Antifa takes over Seattle police station and environs – what it signifies
Weakness and appeasement on the part of civic authorities are signals that give rise to the empowerment of those who would disrupt and overturn civil society:
Antifa, or their helpers, under the pretense of caring about black people, now has control of a police station, and more.
Seattle’s politicians have ceded control over one of the oldest police stations in the city to a group of leftists, who have used the death of George Floyd, to advance one of their long held goals, seizing government property in the name of a Marxist revolution.
One law enforcement source tells me third-shift officers still have personal belongings in the building:
“Officers went to the precinct, which is now patrolled by armed protesters. They asked if they could go into ‘our’ building to retrieve personal belongs. They were denied entry by the armed factions.”
This group, quite likely members of the Antifa-affiliated John Brown Gun Club, now controls, not just the station, but four blocks of the Capitol Hill area of Seattle, which they have renamed…
Reports are that the police haven’t a clue what to do next. That’s no surprise, either, considering that it’s the “progressive” city of Seattle where the leadership is far more aligned with Antifa than with the police.
It strikes me, and not for the first time, that Antifa has a brilliant name. The left knows that the group is made of leftist anarchists, but liberals think the name simply means what Antifa says it means: anti Fascist. So Orwellian.
The quote I offered from the Legal Insurrection article says Antifa is operating “under the pretense of caring about black people.” Actually, Antifa operates under many pretenses (including the “anti-Fascist” one), but helping black people is most definitely one of them. Make no mistake about it, black communities are being hurt the most right now, and defunding the police is not a popular position there. But Antifa could not care less.
Antifa is about power – and they are drunk with it right now. They will do as much as they are allowed to do. In the manner of Al Qaeda 9/11 planners who were surprised when the twin towers actually came down that day, Antifa is probably surprised that their targets so far have proven to be so soft. Although I doubt they thought that an especially strong fight would be put up – after all, the ground had been thoroughly prepared by the Gramscian march, the leftist mayors and AGs are in place, and Antifa has also wrapped itself in the cloak of anti-Fascism/anti-racism sanctity – I think Antifa was nevertheless surprised at the speed and extent of the capitulation.
It also strikes me that the recent brouhaha over the publication of the Senator Cotton op-ed in the NY Times, a skirmish that resulted in the resignation of the editorial page editor who allowed such heresy to be published in its sacred pages, is notable not just for the fact that it represents the victory of the new Red Guards over the older forces there, but also because of the subject matter of the Cotton piece. In it, Cotton had asserted the rather odinary idea that in times of civil unrest of great magnitude, the president is legally empowered to call out the military to subdue rioters (this has happened before, notably during the Rodney King riots). So it is significant that the group that ousted editor Bennett was also protesting the airing of the very idea that when blue city mayors and blue state governors cannot or will not put down an insurrection and protect ordinary citizens, the federal government can step in.
That leads in a straight line to events in Seattle, in which Antifa claims territory from what is seen as the enemy – the police – and the city government cannot muster the strength or will to stop them. The police are probably thoroughly disgusted by the fact that around the country, blue city governments have abandoned them and allowed them to be demonized for the actions of a very few.
Andrew C. McCarthy has this to say:
The Left’s plan is not to defund the police. It is to denude the police — to strip them of their capacity to act and their legitimacy as keepers of the peace.
The plan is not new. I outlined it many times during the Obama presidency, during which the Justice Department made it a priority to supplant the intelligence-based, broken-windows approach to policing — the approach that gave America an unprecedented generation of record low crime and safe urban streets.
Intelligence-based policing scrutinizes dynamic ranges of data points to deploy the police where the crime is. It is driven by offense behavior. In stark contrast, progressive-fantasy policing pretends that the police encounter minority suspects, particularly black men, because the police are institutionally racist, not because these suspects are responsible for a high percentage of crime — much higher than their demographics’ proportions of the total population.
Consequently, progressives theorize that police should back off from investigative activity in criminal hot spots, which is distorted into “racial profiling.” Instead, cops are told to rely on community leaders — typically allied with big-city Democrats — to be their eyes and ears. In this, Democrats can always rely on a mass of Republicans, who echo their tropes about our “carceral state” and the desperate need for “criminal-justice reform” — as if the prisons were teeming with non-violent marijuana tokers rather than hardened criminals with long records (reflecting the system’s practice of pleading serious offenses down to petty ones, the better to get criminals back on the street more rapidly).
