could Happen Here. We Know How It Could Happen Here.
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
Oct 24, 2018

We should be grateful to the Times for not pussyfooting around here. The one thing that makes Wednesday’s near-tragedy unique is that there is a straight line to be drawn from George Soros’s mailbox and the CNN headquarters to the rhetoric of the President* of the United States. This is what makes this latest reemergence of the bomb different.

In the 1970s, there were no national politicians encouraging the Weathermen to involve themselves in the political process. Bernadine Dohrn didn’t get to visit the White House. Of course, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there were southern state politicians a’plenty who knew the people who were setting off the bombs, but the national government was pretty much on the other side; even though it was often dilatory in that regard, it got there eventually. (In 2002 and 2003, the last two culprits in the Birmingham church bombing were finally convicted by Doug Jones, now a senator from Alabama.)

(Trump) trafficks in imaginary threats and encourages, by word and deed, feelings of dread and isolation and deep, familiar paranoia, the entire Hofstadter buffet. And there is an entire media infrastructure dedicated to reinforcing those feelings, 24-7, on all platforms of the modern communications industry. The Weathermen didn’t have their own TV network.

Between the time the bomb was found in George Soros’s mailbox, and the the discovery of similar devices aimed at the Clintons, the Obamas, and CNN, the rightwing media was alive with the notion that the attempt on Soros’ life was a “false-flag” operation aimed at discrediting the president* and conservatism in general. Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog did a splendid job chronicling one outburst of dangerous idiocy in the comments section of the Daily Caller, the ratty platform on which Tucker Carlson hung the entrails of a once-promising career; at Twitchy, Michelle Malkin’s old popstand; and in the deep fever swamp that is Free Republic.
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This constituency wasn’t created out of the air. It did not spring fully grown from the brow of (Trump). It was carefully created and nurtured over the past four decades by a conservative movement bankrolled by oligarchs who were and are perfectly fine with having murderous, angry grunts out there doing the dirty work for them, the way the fine upstanding Alabama burghers of the White Citizens Council were content to have the Klan round up misfits to blow up churches and kill little girls.

And then, in 2016, lo and behold, the perfect vessel for all of this carefully fashioned rage comes along and he wins a freak election, ends up in the White House, and now everybody’s shocked down to their expensive loafers that there’s a large body of their fellow citizens who believe in, and are willing to act upon, the doomstruck fantasies that they have been so conscientiously fed over the past 40 years?
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(F)or the love of god, spare us from the horrified How Could This Happen Here? childishness that attends events like this. We all know how it could happen here. We’ve seen demonstrations over and over again, at rallies and on the street, about how it could happen here. It could happen here because it has happened here.

But Right Wing Violence is not a problem, just ask Dr. George Tiller and those who died and were injured at the bombings of over 42 Women’s Health Clinics (just counting the ones where there were casualties), ask the 168 dead at the Murrah Federal Building, ask the 4 young girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The list is too long to print on these pages.

And who did this? The dastardly Leftist Anarchists of the Antifa, at the direction of Hillary Clinton and financed by George Soros in order to make the Godly White Male Real ‘Murikans look bad.

Cody looks much less frazzled, but that was after only 8 months.

Army Parrots Racist Right’s Talking Points on Antifa
by Kelly Weill and Spencer Ackerman, Daily Beast
10.24.18

Internal U.S. Army documents in 2017 on anti-fascists (antifa) parroted a fascist talking point about the far-right’s supposedly non-racist creds, according to newly released material reviewed by The Daily Beast.

Yet even as two assessments warned of an “increasingly violent” antifa, they conceded that the group poses no threat to the military.

The Army assessments, dating from mid-2017, were meant to alert servicemembers to potential risks anti-fascists posed to military or military installations. But they also stated that the U.S. Military is “not aware of any threats from Antifa directed at the Army or DoD [the Department of Defense] in general.” The heavily redacted documents, marked unclassified, were provided to The Daily Beast by the transparency nonprofit Property of the People and are believed to be the first public disclosures of Defense Department references to antifa.

The documents showed the Army struggling to characterize antifa, or antifascism, a decentralized movement that confronts extremist right-wing forces. Despite conceding that antifa is not connected to any known threat facing servicemembers, the documents showed the Army is encouraging servicemembers to “maintain situational awareness” of the movement, whose profile has soared after the election of Donald Trump—and which mainstream Republican politicians demagogically describe as a Democrat-aligned mob.
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“With the newly released documents, we again find a U.S. agency targeting anti-fascists as security threats while downplaying the menace posed by white nationalists,” said Ryan Shapiro, Property of the People’s executive director.

