Left-wing mayhem

According to the Democratic Socialists of America’s own data, nearly a third of its members in 2017 earned over $100,000 a year. Just 6% belonged to a union. A vast majority boasted a college or post-graduate degree. Only 6% of its members identified as “just Democratic Socialist,” with the rest falling into ideological camps ranging from the dull (“progressive”) to the obscenely radical (“anarcho-syndicalism”).

The survey provided cheap laughs for those suspicious of the group’s real commitment to “working-class liberation” but also provided a glimpse into how much the composition of the Democratic Socialists of America mirrors the Democratic Party, which its members like to complain is insufficiently left-wing. The two may be more alike than each group cares to admit. Polls from the Michigan primary this year, for example, found that 35% of participants earned $100,000 or more. Sanders, the self-identified socialist, won 36% of those voters and just a slim majority, 52%, of households with incomes under $50,000.

As riots broke out across American cities following the needless death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed black man, in police custody, both Republicans and Democrats rushed to separate those engaged in peaceful protests from criminals hellbent on looting and burning unguarded local businesses. A significant portion of those who chose nihilistic criminality over legitimate protest were mere petty opportunists. But they are also, much to establishment Democrats’ chagrin and denial, a large swath of the Democratic Party’s base.

The Trump administration has cast antifa — a violent, loose-knit American adaptation of mid-20th-century European leftists aiming to overthrow the old order under the guise of being “anti-fascist” — as a driving force behind at least some of the nationwide violence.

On May 30, Attorney General William Barr said that “with the rioting that is occurring in many of our cities around the country, the voices of peaceful protest are being hijacked by violent radical elements” and that “groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda.”

President Trump drove the administration’s point home during a speech from the White House. “I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail,” he said. “This includes antifa and others who are leading instigators of this violence.”

A 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service stated that “a portion of antifa movement members are willing to commit crimes to promote their beliefs” and that “the U.S. antifa movement appears to be decentralized, consisting of independent, radical, like-minded groups and individuals. Its tenets can dovetail with the principles of anarchism, socialism, and communism.” The report noted that “particular antifa groups may oppose different things based on how they identify who or what is fascist.”

In the case of the Floyd race riots, early evidence of some central organization by left-wing radicals has emerged, notably in Columbus, Ohio, where police arrested the owner of a bus that was stockpiled with weapons. An official from the New York Police Department’s terrorism and intelligence unit said “organizers of certain anarchist groups” were behind identifying targets for attackers, such as police cars or high-end stores. Details from these officials remain scarce and heavy-loaded with buzzwords such as “encrypted communication” (all iPhone messages are, by definition, encrypted) and “complex networks,” though they could be talking about something as simple as an online group chat. (As the Russian “collusion” investigation showed, intelligence officials have been known to inflate threats.)

But the scarcity of solid information combined with the serious reason to believe that organized anarchists acted as agents provocateurs to destroy thousands of businesses and scores of communities justify thorough investigation and interdiction by federal authorities. Barr said that he would use regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to combat antifa and other violent groups that operate across state lines, tracking their money and coordination.

Arrest records show that individuals behind some of the more heinous acts in the riots mirror what the DSA survey alluded to. Take, for example, the two attorneys arrested by the NYPD on May 31 for allegedly tossing a Molotov cocktail into a police car. Colinford Mattis, a Princeton and New York University graduate, is currently out on a $250,000 bond with his accomplice Urooj Rahman, a Fordham-educated attorney whose bail was secured by Salmah Rizvi, an intelligence official in the Obama administration who is now at the D.C.-based law firm Ropes & Gray.

Then, there’s New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s own daughter, who was arrested that same night for disobeying police orders on the same block police cars were being burned. Chiara de Blasio graduated from the ritzy Santa Clara University in 2016 and still lives with her parents at Gracie Mansion. Reports say she plans on becoming a social worker, although she currently works for a feminist activist group named the Santa Clara Community Action Program.

In short, these are bourgeois revolutionaries, not much different in background than the door-knockers who volunteered for Sanders’s presidential campaign. They are being radicalized on college campuses and in their workplaces, not with pamphlets distributed outside of a labor union meeting. This is important, and potentially more of a challenge, because it is organic and has the tacit approval of the Democratic Party.

Petty criminals drawn toward left-wing violence has been a fixture of American politics for over a century. The question facing those concerned with law and order is why these riots spiraled out of control more than did, say, the 1999 World Trade Organization rampage in Seattle. Those who declare their allegiance to myriad anarchist groups certainly play a role in domestic turmoil, but the accelerant lies with those occupying mainstream Democratic politics.

In The Unheavenly City Revisited, 20th-century neoconservative Edward Banfield writes about the genealogy of urban riots and traces how civil dysfunction on the scale we’re seeing today comes together. The looting of stores on Fifth Avenue, which has been excused by media commentators, politicians, and academics, is a distinct act committed by a different group of people from the destruction of police cars and a kind of petty crime far more common than violent confrontations with the police. But in combination with demonstrations, peaceful and violent, against the killing of Floyd, it serves as an accelerant for a riot — as does the intellectual justification it is given because it is part of more legitimate means of demonstration.

As Banfield wrote on the Los Angeles Watts Riots in 1965, “But what probably did most to make rioting seem legitimate was acceptance of the claim that the Watts riot was a ‘revolt,’ and that rioting everywhere had some political purpose. … Explanations that find the cause of rioting in the rioters’ environment are bound to be taken as justification, or at any rate extenuations, of their behavior and therefore tend to reinforce the irresponsibility that is characteristic of the age and class culture from which rioters are largely drawn.”

