Another Trump lie. Right-wing authoritarians know they have 90% of the guns and all of the armored military vehicles and warplanes, and if they think it's necessary, they will slaughter as few Americans as they can get away with in order to terrorize the rest.
You can see a barometer for such a narrative in, for instance, the recent op-ed by the famous (and very right-wing/libertarian) musician Charlie Daniels. He expects inevitable blood in the streets, and blames protesters for it.
Daniels did not know the name of the group of lawless protesters that he was blaming for what he felt was a closer approach to bloody civil unrest. However, he referenced the actions of what is known as the (soi-disant) anarchist/antifa Black Bloc (who were also the group that stopped Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking in California), in which there has been substantial vandalism.
However, there has been very little actual personal injury, and no deaths. Why would we get so lucky?
The answer is that the Black Bloc is a provocateur-infiltrated organization, which has a particular mission in today's climate of dissent. They are the heirs of certain Communist-front groups from the 1960s and 70s, in performing a particular mission.
Their mission, to state it very crudely, is to discredit all dissent, to give the general idea of disagreeing with government policies or officials, or with various corporate practices from bankers' bonuses to ramming pipelines through Indian land, a bad name.
Who do they work for in this way? I am not going to sit here and start naming agency acronyms and trying to connect all the dots.
You would dismiss me as a conspiracy theorist, and I would have to laugh with you, because although I am an investigator, I haven't the money to pay the operatives necessary to conduct a thorough, conclusive investigation of 9/11, or even the Murrah Bombing (though my MA thesis is the first academic work that was done on that subject).
I am not even sure that the Black Bloc could be successfully counter-infiltrated for investigative purposes, though the scale of money needed to do it would be, I speculate, much less than would be required, for instance, for conclusively investigating the Oklahoma City bombing.
However, I have over 40 years personal, antiwar and antinuclear movement experience with agents provocateurs. I have observed the Black Bloc closely on a couple of occasions, when they were readying themselves in Washington DC. There is a cadre of senior people, and the headstrong teens and 20-somethings you'd expect.
Any veteran knows that the senior people give the orders. But who is giving them orders?
I would posit that in general, those who are in power want to keep elements of society polarized as much as possible, so that its citizens cannot focus, trans-racially, trans-religiously, trans-economic-class, on the actions of that tenth of a percent of humans that intend to run things at a profit if it kills us all or not.
The politicians are managers for the owners of "private enterprise," even (perhaps some of them still naively think) "FREE enterprise." In this particular Administration, we have witnessed a giant step toward the .1-percent owner class being in direct control of the political management of government.
Citizens United was the giant step that made this one inevitable. With that court ruling, the rule of giga-money over the political process became legal.
All the Trumps and Tillersons and Mnuchins (and Kochs and Adelsons) of the world had to do was wait, pump enough billions into the slot machine, seal the deal with an unprecedented weaponization of a Federal law enforcement agency against the opponent at the end, and unregulated capitalism would triumph!
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