Ferguson Burning, Revisited
The New American Perfidy
The question on my mind, as I have recovered my psyche from too much exposure to Facebook debate, is what happens next as ICE operations continue. We are in a twilight of different types. We have not yet reached the point of burning buildings, although the buildings likely to be tested have very likely been selected. Right now there are three open questions.
How far and long will the primary ICE action be sustained in the US?
How long will protests & protestors be undifferentiated?
What are the parallels here and elsewhere?
Winslett’s Number
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen takes up a banger tangent posed by Gary Winslett (D)
What portion of Republicans think the Trump admin/ICE killing a few hundred people, roughing up a few thousand more, and violating all kinds of civil liberties is an acceptable price to pay for making net migration go deeply negative?
The answer to that tells you when/how this ends.
If it’s a small minority (unlikely), there’s going to be internal pushback that brings the worst excesses under control.
If it’s around half (that’s my guess), you’ll get paralysis but not a doubling down. There will be a lot of what-about-isms and excuse-making and reflexive defending of co-partisans and blaming Democrats/protestors, but it’s basically more of this.
But if it’s a large majority (and it might be), this only gets worse from here. Because it means they don’t actually see what’s going on as unacceptable and in fact find it preferable to not achieving those deeply net-negative immigration goals.
This is really where things get interesting. On the one hand, the more people actually die, the more willing people are to engage lethal opposition. So long as the media and writers can get attention, this will continue to be hot, whether or not the reporting is truthful.
Winslett’s question gives us an economic format that might very well be politically useful. How do we know how many arrests go bad? This is something we have studies to examine. What’s the difference in municipalities? How good are local & state authorities and police in cooperation with federal? There’s surely some understanding over the matter of marijuana, and now perhaps abortion.
At the very least, we have COVID. Who is going to shelter in place when ICE comes to town? Who is going maskless into crowds? How many will die from putting themselves in conflict with the declarations of politicians? What’s it worth to you? There is a real economics of conflict.
The Ugly Embed
One of the often unspoken controversies ignored by the shallow ‘justification’ crowds over the death of Good in Minnesota was the matter of intent and preparation. I think I was clear in my declaration that intent mattered and this applies to all people who meet in the streets. I was more obvious in my conviction that Good was in the streets to confront, impede and confound ICE officers, and that her choice to protest was not in question, rather how this choice was implemented, with a bunch of ‘shit happens’ which always counts.
What I didn’t do was speculate about the nature of her protest training, as it were. But it was overwhelmingly clear from my POV was that getting in the way of federal officers making kinetic arrests could very easily fall into that category of bad arrests, which some fraction of the time, turn fatal. Nevertheless I brought up the context of FRE 403 and Antifa membership.
This morning DataRepublican has produced something that I very well understood is going to be a part of the street action, which is essentially the purpose of pre-meditation. That is to say, there are inevitably going to be ‘gang members’ in all street riots who are taking advantage of the chaos in pursuit of their agendas. Some of those agendas will be kinetic obstruction and attacks against LEOs. I’m just going to call this the new American Perfidy. Hashtag Signalgate. Meaning, planning to use the cover of peaceful protest to cover violent conflict. Human shields? Yes, we’ve got human shields on millions of video views. Everybody knows the narrative of innocence.
Take insurgents at their word. Don’t pretend insurgency is going to go away simply because the reporters go away. The frauds against the open society and maintenance of high quality democratic institutions are persistent and crafty. Not only do they include domestic threats, but foreign ones as well. So this dataset is going ‘global’ and believe me that authorities and hackers all will be connecting the dots.
So here is the salient text. This is what I’m on about. 17 million views.
As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.
What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.
Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.
This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.
Again, asymmetrical information war. American dissidents might become America’s worst enemies. They are already embedded in the territory. As I said, it does matter that it’s the Trump Administration, but there is going to be a face off between the federal government and the state of Minnesota. Minnesota will lose. If the comments of Noem mean anything, it means that there are American citizens who are going to lose the benefits provided by FRE 403.
Parallels
Over the past week for various reasons, I have gotten back a significant fraction of my mojo. As such I am prepared to wade a bit deeper into current ugly affairs, and ride one of my hobby horses, which is longitudinal study. BLUF. I’m starting to collect and archive matters of civil unrest that apply to the growing(?) discontent that has spilled onto American streets.
From Berkeley 2017, to Paris 2018, Seattle to Portland to Baltimore to Detroit and Minneapolis (not to mention Ferguson, J6 and LA) there’s a wealth to consider. To that end, I am establishing an Unrest Archive. The first thing that goes into it is this from 12 odd years ago. I’m going to look up what stuff I have collected and see if any of it makes sense.
Dateline November 2014
Ferguson burning is a good thing.
