NYT News Flash For Chris Wray: Antifa Is A Thing

Waste of space FBI Director for the nonce, Chris Wray, made news recently by announcing that Antifa isn't an organization. Wray was even quoted to that effect by Joe Biden in one of his rare appearances--contradicting AG Bill Barr.

Mirabile dictu, today in the NYT (h/t Steve Sailer) Farah Stockman--a member of the NYT editorial board, no less--goes all counter narratival. Stockman actually confirms that, yes, giving the devil Bill Barr his due, Barr was on to something when he called certain cities "anarchist jurisdictions":

The Truth About Today’s Anarchists

“Insurrectionary anarchists” have been protesting for racial justice all summer. Some Black leaders wish they would go home.

According to Stockman, Antifa isn't just an idea. It's a thing, and a highly organized thing--as anarchic things go. She begins her story with an unemployed photographer, Jeremy Lee Quinn, snapping photos of peaceful protests that somehow continually devolved into riots and looting. Quinn noticed that mysterious black clad whites kept showing up and instigating the events. Curious, Quinn decided to don black himself and find out what was up with that. Here's excerpts of what he learned:

Mr. Quinn began studying footage of looting from around the country and saw the same black outfits and, in some cases, the same masks. He decided to go to a protest dressed like that himself, to figure out what was really going on. He expected to find white supremacists who wanted to help re-elect President Trump by stoking fear of Black people. What he discovered instead were true believers in “insurrectionary anarchism.”

 

Quinn must've been reading bulletins from DHS.

To better understand them, Mr. Quinn, a 40-something theater student who worked at Univision until the pandemic, has spent the past four months marching with “black bloc” anarchists in half a dozen cities across the country, chronicling the experience on his website, Public Report.

...

Mr. Quinn discovered a thorny truth about the mayhem that unfolded in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis. It wasn’t mayhem at all.

While talking heads on television routinely described it as a spontaneous eruption of anger at racial injustice, it was strategically planned, facilitated and advertised on social media by anarchists who believed that their actions advanced the cause of racial justice. In some cities, they were a fringe element, quickly expelled by peaceful organizers. But in Washington, Portland and Seattle they have attracted a “cultlike energy,” Mr. Quinn told me.

 

But shouldn't facilitation and advertising for violence have been banned from social media? Am I missing something, or is there a reason why Stockman doesn't mention that as an issue?

Don’t take just Mr. Quinn’s word for it. Take the word of the anarchists themselves, who lay out the strategy in Crimethinc, an anarchist publication: Black-clad figures break windows, set fires, vandalize police cars, then melt back into the crowd of peaceful protesters. When the police respond by brutalizing innocent demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets and rough arrests, the public’s disdain for law enforcement grows. It’s Asymmetric Warfare 101.

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If that is not enough to convince you that there’s a method to the madness, check out the new report by Rutgers researchers that documents the “systematic, online mobilization of violence that was planned, coordinated (in real time) and celebrated by explicitly violent anarcho-socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peaceful protest,” according to its co-author Pamela Paresky. She said some anarchist social media accounts had grown 300-fold since May, to hundreds of thousands of followers.

“The ability to continue to spread and to eventually bring more violence, including a violent insurgency, relies on the ability to hide in plain sight — to be confused with legitimate protests, and for media and the public to minimize the threat,” Dr. Paresky told me.

Her report will almost certainly catch the attention of conservative media and William Barr’s Department of Justice, which recently declared New York, Portland and Seattle “anarchist jurisdictions,” a widely mocked designation accompanied by the threat of withholding federal funds.

Toward the end we realize that Stockman isn't just reporting. She's issuing a warning to the Dems--if you try to ride a tiger, getting off the tiger's back could prove a bit tricky:

That’s the thing about “insurrectionary anarchists.” They make fickle allies. If they help you get into power, they will try to oust you the following day, since power is what they are against. Many of them don’t even vote. They are experts at unraveling an old order but considerably less skilled at building a new one. That’s why, even after more than 100 days of protest in Portland, activists do not agree on a set of common policy goals.

Even some anarchists admit as much.

“We are not sure if the socialist, communist, democratic or even anarchist utopia is possible,” a voice on “The Ex-Worker” podcast intones. “Rather, some insurrectionary anarchists believe that the meaning of being an anarchist lies in the struggle itself and what that struggle reveals.”

In other words, it’s not really about George Floyd or Black lives, but insurrection for insurrection’s sake.

I'm guessing that realization, and the warning, is coming a bit too late. Black Americans seem to have got that pretty quickly, but white liberals are rather slow on the uptake. They're still calling for lining those who aren't in total lock-step with Prog orthodoxy up against a wall and doing a video of the executions. I'm guessing that Chris Wray's cow-towing to the Left won't save him.