The Pacific Beach Antifa Conspiracy
Arrests and search warrants naming eight people said to be "Antifa" were served in Los Angeles County and San Diego County in recent days. Los Angeles police and sheriff’s deputies, Long Beach police, Escondido police and the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office joined in the effort, with at least one of the arrests including a swat-type raid, including military weapons.
Prosecutors describe those arrested as self-identified anti-fascists from San Diego and Los Angeles who traveled to a Pacific Beach “Patriot March” in early January. And there is no doubt that a bunch of black-clad individuals mixed it up with what the press has called “Trump supporters.”
What makes this case a big deal are the conspiracy to riot charges leveled against just one side of the street brawl that occurred. The word “Antifa” has been bandied about as part of the justification for those indictments.
Authoritarians have been using that word for a belief system holding that street fighting is a good way to oppose the far right as if it were an actual organization. There is no Antifa in that sense.
In this case, the word is being used as hype by a DA facing an election next year. Conspiracy charges are notoriously difficult to prove, and hauling those arrested in these raids before a jury sets up a no-win situation for prosecutors and a propaganda opportunity for those charged.
In this instance, as in most conspiracy constructs in recent history, there’s a good chance there’s an informer willing to spin an improbable yarn about clandestine meetings, chat messages, and social media accounts together in a fashion designed to scare the crap out of a jury if it gets that far. If nothing else, the DA’s office will be able to generate a story fitting into right wing mythology.
There were indeed individuals dressed in all black (one even carried an Antifa flag) on the street that day. Whether they were actually self-identified with the group or cosplaying as anti-fascist fighters is open to question. But it is known that their actions didn’t occur in a void.
For years, an assortment of self-appointed MAGA-types (including several identified participants in the events of that day) have threatened and assaulted individuals, along with disrupting the activities of progresssive/leftist gatherings. Both the San Diego Police Department and the County Sheriffs have regularly overlooked these actions.
Eyewitness and media accounts of the conflict in Pacific Beach universally say assaults were perpetrated by individuals in both groups. When police gave an order to disperse, it only applied to the counter protestors.
Three counter protesters were arrested that day: two adults who police said failed to disperse and a juvenile accused of assaulting an officer. An SDPD spokesperson said some of those counter protesters threw bottles, rocks and eggs at officers, failing to note the presence of right wingers using the police as a shield.
From The Appeal:
At least five people involved in the Capitol rally on Jan. 6 attended a violent pro-Trump “Patriot March” in San Diego just three days after the democracy-shaking event. But police declared an unlawful assembly that only applied to anti-fascist counterprotesters.
Among the right-wing crowd was Alberto Nunez, a member of the Proud Boys, who posted on his Instagram account on Jan. 8 that he filmed during the Capitol insurrection and would soon upload footage to Parler. (Nunez never posted the footage because Amazon Web Services suspended hosting the social network soon after the insurrection.) And before that he posted photos of himself at Proud Boys events in Washington, D.C., including one with the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, who was recently exposed as an informant for federal and local law enforcement. In December, the Proud Boys burned a Black Lives Matter banner in D.C. Tarrio was later arrested and charged with one misdemeanor count of destruction of property related to the incident.
David Ramses, Kick Cunningham, Tony Be, and a far-right influencer known as MagaPit also attended the Patriot March after participating in the Capitol rally. And they’re visible in an Instagram video of Proud Boys burning the Black Lives Matter banner. The men are part of the ultra-nationalist group New Patriot Wave; the group rebranded from its previous iteration, the American Coalition Party, because of social media bans. Ramses, Be, Cunningham and MagaPit posted a selfie at the Capitol during the rally.
The so-called patriots included a wide swath of individuals with a history of being associated with violence perpetrated against people in San Diego based on the perception they were anti-Trump.There are allegations about connections by some of those participants to an ongoing series of attacks on homeless individuals in PB.
From the Union-Tribune:
Steve Walker, the communications director for the District Attorney’s Office, provided the names and ages of the men expected to be arraigned Monday, but wrote that he “can’t provide any further information at this time.”
Union-Tribune reporters and editors documented some acts of violence at the scene from both the pro-Trump rallygoers and the counterprotesters. A Los Angeles-based videographer captured a nearly two-minute-long attack by counterprotesters involving the use of pepper spray, a wooden folding chair thrown through the air, sticks, punches and kicks.
A video posted on YouTube and elsewhere showed one of the anti-fascist protesters pepper spraying a man and his dog on the boardwalk.
Neither Sharki nor Walker responded to questions about whether any of the pro-Trump protesters were being investigated for the violence they carried out that day. In one incident, captured from several angles and shared widely online, a pro-Trump crowd attacked a barefoot man wearing a George Floyd T-shirt. Just before the attack, a man from the group spit on the barefoot man. Moments later, as the shoeless man was trying to break up a fight between two women, the spitting man sucker punched the barefoot man, dropping him to the ground. Two other men from the right-wing group — including one carrying a Trump flag — punched and kicked the man while he was on the ground.
The whole notion of fighting it out on the streets for a cause (of any persuasion) is so twentieth century. It comes from the same mindset as those who think buying up large quantities of arms and ammo will protect them from big government, the United Nations, or Jewish space lasers.
I want to yell “grow up!” at some of these folks. Then I realize they rightly feel the wrath of a system based on defining violence by class and racial lines… that the autocracy seen as an end goal by the right post-Trump depends on what Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes in The Atlantic as lawless masculinity:
In classic authoritarian fashion, Trump attracted collaborators by making it easier for men to act on their desires without fear of punishment. In 2019, his administration partly decriminalized domestic violence, limiting its definition to physical acts of harm (which effectively legalized sexual, emotional, economic, and psychological actions or threats of actions). Trump also defended men accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and populated high-profile government positions with men, including Steve Bannon, who were accused of sexual harassment, domestic abuse, or inappropriate workplace behavior. How fitting that his chief of protocol, Sean Lawler, carried a horsewhip around in the office to intimidate co-workers.
The far right shock troops emerging out of the MAGA movement are emboldened by the all-too-common reality that authorities will look the other way when they engage in violence and/or terrorism.
As writer/researcher Brook Binkowski and others have repeatedly documented, San Diego has a long history of white supremacist violence:
The entire United States has yet to come to terms with the national legacy of centuries of genocides and human trafficking, but San Diego, in particular, drifts along obliviously. The city where I grew up has hardly begun to acknowledge its own role in enabling and perpetuating a mind-set that can so effortlessly become racialized violence — especially when hate crimes are treated like a game, the perpetrators egged on by gleeful, ghoulish cheerleaders watching on Facebook Live and keeping virtual score on 8chan and Stormfront.
California, and Southern California in particular, has been held up as an example of successful diversity by some and hopeless liberal failures by others, but in reality the state has been and continues to be shaped by competing forces of demographic change and white supremacist reaction. Nowhere is this more distilled than at the very farthest edge of the country, San Diego, at the gateway to Latin America.
I have zero desire (and close to zero ability) to head to the streets to punch brainwashed humans. My view of history is that ferocity aimed at institutions is what drives change. I also acknowledge the frustration felt by over the erosion of democracy and the willful ignorance of that reality by people who are (also) brainwashed to believe in “two sides” of this question.
None-the-less, this “conspiracy” bullsh*t needs to be opposed, even if it’s applied to people who are not-very-smart. If I punch somebody at a demonstration without provocation, it’s a crime. But it shouldn’t be cause for advancing prosecution for political beliefs.
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Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com