There are plenty of wild posts online, but this one warrants an analysis of its contents and an expose on its posters, because it signifies an escalation in the USA’s class conflict. It shows that the counter-gangs which our government seeks to cultivate on the “left” have become more emboldened than ever, so much that their participants now feel comfortable with making threats of murder while showing their own faces and names.
The top part of the post is merely a Lenin quote that’s presented in an inflammatory way, where the far-right Russian group the Black Hundreds is compared to the MAGA communist group Infrared. In the bottom part, though, the threat of violence gets highly explicit and specific. It parodies the quote by saying: “Revolutionary army groups must at once find out who organizes Infrared and how they are organized, and then, without confining themselves to propaganda (which is useful, but inadequate), beat up and kill members of Infrared gangs, blow up their headquarters, etc, etc.”
The parodic part then ends, with the poster saying in their own words: “No quarter, these people cannot be allowed to exist because they are a danger to humanity. (That includes Midwestern Marx and all the infrared magacommunist crowd)”
Am I a MAGA communist? I don’t identify as such, but that’s irrelevant to this particular discussion. Because everyone who supports Russia and China is ultimately seen as a target for the radlib counter-gangs, whether or not they’re a MAGAcom. And regardless, if we want to be principled, we need to combat all efforts at terrorizing individuals who the government sees as a threat. Which is the end goal of whatever intelligence forces which may have contributed to the making of the post, and which have nurtured the increasingly dangerous online culture surrounding this incident.
Aside from the members of these toxic internet spaces that have endorsed the ideas put forth in the post, others have tried to convince everyone that the post is fake, and that the Infrared community created it to get attention. If this were the case, then the threat’s only participant would be the random sock puppet account that posted it. But this account posted the threat alongside somebody whose name and face are visible, and who’s been a verified Twitch partner since 2019: Kyle Communist.
Kyle wasn’t roped into this violent incitement project unawares. He’s continued to defend and promote the post’s sentiments. He wrote yesterday in a post responding to the backlash (which I won’t link here in case he tries to accuse me of harassment): “National Socialists hijack and obscure Marxist terminology in the hopes of perverting and derailing our movement. You cannot talk cancer out of the body. It must be purged. Nazis must be purged from society.” Whatever psychological factors that may be behind this unhinged statement (which keep in mind is directed not at actual Nazis but at communists), he is an adult who can make his own decisions, and who’s had the wherewithal to become a successful streamer. And he’s using his platform to explicitly advocate for the murder of individuals who he and his mysterious partner have referred to in quite specific ways. Because these individuals are part of particular and (in the case of Midwestern Marx) small groups.
Everybody who’s familiar with Infrared and MWM can think of at least a few of the persons who are affiliated with them, these are public figures. Which means the actions of this menacing campaign’s participants potentially rise to the level of being criminal.
The only reason why neo-Nazis can evade the law while calling for violence is that they make sure to call for violence against Jews, Muslims, etc in general. If they were to get too specific about who they want to murder, they would lose the protection of the First Amendment. Now certain “communists” are getting close to crossing this exact legal boundary in their sectarian attacks, and they obviously feel no sense of risk in doing so. It’s because they’re going after individuals who the government would be glad to see dead; who genuinely represent a counter-hegemonic force, whatever theoretical differences one may have with them.
We know this threat represents something serious because these kinds of “Antifa” left anti-communists work with the intelligence apparatus on tracking down and targeting the people they want gone. Federal infiltrators have a heavy covert presence within the branches of Antifa, as they do within all the radical groups that they can manage to infiltrate. And this has ironically helped advance the goal of the true believers within Antifa. That goal being to identify and terrorize everybody who’s seen as a “fascist” according to the radical liberal ideology, which includes communists who support anti-imperialist countries like Russia. What the actors behind this threat have done is prime many more of the radlibs in these communities for a scenario where an Antifa participant murders pro-Russian communists, and then everybody on the left is expected to either not care about this or see it as a good thing. There were already plenty of people in these spaces who shared this ultraviolent mindset, but the post has expanded the amount of individuals who do.
Why haven’t we seen any reports of Kyle getting banned from Twitch for doing this, or getting visited by police or FBI? Because law enforcement and major companies will ignore criminal or borderline criminal activities when they purely act to help the ruling class. We know that Kyle’s actions would otherwise be considered serious offenses because promoting violent extremism is exactly the kind of thing the feds are working to counter right now, with the FBI’s focus being centered on platforms just like Twitch. Reported Ken Klippenstein this month about the FBI’s program to counter violent political rhetoric on streaming and social media apps:
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have mechanisms to share and receive domestic violent extremism threat-related information with social media and gaming companies,” the GAO says. The report reveals that the DHS intelligence office meets with gaming companies and that the companies can use these meetings to “share information with I&A [DHS’s intelligence office] about online activities promoting domestic violent extremism,” or even simply “activities that violate the companies’ terms of service.” Through its 56 field offices and hundreds of resident agencies subordinate field offices, the FBI receives tips from gaming companies of potential law-breaking and extremist views for further investigation. The FBI also conducts briefings to gaming companies on purported threats.
It’s apparent that the FBI is far more likely to classify anti-imperialist content as “violent extremism” than is the case for the actual violent threats that radlibs are making against anti-imperialists. Law enforcement isn’t going to do anything about this problem, because the perpetrators are on the same side as the feds. The threats can only continue to escalate as our class conflict intensifies. All we can do is stay vigilant, and prepare our cadres to defend against any attempts to pick off our members. Wild as that sounds, it’s now a scenario that we need to seriously think about, because our enemies have shown they want to bring about that scenario.
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