In my scanning the riots, I picked up this little byte, which I’m sure brought a few chuckles from armed suburban home owners. One looter said, “Hey, let’s go out to the suburbs.” And the other replied, “Nah, man, that would be a bad idea.”
Why? you might ask. And the answer could probably be found in the weekly casualty count in Chicago, such as last weekend, 9 deaths and 36 wounded…and (never mentioned) an estimated 5500 rounds spent. Although it’s been tried a couple of times, that level of clear headed marksmanship does not inspire the sort of confidence for inner city gangbangers to take on even a few men, especially if living in neighborhoods they know intimately…and all have likely been trained to kill professionally. Many of Chicago’s shootings are drive-by, and a lot of the casualties are innocents just hunkered on the porch. So, driving a low-rider Beamer down a neighborhood street would be like like one of those little rabbits going by in an arcade shooting gallery.
“Bad idea” is right.
The conversation I just reported was probably between two “joy-rider” punks who may not be in anyone’s hire, or there because they got a phone message that a bunch of them was going to gather at the Ace Hardware parking lot, just to see what happens. Sport. Still others could have been in the hire of the local gangs who would resell all the treasures they could bring them. Sport and looting profit. They could even have been really pissed about that white cop who killed George Lloyd in Minneapolis, but maybe not knowing that the cop had already been arrested and sitting in jail awaiting trial (which won’t even begin until the Fall.)
Then Round Two of this riot spree could begin if the jury doesn’t give back the verdict and sentence they want, maybe late Fall, so it can easily be woven into the re-election of Donald Trump because all the financial promoters of this last riot will be shelling out even more money to burn still other parts of the country.
What I’m trying to do here is think like these young black (and white) kids that make up the bulk of the action we see from a CNN or NBC film crew, plus a few cellphone videos on Twitbook. When Any Ngo was filming in Portland, targeting some Antifa bad actors, I liked to scan the background, and there was almost always, just a few feet from the fists and sticks flying between the beaters and the 70 year old victim, others similarly dressed who were just standing around looking to see what rumble they’d like to jump in, almost as if they were calculating what looked the easiest and less painful.
I always think of the 20-year old Marines at Chosin Reservoir when I see those cherubic faces.
If you’d ever seen these sorts of kinds of events you know what to look for. And also what to make of it. When Antifa first came to national notice it really wasn’t hard to tell the rookies from their squad leaders. And it was no different in sizing up a BLM march blocking a main highway, always made up of the required front row of local blacks leaders, but also septuagenarian retirees and Code Pink crones who shared a core belief in anarchy, (and bail money stashed away in their shoes). They had not one iota of interest in stealing anything, not even in the national museum gift shops. Like our young looters, it was as much sport as it was politics.
But of course the people who are funding these events have more specific objectives. They have the grand plans, which none of these kids at ground zero have a clue about.
In that sense, they are all cannon fodder. Only they have no intention of even by hurt, much less killed. Pain is not part of the equation.
Indeed, should a bus carrying 50 of them to a staging area flip, and all were killed their front office would simply reload for next week at someplace else. Soros wouldn’t even send cards.
Many use George Soros as the mythical godhead of these events. I don’t, simply because I know if we tried and convicted him tomorrow, nothing would change. The money would be untouched, and events would continue to unfold according to schedule.
So, it’s their game plan I want to interrupt.
Consider this: In the 1968 Chicago Mayor Richard Daley sent the cops out to break up the student anti-war riots at the Democrat National Convention (This was the Hubert Humphrey convention, not the George McGovern convention of ’72 where the anti-war students finally got what they wanted, which was the worst electoral ass-whipping the Democrats had ever taken in 125 years.) Daley was an old style Democrat, a boss, and it was his city, and he didn’t like communists and their sympathizers one bit. So he allowed (or ordered…there was never an investigation) his cops to manhandle those students. Little girls with scraggly long hair, and screeching, sneering faces, were bopped on the head with billy clubs, and dragged by the ankles and tossed like potato sacks into paddy wagons. It was a nightly feature on national television.
And much of America cheered. My wife of six months and I did.
There were some “tsk-tsk-tsking” by the Brit Hume’s of the day at CBS, NBC and ABC, but by and large Daley got a pass for how he let his PD handle the streets, in part because the people of the United States tended to agree with his handling of these spoiled college kids. And in ’68 it was largely a white-on-white affair, clean cut versus maggot-infested.
The irony of the Chicago Convention riots of course was the male leaders of the anti-war mobs had suggested that the girls move to the front of the protest line as cops wouldn’t hit them. That kind of gallantry seems to have never left the Left’s male half. Geldings.
My belief is that their in-the-field tactical strategy today is just as sketchy as it was in ’68, mainly because they have to deal with too many ifs from their unpaid joy-riders and looters in the hood and the assorted “new bandana” enlistees who’ve never been under fire.
Actually, very few of the older cadre have ever been under real fire. Their own tactical plan is to avoid it. Their strategy is largely in their reliance on how the local police will react…which is why they do what they do in blue cities, more often also in blue states, so that no red governor can step in to countermand their mayor.
Here in Virginia, Charlottesville would never have happened had we had a Republican governor.
Antifa and other radical planners rely on the predictability of the city political establishment and the police. The nationwide absence of police in the film, videos, and stills we’ve seen, and the total defensive posture of police when they are seen, connotes a kind of trench warfare which can easily become a new norm, sort of like the Western Front in France,1915-1918, if we allow this boil to fester.
But through it all, their strategies depend on the predictability and reliability of their base assets, the cannon fodder, the street kids who will jump into any thrill sport, especially if a few bucks are involved, and the politicized sophomore at State that wants to be able to count coup over the weekend and have some cool pics to pass around friends and impress girls.
For the most part, neither of these groups have known real pain, but unlike 1968, their (Soros) funders and planners are relying on the notion that America will no longer tolerate the images of young people being rough-housed by cops as they were in 1968.
Just three years ago, maybe, but today, at least half of America’s see that ugly specter of socialism (I call it fascism) very vividly in the sort of bully tactics we are witnessing today by Antifa.
But Daley’s tactics offered only one kind of deterrence.
I recommended Skunk only yesterday (May 31) as a means to possibly separate Antifa planners from being able to recruit young hooligans once they see it action on social media and realize that every time they try something they are going to be bathed in shit.
Once their funders lose that recruiting resource they will have to change their entire strategy. In the late 60s;-early 70s when the FBI came after them, splitting the anti-war split into factions, Bill Ayers and Bernadette forming the Weather Underground, moving to basements to build bombs, and Tom Hayden of SDS marrying Jane Fonda. Split, they did what vanity-driven organizations always do, they built Fort Fizzles.
So, I’m not against Mayor Daley’s tactics. People do not root for the little guy as much as they root against the Bad guy, and the Era of the Bad Guy is upon us. Even church ladies are asking why it takes three cops to subdue a scrawny 145-lb kid whose using one of his hands to keep his mask on his face. This does not inspire confidence, except maybe in the mothers of would-be Antifa recruits.
We can do better.