The “defunding” rhetoric aside, the idea is not to make municipal police departments disappear. It is to bludgeon them with federal dollars collected from the taxpayers who most need competent policing. As I’ve detailed, a big part of the strategy is Justice Department civil-rights litigation. The Justice Department uses controversial police incidents as a pretext to open “pattern or practice” investigations and sue municipalities or their police departments under a pernicious Clinton-era civil-rights law. Since municipalities cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the Justice Department’s $30 billion annual budget, they are pressured into consent decrees, often with federal monitors, in which they agree to adopt the Left’s approved police practices.
This had momentum during the Obama years, but it is a gradual process that can be slowed by the election of a more law-and-order–oriented administration (which tends to happen when the public has had its fill of what progressive policies yield on the streets). The more sweeping approach is percolating in Congress now: Washington-prescribed transformation of the nation’s police departments, using the threat that federal funds will be withheld if the Left’s preferred “reforms” are not made.
Is there a single blue-run city standing against it? I haven’t followed the course of the riots in all the cities they are affecting, so perhaps I’ve missed several exceptions to the capitulation rule, but I don’t think so.
In the meantime, Antifa is small in membership. But it is bold and it is flush with success right now. A small but determined group can do a lot of damage if the opposition is confused, cowardly, and/or not really all that strongly opposed.
Antifa and BLM are fraudulent in both name and mission statement.
ProFascists and Black Lives Don’t Matter are the militant enforcers for the Democrat Party, burning, looting and intimidating just like the KKK before them.
My first thought this morning was that the cell phone towers that service that area be shut off, then followed by electricity and water. If they want to be outside of the US, let them! Provide your own damn green energy and set up your own communications. Of course, the mayor of Seattle won’t have the balls (yes I know the mayor’s a xir, or xim, or whatever) to do any of the above.
Blatant Lying Marxists are frauds and love violence? I’m shocked.
There is a solution, tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and where deplorables flourish high velocity lead injections. As some redneck noted, we don’t have tear gas, tasers or rubber bullets, we have real bullets.
This is why the gang violence doesn’t happen where I live. Try to break into my home and exit your mortal coil. 12 gauge 00 buckshot.
Today I ran across a splendid timeline on Antifa which fills in the gaps of how Antifa came out of radical New Left of the sixties. Essential reading. (Apologies to AesopFan or ArtflDgr if they got here first).
____________________________________________________
According to Antifa lore, an effort by young punks to expel neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the music scene led to the formation of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), beginning in the Midwest and then spreading outward. As chapters formed in various cities, regional councils and networks were formed, such as the Midwest Anti-Fascist Network (MAFN) in 1995.
But present at the birth of ARA were members of America’s long-time revolutionary clique, with roots going all the way back to the domestic terror group Weather Underground. Consulting the young anti-racist punks in the formation of ARA were members of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC). Several separate ARAs would go on to form one of the largest Antifa networks in the country, Torch Antifa, whose website was registered by a former JBAKC member.
JBAKC was formed as a front for the May 19th Communist Organization (MCO), itself founded out of the remnants of the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, the FALN and other terrorist groups of the ’60s and ’70s. (May 19 was chosen since it was the birthday of both Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh.)
Following a split in the Weather Underground leadership over whether to emphasize class or racial struggle, the MCO emphasized working for “black liberation.” Members of the MCO were responsible for several bombings and robberies in the 1980s, including the infamous 1981 Brinks Armored Car Robbery.
JBAKC used its newsletter “Death to the Klan!” to highlight street fighting with Klansmen, accuse Reagan officials of white supremacy, endorse MCO bank robberies as “expropriation,” and promote communist insurgencies taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador. It is important, again, to keep in mind that this was all done under the guise of “fighting white supremacy.”
The logic of JBAKC and the May 19th Communist Organization, and the same ideology which drives Antifa today, was that at its core the United States was founded on white supremacy, and therefore needs to be destroyed. Their “Cops and Klan Go Hand in Hand” slogan suggests there is no distinction between neo-Nazis and America’s institutions.
–Kyle Shideler, “The Real History of Antifa”
https://americanmind.org/essays/the-real-history-of-antifa/
I’m old enough to remember the “Little Rock Nine”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
When President Eisenhower “federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students.”
I was living in Memphis when Martin Luther King was assassinated at the Loraine motel and remember when
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_assassination_riots
“In New York City, mayor John Lindsay traveled directly into Harlem, telling black residents that he regretted King’s death and was working against poverty. He is credited for averting major riots in New York with this direct response although minor disturbances still erupted in the city.[7] In Indianapolis, Indiana, United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is credited with preventing a riot there. In Boston, rioting may have been averted by a James Brown concert taking place on the night of April 5, with Brown, Mayor Kevin White, and City Councilor Tom Atkins speaking to the Garden crowd about peace and unity before the show.”
