Tag: civil unrest

AmPart: An SHTF Perspective on Commo

NC Scout at American Partisan sends some communication insights from someone on the ground in the Ecuador civil unrest – A SHTF Perspective on Commo.

In a real deal SHTF situation, such as a nation in turmoil and civil chaos, how would you fare? When the infrastructure goes down and there’s dead in the streets, what will you do?

That’s a reality for one of AP’s readers living in Ecuador, who’s been giving me steady updates on the deteriorating situation there. He first contacted me over a year ago trying to get their communications up to speed at the local Red Cross chapter. Years of neglect and a focus on more convenient systems caused their antennas to deteriorate and a lack of any knowledgeable operators. If that was bad enough, Simply getting equipment into the country is a challenge…

Click here to read the entire article at American Partisan.

Protests, Strikes, Riots, Blockades and Violence in Ecuador

Since President Morena of Ecuador passed some measures last week to address the country’s fiscal deficit and debt burden, which included rescinding a significant gasoline/diesel fuel subsidy, the country has been rocked by protest. The protests are getting some mainstream press, but there isn’t much information on how the typical Ecuadoran is being affected by the unrest. NC Scout at American Partisan has been publishing updates from a local with whom he has been working on some Red Cross communications who has been keeping NC Scout apprised of the situation.  The updates give some insight on what civil unrest can do – downed communications infrastructure, how the government is trying to airlift needed supplies for citizens in towns which have been cutoff from truck resupply by the many protest blockades, and so on. Will this be a passing unrest? Or could Ecuador follow the path set by Venezuela for a longer-term shtf situation?

NC Scout’s updates are currently in twelve parts. Surviving Real SHTF: Chaos in Quito. Part 0. Part I. Part II. Part III. Part IV. Part V. Part VI. Part VII. Part VIII. Part IX. Part X. Part XI. Part XII.

…Stopṕed by the only gas station here. They are done as of today, tanks dry. No more gasoline even for the locals running around the immediate area.
Blockade continues…

Part of the public market is open as of a couple of hours ago but less than yesterday. Meat, fruit, vegetables in some of them but not much and half the stalls closed. No chicken anywhere. Still staples and from my conversations there a few more locals are thinking they might lay in a supply but NOT very many…

Ecuavisa signal in Ambato is out of the air because dozens of indigenous protesters mobilized to Pilisurco Hill to force the antennae of the channel’s repeater…

Red Cross ambulances were attacked by protesters yesterday in Quito, so not much respect for emergency services. As local food stuffs run out without re supply, then attacks on shop keepers are going to increase…

About 180 protesters on Monday forced the security of the warehouses of a dairy company in the town of Lasso, about 60 kilometers south of the capital, and stole products after assaulting employees…

Locally everything is closed. I have not been to centro today but talked to the woman who owns the apartment I rent who is also indig and a shop owner. No more milk, eggs, cheese or bread. When the shops that dare to, open, the police generally tell them to close. She hasnt been able to resupply, everyone else here is in the same condition. This morning I was surprised that there was garbage pickup…

planes of the Ecuadorian Air Force, make the air bridge from the city of Quito to Cuenca in order to supply the population of this sector of the country with essential products…

there have been problems “with the reception of medicines for some of the hospitals and medical centers of the city and the province we will give priority.”

…From internet sources, 2 deaths in the last 24 hours from injuries suffered in the Quito protests. No accurate info on the total number so far…

In the midst of the violent protests that have surrounded Ecuador , the Red Cross announced that it suspends its attention in the middle of the demonstrations for not being able to guarantee the safety of the volunteers…

Red Cross. No blood supply.   No emergency services anywhere.  Really important for people here to realize this…

 

Mainstream press coverage:

Wall Street Journal: General Strike Paralyzes Ecuador as Protests Continue

RT: Ecuador Protesters Storm Parliament Building Amid Chaotic Street Demonstrations

A substantial police presence was seen in the areas surrounding the national assembly, where security forces clashed with demonstrators wielding stones, sticks and other improvised weapons. The police – some on horseback, motorbike, or in armored vehicles – responded with tear gas and billy clubs.

