Contextual Insurgency: Will 2021 be the year of Far-Left “Occupiers”?

As the pandemic grinds, various far left groups are using economic fallout and insecurity as a pretext to advance a radical agenda that essentially calls for the end of private property rights as we know them.

Tactics that range from the fairly conventional -such as facilitating tenants’ unions or coordinating rent strikes to gain concessions- to more aggressive and often illegal “direct actions” including barricading neighborhoods to prevent evictions, and renting hotel rooms for the homeless, then refusing to leave until forcibly evicted. In one such recent case, activists stormed a local hotel with hatchets and knives, leaving the local mayor to describe the incident as “domestic terrorism.”

To clarify, direct action in a leftist context means something different than the common military definition of the term which implies a raid by an elite military force. In leftist discourse it simply means using your assets and personal capabilities to directly implement the change you desire, instead of asking someone else with formal authority to make the change on your behalf.

In the context of this discussion, direct action means instead of appealing to the mayor or obtaining a court order to stop an eviction, doing things like opting to build barricades around the dwelling in question and seeking conflict with law enforcement when they show up to enforce it.

Dominique Walker of Oakland’s Moms 4 Housing group openly called their 58-day occupation of a vacant, investor-owned home a “direct action,” and Olympia WA-based Oly Housing Now refers to their hotel occupations as “direct action housing justice.”

The hotel room occupations in particular are a subset of direct action known as prefigurative intervention. Prefigurative actions are ones where a policy choice is directed and visibly enacted, forcing officials to first witness the desired reality, then un-make the change if they wish to return to the status quo.

A commonly cited and unobjectionable historical example is the lunch counter sit-in integration campaign during the civil rights era, where blacks and whites sat alongside each other in violation of segregation laws, presaging a future where such laws did not exist.

The prefigurative direct action aspect of the recent hotel occupations comes when a block of hotel rooms is rented for one night and a group of homeless is placed in these rooms, who then refuse to vacate once the stay is up.

Meanwhile, supporters forcibly occupy the lobby and common areas and conduct a sit-in protest, obstructing the hotel’s daily business. The group then demands the city or county take advantage of a recent FEMA policy change that offers 100% reimbursement to local governments for funds spent on non-congregate housing, by leaving the homeless in place and accepting responsibility for paying the hotel bills moving forward.

The other option is forcibly evicting them, which can be dangerous and resource intensive, not to mention a potential public relations disaster. The latest Oly Housing Now action on January 31 required a SWAT team to clear the hotel and deploy flashbangs to dislodge a particularly resistant group of squatters.

The desire is to force a decision dilemma, where the alternative to accepting the demands of the occupiers is so risky and expensive that local governments and hoteliers simply comply.  Some of these groups even deliver FEMA reimbursement forms with an instruction sheet to local government officials, just to get their point across:

“We’re just ready to stand our ground. We don’t mean any harm. We actually want this hotel to get business,” said Emma Veite with Oly Housing Now. “So they’re going to get the FEMA funds. And the rooms are going to be occupied by people who need them. So it’s a win-win. The funds are there; the county just has to apply for it.”

Occupying vacant spaces has long been a favorite tactic of the far left, and it should be no surprise that many of these groups also distribute detailed guides on squatting best practices. These guides cover things like finding and selecting the right location (including but not limited to utilizing government databases and public records) to gaining entry (including advice on bypassing locks) and improving habitability and accessing utilities, if applicable. They also include various legal options and strategies to maintain possession of the property as long as possible, including diagrams of various ways to barricade the entrance.

Some of these guides are fairly explicit about their end goal being abolition of private property, such as the Portland-oriented Opening Doors: A Primer stating:

“With the belief that the solution to housing problems is community control of the land/community determination of housing, this book was created to facilitate autonomous reclamation of unused land, providing access to safe shelter for all members of the community.”