My, how times have changed.
Physicsguy +10, exactly my thoughts. The other option is to go full Weimar and in return for peace offer Antifa all of Seattle and Bezos central for headquarters. It might be entertaining to watch, but from long distance.
Still waiting for Andrew McCarthy to stop flapping his gums and start holding accountable his NeverTrump and establishment GOP friends and acquaintances for enabling all this. Does McCarthy think people are just going to read his precious words and the scales will fall from their eyes? Does he still wish Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio were President?
I know some might find this harsh because McCarthy is saying the right things but talk is cheap. McCarthy has essentially ZERO influence over the Left, the Democrats, or the mainstream media. He has SOME influence on the Right. If he publicly called out those on the conservative side who are cowering before this moment, it might help spur some actual action.
Mike
Still waiting for Andrew McCarthy to stop flapping his gums and start holding accountable his NeverTrump and establishment GOP friends and acquaintances for enabling all this.
You want McCarthy to write columns saying David French, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Ross Douthat are tools?
Seattle, like New York City, elected far-leftist Mayors city council members.
They are both getting the governments they deserve.
I wonder who picks up the refuse? And who will provide fire protection? Will those living there have to pay for Electricity, Natural Gas and Water? Are delivery trucks carrying food and other consumables allowed to enter?
Interesting times ahead.
I know some might find this harsh because McCarthy is saying the right things but talk is cheap.
MBunge: So much of what you write is about settling scores. Sad.
Like you say, talk is cheap.
What people don’t realize is that AntiFa is Italian… As in AntiPasto… Think about it…
Amazon has been moving resources to Bellevue for awhile and this stuff will just increase that and if King County and the state go wobbly also then it will move entirely out of state eventually. Bezos can drone with all the ‘correct’ comments but the bottom line will be what matters.
For those not from this area Amazon uses an unbelievable amount of office space in the south Lake Union area of downtown Seattle. That area has not been too badly hit by the riots but if Amazon bails it will leave a massive hole in city tax revenue and greatly hit commercial real estate also.
Whether anybody in charge cares enough is another story.
Let’s compare what happens to, say, the results for Lavoy Finicum or the Waco community shall we?
In the meantime, at least our police (mostly) show more dignity than the Brits.
Watch unarmed Brit cops run from trash throwing crowd, and then be protected by screeching pacifist women.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/12704
What people don’t realize is that AntiFa is Italian… As in AntiPasto… Think about it…
PaxVobiscum: I thought Antifa was a nod to the Palestinian Intifada. But I was wrong.
Et cum spiritu tuo.
Many years ago, when I read Shirer’s excellent, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” I was incredulous the scraggly group of idealogues who tried and seemingly failed to topple the Weimar Republic would rise to power over the entire country. I mean, I know it actually happened, but they were such losers.
If I were a German living in Berlin, or Bonn, or Stuttgart, likely even München; I probably would have barely paused on the story in the next day’s newspaper.
Mr Bunge:
Do the spasms start every time you hear or read the word McCarthy? How long does it take for your pulse to return to your baseline rate and you blood pressure to drop to a safe level? If you were driving when you heard the dreaded “McCarthy” would you pull off to the shoulder or just endanger everyone else in your rage?
We know he turned you into a newt, and you haven’t gotten better so leave the rants for some other subject. Make a new rut to wallow in.
This is similar to the student takeovers of university admin buildings back in the 1960s/70s. Except Antifa is much better organized, much more determined, and armed. Physics guy has the right of it. Cut the utilities, surround the building and wait ’em out. No food, no water, no electricity, no cell phones. Just the loss of cell phone communication could panic them – they are of the generation who are addicted to their cells. But of course, Mayor Durkin wouldn’t do anything so “heartless.” Would she?
It appears that the CHAZites (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) have been infiltrated by someone from the BabylonBee
https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/06/10/hilarious-story-of-the-day-radical-leftists-in-autonomous-zone-in-seattle-already-have-a-huge-problem/
A tweet from a CHAZite reads “homeless people we invited in have taken all the food. Please bring ….” vegan mulch for them to survive on.
Tragic. LOLGF Auntie Fay.
Many years ago, when I read Shirer’s excellent, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” I was incredulous the scraggly group of idealogues who tried and seemingly failed to topple the Weimar Republic would rise to power over the entire country. I mean, I know it actually happened, but they were such losers.
1. Weimar Germany had ill-constructed institutions (so do we).
2. Weimar Germany had an incompetent political class which made horrendous mistakes. (A bright light was Hjalmar Schacht, however).