They say that good fences make good neighbors. I say that anger and frustration are just like farts in the wind. Nothing political really matters until people are ready to burn things down. It makes for good dividing lines. The Ferguson mob is a lynch mob, there’s no question about that. If they could get their hands on The Man, they would stone him. That’s good news. It has clarity. It shows that people actually have the courage of their convictions, they are putting their money where their mouths are. We, at long last, have a proper mob.
When this shitstorm began, I wrote the following:
If the death of one man, by accident, or on purpose causes a neighborhood, community, suburb, town, ghetto or general residential district to break down civility, well I suppose you can call that person a hero by definition. His life is valued higher than law and order. Pinker has words to say on such honor codes. Essentially, they are tribal and inferior to the rule of law. But I’ve been saying this for years, tribal hierarchies are what people use when democratic institutions fail. Nothing at all surprising at that. What is surprising is the extent to which activists and political plotters and strategists try to co-opt the energy of tribalism and convert it back into democratic institutional power. It’s really just swapping one alien committee for another. And of course the big problem is that it doesn’t help the honor code or the tribe.
A real pitchfork and torches tribe working the hierarchy is ready, and I mean defiantly, militantly ready, to stare down and shoot down the System. That’s what ‘by any means necessary’ implies, but it always turns out in America that the means of choice is sublimation to the New Committee (which seems always ready to grant permanent seats to Jackson or Sharpton). It almost makes you miss Khalid Muhammad. But the bottom line is, misappropriation of James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time notwithstanding, the tribe is going to lose.
I went on to speculate about how the protest train would rumble on in infinite circles. I was wrong. It actually got militant, and so I am pleasantly surprised for the militants. We can look forward to seeing t-shirts that say “I rioted in Ferguson and all I got was this bullet in the shoulder.” Non-trivial stuff. But that badge of courage will go to a precious few in the Ferguson tribe, while the complimentary abstracted blather of the rest of the Activist Nation continues. Some props have to go to those who dug into their pockets and made this their Million Man March, went to Ferguson, picked up a torch and burned something down.
I haven’t heard of any cops getting shot yet, but I did hear a story of somebody who, brandishing a pistol, got into a car wreck and shot herself in the head. Her video said of the gun ‘We’re ready for Ferguson’. She gets an E for effort, and a big fat fail for effectiveness. Then again, that can be said for most tribal mobs no matter how many strip malls and car dealerships they manage to burn to ashes.
What we need, right about now, is somebody with a rifle and a can of gasoline to stand up and heroically say “Yeah I did it, and I’d do it again” But we are not yet to that moment. Right now it’s all just Anonymous black mobs of rioters and looters and cockeyed shooters and their attending media circus of armchair wannabe vanguards. I say it should have been Michael Brown’s mother, but apparently she would rather be a media star than a soldier. Understandable, but not heroic.
When buildings are burning is the moment for true heroes to be born. We have arrived at that moment. Will it become heroic or just more mindless destruction?
Now it also must be said that a lot of people are asking if the violence is worth it. The answer is yes. But it wasn’t until buildings were burning that a sufficient amount of violence has been applied to the standard bullshit rhetoric of the Hate America First contingent. What makes the haters pathetic is their pacifism which undermines the legitimacy of their wordsmithing. What makes the Ferguson mob serious is its willingness to do damage. It doesn’t matter that the owner of the bakery was a black woman. What’s at stake here is not race so much as justice, and more particularly the failure of democracy to serve the very human ends of the Ferguson mob.
When Democratic Institutions Fail
It happens all the time, all around the world. There is nothing special in that, but here in America it is especially necessary to pay attention when cities are set aflame. That’s when the mob gets to play from a position of power. It is the human impulse, as revered and as sacred as the mastery of fire itself. It is a Second Amendment kind of fundamental right, and it is an order of magnitude more important than the talk. It establishes the serious skin in the game for all talk to come and it erases the nonsense of the talk already farted into the wind. Here is the dividing line; the acts that pledge and risk one’s life to the cause.
I doubt there will be any hero to emerge from this who can stand on principle and unite the pen and sword. Many who weren’t there will try to abstract this into #BlackLivesMatter or #HandsUpDontShoot. Anybody can play the Twitter game - Catching Fire like a holiday movie meme. In the end, it matters mostly to Ferguson and those who live thereabouts. Democracy has failed that little part of the world and they’ve literally burned a tattoo there. We have a genuine scorched earth reminder. Any headstones will testify permanently. I am reminded, as should we all, that when men are sufficiently provoked, they will demand justice with fire. What will they get? What have they asked for? Who can provide?
We will have plenty of time to review everything that’s going on. But can we say today that it was worth it that Ferguson burned? My answer is no. There is no coherent reform that took place. The brains never moved to Missouri, and I doubt they are moving to Minnesota. Oregon has remained Oregon.
Charlottesville 2017 https://mdcb-public-data.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/unrest/virginia2017/Charlottesville%20August%202017.pdf