The campaign against Elon Musk barely popular movement.
Last month, a wave erupted from more than 200 protests targeting Tesla real estate across the United States.
The media filmed this movement, and officially described “Tesla Lighting”, as a spontaneous violent reaction against the role of Musk in dismantling waste and fraud in the American federal bureaucracy.
Each of these demonstrations seems to have attended a little, but the number of protest sites and the schedule of events indicates a coordinated effort.
On February 21, Rolling Stone published an article by activist Alex Winter (from the fame of the excellent “Bill & Ted”), describing the emergence of Tesla's protest campaign.
Within two weeks of its publication, many Tesla's features were subjected to incendiary devices, and three men were arrested for separate attempts by Tesla Firebomb sites in Salem, Uri; Loving, Colorado; Charleston, SC.
Inside the ecosystem
If you are supposed to believe the main press accounts-as well as the description of the special winter-, then the stature and protests are not related.
When the protests are ever mentioned in the context of violence, some ports described them as “dozens of peaceful protests in Tesla agents and factories.”
The stories did not address how, more often than, the violent and non -violent tactics enhance each other and work towards the same goals.
A closer look indicates that Tesla is the latest goal for the active and organizing of the ecosystem that the left has created for decades.
The manufacture of infrastructure, its amplification and strategic use of protests and “direct procedures” to impose concessions or change policy.
These direct procedures range from nonviolence or Flash Mobs to violence (intentional burning, harassment, or even assassination), all of which aim to focus attention through the drama of confrontation in the real world.
The goal is to bypass the natural channels to make democratic decisions, and to obtain the required ends through the pressure pressure campaigns.
However, it will be impossible to find one person or an entity that directs both protests and violence.
Instead, the two are associated with the concept of “diversity of tactics”, which is an active principle that the movement should be welcomed by using coercion methods as part of a full set of extremism spectrum – from traditional non -violent marches to riots, destroying property and violence – within their strategic program.
The diversity of tactics is encouraged active to take advantage of a smart trick: the party facing the movement of the movement provides the image of nonviolent resistance, while the infrastructure behind the scenes supports and sometimes involves in violence.
One creates strategic opportunities for the other, with any hidden connection behind a veil of reasonable denial.
Tactics diversity
Let's check the diversity of tactics at work.
In describing Tesla Takedown, winter semester sought to display a base campaign image on an expected budget.
“I made a quick database and the registration model using online tools,” he wrote.
“Then I posted everything on Blues. This was it.”
But the imprint of professional activists, who Winter admitted that they “contacted” was clear from the beginning.
Both Tesla Taketedown protests, the date has been set and published in the Action Network, a gradual profit company that provides online tools to organize the left.
He is preparing her clients with tools “to help you pick up a moment, mobilize supporters in your case and maintain relationships with activists.”
The pricing of these services-which includes databases and registration forms such as those described in the winter-can operate more than $ 4000 per month.
The turmoil project was initially identified, a group of the far -left regulation in Philadelphia, as a joint host or care for all Tesla Takedow's protests in the Action Speed Lists.
The project has been cleaned since then from the Action Network website, but it still shares a “short code” SMS with Tesla Takedown, a sign of continuous link.
The founder of the turmoil project is Jeff Odouor, a long -running activist whose background is a series of left -wing professional activity.
Trained at the AFL-CIO Institute, led a Missouri branch of Acorn and worked in both SEIU and the Industrial Zones Corporation.
He was organized by a group related to the Wall Street occupation demonstrations in 2011 and helped organize the Ferguson Intifada in 2014.
His last project, 350 movement, is linked to an international organization and has relations with the Clinton International Initiative, the Climate Work Network, the Numbness of Entity, the Open Community Institutions of George Soros and many other left groups.
According to his career biography, Ordower describes himself as a “mobile organizer” “who spends a lot of his time thinking about continuous teamwork.”
In his writing, Ordower describes the moments of social turmoil as “rupture[s]- Critical turns when traditional institutions fail to control public turmoil and create opportunities for political and cultural transformation.
In other words, Tesla Takedawn shows all the signs of the professional process.
It barely a movement at the base level – it is a product of experienced activists, who is not afraid of inciting “rupture” and benefiting from it to follow their agenda.
The diversity of tactics creates a three -level structure of activity.
At the first level, there are demonstrators who are officially punished-often not violent, racist and a friend of media-and who work as a general face of movement, attract coverage and provide a shell of legitimacy.
The smaller second layer consists of more activists who want to disrupt events, prevent traffic or engage in civil disobedience.
