Category Archives: Fourth Generation Warfare

Feds say far-right group coordinated attack on Minneapolis police precinct during protest 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Law/Justice, Left and Right

By Celine Castronuovo, The Hill

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota on Friday announced that the FBI brought charges against a member of the far-right “Boogaloo Bois” group for organizing and participating in an effort to “incite a riot” outside a Minneapolis police precinct in May amid protests against the police killing of George Floyd.

According to the legal complaint filed Monday, Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old from Boerne, Texas, who claims to be a member of the Boogaloo Bois, communicated with fellow members in late May ahead of a planned trip to Minneapolis as police had already started clashing with protesters in the city.

The documents claim that federal agents obtained a video from the evening of May 28 showing an individual walking up to the door of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis and firing 13 rounds from “what appears to be an AK-47 style semiautomatic rifle.”

Federal officials said the shooter can be seen in the footage walking up to the camera and high-fiving other individuals before shouting “Justice for Floyd!”

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Hundreds protest, clash with police in Naples over new coronavirus curfew Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right

No early bedtime for us, say the Italians.

France 24

Hundreds of protesters in Naples threw projectiles at police and set rubbish bins on fire late Friday during a demonstration against coronavirus restrictions in the southern Italian city.

Calls were issued on social media to challenge a curfew that took effect in the Campania region ahead of the weekend, enacted in response to a spiralling second wave of infections that saw nearly 20,000 new cases detected in the last 24 hours.

A mostly young crowd marched through the streets of the regional capital and chanted as the curfew started at 11 pm, with some lighting smoke bombs.

One carried a makeshift sign that read: “If you close, you pay.”

Regional president Vincenzo de Luca had called for stricter confinement measures to contain the virus in Campania, which recorded 2,300 cases over the last day.

“We are on the verge of tragedy, we need a national lockdown,” he said.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has so far avoided reimposing the kind of restrictions that saw the entire nation confined to home quarantine for two months earlier this year and precipitated the country’s worst post-war recession.

Italy was the first European country to be badly hit by the virus. It has now registered nearly 500,000 cases and 37,000 deaths, according to health ministry figures.

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Joe Biden supporter who was installing BLM sign arrested for allegedly shooting at passing Trump supporter and son Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Law/Justice

Of all the worthless crap to pick up a gun over…

By Justin Vallejo, Independent

A father and son in a pickup truck waving a Trump campaign flag were shot at after honking at a Joe Biden supporter installing a Black Lives Matter sign, police allege.

Douglas Kuhn, 50, is being held without bail for allegedly firing a shotgun at Neal Houk and son Bradly Lang in Maryland on Saturday afternoon.

The judge hearing the case before Baltimore County District Court on Monday was furious that the current political climate had come to this.

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Most People Arrested at Protests Aren’t Leftist Radicals Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare

Notice that Pakman says that most of the serious arrests were for arson and firearms, i.e. actual insurgent activity like torching perceived enemy outposts and armed expropriation of enemy goods. I have identified seven major factions in the events of the last five months, but only one of the seven actually qualifies as “revolutionary.” The situation has mostly involved do-gooders, cosplayers, cops, and sport rioters, intermixed with people that would qualify as “insurgents” in most societies.

A new analysis from the Associated Press confirms that most people arrested at recent protests are not leftist radicals, as claimed by Donald Trump and Republicans

A Civil War is Still a Long Way Off 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare
A friend on my page asked an important question.
“A while ago you were dismissive of the hype around a pending civil war, and you argued persuasively that the USA was one of the most stable countries, and even if it became more unstable, it would still be on the more stable end of the spectrum. You were saying that the majority of Americans are not partisan nuts. Have you changed your mind about these factors?”
My reply:
No, I haven’t changed my mind. A lot of my “civil war” posts are obviously hyperbolic. Worldwide, about 1 in 5 elections involve violence. Many countries manage to maintain an ongoing governmental structure, even with regular elections that are far more competitive than our own, while armed insurgents and low-grade civil wars are operating in their midst, and where the level of violence on a general level is very high. What I said in the previous sentence applies to most of Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In many countries, members of parliament get into fistfights and throw chairs at each other during parliamentary sessions instead of hugging each other like Lindsey Graham and Diane Feinstein.
The other day some drunk hippie chick that lives next door was trying to say that we are in a civil war because the police use tear gas on protestors: “What do you call it when governments use gas on their own people?” she asked. To which I replied, “I call it normal life” and mentioned how I was in Mexico a few years ago when the police casually mowed down 45 people in a protest like it was everyday business.
Real civil wars only happen when the state and its armed forces fracture. We are not even remotely at that point. In fact, the state finds the recent civil unrest so non-threatening that they haven’t even deployed troops to control it. The civil unrest we’ve had in recent months doesn’t even match what happened in the late 1960s/early 1970s in the US where there was a bombing virtually every day.
Americans are used to living in a relatively genteel middle-class society, which is historically rare. What we’re seeing is the US merely becoming a normal country with normal levels of instability and unrest. There are sports riots that take place in other countries that are just as intense as what we’ve seen lately.
Not only does the present situation not threaten state structures, but the state is actually encouraging it as a control mechanism. It’s like a pro-wrestling match from the kayfabe era where the “combatants” are ultimately working for the same promotional company, which profits from creating a chaotic spectacle. But there are always those fans who think it’s real and do things like actually stab heel characters or try to climb in the ring to help their favorite babyface character whom they mistakenly think is in real trouble.”

