Roundup 2/24/2021
Occupation tactics growing, Digital Bill of Rights
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Occupation Tactics Gathering Steam
I have been covering in this newsletter the recent leftist shift in tactics to barricaded occupations of hotels and vacant/foreclosed homes as a means to push their radical “housing justice” agenda, and I recently expounded on this in further detail in last week’s piece for Center for Security Policy. The pandemic-driven economic dislocation is giving them cover to double down on an agenda that includes “community control and disbursement of housing”, which any reasonable person would classify as communism if enacted in accordance with their stated desires.
The hotel occupation tactic seem to be bearing the most fruit, and the recent spate of activity in the PNW seems to be driving policy changes:
This sort of thing operates in a carrot-and-stick manner, with the disruption of the hotel being forcibly occupied by activists and homeless contrasted against the offer of 100% FEMA reimbursement for local government funds spent on non-congregate housing. Seattle seems to have caved, and it’s extremely likely they’ll see the same sort of property damage and disruption San Francisco is experiencing with their program housing homeless in local hotels left vacant due to the pandemic.
Speaking of San Francisco, groups there are now calling on the city to use FEMA funds to outright purchase hotels to convert into permanent public housing, so the slippery slope is liberally coated with grease on this topic.
This hotel occupation tactic may inadvertently spreading to red states, as several similar incidents seem to be happening in Texas in the wake of last week’s ice storm:
The problem ostensibly seems to be transfer limit issues with various payment apps, but it’s also completely possible that some of these cases are intentional recruitment efforts targeting unsuspecting people. Putting several hundred people up in hotel rooms for several days, then blaming the online capitalists and local government inaction and incompetence for the power grid failing and their ensuing eviction, is a completely feasible way for lefties to effectively radicalize people and move them a notch on their Spectrum of Allies:
Deplatforming and a Digital Bill of Rights
John Robb is the author of Brave New War and an expert on network warfare, tribalism, and insurgency (you’ve likely seen me previously link and discuss his Long Night networked tyranny thesis). The digital world is a place into which it’s difficult to graph meatspace ideologies and value systems, but a consensus is growing that basic human rights are at stake when the virtual world is increasingly more intertwined with the real, yet completely at the mercy of consolidated private interests. Robb’s suggestion is a ‘digital bill of rights’, and it seems world governments are haphazardly moving in that direction when you consider things like GPDR.
Jack Murphy is an excellent interviewer, and this discussion is worth a watch:
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