The Weather Aboveground has issued its Port Huron Statement, and it's a doozy

Claremont Institute wargame election scenario is a lesson plan for a violent right-wing coup

Proud Boys on the march

You’ll see where I’m going with this in just a moment, but for the time being, let’s take a trip back to Flint, Michigan in December of 1969.  The occasion was the week-long meeting of the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), later dubbed the radical organization’s “War Council.”

SDS was in disarray.  Founded in the early 60’s as a youth offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy, which had its roots in an early 20th century organization of a similar name founded by Walter Lippman, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Clarence Darrow, SDS held its first convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where leaders such as Tom Hayden drew up the “Port Huron Statement,” expressing its pet theories, aims and goals.  Among its complaints about the “system” as it existed in 1962, SDS condemned the influence of modern technology which was taking advantage of “new forms of social organization” to create “meaningless work and idleness” among the working class allowing the great mass of mankind to remain “undernourished” while the “upper classes” continued to “revel amidst superfluous abundance.”

Sound familiar?

It’s difficult to express from the vantage point of 2021 how bleak things appeared in December of ’69.  Richard Nixon had been elected president campaigning on a platform of having a “secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.”  Upon taking office, he instead began secretly bombing Cambodia and Laos and put forth a patently false plan to “Vietnamize” the war even as thousands more young Americans died in that misbegotten conflict.  At home, the anti-war movement was spooling up with The Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, creating protests in communities around the country in October followed by a mass demonstration in Washington D.C. in November.  But the war wasn’t ending.  Nixon’s prosecution of the war looked just like Lyndon Johnson’s before him.

In October, the Weatherman faction of SDS held what it called the “Days of Rage” in Chicago, when helmeted members rampaged through the streets of the tony downtown “Loop” smashing store windows and generally creating havoc.  Several hundred were arrested and it would take more than $200,000 to bail them out.  It was in that grim atmosphere that the Weatherman faction of SDS met in December.  

The group, renaming itself the Weather Underground, decided it was time to form separate and secret collectives around the country and engage in “armed struggle.”  In the evenings they met and had what they called a “wargasm,” practicing Karate, listening to speeches, and singing revolutionary songs.  In a speech, one of the group’s founding members, John Jacobs, told the assembled revolutionaries, “we are against everything that is ‘good and decent’ in honky America.  We will burn and loot and destroy.  We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.”

The Weather Underground would go on to carry out what they thought was violent insurrection, including bombings at New York City police headquarters, the Capitol, and the Pentagon.  But surveillance under the FBI program COINTELPRO, illegal domestic spying by the CIA, so-called “black bag jobs” and infiltration of the Weather Underground by FBI informers resulted in most weapons and bombing charges being dropped against leaders who had been arrested, and by the mid-1970’s the Weather Underground was over.

But the Weather Aboveground was just getting started last October when certain elements of the American right wing were sufficiently concerned that Donald Trump would lose the election in November that they convened in Austin, Texas in what amounted to a far-right convention of conservative leaders and intellectuals to run a “war game” which predicted what might happen in the country if the election was closely contested and resulted in a narrow win for Joe Biden. 

Like SDS before them, they produced what amounted to a founding document distributed by the arch-conservative Claremont Institute and the equally conservative but innocent-sounding Texas Public Policy Institute.  Titled “The 79 Days Report,” it was a product of a so-called task force led by the now notorious John Eastman, the Trump lawyer who would produce the infamous memo outlining how Vice President Pence could reject certain votes of the electoral college and create a situation that would force the decision on the presidency into the House of Representatives where Trump would be declared the victor.  Another task force leader was K.T. McFarland, a deputy national security advisor under the disgraced Michael Flynn. 

