Insurgency Or White Saviors?

Andy Ngo writes in The New York Post, The anti-ICE activists are an insurgency, not a protest movement:

On Saturday, the Democratic Socialists of America celebrated hitting 100,000 members. Almost on cue, their footprint in organizing anti-ICE so-called “protests” continues to grow.

But these are not protests. They are coordinated obstruction campaigns modeled on the playbook of revolutionary insurgency inspired by violent revolutions.

That much is clear from the latest reporting in The California Post, documenting how militant far-left activists from the Golden State are advising radicals in New York on the latest tactics for sabotaging federal immigration operations.

But also yesterday,

Immigrant groups have a message for their mostly White allies: Quit blowing the whistle on ICE.

Fox News Digital has reviewed days of messages inside Signal chat rooms that reveal that a new internal feud has erupted inside the anti-ICE protest industry, pitting immigrant-led organizations against predominately White "rapid response" networks that have made whistle-blowing a dramatic part of anti-ICE protests.

. . . Groups from Seattle to Montgomery County, Md., are telling mostly White "rapid responders" to back off a dynamic described by activists as "White Savior," reminding them they are not cameo actors in an "action movie" against ICE.

Montgomery County, MD, includes Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and Potomac. The illegals there are likely to be nannies, gardeners, and domestic servants in upscale households; none of their employers is an insurgent, whether or not they go to anti-ICE protests. Possibly their enititled children at least do.

But I think we need to look at this question through the lens of an earlier generation, Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station (1940) and Whittaker Chambers in Witness (1952). Both discuss what may be history's most successful insurgency, the Soviet Union, from different but equally illuminating perspectives. To the Finland Station is an idealized intellectual history of European socialism that culminates in Lenin's arrival at Moscow's Finland Station to begin the final stage of founding the Soviet government.

Wilson appears to have had a comfortable bourgeois life. He attended a private secondary school and then went to Princeton. After service in World War I, he returned amost immediately to pursue a privileged literary career. According to Wikipedia,

Wilson was the managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1920 and 1921, and later served as associate editor of The New Republic and as a book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

. . . In 1932, Wilson pledged his support to the Communist Party USA's candidate for president, William Z. Foster, signing a manifesto in support of CPUSA policies; however, Wilson did not identify personally as a communist.

Wilson strikes me as a member of the "white savior" faction of the American left, especially insofar as Princeton did not admit Negroes until the eve of World War II; Wilson may not even have been aware of this. His loyalties are literary and performative. He admires Lenin as a man of action, a theorist who finally has the determination to wield absolute power on behalf of the revolutionary working class, of which Edmund Wilson was never a member.

Whittaker Chambers is a very different figure. In the 1920s, he followed a literary career not much different than Wilson's; he was an editor and writer for The Daily Worker and New Masses. But in 1932, when Wilson publicly endorsed William Z Foster, Chambers went underground and became a Soviet spy. In fact, Chambers also went to an Ivy, Columbia, where like Wilson, he was a member of the influential literary set. But unlike Wilson, he dropped out and seems to have felt that other experiences, like traveling to Germany during the postwar devastation, were much more formative.

But Chambers's involvement in socialism was more like a pig's involvement in breakfast: a chicken is involved by laying eggs, which would be Edmund Wilson's position, while a pig is involved by becoming bacon. Wilson was a public intellectual, while Chambers became a clandestine spy. Among other things, he recruited Alger Hiss. But as Andre Maulreux wrote to Chambers after reading Witness, "You are one of those who did not return from hell with empty hands." I don't think anyone could say the same of Wilson, who spent his later years collecting the usual medals, prizes, and awards.

So let's return to the problem of the white saviors. Ngo writes,

One familiar tactic is the strategic placement of women at the front of confrontations. When these activists block agents on foot or with vehicles, cameras start recording. Clips of screaming women being arrested are quickly circulated with false narratives claiming innocent women are being “snatched” off the streets arbitrarily.

I witnessed this tactic in 2020 in Portland, when the “Wall of Moms” stood at the front of the mob seeking to burn down a federal courthouse in downtown during the George Floyd riots. Behind the “moms”? Masked Antifa militants in black bloc outfits, hurling rocks, frozen water bottles and explosive devices.

. . . The plan was explicit: confront federal agents and ensure cameras are ready.

For these extremists, the potential cost in human life is worth it, because of the potential political payoff.

These tactics have already fueled online threats and real-world violence against federal officials. They helped spark deadly unrest in Minneapolis and drove an international media frenzy built on lies.

But the basic problem, as I think Whittaker Chambers would recognize, and possibly Wilson as well, is that the moms are all bourgeois romantics. They aren't the sort of insurgents who will work undercover, as Chambers did, at the real tasks of the working-class revolution. Renee Good, uniformly characterized as a mom, tried to run down a CBP agent in a $50,000 SUV. Alex Pretti was less successfully characterized as a nurse, a bicyclist, and an outdoorsman, but the media had to retouch the sketchiness out of his hippie persona to do this.

I've been saying all along that the current leftist alliance is between the upper bourgeoisie and Marx's Lumpenproletariat. It's a creature of the faculty lounge; the true working class isn't involved. Even the Montgmery County, MD Immigrant Rights Collective seems to understand the issues here. At the second link,

"START WITH REALITY (NOT HEROICS)," they wrote, with the soundtrack of a popular protest song, "Que me devuelvan la tierra," which means "Give me back my land."

They wrote, "This is not an action movie. You are not in a one-on-one fight with ICE."

Adding bold emphasis, they noted, "And you are not the center of this situation."

On one hand, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were bourgeois useful idiots. On the other, the people who might actually be clandestine actors like Whittaker Chambers, who might actually further an insurgency, seem to be AWOL. Ngo says,

Earlier this week, a Minneapolis Antifa activist named Kyle Wagner was charged by federal authorities after posting multiple social media videos urging his comrades to acquire firearms to kill federal agents.

But Fox News adds context:

In a video obtained by Fox News Digital, Kyle Wagner, 37, of Minneapolis was arrested in the early morning hours wearing a sweatshirt that said, "I'M ANTIFA," a reference to the far-left organization that the Trump administration has deemed a domestic terrorist group.

Wagner’s bald head and numerous tattoos, including "RESISTANCE" across his chest and a "three arrows" anti-fascist symbol on his neck, have made him a recognizable figure on anti-ICE social media feeds.

Wagner operated an Instagram account under the handle @kaos.follows, where he had amassed tens of thousands of followers before the account was deleted. In his bio, he reportedly used the hashtag #IronFront and described himself as an "entrepreneur."

This is a bourgeois romantic, not an insurgent, no matter how loudly he may claim that's what he is. "This is not an action movie. You are not in a one-on-one fight with ICE." These people will not make a revolution, even Edmund Wilson understood this.