As American politics further realigns along income and educational lines, these professional-middle-class radicals have become more and more crucial to the Democratic Party’s governing coalition. This reality helps explain the bizarre response given from the Minneapolis government after the first night of rioting. Mayor Jacob Frey abjectly lied and blamed the violence on “out-of-state” instigators and suggested white supremacists were taking advantage of peaceful protesters to commit terrorism. No evidence has emerged of a single far-right actor attending any riot, anywhere, and the vast majority of arrests in Minneapolis were from state residents.

Before his current stint as Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison represented the state’s 5th Congressional District, where he won 71% of the vote in a district that’s 77% white. That seat is now occupied by Rep. Ilhan Omar. Following Sanders’s primary loss in 2016, the Democratic Party knew it had a problem on its hands, particularly after Ellison opted to run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison lost to Tom Perez but was made deputy chairman.

The following year, he expressed his solidarity with antifa by tweeting out a picture of himself holding the “Antifa Handbook” outside a Minneapolis bookstore. “At @MoonPalaceBooks and I just found the book that strike fear in the heart of @realDonaldTrump.” He has since deleted the tweet, but he is now, as mentioned, the state attorney general.

Despite his revolutionary rhetoric, Ellison hails from a comfortable, bourgeois background. He grew up in Detroit as one of five sons to a psychiatrist and social worker. He now counts three brothers as lawyers and another as a surgeon. In other words, his life is the embodiment of the American dream that Ellison claims is no more than a suffocating fairy tale.

Perhaps one of the most undercovered things to come out of the riots was the Biden campaign’s response. Although the former vice president was careful to condemn the violence in less-than-harsh terms, the behavior of his staff was more revealing. As business owners in Minneapolis pleaded to be spared from the senseless anarchy engulfing the streets, at least 13 of Joe Biden’s staffers donated to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a group that “pays criminal bail and immigration bond for those who cannot afford to as we seek to end discriminatory, coercive, and oppressive jailing.”

Only 45 individuals were arrested in Minnesota’s Twin Cities from May 28 through May 30, according to police reports, meaning that law enforcement focused on arresting particularly bad actors, not your average college student disobeying orders. Thirteen of those 45 were arrested for commercial burglary, another for possession of an illegal firearm. The rest were taken into custody under rioting charges.

The rationale for donating these funds was that Biden sees cash bail as a “modern-day debtors prison,” according to the presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign spokesman. Of all the times to make a point about the injustice of our legal system, the Biden campaign chose a moment when the poor and disadvantaged were the main alleged victims of those the campaign was helping.

And the damage was substantial: at least $55 million in Minneapolis, over $10 million in Georgia and Nebraska, and tens of millions of dollars’ worth in New York.

The entire conceit of Biden’s campaign, and the reason establishment figures rallied to his side before Sanders could jump out to an insurmountable delegate lead over him, is that he represents moderation at a time of radicalism and division. But the actions of the campaign over the past couple of weeks completely undermine its own raison d’etre.

And it marks a departure for the Democratic Party. No one from President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign bailed out the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in 2011 when 768 of them were arrested after blocking the Brooklyn Bridge that October.

For years, conservatives have speculated that wealthy leftist philanthropists such as George Soros play a role in the funding of antifa or in organizing Black Lives Matter-led protests through his Open Society Foundations, but his network denied any involvement, and little evidence supports the theory. Many on the Left happily join in for free, without the need for outside seed money, and with the blessing of elites.

Even Black Lives Matter, a movement for which virtually every major corporation and media outlet expresses support, traces its roots to the black radicalism of the 1970s, although its modern iteration goes back only to 2014 and an entirely false account of racist policing being responsible for the death of a young black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.

Black Lives Matter’s website declares the group’s mission is to “counter police violence” and “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes” and that “by combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, we are winning immediate improvements in our lives.” But one of its founders, Alicia Garza, counts convicted cop killer and FBI fugitive Assata Shakur as one of her main inspirations. Garza, along with the two other founders of Black Lives Matter, were named three of Time magazine’s “100 Women of the Year.”

Borealis Philanthropy, a left-wing group that connects grant-makers with activist organizations, helps manage the Movement Fund, which provides funding to a constellation of groups based on priorities set by the Black Lives Matter-affiliated group Movement for Black Lives. There is also a host of bail and legal relief funds for different Black Lives Matter chapters. On May 27, Borealis announced $915,000 in grants to 16 new grantees “advancing Black liberation” across the United States, including funding to a Black Lives Matter chapter.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Black Lives Matter set up a petition on its website to defund the police, calling law enforcement a barrier to the survival and thriving of black people. “George Floyd’s violent death was a breaking point — an all too familiar reminder that, for Black people, law enforcement doesn’t protect or save our lives. They often threaten and take them,” the group wrote.

That didn’t stop the corporate boards of Nike, Disney, NBC, CitiBank, McDonalds, and many others from releasing statements supporting Black Lives Matter and the Floyd demonstrations, although it remains unclear whether they even fundamentally disagree with their radical messages. The breakdown of civic order in cities has earned the approval of almost every functionary of power in the country, as the Biden campaign’s donations to a bail fund prove. Once, left-wing radicals feared that when they looked at the establishment, they were seeing their future. Now, they’re seeing their reflection.