Monkey-wrenching the democracies
“The real threat to democracy is a failure to imagine the worst-case scenario,” Tony Gerber, co-director with Jesse Moss, told NPR Monday in an interview about their new documentary War Game. The film simulates U.S. officials responding to a post-election coup after a disputed election. “Insurgents take capitals, questioning the president’s military control,” says IMDB. Officials must counter a “Red Cell” radical faction coordinated by a fictional “Order of Columbus.”
Gerber is wrong here. The real threat to democracy is the flagged-bedecked Americans in diapers who have rejected democracy, the Constitution, and America’s founding vision for strongman rule. (And Supreme Court justices prepared to prop it up.)
Republicans plan to open a second front after November 5. The election they expect to lose at the ballot box they plan to win, or at least thwart, in court. Georgia is just one battlefield.
But the threat of violence War Game postulates is real. For those not paying attention, right-wing riots broke out over the weekend across England and in Ireland. Police arrested hundreds. Several officers were injured.
CNN:
Far-right riots swept Britain over the weekend, with outbreaks of anti-immigrant violence in a number of cities and towns, leaving the new UK government scrambling to control the worst disorder in more than a decade.
Crowds of far-right agitators set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, leaving those inside trapped and terrified, while throngs of rioters in other cities damaged public buildings and clashed with police, throwing objects at officers and smashing their vehicles.
Protests first broke out late last month, after an anti-immigrant misinformation campaign stoked outrage over a stabbing attack that left three children dead in Southport, northern England.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer chaired his first COBRA session on Monday morning – an emergency meeting of national agencies and branches of government – to discuss the response to the disorder. “This is not protest,” he said on Sunday, adding: “It is organized, violent thuggery and it has no place on our streets, or online.”
What provoked the riots? Disinformation spread widely on social media falsely blaming a Muslim immigrant for the stabbings. Rioters then set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers,
CNN explains:
The gatherings ostensibly started as anti-immigration marches, organized on social media platforms like X and on WhatsApp and Telegram groups. They quickly turned disorderly and violent.
Protesters set ablaze two Holiday Inn hotels, in the town of Rotherham, northern England, and in Tamworth, in the Midlands, central England, that were believed to be housing asylum seekers awaiting a decision on their claims.
The Rotherham hotel at the time was “full of terrified residents and staff,” according to a statement by South Yorkshire Police Assistant Chief Constable Lindsey Butterfield.
The false reports are reportedly coordinated by foreign agents looking to destabilize western democracies.
Starmer added:
“People in this country have a right to be safe and yet, we’ve seen Muslim communities targeted, attacks on mosques, other minority communities singled out, Nazi salutes in the street, attacks on the police, wanton violence alongside racist rhetoric,” Starmer said at Downing Street.
“So no, I won’t shy away from calling it what it is: Far-right thuggery,” he added.
Knowledgeable friends on the ground say these thugs are simply itching for a fight, looking for an excuse. They know the social media reports are false. Some accounts promoting disinformation were opened in July 2024, one obviously from China, says a former counter-terrorism officer, but others hail from Russia and elsewhere. These English riots are a trial run for how events might play out in the U.S. after Trump loses in November, just what War Game considers.
Naturally, Alex Jones is loving it.
A friend at Government Cheese comments:
It’s so clear that there is a coalition of some sort between the authoritarian petrostates, a number of US billionaires & various international oligarchs, authoritarian leaders like Putin & Orban, American & international right-wing movements — to attack and destabilize Western democracies. They are sick and tired of regular people being able to band together, implementing rule of law, taxes, unions, regulations and the rest of that stuff that gets in their way.
The Playbook
The playbook is to stir up racial, religious & nationalist division. Use social media & media outlets they own to spread victimization disinformation. Demand “free speech” rights to do it. You see the same stuff in countries around the world now. It’s like they are reading scripts prepared in “best practices” seminars. Use anti-refugee disinformation (“illegals”) to incite hatred, and “other” these vulnerable people who have nowhere to go. India’s authoritarian ruler is using anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism. Orban using Jews & other “others.” Etc etc around the world.
This is modern warfare for Russia, China, and others opposed to the democracies.
Many Americans opposed to democracy stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. We’re looking at how they might reprise that effort between November and January if GOP efforts to monkey-wrench the elections in court fail. But then they’ve monkey-wrenched the courts too.
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