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A Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias. This Is What He Found.
(www.propublica.org)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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Just started reading, but God, these people are so much better organized than us, it's depressing
it's not for lack of trying, but the far right doesn't deal with wreckers and state interference to the same degree the left does.
the left is also less willing to abuse human psychology to get people under the banner.
we can be like them, but we have to start getting left wing sympathetic people on board with things that traditionally the left finds abhorrent in this country.
A lot of little and big rubicons to cross culturally before we can have organizing like that.
specifically about the use of force and discipline around organizing. people need to accept enough hierarchy to be able to take orders, to be willing to do what it takes to keep your movement and your comrades safe.
acceptance that we've been at war for decades now, but haven't been acting like it. It's time to treat this like war and i think a lot of leftists are still not there in the USA w/r/t accepting that.
biggest thing i think is that the state hasn't been murdering and imprisoning right wingers en masse for the best part of a century
And life is too comfortable here for leftists to seriously pick up arms or do anything more than organizing book clubs and mutual aid. I'll take it over nothing but let's not fool ourselves.
A few possibilities:
The kinds of people who radicalize on the right seem to be more rural, less smart about money, and more fearful of economic and cultural changes hurting their way of life. Rising gas prices and inflation hurts the person with a $800/month payment on a truck that gets 10 miles per gallon, on top of keep a gun hobby that costs thousands of dollars for all the latest parts and ammo. We think "time to cut back on meat and finally pull the trigger on that hybrid/EV". They think "Soros wants illegals to replace our jobs and make us eat bugs." No, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to.
These folks may be class conscious in a sense that they see "elites" as the ones holding them back, but they don't recognize the bourgeois on the right. They love Elon Musk and Trump and hate Soros and anyone from LA or Hollywood. They may also see this as "a few bad ones" or "not real Capitalism" and fall into the same mental trap Democrats do that if we just get rid of X everything will be fine.
They think their "culture" is under attack, and they think they are losing some Culture War. Every time a major TV show, movie, or video game has non-white characters or anything LGBT or anyone this isn't white and Republican like them they call it "woke" and freak out. These are not people that can simply "not watch" because to them they need control over ALL media. They can't tolerate some media catering to people besides them!
I think in addition to what MayoPete said there isn't really any media to speak of out there telling people shit is bad and it's because of marxist explanation. Instead we have a right wing media that tells people shit is bad because of immigrants and the elites and a liberal media that tells people things are fine stop worrying so much. Unions are basically non-existant and third places no longer exist so unless you actually go looking for it and actually do some reading the closest thing to class consciousness you're going to land on is fascism because it's the most readily available in life.
This can't be overstated. Compare the treatment of the Black Panther Party to the Sovereign Citizen movement. The BPP created lunch programs, healthcare clinics, tutoring centers, etc. and yet they were completely vilified by the media as a gang of black supremacists. The FBI carried out decades-long campaigns of dismembering the organization with a network of informants and multiple attacks (notably the assassination of Fred Hampton).
Meanwhile, Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unibomber) killed multiple FBI agents. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nicols carried out the largest domestic terrorist attack ever on US soil by blowing up a government building. All three men were part of the Sovereign Citizen movement. Despite this, sovcits were able to take over a town in Oregon and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge HQ in 2016.
So you have a group with a history of violence against the federal government who do an armed takeover of an area, who provide zero community assistance or outreach, and yet it took weeks for the feds to do anything serious. When the BPP protested (while armed) against discrimination in Sacramento on May 2nd. 1967, they were arrested and dispersed that same day, despite breaking no laws.
There continues to be targeted attacks against Black Lives Matter leaders (resulting in the deaths of over a dozen local leaders), while sovcits are free to continue planning mass shootings, bombings, and other forms of terrorism. If you're leftwing in the US and try to help your community or ask maybe the government should give you a trial before they execute you, the state will come down on you with every resource available as swiftly as possible. If you're a rightwing, literal terrorist who vocally advocates for the murder of government officials and violence against the state, you get treated like you parked illegally.
The left (the real left) in America can't use violence not because it is unwilling, but because it doesn't have a state apparatus to do so. We have to get a critical mass of people to the point where reactionaries will be unable to simply send in a SWAT team and run a smear campaign on the evening news. A leftwing, American revolution will essentially require entire cities and counties to come under leftwing control before it even thinks about using violence against the state.
It's not just that. These people simply take the prevailing ideology pounded into everyone with omnipresent propaganda to one of its logical conclusions.
You can get a lot of people that way, you have a big pool. By contrast to become an organized member of a left-wing political movement you must reject everything you've been taught, the entire mainstream media, the dominant entertainment narrative and begin entertaining explanations for things that leave you alienated from liberals and conservatives if voiced too loudly and openly while these reactionaries can get more and more cooked and extreme and still retain normie Republican friends and relations after expressing all but their most direct agitation for violence type opinions. Simply holding to normal Americans that the US is a force for bad things, does imperialism, shouldn't be supported is a sure-fire way to be cast out as an extremist by co-workers, friends, family, etc. On the other hand the simple reactionary contention that the US government is too woke, that uh they're infringing on individual rights and liberties, that we need some sort of mass reactionary movement to take back our rights will be nodded along by or shrugged off by most Americans.
Add on that most self-aware members of the left are much less likely to have ever been cops or joined the military and the years of experience and network effects of being former either of those don't exist for the left either meaning it's stray individuals who took the time to train or radicalized after leaving the military who have to find each other.
The consequences are also lesser. You won't have any kind of mass movement to free leftists imprisoned on trumped up charges and they'll be gleefully condemned and distanced by liberals and the Democrats who falsely pass themselves off as something resembling left in the US, meanwhile the wider right will immediately rally around anyone but an open neo-Nazi and proclaim the government did them dirty. The feds and local cops see these militias as mostly lost sheep, they have similar politics after all they just think these people take it a bit too far, but at the end of the day they like them are reactionaries at heart so there's less interest in pressure there.
The thing is, these dorks love role-playing as military in everything they do, so things like hierarchies and orders and taking Everything Very Seriously is what they'd be doing even if they weren't into militias. Those kind of things, conformity and discipline, are the things that cool leftists avoid.
They organize by being insufferable dorks who believe they alone stand between civilization and removed. We are cool and nice and people like us and that's why they're drawn to us and that's where we start to organize
based on the average american's reaction to the word ''communism'', i don't think this is working too well
aka counter-cultural lifestylists.