One of the documents, dated June 30, 2017, is titled “Situational Awareness: Criminal Activity Sometimes Associated With ANTIFA and ANTI-ANTIFA Gatherings.” Warning of potential violence at “scheduled nationwide protest[s]” for the 4th of July holiday, it portrays Antifa as a sprawling “network of left-wing anarchist group [sic] whose goal is to ‘smash fascism in all its forms,’ specifically sexism, racism, homophobia, government corruption and Islamophobia.” (Some anti-fascists are anarchists, while others are not.)

Antifa’s antagonists, however, are portrayed in a more favorable light: “According to open source [publicly available information, often news reports], ANTI-ANTIFA members are individuals and groups who are engaged in a political battle against ANTIFA, but who are not affiliated with racist nationalists.”

The Army did not provide its basis for that assessment beyond saying it came from “open source” information.

This anti-antifa claim is more than just false—it’s a popular talking point with fascist groups hoping to disguise their racism.

One of the most vocal anti-anti-fascist groups is an extremist collective called Anticom or Anti-Communist Action. Now largely defunct, the most active version of the group billed itself as “the right’s response to antifa.” But Anticom was more than anti-communist; the group was intimately tied to neo-Nazis, as leaked chat logs published by the media nonprofit Unicorn Riot revealed. In between acts of racist incitement, Anticom members predicted a forthcoming “massacre” and “a genocide,” in which white supremacists would have “the military on our side” the leaked chats reveal.

The group had a presence at Unite the Right, and members worked as security for prominent white nationalists like Richard Spencer, ProPublica reported. Despite appearing at white supremacist rallies and promoting genocide online, Anticom told ProPublica that “all races and ideologies are welcome” in the group, as long as they “are anti-communist.”

Similarly, chat logs from the now-defunct white supremacist group the Traditionalist Worker Party also showed the violent group trying to salvage its reputation after Charlottesville by shifting the blame onto anti-fascists. “You want people hating antifa as much as possible lol,” one wrote in the logs, which were published by Unicorn Riot. Elsewhere in the logs, the violent group discussed building explosives to use against anti-fascists.

“‘Antifa’ means anti-fascist, i.e. people who are against fascism,” a New York City anti-fascist activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast. “The provenance of the term ‘anti-antifa’ originates in the messaging of neo-Nazi movements and is absolutely a term used by ‘white power’ groups and adherents around the world. Just breaking down the term, anti-anti-fascist just means fascist. The question that arises is why is the U.S. Federal government casually using a term originating in neo-Nazi circles?”
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Although the TWP and Anticom have disbanded or fallen in stature, their anti-anti-fascist posturing has been taken up by other far-right groups like the Proud Boys, American Guard, and Resist Marxism, which have fostered violent extremists while publicly claiming not to be racist.

And although those far-right groups claim to brawl with anti-fascists out of self-defense, their members have been accused or convicted in a series of brutal attacks. Overall, the far-right has been responsible for most extremist killings over the past decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League. From 2008 to 2017, 71 percent of extremist murders were carried out by the far right, dwarfing killings by Islamic extremists (26 percent) and far-left extremists (three percent).

Meanwhile, the Army assessments ultimately conceded antifa that posed no known threat to the U.S. military.
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Johnson said left-wing extremism targeting the U.S. military was a marginal phenomenon. He recalled a “handful” of episodes from “five to seven years ago” involving vandalism at recruitment stations. “The type of threat is property destruction, and it’s usually [done] after hours, when no one’s around,” Johnson said, indicating a disinterest in causing someone physical harm.

By contrast, Johnson said, white supremacists actively target servicemembers for recruitment, creating a “substantial infiltration problem from white nationalists and anti-government extremists on the far right.”

In May, ProPublica revealed that at least three members of the race-war focused militia Atomwaffen, including its founder, were members of the Army National Guard, active-duty Army, or the Marines. A Marine veteran, Erik Sailors, trains white supremacists in the group Patriot Front for physical confrontation, according to The Intercept’s Shaun King and The Daily Beast. Splinter reported last year that the leader of a neo-Nazi group present at Charlottesville was a Marine Corps recruiter. A Military Times poll last year reported that about one in four servicemembers saw instances of white nationalism within the military, with the number rising to 42 percent amongst nonwhite troops.

“The Army’s intelligence center … uncritically accepted far-right talking points whitewashing ‘Anti-Antifa’ groups’ racist underpinnings,” Shapiro said. “In so doing, the Army continues the American intelligence community’s long tradition of finding more common ground with violent, jingoistic bigots than those devoted to stopping them.”

So “False Flag” is a LIE! Atrios dug up a funny quote about Dick Cheney from his archives-

Cheney’s Razor (n.) – A philosophic rule that the most complex explanation of an unknown phenomenon is probably correct. From Cheney, Dick. (CF)

Sometimes if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck- it’s a duck.