Going Global

Whistling past Hunter Biden’s laptop and taking a break from the Ukraine refrain the Washington Post today returned to its favorite subject, which is its least favorite people, white dissidents:

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Melanie Gabriel became the teen idol of Washington state’s anti-masking movement last fall when she showed up to school and, claiming a medical exemption, marched barefaced to class.

As Gabriel’s protest continued and she was barred from campus, she drew support from self-styled militia groups and other far-right extremists who saw the anti-mandate movement as a chance to rally conservatives toward more-militant stances. Members of the Proud Boys offered to escort Gabriel to class, prompting a security lockdown of three schools.

You might think locking down three schools because of suburbanites with picket signs is unnecessary–but it isn’t if your goal is to shock the normies with the illusion you’re under assault; the action is what the Left likes to call “performative”. Later it will be referred to as proof of the threat presented by the Proud Boys et al–and it has the immediate effect of gaslighting the children and parents. Kids were “sheltering in place” as if in an active shooter–or Cold War-era “duck and cover”–drill.

The aforementioned Gabriel is only 14 years old and the staid old merely liberal Post would have–disingenuously of course, but still–lamented her exploitation by political activists. Of course that might draw attention to the routine use of kids as props by the establishment, and a 14 year old girl campaigning for something like “trans rights” up to and including genital mutilation would no doubt be an inspiring tale of youthful activism. The new Washington Post is all for using children to advance causes, so all they can do is lament the local resistance has their own Greta Thunberg, less the unattractive, well, everything.

Now, with the lifting of most mask and vaccine requirements, Gabriel and her far-right backers are mobilizing the networks they’ve built over the past two years toward a new goal: November’s midterm elections.

Gabriel spoke this month at a gathering that was emblematic of the increasingly blurry lines on the right — it was organized by the far-right Washington Three Percent and sponsored by a conservative student group, Turning Point USA. With the state Capitol dome in the background, speaker after speaker told supporters not to get complacent with mandates gone.

“Just because they’re lifted doesn’t mean they’re going to stay that way, and that’s why we’re all here,” said Gabriel, a striking figure in a bright crimson bob, cat-eye makeup, and a T-shirt with the anti-Biden slogan, “Let’s Go Brandon.” Her bullhorn was decorated with stickers that read, “Say No To Critical Hate Theory” and “Allergic to socialism.”

A man in the audience yelled that Gabriel should run for governor.

“I will!” Gabriel replied. “I will run for governor. And I’ll run for president. And I’ll run for everything!” She waited a beat before adding: “Once I’m of legal age.”

That’s the kind of youthful energy far-right movements are working to harness across the country as they teach the pandemic’s newly minted activists how to get out the vote.

Organized political redress used to be seen as inherently good; now that normalcy itself has been put beyond the pale to make room for trans rights and whatever comes next (Globohomo needs psychological lebensraum, lots of it) unregulated political action is seen as inherently bad–routinely the Left now, with apparent lack of self-awareness, will sound alarm at basic, innocuous political organization on the Right–registering voters goes from sacred to sinister.

Extremism trackers say the past two years of fighting pandemic restrictions have given far-right groups a new generation of recruits and a blueprint for taking the lead in conservative organizing. The midterm season, they warn, brings a heightened risk of political violence, as armed groups build on those gains to push deeper into the mainstream.

“In Olympia today, we saw paramilitary groups and a range of other anti-democracy activists aggressively working to recruit young people and making pledges of unity against what they see as their common enemies,” Eric K. Ward, executive director of Western States Center, a regional extremism watchdog, said in a statement after the event where Gabriel spoke.

Western States Center is a local non-profit whose donors include the Gates and Ford foundations, with a focus on “gender” and race that looks to be in the business of providing institutions with anti-racist “worksheets” and the like.

The Post seems to lament no antifa faction showed up to turn the event violent–which would then be blamed on the demonstrators.

Unlike at previous far-right gatherings in Olympia, no leftist counter protesters showed up, and the event was peaceful. Journalists were encouraged to refer to it as a “freedom festival,” not a rally. On the damp statehouse grounds, leather-clad bikers chatted about gas prices with khakis-wearing politicians. Gun rights activists told college students that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an example of why they consider the Second Amendment untouchable. A voter registration table sat next to a self-styled militia’s information booth, a reminder that, in this milieu, there are two paths to making change.

Not that anyone’s paying attention, but the peaceful nature of these “far right” rallies is only ever interrupted when black bloc shows up expressly to fight, something this paragraph inadvertently advertises. The author seems to lament no one showed up to ensure the “leather clad” can’t caucus with the “khaki wearing”–and that is the genuine concern here, the subtext of this article howling from the depths of elite progressive paranoia: “the people are conspiring together!” Something must be done.

Articles like this tend to hit all the narrative bullet points (with complete spontaneity, I’m sure), and this one does not neglect the latest, and one we can expect to see a lot more of–the threat of a “global far right”.

Neoliberalism’s contradictory nurturing of Ukranian nationalism as a proxy in its war against Putin’s Russian nationalism is, like most things when you own the Megaphone, a feature not a bug, and any expected reckoning with Azov if and when the Ukraine is wrested completely from Russia folds perfectly into the budding propaganda campaign casting domestic resistance as connected to a global right wing terror matrix being pushed hard by our aforementioned friends at Western States Center as well as far bigger and more influential entities.

In this video from something called the GW Program on Extremism a man named Cohen tells us all about the threat of the rising global right, based entirely it seems on the entirely predictable increase in dissident speech online responding to the Great Reset, the Racial Reckoning, Covid, Critical Race Theory and now war hysterics. They are telegraphing their pivot, away from a global war on “Islamic terrorism” to “right wing terrorism”. The ghouls, spooks rather of the intelligence community get to keep partying on the taxpayer dime and the final suppression of dissent is achieved. We won’t be able to say we weren’t warned.