Thread by @hradzka

this should be a bigger news story but so far none of the American journos who covered the caravans are tweeting about it

https://twitter.com/michellemalkin/status/1136410684499976192

The arrests of Irieno Mujihca and Cristóbal Sánchez appear to be connected to the prosecution of Scott Warren, about whom THE INTERCEPT has an head-over-heels lovefest article that is extremely informative about how this kind of organizing works.
theintercept.com/2019/05/04/no-…

Warren is a border studies guy who, according to the article, got seriously plugged into the organizing network when he took a Border Patrol Citizens' Academy. Half the class were Ajo Samaritans -- a lefty group involved in border-jumping stuff. Warren made friends.

The roots of Ajo Samaritans & similar groups in the area was the 1980s Sanctuary Movement, done by religious lefties to bring in people from Central America. The feds tried to shut it down, but as lefties do, they mounted a massive public-support campaign, & the judge blinked:

This is where the true Hard Lefty strength comes from: people do something together as part of an organization with concrete projects, and maybe that particular organization ends but the people who worked with it have real and useful skills. So the abilities carry forward.

I've talked up the podcast IT COULD HAPPEN HERE before, but at the very least listen to the final episode, "The End of the United States of America," starting at 37:30, for extremely informative details on small scale and large scale organizing mechanics.

The host talks to two people in that segment. One, Alex, is a former police officer who attempted to reform (or, seen another way, subvert) his police department. The other, Scott, is an anarchist who was involved in post-Hurricane Katrina work.

Alex wanted to change the way police officers in his department trained. Typically, after you become a cop, there is on-the-job training with a training officer, and if you don't please your training officer, you're screwed. This distributed training is resistant to alteration.

The training officers perpetuate the idea that the real world is not the academy, which attitude Alex viewed as a problem that led to police brutality, because it doesn't matter what you teach in the academy if graduates are taught to do something different on the streets.

Here is what Alex did not do: he did not complain about it, he did not bitch online, he did not do something ineffectual.

No. He analyzed the training officer program ran in his police department, identified the position supervising it, and angled for that job. And got it.

Alex realized that a lot of training officers were cynical in part because they were burned out on the gig. So he started making more training officers. As many as he could. As many younger officers as he could. A whole new cohort.

They looked to each other, not the old guys.

Personnel is policy.

What can you do to affect personnel where you are?

("That's not my job!" ...well, it wasn't Alex's either, originally.)

Scott, the anarchist, sounds like he's jacked up on meth or maybe just anarchism. Why it's important to listen to him: because he basically set up an anarchist hospital and aid program post-Katrina. And he couldn't have done it alone.

Anarchists had been training street medics for protests for fifteen years or so. So by Katrina they had networks of street medics. Scott thought, "We could make a first aid camp with the street medics I know! ...and what if we reached out to other groups, with different skills?"

So they reached out to radical street medics and radical doctors, and now they had a hospital. They reached out to Food Not Bombs, and now they had a food service program.

They could do it because these groups train in concrete skills, were growth-focused, and had members who had been involved with various groups and had lots of friends everywhere.

This is why the Hard Righties, despite their bluster, would brutally lose a war with Hard Lefties in about two weeks if both camps went hot.

Anyway, that Intercept article is essential reading, and the podcast ep essential listening, for anybody who wants to understand this stuff, and maybe even try to build something themselves.