A larger gathering of several thousand met near the parliament building, defying Moreno’s national emergency decree, which banned public assembly and put restrictions on press freedoms. Many of the demonstrators come from poor and indigenous communities across Ecuador, where the spending cuts have taken the highest toll, particularly the elimination of fuel subsidies.

Voice of America: Crisis in Ecuador over End to Fuel Subsidies

Jim Kunstler: Civil War On

Jim Kunstler is the author of the books The Long Emergency, the consequences of a world oil production peak, coinciding with the forces of climate change, resurgent diseases, water scarcity, global economic instability, and warfare, and The Geography of Nowhere, which discusses why suburbia should not be considered credible human habitat, among others. The following excerpt comes from Jim Kunstler’s article today Civil War On:

Someone in Impeachmentville is not paying attention. Of course, diverting the rubes is exactly the point of the latest CIA operation to negate the 2016 election. Has nobody noticed that there is treaty between Ukraine and the USA, signed at Kiev in 1998 and ratified by the US Senate in 2000. It’s an agreement on “Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters.”

…How does this not permit Mr. Trump asking the president of Ukraine for “assistance” in criminal matters arising out of “collusion with Russia,” as specified within the scope of Robert Mueller’s special prosecutor activities? For instance, the matter of CrowdStrike. The cybersecurity firm was co-founded by Russian ex-pat Dmitri Alperovitch, who also happens to be a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, an anti-Russian think tank funded by Ukrainian billionaire, Viktor Pinchuk, who donated at least $25 million to the Clinton Foundation before the 2016 election. Crowdstrike was the company that “examined” the supposedly hacked DNC servers, while somebody in the Obama administration prevented the FBI from ever seeing them. Does this sound a little like part of the origin story of RussiaGate? Is that not exactly the potential criminal matter that the current attorney general, Mr. Barr, is officially investigating?

…UkraineGate is the equivalent of Fort Sumter in Civil War 2.0. Charges have been flying and tempers flaring for three years now, much as they did between 1858 and 1861. Once again, what seems to be at stake is the integrity of the Union. As in the previous enactment, one side is dangerously deluded, and that is liable to lead to its destruction.

Wilder: Civil War 2 Weather Report, Issue Four

John Wilder at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise has released the next monthly installment of his Civil War 2 weather report in which he updates the various indices he watches in reference to conflict in the US. An excerpt:

Last month when I wrote the Weather Report, the El Paso and Dayton shootings had just happened.  I believe I predicted in the comments that El Paso would have legs, while Dayton would quickly be forgotten.  It didn’t take Nostradamus to predict that – El Paso was attributed to the Right.  Dayton, where a confirmed Satanist Antifa™ member killed bunch of people?  We can ignore Dayton.  That was just random violence by a good boy who just went a little wrong.

Red Flag laws have been the focus of this month’s activity.  I noted in this post (Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote) that they would be used inappropriately.  Again, I didn’t need to have psychic powers to predict this.  I landed on a clickbait story from the Puffington Host (I won’t link to them) about 40 “potential mass shooters” having been arrested since El Paso.  Not Dayton, but El Paso.  Odessa happened this weekend.  Assume if the killer’s ideology doesn’t match the required narrative, it will be forgotten…

…Violence was, sadly, the theme of August. But a secondary theme was censorship. Several large YouTube® channels were deleted without any warning, without having violated any of YouTube’s© rules. I had only heard of one of the deleted channels, and, although the others were reinstated, the one that stayed deleted was the one I watched: James Allsup…

…Allsup will keep pushing a message out – he’s articulate and relatable, but now the message will untethered by rules.  The message will cease to be moderated.