The resulting war game document is a paranoid fantasy predicting violence in the streets, left-wing conspiracies, media misbehavior, and illegal suppression of conservative dissent.  The document amounts to an instruction book for how Trump followers in the government, including the Justice Department, FBI, and Homeland Security Department alongside local law enforcement and right-wing so-called “constitutional sheriffs” aided by such Trump-friendly militia groups as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters could help in a coup that would lead to the installation of Trump in the White House for a second term.  Talk about days of rage!  The report envisions arrests of opposition leaders under spurious RICO statutes, murders of others, as well as a coordinated legal assault on the election results, with sample lawsuits to be filed in courts in battleground states leading to eventual hearings before the Supreme Court.

The Claremont coup-menu envisions an election night in which networks have declared Joe Biden winner by a narrow margin followed by a retraction a few hours later, leaving an uncertain outcome with battleground states in the balance.  For reasons known only to people like former Flynn deputies and insane clown posse lawyers like Eastman, this situation results in riots in the streets of “more than a dozen major cities . . . 14 law enforcement officers are known to have been shot, with one confirmed death. There are unconfirmed reports of a car bombing of a police precinct building in Philadelphia.”  Under the wargame scenario, violence overwhelms police and fire departments across the country, leading the Trump administration to invoke something called “Operation Spearfish,” targeting BLM, Antifa, Boogaloo, and a little-known Black paramilitary group known as NFAC.  The operation would involve “over one thousand arrest warrants issued using federal and state statutes from RICO to disorderly conduct… The decision to obtain arrest warrants even for the barest minimum of probable cause on the lowest of charges is meant to remove the players from the picture, at least temporarily.”  Left-wing players, that is.

The Claremont—TPPF wargamers go on to present a scenario in which “several groups affiliated with the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers have openly offered to assist law enforcement in putting down the violence via social media, touting significant current and retired law enforcement and military membership.”

But not everything the wargamers predict is fantasy.  The Claremont Institute has created a “Sheriffs Fellowship Program” targeting rural sheriffs friendly to their right-wing cause promising to offer them  innocent-sounding “training of unparalleled depth and excellence in American political thought and institutions,” which doesn’t sound innocent at all when you read that their wargamers predict “rumors that several sheriffs in conservative counties throughout the country are hinting that they may deputize regular citizens into posses should the lawlessness come to their counties. Social media is ablaze with volunteers from Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers and other Posse Comitatus groups to form posses.”

It gets worse.  The wargame foresees that Federal and local law enforcement officials will have “meetings with Google, Facebook, and Twitter to discuss tracking phones and electronic communication devices that have been traveling together to various cities to track various agitator groups.” 

And worse: Checkpoints would be “established along major corridors entering Michigan, Texas, and Florida to stop and detain any suspicious caravans or large transport vehicles and to identify passengers for verification in the state fusion centers as members of Antifa and BLM are expected to descend on the capitol buildings in those states.”

If you can believe it, these Claremont –TPPF paranoids go even further: “The FBI’s elite counterterrorist Hostage Rescue Team is sent to execute search warrants for weapons in and around Washington, DC.  Seven Antifa members are killed by gunfire during the simultaneous raids with no injuries to the agents.”

Of course not, because as we all now know, Trump-friendly factions here there and everywhere wouldn’t even think of hurting any law enforcement agents or local police.  January 6 taught us that much.

The wargamers predict higher and higher “body counts” due to “officer involved shootings” during raids “executed in middle to upper class neighborhoods where the Antifa and BLM activists/leadership tend to reside.”  

It’s hard to think of what to make of this paranoid fantasy document other than to see it as a kind of “Port Huron Statement” of the far right with a marriage between cops and Proud Boys and Oath Keepers serving as the shock troops of their fantasy war against the left in the furtherance of anything Donald Trump wants to do, including installing himself as president by means of a violent coup. 

The left-wing Weather Underground justified violence as the cost you had to pay to achieve the destruction of a government that did not serve the “interests of the people.”  The right-wing Weather Aboveground is ready to justify pretty much anything including extra-legal arrests and even murder to serve the interests of Donald Trump.

I don’t think any of us ever envisioned a future in which “what goes around, comes around” would end up here, but folks, like it or not, here is where we are.