Roundup 2/11/2021
Election Integrity Training, Upcoming Antifa Direct Action, Networks and Resiliency
Welcome to the Contextual Insurgent Project by writer, analyst, and activist Erin Smith.
Sign up now so you don’t miss any future issues!
Please share!
Upcoming Election Integrity Training Webinar
During these two and a half hours, you will follow a role-playing narrative that puts you in the position of a local activist starting from zero. You will battle your county government to get rid of untrustworthy voting equipment before moving on to fight for broader legislative changes with your state government.
You will learn how to do political research, develop your message, organize like-minded neighbors, build coalitions, and lobby your county and state government for change.
Election integrity (and how to get it) weighs heavily on most right-leaning minds these days, and I strongly recommend as many of you as possible sign up for this upcoming Leadership Institute Zoom training seminar from Matt Braynard covering the topic. Leadership Institute is probably the closest thing we currently have to our own Highlander Center, albeit with a bit more focus on electoralism than their lefty counterpart.
LI also has online written resources and free/low cost on-demand training in many different relevant activism-related areas, make sure to go check them out and bookmark them for future use.
An Antifa group linked to some of the most destructive incidents of rioting in the Pacific Northwest is calling for a global “autonomous day of action” proposed for March 6th.
Kyle Shideler at the Center For Security Progress covers an upcoming March 6 direct action campaign being pushed by PNW-based Youth Liberation Front, one of the more aggressive antifa-aligned groups out there. The campaign is explicitly calling for violence and property destruction primarily government assets and employees, so if you’re LE in an area with active YLF chapters keep an eye out, and if a supervisor be sure to alert your people and consider adjusting force posture.
A Lefty Semantic Trick, Explained
Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”
I talk a lot here about the credentialist class discrediting itself, and in that vein this is a decent WSJ piece about Trump and the failure of the expert class that channels Taleb’s IYI Framework into a valid analysis of the last four years. I linked it because of the succinct deconstruction of the “Our Democracy” buzzword where our somehow never seems to include us, but the entire thing is worth a read.
Lefties on Swarming Tactics and the Future of Netwar
However closed governments are more rigid and fragile in the face of change. Because they rely on subordinating individuals to function, they must suppress individual initiative and autonomy to retain power. The relation between those ruling and those being ruled becomes increasingly zero-sum because those being ruled can use any agency they seize to erode the control of the ruling class. The zero-sum nature of control means that society as a whole is less capable of responding to significant unexpected changes since interventions can only come from the central authority.
This is an interesting analysis on Transforming Networked Conflict from a lefty perspective. Lots of food for thought, and some ideas on where we may go from here. The excerpt above was referencing openly authoritarian governments like North Korea and Iran, but it can be argued that the sentiment also applies domestically to the fused public/private autocratic system we have.
Efficiency At The Cost Of Resiliency
Why don’t we pay as much attention to the benefits of resilience as to the benefits of efficiency? We tend to get good at what we can measure, and it’s easy to produce numbers that support efficiency, such as crop yields per acre. Resilience cannot be easily measured, though. Its benefits are most evident during the catastrophes that can’t be predicted and the trends that haven’t been foreseen.
Decentralization is likely the future for many reasons beyond just censorship resistance, as this WaPo piece on Pandemic-driven disruptions in our food chain covers. Centralization is attractive to many in power because it allows micromanagement and economies of scale that lower costs and increase profit, but as we saw so often in 2020 that comes at the cost of adaptability.
Thank you so much for subscribing, please consider supporting my Patreon/cashapp and joining my telegram channel!
-Erin
——————————————————————————————————
Please join my Telegram channel to keep up with the community:
You can also support my work here:
Cashapp: $eesmith4