Censorship and alienation is a great way to manufacture radicals.  Radicals are a great way to increase polarization…

…Given our current polarization, and with violence springing up regularly when times are good, I tend to think that the younger generation doesn’t see a way forward, doesn’t see prosperity as an option. They feel that they have nothing left to lose…

Read the entire article at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise by clicking here.

Guardian: Why Leftist Groups Are Taking Up Arms

From The Guardian, ‘If others have rifles, we’ll have rifles’: why US leftist groups are taking up arms:

A John Brown Gun Club member wears a patch featuring the Trans Pride flag and an AR-15 while community defending Trans Pride in Seattle.
A John Brown Gun Club member wears a patch featuring the Trans Pride flag and an AR-15 while community defending Trans Pride in Seattle. Photograph: Grant Hindsley/The Guardian

The van lumbered down one of Seattle’s many steep hills. A half dozen people packed inside but despite the heat, most wore long pants and boots, and several sported black hoodies. The atmosphere was subdued, except for the occasional joke. It wasn’t so much tension as seriousness – there was work to be done.

The people in the van are members of the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club (PSJBGC). Their stated aim is to fight white supremacy and build community defense in America’s Pacific north-west, and their presence has become a fixture of protests in the Seattle and Tacoma areas, where the group is often invited to provide security against rightwing aggression.

The night before, several of them had been called to a library in nearby Renton, Washington, where a Drag Story Time Hour, an event series in which a local drag queen or drag king reads to children in a library or bookstore, was being disrupted by rightwing protesters. The protesters, who opposed the event as “immoral”, held up signs equating drag with pedophilia, and screamed “Shame! Shame!” at parents and their kids. Among them were members of the Proud Boys, a violent rightwing street gang, and Three Percenters militia, who were open-carrying firearms.

The north-west has been at the center of tense political clashes over the last two years. The area is an adopted home base for far-right groups like Patriot Prayer, Identity Evropa/American Identity Movement and the Proud Boys, who have organized numerous marches that have ended in violence. In response, a range of leftist groups have organized self defence groups and, in doing so, present gun ownership as a way to protect themselves and others.

Now, the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club was en route to Seattle’s Trans Pride March.

In the weeks prior, word spread that a number of white supremacist groups had planned to disrupt the celebration. Hearing this, the club reached out to the organizers of the event, the Gender Justice League, and offered to assist with security or to provide escorts.

Brooke Wylie, the head of security for the Gender Justice League in charge of overseeing the 101-person security detail for the event, did some research on the club. She told them the event had a policy of having no open carry (that is, no visible weapon), which they were fine with. She accepted their offer. Police were also present, but many marginalized groups do not trust them to provide protection at public events, especially when far-right groups are involved.

Each member showed up with a concealed handgun. “We do our actions proportional to the threat, so when other people are out with rifles, we’ll be out with rifles,” Nick, the group’s de facto spokesperson, explained. “In this case, we don’t want to appear threatening for the people that we’re trying to protect and support; we want this to be a happy atmosphere, especially for a population that may have faced gun violence on the street just for being who they are.”

This scenario – in which armed community groups are working together to patrol a Pride event and protect it from other malicious and potentially armed groups – is becoming more and more common. There are more guns than people in America – approximately 393 million in a country of 328 million people…

Click here to read the entire story at The Guardian.

 

Related:

Defense Maven: Man killed in attack on ICE facility identified as Antifa militia member/John Brown Gun Club member.

…Van Spronsen was declared dead at the scene. The Pierce County medical examiner said he died of multiple gunshot wounds.

He was quickly identified as an active member of the John Brown Gun Club, a left-wing militia, who had been arrested in June of 2018 while protesting at the same facility he was trying to blow up when he was fatally shot, the Seattle Times reported…

RT: America Stumbling Towards Civil War One Terrible Tweet at a Time

Patriot Radio Interview with Sam Culper of Forward Observer, July 2019

In the attached file below, Patriot Radio’s Rep. Matt Shea interviews Forward Observer founder and chief analyst Sam Culper – from July 2, 2019 airing. Rep. Shea and Sam Culper discuss low-intensity conflict in the US. The interview begins at the 31:30 mark.

Around the same date Sam Culper was also interviewed by Prepping 2.0‘s Glen Tate and Shelby Gallagher on SHTF Intelligence or practical intelligence for preppers. Sam also discusses the coming civil unrest/low-intensity conflict. The interview begins at the 6:50 mark.

Forward Observer: Breaking Down “Civil War 2” – Part V

In this video, Sam Culper of Forward Observer shares part five of his critique of the Civil War 2 video.  See Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

In this video, intelligence analyst and Iraq/Afghanistan war veteran Samuel Culper breaks down his thoughts and the implications of military and law enforcement involvement during a Low Intensity Conflict.

American Partisan: Balkanization in the United States

From the fine staff of American Partisan is this brief article, Balkanization in the United States: Is it Coming?.

…We are meant to swallow the lie that says “diversity is our strength” without consideration for merit, performance, ability, intelligence or actual results.

This is not meant to be an indictment on any specific culture or ethnicity, but more of a history lesson, a social observation and a dire prediction.

The history lesson is the continued failure of all socialist based economic models, whether we want to consider them “real” socialism or not. The sort of hard socialism seen in 1980’s Yugoslavia and the crony-capitalist soft socialist version seen in the US today are both examples of that failure system. As I stated earlier, it does not take any level of economic expertise to understand that our current system is insolvent and that we have passed the point of no return on a future crash of our financial system. Now that less than half of the people in the US are net-taxpayers and over half of the people in the US are receiving some sort of government assistance simply to survive, we have become a welfare state, with only decreasing numbers of producers with increasing numbers of consumers. Mathematically, it is not sustainable. Historically, it is disastrous.

The social observation is that such a mass of diverse peoples must have a voluntary pressure outlet in order to maintain peace. We must accept reality that not all cultures are able to be forced together with peaceful results. Forced proximity, with advantages, disadvantages and blame doled out to certain peoples, with a lack of opportunity to separate peacefully will always result in strife and eventual violence.

The dire prediction is one that is easy to see coming: An eventual economic failure is the lit match, while the total lack of national cultural identity is the gasoline. The media and governmental apparatchiks stand by to stoke the fires.

We are Yugoslavia circa 1980’s.

My advice? Stay out of Sarajevo.

Click here to read the entire article at American Partisan.

Related:

Forward Observer: The Hidden Tribes of America

 

NY Times’ Literary Supplement Publishes “Trump Assassination” Story

From Mac Slavo at SHTFPlan.com comes a story of media hypocrisy. While the media and media talking heads like former CIA head Brennan blame President Trump for inciting violence leading to the recent failed bombing attempts, they ignore the well recorded incitement to violence of Democrat party leaders and the media.

While mainstream media outlets balk at the suggestion that they may have been guilty of ramping up the division and political tensions in the United States, one of those outlets actually published an assassination story about president Donald Trump.

While those in the mainstream media blame Trump’s inflammatory “fake news” rhetoric for half a dozen bombs mailed to prominent Democrats and CNN, the New York Times ran a short story envisioning Trump’s assassination.  The story detailed a failed assassination attempt by a Russian but what happened next was incredibly disturbing.

Frustrated by the failure of the Mueller investigation to turn up the requested dirt on their “enemy”, Trump, the media “resistance” asked a few spy novelists to predict a more “appealing future” for the president in the Times‘ literary supplement., according to RT. The results revealed some shoddy writing work, even putting aside their predictable endings. Spoiler alert: Trump was colluding with the Russians all along…

…This is a highly hypocritical stance for the mainstream media to take.  On the one hand, they demand Trump cool down his rhetoric toward them, but on the other hand, they insist on publishing violent leftist trash meant to incite glee over the president’s assassination.

Trump’s election has hastened a decline in journalistic standards that has seen once-respectable media outlets like the Times jettison fact-checking, accountability, and taste standards in favor of grinding their political axe. Journalists’ concerns about the Trump regime are not unfounded, however – his Justice Department has prosecuted more whistleblowers and leakers than even media darling Barack Obama, who previously held the record. -RT

If you think the media is not inciting violence, just take a quick look at an article by Breitbart titled, 613 Acts of Media-Approved Violence and Harassment Against Trump Supporters...

Democrats claiming that they are not inciting violence with their words are reminiscent of South African President Zuma singing “Kill the Farmers, Kill the Boer” and claiming that it is merely preserving history and is not an incitement to violence.

Forward Observer: 2019 Is Shaping Up to Be an Ugly, Brutal Year

From the intel guys at Forward Observer:

civil unrest

…The central hallmark of low intensity conflict is action below conventional war but above peaceful competition. We’ve had some pretty low lows in politics, but this period does seem to have escalated above peaceful competition between Republicans and Democrats. Fundamentally, there’s nothing inherently wrong with winning elections to stop an opposing party’s agenda. But when politics becomes subject to rule bending and breaking — the erosion of political norms often referred to as “guardrails” in civil society — we’re no longer seeing peaceful political competition. We can go as far back as gerrymandering, IRS targeting of conservative groups, and the show stopping of Merrick Garland as three prominent examples. And if that’s truly the case — that we’ve devolved into sustained open political warfare — then the country may well be stuck in a low intensity conflict at continual risk of organized political violence.

Looking forward to the next 12 months, I fear the convergence of two major trends: incivility in politics that breeds political violence and a recession that puts 10-25% of Americans out of work. It’s entirely possible that we arrive at this juncture of American history in 2020. Since the Democrats plan to make 2019 disruptive, there’s no reason to believe that 2020 would be any calmer. As ugly as the past two years have been, there are reasons to believe that 2019 and 2020 will be worse.

Click here to read the entire article at Forward Observer.

What Role Militias?

Sam Culper at Forward Observer wrote a piece a month ago titled What Role Will Militias Play in the “Coming Unpleasantness”? in which he discusses a Navy Post-Graduate paper Rethinking Militias: Recognizing the Potential Role of Militia Groups in Nation-Building. Sam discusses a definition of militia and how they may be of importance in coming civil unrest in the USA.

A community based militia is one which has influence only over a very limited area, such as a village, or a neighborhood within a larger community. The militia is seen as a legitimate protective entity only by that community, and generally does not seek objectives beyond that community.

Being that local militias may become a central part of the security of a free state, we should be asking ourselves how we build legitimacy in the area. How do we become recognized as a necessary and desired part of the neighborhood? For me, this goes back to Intelligence Preparation of the Community. Tomorrow I’ll post a guide to determining support and opposition in your neighborhood (h/t Aesop), and that begins with intelligence collection and analysis. Almost everything in these scenarios goes back to intelligence.

NC Scout at the Brushbeater blog has written a response or follow up, So, What Role Will Militias Play In The ‘Upcoming Unpleasantness’, Anyway?  NC Scout comments on the Navy paper from his own personal experience and opines that in some areas the militia may end up the only lasting power structure in a prolonged civil unrest, but perhaps controlled by outside forces.

That look to the recent past is a very good look into the future. There should be no doubt about it, some very hard times are in our path. We had the largest mass political assassination attempt in history not that long ago and most have already forgot about it. We have leaders who instead of debating ideas have decided there is no further debate- contrary opinions must be wiped out and they routinely call for this on their propaganda platforms. The political corruption of our justice system is now completely exposed- these were always political organs– and the air of legitimacy is fading. Its a difficult situation but from a social science perspective, and a person with experience both as boots on the ground and as an academic studying this very topic, my opinion is that militias will not only play a very large role in the upcoming hard times, even ending as the very power structure for a time in some places. For all these reasons there’s some critical takeaways that need to be pointed out.

Both articles are worth your time.