Netwar2024: Assassination
Class war before race war?
The sixteenth anniversary of my entrance into this curious pursuit of mine is imminent, and I am in no way surprised to find a class driven assassination in the news, but there were other things I expected would happen first.
I don’t know if it’s in the formal definition of a failed state, but a state losing its monopoly on violence is a very, very bad sign. Let’s have a look at this wondrous horror from New York, and see if there are any other prognostications that can be fit to this curve.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Accelerationism and DVE (Domestic Violent Extremists) and whatnot will be found herein. I guarantee you will not care for the result of opening your eyes in this waking nightmare.
Background:
A rich white man involved in the laughably misnamed “health insurance” industry was shot dead in a premeditated operation by an individual who managed to procure a single action suppressed pistol for the job. I wonder if the shooter was inspired by No Country For Old Men, wherein Anton Chigurh employed a packing plant specific weapon in one of his murders. Both the real and fictional weapon are meant for dispatching animals, not humans.
There’s been an immediate leap to characterizing this as LEFTIST TERRORISM, but I think that is extremely premature. The politicization of every little thing - meaning taking every event, any slightly controversial product, and other things that are decidedly non-partisan in nature - has left us with a skewed, bipolar worldview. The third player on the field are the accelerationists, who exist across the entire political spectrum. The conclusions of anyone insistently ramming every event into an us/them mold should be immediately treated as highly suspect.
Here, have a thoughtful seven year old article for background reading.
Grey Hat Accelerationism — An emergent hyperstition?
Expectations:
We’re Gonna Fight back on February 5th morphed into We Are Fighting by September 27th. At the time my assumption was that we’d maintain the rule of law and have religiously motivated para-state(s) forming in the hinterlands. Instead we’ve decided on textbook fascism with religious overtones. I think a bunch of old white people who HAVE guns but who NEED social security are about to be made very, VERY angry. They’re going to belatedly learn about the huge payoff psychopaths get from duping people, as well as the payoff they get from sadistic behavior.
So in this world in which most everyone, except for the religious accelerationists, are going to have a variety of grievances, there are some activities I expected to see before a high profile assassination.
Multilocation wildland arson.
Complex, well executed structure hits.
Drones used for more than just recon.
Improvised Explosive Devices causing casualties.
Ideologically motivated fire team mass shootings.
The escalation ladder is first clear intent to do damage, separate from the mentally ill and the profit motivated fire fighter set blazes we see every year. Structure hits where the actors evade security measures would be next, then finally multiple individuals who entirely avoid the mentally ill loner model of mass shooters.
The arson just happens already, against a backdrop of much more active fire seasons, and a cautious operator could do this without leaving much evidence it was intentional, let alone a trail leading back to them. There is also a backdrop of trouble with electrical network facilities, with rail related sabotage coming in a distance second. There are a LOT of cameras in the world, the bigger the prize, the more numerous the eyes.
Activities supported by drones are relatively common, but we have yet to see drone deliveries of homemade thermite or Tannerite charges atop large transformers. I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see theft of large cargo drones of the type used in agriculture and forestry being employed to drag a length of log chain into the air for the sake of shorting out large transmission lines.
There were some IED attempts during the Obama years, the Boston bombing was a notable large casualty event, and the most intriguing to me was the Nashville telco facility suicide bombing using an improvised fuel air explosive. It’s a testament to the tight controls on explosives put in place after Oklahoma City that we haven’t had more trouble like this.
And I watch the news for that first fire team mass shooting. The D.C. Sniper Attacks were a two man operation and the Hutaree Militia attempt to attack a police funeral failed. This has always seemed to me like it would be a watershed moment - an obvious escalation that could not be explained away by handwaving and NRA talking points.
False Flag Festival:
Accelerationists run the full gamut of views - environmentalists at one of the spectrum, religious fanatics at the other, and a middle ground with more “men who want to watch the world burn” than would be found at either end. The grim commonality is this:
Accelerationist sabotage and terror will often carry the signature of whatever group will cause the most aggressive response.
The ugliest of the George Floyd protests always featured some right leaning actor instigating trouble, with the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct Arson involving Boogaloo Bois.
Thus far efforts like this have been clumsy fools with little direct knowledge of those they sought to impersonate doing things that went viral … and then got shredded by actual journalists and law enforcement looking at the details. Expect the mimicry to improve as the stakes get higher.
Conclusion:
After almost sixteen years of my various efforts to head off trouble, the United States chose imperial dissolution and violence en masse via a national election. Reinventing Collapse is front and center on the masthead because I believe that is now unavoidable. I expect that there will be a lot of buyer’s remorse very, very quickly, but that’s of little value after the harm has been done.
Telegram, Twitter & Thee offered some thinking on how to avoid getting entangled in things. There’s a lot of “join the resistance” chatter out there, but few of those sources have any direct knowledge. Over the last year I’ve seen a mailing system penetrated by bad actors, the operator did not understand the hazard, and refused to clean up properly. I’ve seen hosting operations with gaping holes leading to important data inside, the operator refused to understand the hazard, and employed someone dishonest and incompetent to “fix” the problem. And there are endless, PAINFULLY OBVIOUS counter-intel problems that get waved away as personality disputes, then that continues … until the operator wonders aloud why their effort gets no support.
Attempting to protect those with no experience is a fool’s errand. Until they’ve had to painstakingly rebuild their understanding of the world, after the norm of behavior in polite society have been utterly shattered, it’s like having “the talk” with an incorrigible teen. Only after they’ve been beaten into a state of reasonableness will there be some utility in sharing safety focused tradecraft.
Health care executives across the country are scurrying for cover. The online threat hoax actors will be turning their attention to these companies, and it’s difficult to track that against the backdrop of a nation that views the assassination of Brian Thompson as justice served. Executive protection is tricky enough in what has long been a free, safe society. The pivot to focusing on their family members will happen the instant they put themselves out of reach.
This guy is definitely tuned into the Zeitgiest …