Refusal
The third layer is the smallest and includes those who have a greater commitment to radical action in addition to preparing to engage in vandalism and sabotage, destruction of property and violence against people.
Each level claims to be distinguished from others, even at a time when he supports or creates opportunities for others' activities.
In fact, the diversity of the tactics framework for activists simultaneously allows coordination and benefit from violence.
Is the violent disturbance project considered?
Its page on a “qualified defense” offered: “While we tend to believe that the desired mass action creates a more bold collective action that generates unavoidable overthrow these systems, we respect the utmost respect for those who are trying to win and unify structural reforms at this time.”
(Confirm added.)
Such a language creates a reasonable denial, although it supports what it refers to from the stalled point of view as “uprisings, resistance and collective direct work”, which does not exclude revolutionary violence as a possibility.
A similar pattern of unusual denial is evident with Tesla.
In the wake of a series of thermal fists in Tesla Properties and Meacetles in early March – and the Prosecutor's decision to address the case at the federal level – the Tesla Takedow campaign on its work network page noted that it officially opposes “violence, mixing and destroying property”.
Although we may understand these words as synonymous, leftist extremists see them as separate groups, as well as legitimate or even necessary protest methods.
In radical theory, the destroyed riots of property are framed as defensive responses to the device, and in many cases, they are directly encouraged.
“Each of the civil disobedience and direct work can involve the destruction of property and still can be considered not violent by many activists,” notes a professor of Brock Janet Konway in the 2003 article of the law.
Who answers it?
“An attack as for liberal sensitivities, property destruction may be an integral part of success [Black Lives Matter] The uprising, “Rh Lossin, a lecturer in the History Department at Harvard University.
“Activating the destruction of property and even theft due to a false association with a coincidence of nonviolence is a mistake. It is a power.”
The Tesla Taketedown campaign was not treated specifically, condemning the thermal bombs, or the perpetrators in its statement, opposing “violence, sabotage and destruction of property.”
As a practical issue, the diversity of tactics framework only works with a commitment to the principle of “non -movement”, or refrain from condemning the most strict tactics used by allied activists.
This maintains internal cohesion between active groups and prevents activists who face a year from having to answer the crimes committed by their most dominant comrades.
Such condemnations can also be used to form other activists or left in general.
In this way, the leaders of Tesla Takedown can invite the escalation without having it.
Due to the lack of any one representative permanently with both legal protests and illegal acts of sabotage, the greatest movement can present itself as legal, radical, Islamic and disorganized authentication.
The Tesla Takedown organizers, who faces the audience, does not need to know who lit the Molotov cocktails, and many of them are less to do so.
They only leave a room for such actions in their strategic ecosystem, knowing that a person within his wide alliance may go ahead and adhere to them – and that their own efforts gain urgency, personal file and leverage.
The result is a smooth escalation that applies driving while increasingly enabling extremist behavior to the margins.
This model of class turmoil has proven significantly effectively, as it took advantage of the media's tendency to the concession of peaceful images and ignored the radical infrastructure that facilitates violence.
Many journalists participate in the global view of the demonstrators and see activists as the facts of civil thinking, and not the rebels play a long game of destabilizing institutional stability.
Violence, no matter how necessary, is just one advantage of the greatest movement, which sympathetic media describes as “mostly peaceful”.
The removal of Tesla is not just a protest. It is an exercise in pressure policy.
Tesla was the pressure point, and Elon Musk was the agent of the capital of capitalism, fascism and repression.
The campaign reflects an calculated application of the diversity of the tactical approach, and mixing non -violent protests with strategic acts of property damage aimed at generating fear and economic pain.
Architectural engineers in the campaign knew that the protests or deliberate burning alone could remove Tesla.
But together – through contrast, escalation and repetition – they can pay public opinion, the consumer enthusiasm and threaten the flow of capital.
The protest strategy
Ultimately, the TESLA control campaign reveals the strategic logic that leads modern protest movements.
The left depends on the ambiguity of weapons, using its professional wing to draw addresses and armed wing to impose costs and thus achieve political goals.
Because of the massive scope of the campaign, in addition to the first amendment restrictions, law enforcement and policy makers were slow to recognize the ecosystems active in the extremist left.
Those responsible for our security need to understand how violent and non -violent instigators work to enhance their revolutionary goals.
Christopher F. Rufu is an older colleague at the Manhattan Institute, a shareholder in City Journal, and the author of the American Cultural Revolution. David Riboy is a fellow at the Clairemont Institute, a writer in the nonsense of the late Republic, and the head of strategic improvisation, a strategic telecommunications company.
