Yes, There Is Such a Thing As Professional Left-Wing Protesters

Nebraska senator Ben Sasse has come under fire for this tweet:

He later clarified that he accepts there’s a difference between riots and protests, but his point is that it’s worth knowing whether or not there were any institutional groups on the left that were financially supporting or enabling the violent protests we’ve seen since Donald Trump was elected. It’s an entirely fair question. Nonetheless, left-leaning pundits are declaring that Sasse is “laying the groundwork for an authoritarian crackdown.” This is nonsense.

Earlier this year, MoveOn.org fundraised off of a promise to support protests of Donald Trump. “So here’s the plan: We’ll support MoveOn.org members to call out and nonviolently protest Trump’s racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, and violent behavior — and show the world that America rejects Trump’s hate,” according to a fundraising email. “And to keep it going, we’re counting on you to donate whatever you can to cover the costs of everything involved — the organizers, signs, online recruitment ads, training, and more.”

And already, a left-wing group called the Progress Unity Fund is raising money to support protests of Trump’s inauguration. Progress Unity Fund is a financial backer of International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), an organization that has long provided logistical and financial support for protests—particularly in D.C. and San Francisco. A.N.S.W.E.R.’s first big action was to protest the American invasion of Afghanistan in immediately following September 11. (It’s perhaps notable that A.N.S.W.E.R. is an outgrowth of the communist Workers World Party, which supported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)

While these and other organizations are generally committed to nonviolence, it’s safe to say that when you urge the left-wing rabble to go into the streets, you can’t always count on them to stop at singing Kumbayah. They’ve often had uneasy alliances with anarchists and other left-wing groups that make it a point to provoke and vandalize.

Since the turn of the millennium, Washington D.C. has seen left-wing protests with some regularity. I covered a lot of these protests, and later, when I worked for a financial wire service, I had to make it through the barricades to do my job. For many years in a row, the annual World Trade Organization meeting in the city sparked large protests that you could set your watch to. (Now consider the irony of many of the same people showing up to protest Trump even though he’s perhaps the closest to their position on trade of any president in their lifetime.) This was on top of anti-war protests that were a regular feature of the Bush administration. And then came Occupy Wall Street.

Basically, since the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999 on through the Trump protests now, the left has been protesting with regularity and, naturally, there has been political infrastructure that has grown up around these protest movements. That’s just a fact—and it doesn’t preclude reasonably concluding these protests also have support. Even though most left-wing organizations that support protesters employ the rhetoric of nonviolence, there’s been no shortage of violence. Again, asking for reporters to examine the question of whether or not these groups have supported irresponsible actors, wittingly or unwittingly, seems like a legitimate thing for journalists to look into at a time when anti-Trump protesters are attacking pregnant women.