Stepping Back from the Brink Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right

A good discussion of the present situation by fourth-generation warfare theorist Bill Lind. As the discussion thread following this article indicates, more and more I am seeing people on “both sides” (although there are actually dozens of “sides”) saying of their opponents, “But they want to kill us!” We are increasingly reaching the point of what Carl Schmitt considered to be the essence of the “political.”

By William S. Lind, The American Conservative

As the elections fall upon us, most people are focused on who wins, Republicans or Democrats. That is an important question, since a Democratic victory would bring a serious assault on freedom of thought and expression. What you see on campuses is what the cultural Marxists want to force on society as a whole. “Cancel” is the new synonym for “liquidate.”

There is nonetheless a more portentous question facing our country: do politics stay within the banks of the political system or do they overflow those banks and inundate daily life? The answer to that question may lead to another: do we remain the United States or will the astonishing disintegration of the Soviet Union be followed by the even more astonishing disintegration of our own country?

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How Could Everyday People Stop a Coup? 1

by • Activism, American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Strategy
My take on the present situation is both presidential tickets are (roughly) equally dangerous.
Trump is a narcissist and a megalomaniac but so are most politicians. What is most dangerous about him is his complete fealty to the KSA, UAE, and the state with whom the US has a “special relationship.” And his running mate is another George W. Bush waiting to happen. Biden is clearly experiencing the early stages of Alzheimer’s or dementia which means that his running mate, who appears to be a clinical psychopath, will be the acting president and merely a frontwoman for a ruling class unity regime, which is what a faux “Biden” administration would be.
The Republicans are a combination right-wing plutocratic party (like El Salvador’s ARENA) and an ultra-militarist party (like Likud). The Democrats are a far-right imperialist party and a center-right neoliberal party (and on the right end of neoliberalism). The various far-right/far-left streetfighter groups are de facto gangsters operating in either direct or indirect service of the parties. None of these groups would create a better society than the one that exists now (which is a pretty low standard).
Even worse is the fact that the neocons and their allies have more or less gained direct control of or substantial influence in ALL of the campaigns, parties, and factions, from top to bottom, and are engineering chaos from the top in order to prevent any unified resistance to the state, ruling class, and empire from developing.

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One person killed after shots fired in Denver amid rival BLM & right-wing Patriot rallies, 2 suspects in custody Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare

Middle-class gangbangers on the rise.

Russia Today

Police in Denver have launched a homicide investigation after one person was shot dead at the site of the duelling right-wing ‘Patriot Muster’ rally and a Black Lives Matter protest. Two suspects have been apprehended.

Footage has emerged on social media purporting to show the moment a shooter fired his gun at the victim. Right before the single shot rang out, a burst of orange substance, apparently mace, can be seen rising from the scene.

Police, that were deployed en masse to prevent skirmishes between the rival groups, could be seen surrounding the alleged shooter, telling him to drop the gun. One suspect, who drops on his knees, puts the weapon on the ground and hands behind his back, did not show any resistance as he is taken into custody by the officers.

The video also shows police trying to resuscitate the victim, who lies motionless on the ground.

Another video shows a shouting match between an apparent Black Lives Matter supporter, donning a “Black Guns Matter” shirt and a man with a pepper spray in his hand. The BLM activist can be seen goading the other man on to spray him with mace. “Mace me, motherf**ker, f**cking mace me,” he says repeatedly. As the back-and-forth between the two gets heated, a third man attempts to break out the brawl, prompting the apparent BLM supporter to tell him off. “Don’t f**cking touch me,” the BLM activist says, before shoving him in the back. “Don’t touch me, old man. Don’t f**cking touch me old man,” he repeats.

A couple of seconds later a sound of pepper spray being discharged and a shot fired can be heard.