3. Weimar Germany made some crucial policy mistakes after 1929 in tandem with other western countries. Britain was able to reverse course in the fall of 1931 and limited the damage to it’s economy. Germany did not.
This acted to discredit the German establishment. NB the revanchist volkisch element antedated the Weimar Republica and had a constituency that bounced around 6-7% of the electorate during Weimar, a good deal larger than the libertarian or palaeo constituencies in the U.S. today. The German tragedy was that the country did not turn to the conservative and monarchist element, which withered away as the Nazi’s advanced.
Mayor Durkin wouldn’t do anything so “heartless.” Would she?
If she won’t, there’s the King County Sheriff and the Governor along with the state police and the National Guard.
Your problem, really, is that just as the distinction between ‘peaceful’ and ‘violent’ ‘protesters’ is factitious, the distinction between different fractions of the Democratic Party is as well. They range from the horrible to the merely ineffectual.
Art Deco:
I can’t speak of the King County Sheriff but the governor “King Jay of Inslee” is a leftist loon that won’t do squat. If the Aunti Fay decide to mess with the Federal Courthouse/office building down the hill from the CHAZ things may get interesting. Federal Protective Services personnel are not under local control.
I lived in Seattle for many years and was there for the “Battle of Seattle,” in 1999, when anarchists from Eugene, Oregon, made their presence known in all the ways we’ve come to associate with Antifa.
I still have dear friends and family members in Seattle and have been trying to warn them about Antifa, a collection of goons I came to know all too well after moving to Oakland in 2005. Whatever else Antifa may be, in Oakland these people are the remnants of Occupy Oakland (or “Occupy the Port,” as they chose to call themselves, after their best-known “Antifaschisitsche Aktion,” which was to shut down the Port of Oakland, with, of course, no concern whatsoever for the many working-class people of all races who worked there).
I imagine that my dear friends and family members in Seattle are experiencing no small degree of cognitive dissonance. At least that is what I read in their conspicuous silence about what is going on in their own neighborhood. A glance at the Seattle Times brings up some interesting items.
First this:
Police have heard from Capitol Hill community members that some protesters have set up barricades in the neighborhood – and are apparently demanding to see people’s ID, and in some instances, residents and business owners have been asked to pay a fee to operate in a roughly six-block area around the precinct.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-area-protests-live-updates-for-wednesday-june-10/
And then there’s this (the Seattle Times is behind a paywall, so forgive me for just quoting the whole thing, which has to be read to be believed):
If I wasn’t thinking about being Black, what would I think about?
I think about the murder of Black people every morning. When I wake up, when I leave my house, when I jog around white neighborhoods, when I see the blue-red blur of a police car. I think of Black murder every time I open my phone to see white people’s vacations or dinners with friends or family gatherings. I look at white happiness and I wonder how they can so easily ignore the unjust murders countless Black families in America grieve every year. I look at white skin and wonder how they can discriminate against melanin yet lie blissfully on sunny beaches seeking darker complexions. I wonder what it’d be like to enter stores, go on walks, approach any public space and not worry about policing your face, posture, tone of voice.
George Floyd’s murder has reinforced the sad truth I’ve come to acknowledge after watching this happen to countless Black people, especially Black men, over the years: many white people don’t think of Black people as human, and therefore as beings who can be killed and mourned. Being a Black woman in America has led me to conclude that Black death is seen as deserved and inevitable, that the murder of Black people is not truly murder unless white people have eight minutes and 46 seconds of proof. They need to see the Black man choke and beg and plead for mercy before they acknowledge him as dead.
I feel silenced and powerless. To clarify: the fear that is associated with Blackness isn’t new to me. White-on-Black violence has always been an integral part of Blackness in America. What is new is white people seeming to care. Loudly. On Instagram, Twitter, in neighborhoods, at protests. Part of me feels emboldened to take advantage of the listeners and do activism work well and boldly. The other part of me is mourning.
https://www.seattletimes.com/life/as-a-black-woman-i-cant-stop-thinking-about-racism-its-my-reality/
I am happy to be living now in southern New Mexico. Some BLM idiots stopped traffic for a little while last Friday, but at least a few motorists had the temerity to yell at them and tell them to get the hell out of the road.
J.J.:
Some of those students were armed at Cornell in the 60s:
Bad link with no closing []
[a href”https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/06/its-going-down-seattle-surrenders-a-police-station-and-four-city-blocks-to-antifa/”]
Gerard vanderleun:
Thanks, fixed.
MollyG:
I’m sure this black woman grieves every time she hears of all the black men killed by other black men in Chicago or Atlanta or where ever. Crocodile tears she cries.
@om: I know, right? Thus one answer to her question: “If I wasn’t thinking about being Black, what would I think about?”
