Right now, all over the country, we are seeing despair channeled into productive outrage, as crowds turn up to protest the decision by the Taney Roberts Supreme Court to gut abortion rights. The outrage and organizing we see today is just, it is righteous, and it will lead us — however long it takes — to a better place.
In other words, it sounds a lot like the BLM protests of two summers ago. And just as with those protests, we are also witnessing a counter-movement that may pass outside the notice of those of us who get our news from mainstream and other sane sources.
I am referring to the conspiracy theories that shut down the BLM protests a few months in, and sharply limited their political impact. Not many days into those protests, our sane and mainstream media sources were flooded with claims that BLM was in league with, or perhaps the same thing as, the mainly mythical “organization” known as Antifa. (Note: antifa is just short for anti-fascist. It isn’t a group. Anybody can claim to be “antifa” because there is no organization.)
In the summer of 2020, a few scattered acts of vandalism and even rarer acts of violence, many of the worst of them actually perpetrated by far-right provocateurs in a (sadly, successful) effort to smear BLM, were played on endless loops on the nightly news. To this day, there are people who believe that BLM and antifa burned down entire cities and attacked police officers and police buildings across the country. Some of the brainwashed even live in the cities that they think were burned to the ground. For too many, the propaganda war was successful. But beyond that, far too many centrists and moderates in this country turned against BLM because of the trumped-up association with violence.
Well, guess what: it’s starting up again. Consider this diary a head’s-up. Right-wing leaders have latched onto a handful of internet postings by a “group” called Jane’s Revenge calling for a “night of rage” when Roe v Wade is overturned. They are using it to taint the entire abortion rights and women’s rights movements. Read about it here:
Conservative US political figures pre-empted and reacted to the United States Supreme Court’s rollback of abortion access conflating an ambiguous risk posed by a fringe group with the broader, peaceful pro-choice movement in the United States. To advance that willful misrepresentation against the majority of Americans that disapproves of the ruling, they deployed a familiar narrative playbook and information ecosystem.
Mainstream and increasingly extreme voices in the conservative information ecosystem amplified threatening messages posted online by an apparent radical pro-choice group and proceeded to cite those messages to stoke fears of imminent, coordinated, and widespread radical-left violence against abortion opponents. Democratic politicians who offered messages of support for pro-choice causes and encouraged protests were branded “insurrectionists” by prominent right-wing influencers — a cynical attempt to equate the violent January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol that led to multiple deaths with the ongoing popular, peaceful protest in response to the Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. A common refrain in these narratives pointed back to a supposedly inevitable “night of rage” from pro-choice groups following the decision.
Here’s what the far-right’s real playbook is, in my opinion:
1) Send out a signal to violent far-right people — you know, the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper sorts — that they should show up, armed and ready for violence, at pro-rights rallies. This is exactly what they did with the BLM protests. And if you remember summer 2020, wherever they didn’t find violence (which was pretty much everywhere), they created it. That is what they will want to do this year.
2) Send out the message to police departments across the country (many of them, as we know, already infiltrated by the Oath Keeper types) that they should expect violence from the non-violent protesters. We should already know this playbook: this is what they did in 2020. Far too many police departments ganged up with the Proud Boys and other violent extremists to attack BLM protesters, with the excuse that the nonviolent protesters were the trouble makers. Don’t be surprised to see this again this year.
3) The end game: discredit the pro-woman, pro-rights movement and strike fear and hate into the hearts of the right — while turning off the centrists and moderates, who (they hope) will come to associate abortion rights and not the far right with violent extremism. Again, this is exactly what they did with BLM.
Will it work? I have my doubts. But have no doubt that this is their playbook, and they will run it for all it’s worth.