They’re he-e-e-e-ere!
Here’s what we know as of now: On Friday, April 16, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s fundraising staffer Allee Bautsch and her boyfriend Joe Brown were coming out of a Republican fundraising dinner in New Orleans organized by the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. They were set upon by a group of demonstrators. He reportedly got a broken nose and fractured jaw, she got her leg broken in several places – the kind of breaks you get from a stomping, not a fall. She’s got surgical scars and pins in her legs to show for it.
The New Orleans police first said “insults of a political nature” were shouted as the demonstrators did their thing, then backed off, then reconfirmed.
In dispute was whether the victims were wearing Palin buttons or not.
The demonstrators in the area were reportedly from a left-anarchist group called the Iron Rail Collective.
One thing worthy of note, Walter Abbot in Lincoln Parrish News Online blog reported that earlier in the evening:
“In an interview this afternoon, Louisiana GOP Chair Roger Villere, Jr. told Lincoln Parish News Online he and several others were pursued by protesters last Friday night after a political fundraiser, but managed to get into a cab and avoid the mob. “We started to leave out the front door after the event, but the protesters had us blocked – there were six of us in our group – so we went out through the kitchen,” Villere said. Once they got outside, the protesters spotted them and began to pursue them, but they managed to get into a cab and avoid confrontation.”
So who are the Iron Rail Collective? Their website (and Wikipedia page) describes them as mostly a lending library.
“Our lending library is one of the largest collectively-run radical libraries in the country. The Iron Rail was the first library in metro New Orleans to re-open after the disastrous failure of the government levees in 2005, and for several months were the only functioning library in the city. In 2009, we were invited to be the official bookseller for the Family Violence Prevention Fund’s 5th annual National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence. We were super-duper stoked about this opportunity and we did a great job, because we’re awesome.”
What the Louisiana Hayride has to say about them is:
“So, what’s the Family Violence Prevention Fund? Well, it’s one of your standard-issue leftist non-governmental organizations. We say that because they say they advance a cause – the prevention of domestic violence – that nobody could possibly disagree with, and yet on their website one will find a grab-bag of hard-left advocacy.
Like what?
How about banning of guns, chatting up unions about making employers put domestic abuse prevention programs in collective bargaining contracts and granting asylum to women on the basis of domestic abuse in the home country.
FVPF is also covered in George Soros’ fingerprints. The organization’s President is Esta Soler, whose bio says:
She has been a consultant and advisor to numerous public and private agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Soros Justice Fellowship Program, the Ford Foundation/Harvard University Innovations in American Government initiative, and the Aspen Institute. She was a member of the Violence Against Women National Advisory Council when it was co-chaired by Health & Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala and Attorney General Janet Reno.
And on the FVPF’s Board of Directors is Ellen Friedman, who is a vice president at the Tides Foundation, an outfit partially funded by Soros and whose board chairman is Wade Rathke of SEIU and ACORN fame.
So that’s who the Family Violence Prevention Fund is. Their 5th annual National Conference on Health and Domestic Violence was held in New Orleans. It says on the Conference’s web site that:
The Conference is primarily funded by the Administration for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services.
ACF’s staff bio page is a mixed bag with some people who actually look like professionals in the field of social work and others whose backgrounds are not so appetizing. Its Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Mark Greenberg, is a veteran of the Soros-funded/John Podesta-led Center For American Progress.
The fact that the Iron Rail Book Collective was the “official bookseller” for that FVPF conference in New Orleans probably bears further research. The obvious question one would imagine is whether that title afforded to the Iron Rail Gang came with a grant or fees from the conference – because if in fact that did happen it would signify taxpayer funds indirectly making their way to an anarchist commune which brags about vandalizing banks in the French Quarter, holding book-study groups to teach The Coming Insurrection and organizing demonstrations which turn violent against people they don’t agree with politically.
And that would be worse than the idea that an outfit tied into George Soros would be directly providing funds to just such an anarchist commune.”
OK, now go do your own research, I just want to make a couple of points.
One, I just hate it that these folks call themselves “anarchists.” In my younger days when I was enchanted with revolutionary romanticism, I wore the term myself sometimes. But I called myself an “Individualist Anarchist” or “Anarcho-capitalist.”
I don’t anymore, for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with other anarchists, but I retain a certain fondness for the tradition and still recommend reading Lysander Spooner’s critique of representative government. Agree or not, Spooner raises points that have to be addressed.
I’ll even concede that I’m very glad I read anarcho-communist Prince Peter Kropotkin’s ‘Mutual Aid.’ Although he disturbingly uses the term ‘communism’ favorably too damned often, he’s worth reading for his critique of the metaphor of evolution as a “war” among other things.
But Individualist Anarchists Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and even that hopeless nerd Murray Rothbard intelectually have nothing in common with these thugs. (Though admittedly Rothbard was at times in his life also attracted to Left adventurism and had a brief flirtation with the Black Panthers before getting mugged by reality – and the Panthers.)
Two, the Left has shown their ability, like sociopaths and alcoholics, to stay always a step ahead of you in their thinking. For a while they’ve charged that Right-wing speech, on venues like talk radio, is creating a “climate of violence” that is in some way responsible for everything from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Holocaust Museum shooting, and tarred Tea Party demonstrators as dangerous extremists.
No matter that Timothy McVeigh’s politics are largely unknown but appear to have been a mishmash of anti-war/anti-government views not terribly different in tone from Michael Moore or Ward Churchill. Never mind that the Holocaust Museum shooter was a neo-Nazi, that is to say a National Socialist. And never mind that the FBI considers the most dangerous domestic terrorist groups to be the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front.
They’ve pre-emptively tarred the Right as violent extremists. So who is it that’s getting a free pass?
Yahoo news reporter reporter Bret Michael Dykes ends his story, “Victims of brutal New Orleans attack relay their story and contradict police report, but uncertainty about attackers remains” on this note:
“Of course, even if Bautsch and Brown’s recollection is correct and the attackers did come from the group protesting the event, they can’t know for sure what their motives were. Their account of the non-political nature of the verbal assault matches the one Brown gave police and the homophobic, misogynistic nature of the insults would be unusual coming the kind of person one might expect to protest a Republican fundraiser.”
Three, I’ve said it before, a controlled economy, i.e. fascism, needs a thug corps. Told you.
The beating of that black conservative guy by the Purple Shirts from SEIU was just a shot across the bow. Wait for the escalation.
I do not mean the president is part of a conspiracy to recruit a Brownshirt army. I mean it happens spontaneously, of necessity, whenever a dirigiste comes to power.
I don’t think Woodrow Wilson the professor, or Franklin D. Roosevelt the genteel patrician had the stomach for the kind of street violence Mussolini reveled in. And admittedly, the mob violence during WWI and thugish behavior of supporters of the National Recovery Administration* during the Great Depression, was restrained compared to the Fascisti or Brown Shirts.
Nonetheless, a leader who aims at the use of unrestrained power to shape society and the economy, all to the good of course, will always be followed by enthusiasts who don’t share his distaste for the cruder methods of social change.
He in fact creates a “climate of violence.”
Look for more of this. And if you’re free with your conservative or libertarian opinions in public, you might give a thought to what extent your personal ass is on the line.
*As chronicled in Jonah Goldberg’s, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change.
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