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Contact. jeremy@publicreport.org

The 2020 - 2021 report was intended to provide a non-partisan source of information on riot Direct Action, street conflicts and how they played out “under the cover of protests.”

The home page as of September 2022 now catalogues ALL reported events of political violence between 2015 - 2022. Omissions welcome.

You will find that those referenced in this report may carry several affiliations or self-identifications, a pervasive characteristic of diversified political & cultural identity in the US. The report strives to avoid labeling that is not backed up by self-identifications.

ie. Blanket labeling “Nazi,” “Fascist,” or “Commie,” “Pedo” in the interest of disparagement.

I am an advocate for non-violence as a Photojournalist and former (sometimes still) professional news anchor; Also a working filmmaker, actor, and student of theater when time allows. From the perspective of a Thespian, all perspectives are valid and should be honored in the telling of what happens.

My concern, shared with others I collaborated with following unrest on the ground in 2020-2021, is empirical truth:

Not agenda or partisanship.

I highly recommend those interested in parsing the culture war violence we witnessed, to go directly to primary source documentarians such as Ford Fischer, Brendan Gutenschwager, Scootercaster, Jake Lee Green and C.J. Halliburton. PDXZane and Sergio Olmos in the Pacific Northwest among others.

Similarly, I would urge that reporting from the Daily Beast, Vice, Huffington Post, Guardian, Rolling Stone, Daily Dot and other Left wing partisan platforms be given the same scrutiny that Breitbart and others would receive for Right wing partisan coverage, as all appear allergic to printing anything that reflects poorly on one’s own affiliated activists.

Then there are the activists themselves presenting as journalists.
If a camera is positioned to show only one side of a conflict as is often the case, buyer beware.

There were neutral perspective journalists that captured how it went down on the ground during 2020’s summer of civil unrest which continued into 2021. Some of us were also at the Capitol on January 6th. Some have been on the ground since 2017.

We are not reporting from behind a computer monitor- but on the streets.

Seek us out.

Forward:

February 2021

This report is not attempting to stoke rumor of myths or to disparage movements focused on political activism, government overreach or addressing economic and racial inequities in this nation.

This report is an attempt to document events as they occurred and hear from as many people as possible without filtering the content.

This report aims to show the thing that happened; And outline a chain of escalating events that have upset our nation’s political discourse.

I am here to share my eyewitness account, coordinate with others, and develop a cultural understanding of what has been termed diversity of tactic “Direct Action” by autonomous participants. In short, riot actions.

What I witnessed starting on the Left, was appropriated by the Right on January 6th.

I have networked with other Photogs across the country who have kept their cameras rolling while most establishment media pulled back. If it all goes south again in 2024, we’ll be back.

Identifying Coordinated Direct Actions

On the streets of Santa Monica I dashed from the Montana Ave. protest where I had been a peaceful participant, to where the public rioting and looting started on the afternoon of May 31st.

An eerie masked man overseeing the mayhem avoided cameras but was caught on mine. When I reviewed the footage I was perplexed. Was it a racial slur? Was it tied to any hacktivism? Or was it just a latex mask, a tactic simply to conceal identity?

For weeks I persisted despite obstacles everywhere. One other eye witnesses reporter to these men would not share information. “I’ve put it behind me,” he wrote.

What both he and I witnessed that day would be a prelude to even more continuous widespread destruction of social order and continued political agitation

I tracked down another looting in Hollywood the following night and traced the techniques used by the coordinators from Portland and Minneapolis to Walnut Creek, California and beyond.

The patterns were identical. The tactics had gone viral.

When I went to Portland that summer, everything was out in the open, and it was plain as day how Insurrectionist tactics had developed year after year in the Pacific Northwest since the Seattle WTO riots of 1999:

These riot tactics were then applied in a culture war between the militant right and militant left on the streets of the west coast. The term LARP (live action role play) has come to describe the full scale political rumbles between militants on the west coast as recent as 2021, and in Charlottesville in 2017.

Also check out any annual May Day protest on Youtube from that region. , several which are documented on the homepage.

Portland and the SF Bay area started their riot resistance to the Trump administration in November 2016. Attacks on the perceived “fash” were launched in DC the night of the inauguration January 19th, 2017, but were also evident during the 2016 campaign in Costa Mesa and San Jose, CA.

Tactical insurrectionary anarchism has a 33 year + framework of revolutionary political organizing on the Left, starting with Antiracist Action and its “Insurrecto” Anarchist underpinnings.

The culture has gone viral and one asks, where is the off-button?

The hyper focus on activist right is accompanied by a consistent omission:

It is the activist Left showing up to the activist Right’s events with regularity.

Some have come to the conclusion that Insurrectionary Anarchism / Social Justice Antifascism not only hijacked the Leftist protest movement since May, but also the principals of Anarchism itself, which center on individual freedom from coercive authority and personal accountability.

How steeped are we as a nation in two party polarization? At what point does the madness of the mob take over?

At what point if the Press falls silent or entrenched in partisanship, do we cosign to the upheaval of our social order?

These are topics worthy of discussion.

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