I hate soccer. I fucking hate soccer. The reason I hate soccer is the flop. The flop is when a player takes a dive and fakes an injury to win a strategic advantage in a game. The amazing thing is, this isn’t cheating. It’s a strategy. But as Americans, we consider this behavior to be egregious.
What does the soccer flop have to do with Antifa? That is made clear in this article from Reason:
The Conservative Trans Woman Who Went Undercover With Antifa in Portland
In this article, the mole describes an Antifa tactic used against the police.
We get to the Portland Police Association and immediately, they blockade both ends of the street. They built the shield wall and they’re hammering the door open. I went over and I’m standing in the bloc as they’re breaking the door down. It took them a little while longer than what I thought. They could have found better ways to breach the building, but they had hammers and pry bars and they pry it open and pry the plywood back and they pour fuel and light it on fire and start burning stuff.
Strategically what they’re doing is, they’re forcing a dilemma action. A dilemma action is when you put your opponent in a no-win situation. Your enemy has to react. If they don’t react, they look weak; if they do react, they have to react in a certain way where it looks like it’s an overreaction.
That’s their [antifa’s] objective. It’s not a tactical thing. That’s why all the “press” is there, the sympathetic press. They’re trying to create propaganda. They know how the police are going to react, so they carefully calibrate what they do to try to provoke the police into reacting and then filming it. They want to try to push public opinion in favor of removing the police. The police aren’t perfect, but what a police force is, it’s putting force under an objective third party, under government control. Antifa wants to separate the police from the populace.
This is basically guerilla warfare. They’re trying to undermine legitimacy of the state. The police right now, I think some of them are catching up. There’s a playbook for how police respond to riots and they’re not actually doing it; it’s not an actual riot. I mean, it is a riot, but at the same time, it’s a specific type of riot that’s trying to make the police respond in a certain way.
Over the weekend, Antifa interrupted a motorcycle officer engaged in a traffic stop. They made it possible for the driver to take off and forced the officer to chase him. Then they tried to block the officer from engaging in pursuit, forcing the officer to knock over one member of the mob. The reaction was immediate and histrionic.
Portland tonight: BLM-antifa rioters surround officer who pulled over driver. The driver flees & when the officer tries to follow him, rioters stand in front of his motorcycle. One gets hit. #PortlandRiots #antifa pic.twitter.com/xTdiLap6Hm
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) October 3, 2020
The officer was on a motorcycle, not in a car, so he was fully exposed to the mob.
This is how The Oregonian reported the incident.
Portland police officer drives motorcycle into protester at Friday night demonstration https://t.co/lzCEbw7jAy pic.twitter.com/ifww1MqHu0
— The Oregonian (@Oregonian) October 3, 2020
There are other videos of the incident:
Motorcycle cop tried to pull someone over, took off and dragged a protesters for about 20 ft and then ran her over pic.twitter.com/0u0ONAPcIE
— John #PortlandProtest (@Johnnthelefty) October 3, 2020
We look at this and can’t understand how these people always seem so shocked that when they stand in front of cars, especially cop cars, and then they get driven through.
This is a soccer flop.
They want to get run over or plowed through. They want to scream bloody murder and act like “how dare the police officer run me over for standing in his way.”
They know what they are doing and they play it up for social media and the press as a propaganda weapon.
The law needs to be changed to create some Stand Your Ground equivalent to running over protesters who block traffic. If they want to be run over for clicks than the driver forced into that position should be legally protected from having to do exactly what the mob is baiting him into doing. Police included.
For the political futbol flop to work, you have two important factors: time, and frequency.
In terms of time, the longer the protest continue, the less likely the general public is going to care, and may even come to support actions against the protestors.
In terms of frequency, the more they do it, the less impact it has.
The Radicals wanted to eat their cake, and have it. They wanted to be the rough, tough, intimidating streetfighers and the persecuted nonviolent protestors at the same time. They’re getting neither.
Yup, and the longer it continues the more people just want to send in the storm troopers and be done with it already.
They lost their “non-violent” claim years ago. This summer alone they’ve attempted arson on multiple occupied buildings, thrown explosives at police, tried to blind police, tried to lynch Kyle and ambushed and murdered a man.
All the “they’re trying to provoke a reaction” BS is just a route to paralysis, a line pushed so we let them get away with more violence and murder.
There is also the whole white people need to put their bodies physically on the line to protect black bodies and to somehow create parity for all the black injuries and deaths.
As I said in comments on the last post on “the flop”, Americans don’t like it as a “strategic maneuver”, and the way to get it to stop is, when you know your opponent is going to “flop” (it’s a strategic move, so the timing is predictable), to kick them good and hard in a tender place. If they’re gonna flop, give them something to flop about.
Sure, you might get a yellow card, but they’re trying to give you one anyway, so you might as well own it and make it cost them.
That’s the root of the issue: it penalizes you, but it costs them nothing. That last is what needs to change if you want it to stop.
The same is applicable to the riots. The police trying to maintain peace and order are being penalized for doing so, but the rioters trying to burn down occupied buildings, blind police, assault and murder opponents, etc., face zero consequences for doing so. It costs them nothing. That needs to change if this is to stop.
Here’s the part I don’t get: The riots and intentional arsons are happening in a downtown urban area, surrounded by buildings. These buildings have rooftops. An enterprising opposition could prepare their own Molotov cocktails and station themselves on the rooftops surrounding the mob. As soon as the front line takes up their shields and the second line starts hurling firebombs, the rooftop opposition could start hurling their own … starting at the back lines of the mob (where the rioters think they’re safe) and working forward. Just throw what they have and then clear out before the rioters have time to realize what happened and turn their cameras skyward (they’re all trying to film the next “police brutality” incident; how many are watching the rooftops?). From a tall roof, you should be able to throw several and get out of sight before the first ones hit.
What I don’t get is why that hasn’t happened yet.
Bingo. This is EXACTLY what they are doing. I’ve been saying it for weeks. It is pure provocation. The rioters in the streets just want to get the police to arrest someone or do anything that they can edit and make look like ‘brutality”…basically anything at all designed to discourage a riot and disperse it. If all the police do is disperse them, they fall back on “the police were driving innocent protestors out of the streets to silence them!” (never mind the hundreds of actual peaceful protests where the police stand by and observe them breaking the law and taunting them, blocking traffic, annoying the neighbors, without lifting a finger to stop them).
But I think the major leadership hopes for a bigger catch: they hope for an incident of lethal force. They hope that either some group of rioters will end up putting a cop in a position where they have to shoot, or that some conservative with a gun and no more patience will start shooting. That’s the big goal.
But they will be happy to settle with Death By 1000 Cuts, as described.
It is long past time to bring out the Colt Potato Diggers. We can’t keep the terrorists from acting like that, but we can make it hard for them to do it a second time. If it is hard enough for the terrorists to do it a second time, it gets hard for them to recruit new cannon fodder to do it a first time.