Beer Not Bombs!

Florida had overtaken California in the fruit and nuts department many years ago.  Stories involving kooky people doing kooky things used to be primarily a California deal, but these days Florida generates the nutty stories.  Florida even has its own tag on Fark.  Now we’ve even got our own domestic terrorist group.

Anarchism (Photo credit: anarchosyn)

“Prosecutors allege that three men were plotting to attack President Obama’s campaign headquarters, Mayor Emanuel home and several Chicago police stations with Molotov cocktails.

The defense said that’s not true and all of this is a set up by Chicago police.

New details have been revealed about what was going on inside this apartment in the 1000 block of 32nd Street. Three protesters are now charged with several counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

Brian Church from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Jared Chase from Keene, New Hampshire and Brent Betterly from Oakland Park, Florida are each being held on a $1.5 million bond.

Each man has been charged with material to support terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism and possession of explosives – a first for the state”.

So with our two terrorist contributions, Florida once again intrudes on the national consciousness.

Of course this isn’t the first time Florida has generated domestic terrorists.  In 2006 members of a Miami based Muslim group were arrested for plotting to blow up the Sears Tower.  Oddly enough, another Chicago target.  But those guys were still in the planning stages.  No serious preparation had been made.  These terrorists were actually in Chicago with their equipment.

According to the Illinois State Attorney’s office, these men were a member of a Black Bloc anarchist group.  These are the groups that travel the world showing up at various international conferences, such as the     G-8, or in this case, NATO, and basically commit street mayhem.  Politically, they are leftist, although they most often describe themselves as anarchists.

Naturally these were also Occupy veterans as well.

Although amongst the many kooky groups on the left, anarchism is probably the most marginalized, they are still the guys willing to go out and blow stuff up for their cause.  Whenever there is an international conference, they will show up in that city and start smashing windows.  However as a philosophy, anarchism (at least the modern variety) is pretty much devoid of any real public policy positions.  Worried about the financial crisis?  Smash a window.  Upset over the bailout of banks?  Poop on a cop car.  Don’t like the way the big Western economies dominate the third world?  Hit a cop.

It’s not really a program that many can get behind, although for the sake of inflating their numbers, the Occupy movement as well as any other lefty protest is always glad to have them.  But anarchists seem somewhat of a paradox on the left.  Most leftists are authoritarian statists.  They want to build up the state and just love to tell people what to do, whether it’s forcing them to buy a particular health insurance plan or restricting snack foods.  Anarchists want to smash the State altogether.  No military or cops.  Yeah we get it.  I can only assume that the lefty connection, besides the historical one, has to do with that.  Your regular garden variety liberal loves the Big State, but doesn’t have much use for the military, police, or border security; the primary functions of government.  Liberals are only interested in secondary and tertiary government functions like regulating everyone and distributing social services to supporters.

Although the various groups on the left embrace the anarchists and consider them part of the family of the left, it’s easy to do since they, unlike on the right, are never tarred with the violence committed by their anarchist cousins.  When the left commits violence, the blame goes squarely to the individuals, never the philosophy or politics that spawned it.  Meanwhile the media blamed the militia movement, Christianity, and Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing, and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was, within minutes of being reported, was laid at the feet of Sarah Palin.

That sort of lack of accountability on the left makes it easy for them to be fairly lackadaisical when their side commits violence.  Watch and see if any MSM connects these knuckleheads to the Occupy movement, even though they are Occupy members.

But what makes this a Florida story is that their defense is that the bomb making equipment was actually a beer homebrew kit.  Maybe when these guys get out of jail they can recover that equipment and go into business making some Occupy Wall Street labeled specialty brews.  They’ll have to get over their distaste of capitalism first, but I’m sure they’ll have many years in a Federal prison to ruminate on that.