A kitchen light is thrown on. A roach scurries toward darkness, pauses, composes itself, and issues a confident statement explaining it was in no way seeking shelter, nor darkness. It just didn't want to detract from the mission, or something.
The roach, Matt Rivitz, a San Francisco lefty and founder of Sleeping Giants, an "anonymous leftist group that organizes social media mobs in an effort to silence conservative voices." (Breitbart)
The DailyCaller smoked him out with some social media sleuthing.
"The founder of Sleeping Giants, a left-wing activist group that has targeted right-wing voices with boycott campaigns, has managed to keep his identity a secret, even as his own group has become a major political player among liberals. Until now."
Breitbart: "The group’s modus operandi is consistent throughout its campaigns: use social media in cooperation with other well-funded left-wing groups like Media Matters for America and Think Progress to urge their followers to contact advertisers en masse – expressing their outrage that companies dare advertise with conservatives."
...
"More recently, the group joined with teenage anti-gun rights campaigner David Hogg to try to push conservative icon Laura Ingraham off the FM airwaves and cable news."
The new New Left: wealthy, connected, establishment; hostile to all things nationalist and populist. In love with its money and status, hostile to all things potentially antithetical to its voracious appetite, and using its social justice virtue signalling and identity grievance politics as a blunt instrument to pummel its social inferiors in the general citizenry, with their banal focus on law, order, jobs and community and identity.
The Rivitz saga is one facet of a many sided face, only partially unmasked, which undermines the law and the public will through the machinations of substate and overstate actors connected with the real power operative in America.
The structure of power in the Anglo-American model involves a two facedness: the formal constitution, a set of de jure law, and a structure of private power, the de facto, behind the curtain law.
Changing the formal law is an onerous process, and changing the constitution near impossible.
But the wheels of commerce need to go on turning, and so the powers that be, those informal structures of power behind the curtain, have devised clever work-arounds when the public, formal processes and bodies of elected representatives prove recalcitrant and unruly to pressure and propaganda.
The first amendment to the US constitution is the freedom to speak and assemble. This right is still on the books in America, at least. So, how flout the spirit of the law, without violating the letter?
Enter Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the #Resist Crowd. Allow the lawless goons and thugs in the employ of these organizations to run riot in the midst of legal gatherings of Americans intent on exercising their freedom of expression. Don't disperse them or prosecute them formally, in the law courts and the court of public opinion, but via the backdoor of mundane violence and intimidation tactics.
Simply permit these private, substate actors to behave as de facto enforcers for the private state, the informal power structure, composed of financial interests, lawyers, lobbyists, shareholders, bureaucrats, intelligence operatives, and sundry intellectuals and journalists of our runaway regime.
You want to speak and assemble for or against some formal measure? Good for you. That is your democratic right, on paper. But are you willing to bear the burden of violence, arrest, or jail if some bat wielding, masked psychopath attacks you on orders from above?
It is not so different for you than for the booked arrestee, faced with conviction of some petty crime, armed with an inept public defender, or a plea bargain that guarantees a light sentence for a crime perhaps never committed. You have options, but are they really options?
There are laws regulating the entry of people into our country. It is the duty of the executive branch to execute these laws as written. The failure to do so, and the failure to penalize localities which refuse to cooperate in doing so, renders such laws null and void. Voila! a breach of the whole idea of law, under the guise of humanity and compassion, as portrayed by our unelected media.
Tax laws exist on the books to fund the government. They fall hardest on those unable to skirt the laws through the methods of clever attorneys and accountants hired for the purpose. One such method is to create a fake country and government somewhere outside the territorial jurisdiction of a western country, yet protected by its military and courts, and allow corporations to operate there in a financial sense. Though outside the formal jurisdiction of law and taxation, these territories exist under the military umbrella of the western powers, and these businesses feel free of any external threat from real world powers, or even mere pirates. They free ride on implicit protection while cheating on their obligations to the body politic that protects them. It is a roundabout way of collecting a sort of tribute from the taxpaying class.
The same is true of the outsourced capital operating in countries that could be easily invaded and occupied, the factories and intellectual property seized, without implicit American protection. The profits that flow from the cheap labor of these factories, the skirted wages, taxes, regulatory costs, etc., operate on the backs of an implicit protection from external seizure by neighboring regimes.
This arrangement relies upon the social engineering of masses of voters, who themselves benefit little from empire, or even imagine themselves as participants in an empire. So it is that they, when propositioned with war to defend some business interest, need a moral justification for the war that is amoral. War propaganda, spoonfed by private media working hand in glove with the state, create the black propaganda that feeds a war spirit, and requires extra punitive and extra lengthy entanglements in conflicts that if fought formally on the basis of mere economic interest could be wrapped up quickly. This little glitch offers irresistible charm to the American arms industry.
On the flipside, the bottom half of taxpayers appear on the surface to pay very little in taxes for the maintenance of the state, and this figures in the political talking points. Yet, by its permitting rampant usury and financial fraud in finance, real estate and insurance, medical care and higher education, the regular citizen is raked over the coals to feed the private coffers of private organizations, who then fill the political campaign coffers of the politicians and offer them lucrative places on their boards of directors, after their term of service in the formal state expires.
Fees, interest payments and so on stand in for traditional taxes and flow from poor and middle to rich in exchange for "financial services" that are more or less unearned rents.
The monetization of natural resources; loans to foreign states, enforced on the back end by American arms if they dare default; the conversion of land values into mortgages, all represent a gigantic flow of labor and money from average citizens to elite capital that should be flowing to the public good, or else left in the people's pockets.
Bailouts after an orgy of speculation on the credit of the public function similarly, as do federally guaranteed loans that earn hefty interest with no risk of default (student debt).
The provision of state subsidies to poorly paid workers is another shift from the taxpayer to the free riding private state that runs its squeeze on the average citizen, in that it absolves these corporations of the need to pay adequate wages, and nips any nascent labor organization in the bud. The service economy lives and breathes of state welfare.
Finally, when the people actually make their will manifest through laws and elections, the supreme court can be relied upon to overturn whatever the other branches of government allow to slip through, overruling the public will by judicial fiat. The whole apparatus closes ranks to take down enemy politicians, called "demogauges," and strongmen. Trump is not the last.
The running of covert, proxy wars outside the purview of Congress, the collection of intelligence on Americans through exchange with foreign agencies, or the use of the private tech sector giants for same -- all these employ outside surrogates to circumvent the law as written and violate the rights of citizens enshrined in the formal law, and the trust implied in law.
It is what the state does not do, what it encourages and what it fails to prohibit, that matters as much or more so than what it does overtly. As in Bastiat, the unseen is more important than the seen.