MollyG:
Does she have any other thoughts? Fixated on race? Racist maybe? Oh noessssssssss! Sorry. 😉
Hope you like New Mexico. I enjoyed the time I was on temporary work assignments in Abq 30 yrs ago.
I agree that antifa will seize as much power as they’re allowed to and it’s a virtual certainty that antifa members in other major cities are well aware of Seattle’s “CHAZ”. It seems likely that the longer CHAZ remains, the more certain that more antifa groups will seize other urban areas.
If BLM is stupid enough to join antifa in seizing urban areas, then they give Trump the rationale needed to declare BLM a terrorist organization as well.
If majors won’t act and Governors won’t act, then at some point Trump will have to act. Antifa has been declared a terrorist organization and in Seattle are engaged in open insurrection. That cannot be allowed to stand. They’re playing hardball now and shall reap what they’ve sown because in the real world… actions have consequences.
I wonder how the intrepid protestors would react if the National Guard showed up and started efficiently constructing a very tall, very sturdy wall to keep them in.
When I commented previously, I wasn’t aware that they blocked off a six block area. This will require a blockade of the entire area. Evacuate all regular citizens, then don’t allow anyone else in or out.. Starve ’em out. Either that or call in a few regular military who have experience in urban warfare from Iraq and Syria. Last resort, of course.
Unfortunately, the city council is almost all Marxists and sympathetic to Antifa. Mayor Durkin hasn’t the spine to do much. And don’t get me started on King Jay. He’s hiding out in Olympia mumbling about justice, science, and social distancing or some such. He’s easily the least impressive governor in all 50 of our states and that’s saying something.
The head of the Seattle Police Dept. union was on Laura Ingraham tonight expressing the outrage his members feel. Obama’s DOJ neutered the SPD during his term and they are a much diminished and hampered in trying to protect the city. It shows. Another of Obama’s contributions to the “fundamental transformation” of the country.
Why don’t black lives that are taken every day by other blacks matter? Eighteen black on black murders in Chicago last weekend. Nary a peep from BLM. This meme that the police are murdering blacks is BS and the data shows it. As we all know. The country is gripped in a mass hysteria. All mass delusions and madness of crowds eventually ends. How will this end?
Neo, sorry I didn’t know about the situations in all the schools. I was primarily speaking of California schools, of which I had personal experience. And unlike you, I did not research the subject thoroughly. 🙂
I prefer siege to invasion.
Right now, the residents are still quasi-brainwashed leftists, because, Seattle.
Government forces should not make martyrs of the Antifa insurrectionists until public sentiment turns decisively against them, so that intervention will be welcomed instead of turned against the rescuers.
This is, after all, a domestic dispute, and we know that the cops who step in to stop an abusive person from beating the victim are very often, if not always, turned on by said victim as well as by the abuser.
Some relevant posts around the web, to go with the one from Ace in Neo’s later post.
Support for the siege idea:
https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/06/10/hilarious-story-of-the-day-radical-leftists-in-autonomous-zone-in-seattle-already-have-a-huge-problem/
You can’t fire us, we quit:
https://www.redstate.com/diary/clint-fargeau/2020/06/10/veteran-police-commander-writes-explosive-op-ed/
This won’t end well:
https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2020/06/08/i-lived-in-a-society-that-had-no-police-n505848
Best for last:
https://babylonbee.com/news/lego-replaces-police-with-antifa
Today the pits, tomorrow the wrinkles.
Gramsci marches on.
https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-vaughn/2020/06/10/hundreds-of-protesters-enter-seattle-city-hall-along-with-councilmember-sawant/
Aesop Fan
That’s what happens when you elect a socialist radical to a position in government, they betray the trust of the people. She opened the city hall after hours to the “protestors” aka the mob, for a photo op. Good thing, I guess, that the building is still standing.
Either that or call in a few regular military who have experience in urban warfare from Iraq and Syria. Last resort, of course.
It wouldn’t take much effort to clear the rabble out. These people aren’t Iraqi insurgents. They’re a bunch of okupiers.
Here’s the official Associated Press headline for its story on Seattle.
“Trump fumes as protesters stake out festive zone in Seattle”
Mike
Parker said “Try to break into my home and exit your mortal coil. 12 gauge 00 buckshot”.
I have no personal knowledge of this and am not giving advice, but for whatever it might be worth-
I was in a civilian training course and the instructor (ex military and law enforcement) recommended against using 00 buckshot for home defense. He based this on his having to secure a crime scene apartment where someone was killed by this method. He said the sickening carnage and damage to the premises would make the home psychologically uninhabitable for a home defender.