White antifa anarchists have taken over the BLM "protests"

Ed. here. Poor Len thinks that Walt left the picture we posted yesterday where it could be seen easily as a way of putting us off his trail. In reality, Len thinks, Walt is not in the wilderness, but inside the bubble around the Scotiabank Centre in Toronto, where Canada's team (the Montréal Canadiens) are trying to get through the NHL "play-ins", to advance to the Stanley Cup playoffs. Only the hockey players, their support workers and a handful of media types are allowed inside, so if Walt has found a hiding place in the rafters -- "The Phantom of the Arena"? -- he's not about to tell us! Stay tuned...

Meanwhile, it falls to me [and Poor Len! Len.] to fill this space, and not with irrelevant funny stuff, as Walt made clear in a rather scathing message two days ago. Today I've chosen "How white radicals hijacked Portland's protests", by Michael Tracey, on the UnHerd blogsite, 4/8/20. As before, space doesn't allow us to repost the whole article, so I've selected a few trenchant excerpts. If you wish to read the whole thing, click on the link above.

The overwhelmingly white, anarchist activists who populate the ongoing protests in Portland...[have] discovered a work-around to arrogate moral cover for whatever insurrectionary upheaval they would have been ideologically committed to fomenting anyway. The Left/liberal political and media class is deeply invested in preserving the untouchable sanctity of "BLM". So by fusing themselves in the public mind with this ambiguously-defined protest movement, or even putting themselves at the vanguard, the anarchist whites insulate themselves from the type of scrutiny that might ordinarily be prompted by activists whose ultimate goal is the overthrow of the state....

To characterise what's gone on in Portland as a traditional "protest" is a misnomer, however. Pay a visit to the area around the Federal Courthouse in Downtown after midnight and you are greeted by brigades of black-clad "Antifa" foot soldiers — geared up in full body armour, complete with industrial-grade gas masks, shields and even customised radio systems. Being overwhelmingly white, they are strategic about public presentation: the speakers appointed to address the nightly "rallies" are almost exclusively black, as "amplifying black voices" to whom whites must dutifully "listen" is a central tenet of the Summer 2020 protest ethos.

If there is any foundational idea operative in Portland, it's to keep a frenetic confrontation with the state going for as long as possible, so as to maximise the chances that an incendiary incident might occur and catalyse a larger insurrectionary uproar — similar to the killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked nationwide riots. One fateful tear gas canister fired into the temple of a "protester" could reverberate rapidly across the country; "Portland solidarity" actions have already sprouted up as far away as Richmond, Virginia....

When protesters chant "NO GOOD COPS IN A RACIST SYSTEM", the "system" to which they are referring is the foundational system of governance of the United States — again, deemed inherently "fascist" and "white supremacist", and therefore impossible to reform. As one sign wielded by a protester declared: "The Revolution will not come by asking or voting"....

A strange feature of this protest movement is that one would barely know Barack Obama, a black man elected president in a majority white nation, ever existed. Not that Obama's mere election was supposed to have eradicated every last trace of racial inequities in the United States: of course it wasn't. But you'd think it would at least inform popular conceptions of the role of race within the nation's elite power structure. Instead, Obama seems to have been simply "erased" — the significance of his tenure not even worth mentioning. Are we to believe that a country so intractably defined by "white supremacy" — a totally uncontested truism among protesters and their media allies — nonetheless elected a black man not once, but twice? Apparently....

Further reading: "Riotous BLM Protesters Suddenly Realize They're All White People", Babylon Bee, 5/8/20. Don't forget, folks, that the BB is "Christian satire", to be taken cum grano salis... but not too large a grain. Truth is stranger than fiction!