Felonious Bunk

Via Home Depot.

Via NPR:

On Fox News this week, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf admonished state and local leaders there and elsewhere for failing to restore law and order, and he touted the administration's response.

"We've seen about 300 arrests across this country regarding civil unrest and protest, violent protesting, I'd say criminal protesting, criminal rioting," Wolf said. "About 100 of those have been in Portland specifically, and I know the Department of Justice has charged about 74 or 75 individuals in Portland there with different federal crimes."

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that there have been around 100 arrests in Portland, Oregon for what Chad Wolf would regard as criminal protesting or criminal rioting, with 74 or 75 being charged with different federal crimes?

Answer: In principle, yes, but

• first of all, the (illegally) acting secretary's views on what constitutes criminal protesting and rioting may not be an actual thing;
• second of all, of the 74 federal cases brought in Portland over the ongoing unrest as of 28 August, only 23, or 28.3%, were for felonies—there were 11 citations (equivalent of a traffic ticket), and 42 misdemeanors, including 19 class C misdemeanor cases of failing to comply with a lawful order (such as an order to disperse), and a similar number of class A misdemeanors, typically for non-physical assault on a federal officer, such as yelling at him or "pretending to throw an object"; and
• third of all, since most of the 20 serious felonies involved physical assaults on federal officers such as hitting a deputy US marshal with a baseball bat or hitting a deputy US marshal with a hammer (there are also some arson cases, which is very deplorable), it seems clear that if there had been no federal officers sent to Portland under the (illegally) acting secretary's orders, there would have been virtually no federal crimes at all.

That last is my observation, not NPR's.

You could make the same case for the horrible killing of Patriot Praying Aaron J. Danielson in Portland last week, which seems indeed to have been perpetrated by that "100% antifa" guy, Michael Reinoehl, now slain himself by police in what looks like a justified self-defense on the cops' part. 

Antifa law is made like sharia, by any anti-fascist imam in good standing who wants to issue a fatwah, so I'd like to take the opportunity to say that Reinoehl should not have been carrying a firearm on either occasion, and you can take that as official (strictly speaking, nobody should be carrying a baseball bat or a hammer either, but maybe you need to be prepared for a pickup game or spot of emergency carpentry).  Nevertheless, the Patriot Prayer shouldn't have been there either, and certainly shouldn't have been heavily armed (Danielson was openly carrying a loaded Glock at his waistband when Reinoehl popped out of a parking garage and shot him, though the evidence suggests he never drew it; he may have pulled a can of "bear attack deterrent" on Reinoehl, though, since the medic who attended Danielson found such a can, struck by a bullet, alongside an expandable metal baton, on the pavement where Danielson lay):

“You have this kind of culture where the right-wing vigilantes, though much smaller in number, are better armed and are calling for violence,” said Joseph Lowndes, a professor of political science at the University of Oregon. Whenever they appear, they are inevitably confronted by Antifa or other anti-fascist movements in Portland, and, he said, “you end up with this cycle of continuing confrontations.”

And if they hadn't been there, looking for a fight, and probably intent on generating video for Trump campaign ads, nobody would have been killed.

Kettle-Corn Kevin

Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, 1966.

London Skinheads, 1980s, photograph curated (I guess) by Sean Reveron.

Haven't noticed National Review's Kevin D. Williamson ("Whose Streets, Indeed?") doing this in a long time, pretending to be Tom Wolfe:

S

o there’s this really whacked-out young lady just absolutely spitting high on rage with one of those weird Chelsea Girl fringe haircuts like skinhead molls used to wear back in the Age of Reagan and she is right at this moment very fixated on — and I am not making this up — kettle corn, that weird repulsive caramel-coated Dutch mutant popcorn varietal sold at state fairs and any place men in laced-up pirate blouses are gathered, and she’s just going on and on about it, screaming at the top of her skinny little lungs: “It’s salty and sweet! It’s salty and sweet! It’s salty and sweet!”

This is some of your High Bad Writing indeed, pounding the reader with cultural signifiers without regard to the laws of physics, in allowing a character to be simultaneously wearing two completely different haircuts and whacked out on rage while fixated on snacks, I mean even if rage really does give you munchies, which is somewhat at odds with my own experience of both, can you be fixated on kettle corn and spitting with rage at the same instant? Or is it the kettle corn that enrages her? Is she high on rage because it's salty and sweet? Does that give her something in common with Kevin D. Williamson? How many places are there where men in laced pirate blouses gather, other than Disney movie sets and maybe a Halloween party gone wrong, and are any of them really state fairs? Do our lungs in fact comport with our body types, do we have fat lungs, skinny lungs, and mesomorphic lungs to match the various torsos that enclose them?

Antifa Madness

There's something wrong with this Politico story by Josh Meyer that is getting huge play in the rightwing outlets with the claim that the so-called antifa is now officially regarded as practitioners of "domestic terrorist violence":

Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.

It's that after that opening graf you can't find any information about how that DHS "formal classification" is sourced. Interviews and documents are cited, but none of them say that. They say that

A senior state law enforcement official said, “A whole bunch of them” have been deemed dangerous enough to be placed on U.S. terrorism watch lists.

and that

recent FBI and DHS reports confirm they are actively monitoring “conduct deemed potentially suspicious and indicative of terrorist activity” by antifa groups.

and that federal officials launched an investigation in spring 2016

To determine whether the U.S.-based anarchists might start committing terrorist bombings like their counterparts in “foreign anarchist extremist movements” in Greece, Italy and Mexico, possibly at the Republican and Democratic conventions that summer.

They did show up at the Republican convention, where Alex Jones charged them rhinoceros-fashion with a megaphone in one hand and then fled in fright, but escaped with the assistance of the police, who saw no reason to arrest anybody. But there's no indication that DHS and FBI have even determined that there is a group in a coherent sense, let alone "formally classifying" it as anything.

That first paragraph is either a gross editing blunder or a silly clickbait lie, but I'm starting to think, beyond that, that there could be a lot less to this antifa story in general than meets the eye. And here's something else weird: Dr. Google finds me an instance of a government labeling antifa as "domestic terrorists", but it's not the US government: it's New Jersey, according to Kim Kelly for Al-Jazeera: