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By whom?
I'm sure you can find any number of groups who are proud to participate. I don't think any of them deserve much credit.
If the signs are like those at other student protests, A.N.S.W.E.R. has something to do with it.
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Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, along with a couple other umbrella groups, have jointly claimed credit for both the Columbia-specific protest and the follow-on encampments at a number of other schools. There's a fair criticism that there's at least a few rando Garbage People in the hradzka sense running around, or even agent provacateurs, but this isn't some Stand Alone Complex where the simulacrum had no real original version.
((The less charitable take on 'umbrella group' is that they're both just front groups for the actual coordinating organizations, but by definition I can only point to the subchapters and related organizations giving extremely similar messaging on short notice, or other more subtle signs that they've got intercampus communication going on that doesn't match the paper or training from the public faces.))
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I don't know, I'm not on their mailing lists (or Discords as the case may be)
Then how do you know it exists?
The bailey, I mean, where these discord servers somehow distinguish their members from "a mob of dissatisfied individuals." Anyone can give out an email address. That puts them roughly on par with a local HOA. Scary.
I see what appears to be co-ordinated protests, I know protests have been co-ordinated in the past, I infer the existence of a co-ordinator. It's not rocket science.
I would gently posit that your level of conscientious organization is slightly higher effort than these flash mobs. Occupy Wall Street and Chaz exhibit hallmarks of being coalescing of disparate bedfellows rather than a coordinated mobilization effort. Coordinated efforts if anything exhibit geographical dispersion to maximize visibility, like deliberate disruptions of uninvolved parties and events by the pro-pal protestors. Staying in a single region to protest dance is just a magnet attracting the crazies, and those tend to dissolve the moment a power struggle arises.
The CHAZ/CHOP in particular had 3 phases, at least to my eye. The first had a lot of influence from the local anarchist community, and had some rhetoric about seceding from the US and suchlike, hence the name "autonomous zone". Then there was some sort of low-key power struggle, possibly just the natural result of all the anarchist-style meetings that were going on, and the BLM faction came out on top, and ditched the more abstract stuff in favor of focusing on police interactions with black people, and changed the name to "occupied protest". Then the police backed off, and there was no resistance, and the normie-lefty contingent kept growing, and it turned into a giant homeless encampment, resembling Hamsterdam from "The Wire" but with smartphones and guns. And then enough people died there that public opinion soured and the mayor felt comfortable shutting it down.
After the first few days, the CHAZ was just where you went if you were a lefty. At first it was the core protestors against the police (the East Precinct substation being right there), but it spread out to people who liked to protest in general, and people who wanted to change something about America's police or America's treatment of black people, and also people who got bored of sitting around in lockdown. I was regularly in the area for other reasons, but one time I think I heard someone talk about "coming down to the protest to see what was happening today".
There didn't need to be a co-ordinator, it just became a Schelling point for every protestor in the city.
I've seen antifa show up to events a couple of times, and I don't doubt that they've got some form of co-ordination, although it might not be very centralized. The earlier riots and looting in Seattle might have had some co-ordination like that, where people passed the word on to friends, and then everyone showed up that evening to a march that rapidly degenerated. But the CHAZ/CHOP thing seemed organic.
Your assessment largely tracks with what I read, with a single point I'll raise about Raz Simone turning warlord at phase 3 being the major trigger for a violence spiral, instead of armed lefties suddenly finding their christiania.
Calling it a schelling point really reminds me of OWS, just where people WENT if they had nothing better to do. I was at Zucotti and there was this bartender from Georgia who quit his job to live a crust-punk existence with the other OWS. This was like 2 days before the crazies started using the park as their bully pulpit and the progressive stack became implemented to manage the crazies, only for that to morph into its own retarded beast.
Maybe Raz did something I'm not aware of, but the reports I heard seemed overblown to me. "Warlord of Capitol Hill" sounded like a catchy phrase that got picked up and tossed around right-wing media, and persisted virally until the end. But maybe that meme contributed to public opinion turning, allowing the shutdown, regardless of whether it was true.
I wasn't down there a lot, but I never felt unsafe because of the large men with guns. It was the opposite, actually: I worried more about the criminals, crazies, addicts, and people currently high, and I thought the presence of the "security" team made it less likely that one of those other people would start something. That's just one person's perspective, of course. But I don't recall hearing about them being involved in the rapes or murders or fencing or drug dealing or whatever else went down.
I do still wonder about extortion, though - there's a liquor store across the street from the police station, right in the heart of the CHAZ/CHOP, and it seemed to survive without visible damage (other than graffiti outside). It's hard to imagine someone there not wanting to shake down the store for free booze, but either they didn't, or it was covered up. I assume the people who run the place wouldn't say anything, because they want to stay safe.
Your OWS story does sound very familiar. The incident that triggered the shutdown of the CHOP was a shooting, that left a black 16-year-old boy dead and a 14-year-old boy wounded. Apparently the kid was from San Diego and had borrowed some money from family the previous Wednesday, to travel north to be part of the protest. Sunday night, he died in a shooting that had some connection to a carjacked SUV, although reports agree that someone else had stolen the SUV and brought it to the CHOP, so last I heard it was still unclear what he and the other kid were doing around it.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-what-happened-at-the-chop-shooting-that-killed-a-teenager-and-led-to-the-areas-shutdown/
Raz illegally transfered "semiautomatic assault weapons" without a background check, which is a crime in WA and supposedly an enforcement priority for the party. Needless to say there was no attempt to prosecute anyone involved, because the law was only intended to be used against political enemies.
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