It’s unclear if any of those involved in the row captured in the video were also involved in the shooting incident.

While police have yet to release the identities of the suspects and that of the deceased victim, a man can be heard crying “white supremacist” and “right in the f**cking dome” in a video that captured the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

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Cities, states and businesses brace for election unrest in US Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

By Bob Ortega, Collette Richards and Evan Perez, CNN

(CNN)Corporate America, city governments and federal and local law enforcement across the country are making plans to deal with political instability, civil unrest and violence around the upcoming presidential election.

Concerns range from isolated violent incidents to a long stretch of mass protests, violent confrontations between extremists and widespread property damage, if the outcome of the election remains unclear or is hotly contested for weeks or months, according to security consultants, analysts of extremism, police officials and local elected leaders who spoke with CNN.
“It keeps me up at night,” Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley, who chairs the US Conference of Mayors’ Mayors and Police Chiefs Task Force, about the threat of violence. “I’m also worried that there will be a bogus attempt to prevent the counting of all the ballots, and that also could lead to a variety of unrest in a variety of ways.”

More than half in new poll expect violence after Election Day Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

By John Bowden, The Hill

More than half of voters expect violence in response to the November election results, according to a new poll published Wednesday.

In the YouGov survey, about 55 percent of registered voters said they thought violence would increase in the U.S. following the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Just under 11 percent of respondents said they didn’t expect a rise in violence to occur after the election, while 33 percent of voters were unsure.

The same poll also determined that 50 percent of Americans expect the country at large to disagree about which candidate wins the presidential election, while 49 percent said they expected Americans to largely accept the election results.

Just over half, 52 percent, said they expected the November elections to be held in a “fair and honest” manner, while 47 percent doubted that the process would be above-board.

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Domestic Terrorism and the U.S. Elections Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

By Brian Michael Jenkins, RAND Corporation

The country is deeply divided. The political system is polarized. Bizarre conspiracy theories have entered mainstream political discourse. There seem to be messaging efforts designed to delegitimize next month’s elections. The president refuses to say that he will abide by the results. One official talked on social media about buying ammunition and preparing for violence. Some pundits are warning of civil war. The nation’s anxiety is palpable and understandable.

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Violence Has Long Been a Feature of American Elections Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

This article from 2016 reads like it could have been written today.

By Jesse Rhodes, Scientific American

The 2016 American presidential campaign has renewed concerns about the specter of violence in American electoral politics. The campaign has been marked by tense—and occasionally violent—altercations between supporters and critics of Republican nominee Donald Trump.

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‘The US feels very volatile’: former ambassador warns of election violence Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

By Julian Borger, The Guardian

The former UK ambassador in Washington, Kim Darroch, has warned of a “genuine risk” of violence in the aftermath of a close-run US election in November.

Darroch noted that although Joe Biden is maintaining a significant lead nationwide, the margins in some battleground states are shrinking, and he suggested pollsters could be systematically undercounting Donald Trump supporters.

“I’m not sure the pollsters really know how to count Trump voters,” Darroch said in an interview.

He pointed to the recent violence in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the wake of police shooting of unarmed Black Americans, and the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, a fervent police supporter facing homicide charges after a shooting incident in Kenosha that left two people dead and a third seriously injured. Rittenhouse has since been hailed as a vigilante hero by the far right.

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Our Long, Forgotten History of Election-Related Violence Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

By Jelani Cobb, New Yorker

In the fall of 1856, according to news reports, a Baltimore resident named Charles Brown was “peaceably walking along the street” when he was shot dead. It was a local Election Day, and Brown was in the vicinity of a Twelfth Ward polling place. Democrats attempting to enter it had been repelled by supporters of the American Party, better known as the Know-Nothings. For some two hours, the groups exchanged gunfire in what the Baltimore American described as “guerrilla warfare.” Brown was one of five people killed, and the newspaper marvelled that more lives were not lost. This was not an uncommon event. The American Party, a group defined by its truculent nativism, frequently deployed violence to political ends, particularly against immigrant voters. As Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, in their book “American Violence: A Documentary History,” wrote of Baltimore, “In many districts immigrants were stopped from voting entirely.”

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Preventing Electoral Violence Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

About 1 in 5 elections around the world turns violent.

Increasingly aware of the risk of strife presented by elections in countries affected by conflict, governments and civil society need more effective approaches to prevent election-related violence. The U.S. Institute of Peace conducts research, training and fieldwork to develop evidence that will improve knowledge in this field and inform initiatives such as codes of conduct developed by police and elections officials to avert violence. USIP’s Academy also conducts extensive training and education on election violence prevention in Africa.

Election violence in November? Here’s what the research says Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, History and Historiography

By Ore Koren, The Conversation

After Kenya’s 2007 election, as incumbent President Mwai Kibaki declared victory, the opposition alleged the election had been rigged.

A wave of protests, riots and ethnic violence followed. As many as 1,500 citizens were killed and another 600,000 forcibly displaced.

As the U.S. presidential election draws near, many have expressed concern that a similar scenario may unfold here. Some envision President Donald Trump’s supporters using misinformation to mobilize vigilante militias to clash with leftist protesters. Others envision that groups on the left will refuse to accept the results and mobilize, leading to violence and deaths across the country.

Having a contested election in times of crisis, however, is by no means a guarantee of violence. The front-runners in the 2017 French presidential election, for example, were as politically polarizing as their U.S. 2020 counterparts, with centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron calling right-wing leader Marine Le Pen’s party racist and xenophobic and Le Pen charging that Macron was “the candidate of savage globalisation.”

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Facebook readying ‘break-glass’ tools to restrict content if violence erupts after election Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

By Joey Garrison and Jessica Guynn, USA Today

WASHINGTON — Facebook executives said Tuesday the social media company is ready to implement “break-glass measures” to restrict content on its platforms if civil unrest and violence erupt following the Nov. 3 presidential election.

The preparations come as Facebook has taken more aggressive steps ahead of the 2020 election to limit disinformation on the social network than in 2016, when Russian operatives sought to further inflame tensions over hot-button topics such as race and immigration.

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs, told USA TODAY the company has engaged in meticulous “scenario-planning” on election outcomes that range from “benign scenarios to some extremely worrying ones.” He said Facebook has used knowledge gleaned from 200 elections around the world in the last four years to crack down on election interference and misinformation.

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Meet the Americans ‘standing by’ for possible election violence Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare

By Andrew Hay, Katie Paul Reuters

(Reuters) – Some Americans worried about possible violence after the U.S. presidential election are forming community watch groups, others are working on conflict de-escalation and still others are purchasing guns, according to two dozen voters, online groups and data surveyed by Reuters.

A common fear is that the Nov. 3 contest between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden remains undecided, leading to protests that could escalate into civil unrest, or even sectarian conflict.

An illustration of those concerns came in Michigan on Thursday, with the announcement that 13 people had been arrested in alleged plots to kidnap the state’s governor and attack the state capitol building.

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‘All the red flags’: Political analysts warn of U.S. election violence in November Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right

By Elliot Smith, CNBC

With President Donald Trump refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power in the event that he loses the election and clashes already unfolding in some states, political analysts are uniquely fearful as November approaches.

Asked last week to commit to conceding should the Nov. 3 election go in favor of Democrat Joe Biden, Trump doubled down on his unfounded claims about mail-in ballots leading to widespread voter fraud in justifying his reluctance.

He reiterated this during Tuesday night’s chaotic presidential debate, calling mail-in voting a “disaster” and again suggesting that he would not accept a result that goes against him.

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When elections lead to violence: It’s happened before — and we’re heading that way now Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right

By Paul Rosenberg, Salon

Not even the most perceptive academic could have timed the publication of a 10-year research project this perfectly. LSU political scientist Nathan Kalmoe’s new book, “With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War” is being published in this overheated election season, and that’s just an accident. Ten years back, no one would have imagined the recently reported Transition Integrity Project projection of “both street-level violence and political impasse” in all four war-game scenarios it conducted for the 2020 election. (The full report is here.) Such possibilities weren’t on anyone’s radar — except for his.

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The Party of Fear vs the Party of Anger? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right

William S. Lind

Traditional Right

I expect President Trump to be re-elected, probably by a large margin, and the Republicans to hold the Senate and retake the House. Why? Because by this point the number of Americans who are angry is greater than the number who are scared. The Democrats are the party of fear and the Republicans are the party of anger. So the latter will win.

But what if fear does win out and Biden becomes President while the Democrats hold the House and take the Senate? Biden is an old-line Establishment politician who is unlikely to do anything radical on his own initiative. But he will be under pressure from the “woke” alt-Left, radicals in the House, and his own Vice-President to do some very stupid things. If he yields, or if we suddenly find ourselves with a hard-Left broad from California running the country, the Democrats could take some actions that would rip the country apart.

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America’s Extreme Right Wing: How Violent Political Polarisation Threatens a Peaceful Election? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right

The run-up to the coming US elections has seen an America more divided than ever before. As President Trump seeks re-election, national security observers in America watch the rise of the far-right with alarm and say politics, conspiracy and extreme right-wing ideology are all stirring the pot of violence.

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