One example of this strategy in practice is the aforementioned Moms 4 Housing group. They not only successfully squatted a vacant home for 58 days from November 2019 to January 2020, but they also managed to negotiate with the owner-investor to sell the home at-cost to a Community Land Trust, then agree to right of refusal for the city of Oakland and the Trust for all of the other 100 investment properties in their portfolio. Two founding members of Moms 4 Housing were subsequently elected to the Oakland City Council and Rent Board, likely providing some insight into the mindset of local residents and how they feel about the use of these tactics.

While the far left insists it is just good politics, to local governments and private property owners these tactics can feel very much like extortion.

The ambitions of the far left are not limited to a few hotel rooms and unoccupied buildings. The growing rise of establishing autonomous zones and conducting barricaded eviction defenses is an even more worrisome but related trend. Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is perhaps the most notable example, which lasted several weeks before a spate of shootings gave Seattle police the political cover they needed to move in and restore order.

While CHAZ failed for multiple reasons, the main issues of note for the purposes of this article are that the territory was simply too large for the occupiers to defend with a poorly barricaded perimeter. The occupiers also presented the city with a crowdsourced list of unrealistic, unenforceable demands.

Portland’s so-called Red House Eviction Defense (RHED) action last December however, shows what was possible when those tactical errors were addressed.

The list of demands contained just one item: return the title to the family that had resided there for 65 years. The fact the house had been owned free and clear before a loan had been taken out against it to pay the criminal defense bills of the family’s Moorish sovereign citizen son, or that the house was foreclosed after the family attempted to place the property into a trust and void the lien via nonsensical legal arguments, was beside the point.

In addition to the realistic and achievable goal of the RHED action, once the initial eviction attempt was stopped and the police violently expelled, the final established perimeter was much smaller and more defensible. The barricades were multilayered, much more robust than CHAZ, and positioned to offer good lines of sight that made undetected approaches extremely difficult. There were also numerous anti-vehicle obstacles like D-Day-style hedgehogs, caltrops, and even plastic wrap stretched across streets, a tactic adopted from Hong Kong protestors who found it to be a devilishly good way to foul axles and disable even larger emergency vehicles.

The entrances featured armed checkpoints, and -perhaps acutely aware of the dangers of surveillance and real time intelligence after a summer and fall spent rioting- all unvetted journalists and live-streamers were intercepted and escorted to a designated containment area for supervision. According to the account of a local resident, all Amazon Ring security cameras inside the perimeter were also smashed, presumably due to the ability of law enforcement to access those feeds under certain conditions.

The RHED occupation ended when the new owner of the property agreed to sell the house back to the family at cost, so the defensive preparations were never put to the test.

These actions parallel the 1980s West German Autonomen squatting movement, which was one of the ideological antecedents of today’s Antifa.

German Autonomen seized multiple squats throughout German cities during the years of their activity, some of which required upwards of a 1,000 police using armored vehicles and cranes to successfully clear, all while under assault from the occupying Autonomen. Some squats were never cleared at all and were (eventually) legalized and turned into co-ops.

By comparison, the Portland Police Bureau currently has roughly 600 sworn officers total, with only half of those assigned to patrol. Besides the low manpower numbers, the 1033 program (which allows police departments to acquire former DOD hardware) has current limitations on tracked surplus vehicles despite that these are probably the best option for defeating the obstacles and barricades.

It is unlikely PPB could have accomplished the mission to retake the RHED without massive interagency support.

Another parallel with 1980s West Germany exists. Germany in the early part of that decade was struggling with economic stagnation and cultural rifts that created both a disaffected youth population with high unemployment, as well as blighted urban centers that provided large contiguous blocks of abandoned commercial properties and houses ripe for occupation; conditions in certain parts of America today are not dissimilar.

The disruption due to the pandemic has been profound. With millions thrown out of work and wildly variable lockdown/mitigation policies imposed by state and local governments, the result has been a massive wave of business relocations, transitions to remote work, and internal migration. While this may be a boon for competently-managed jurisdictions capable of attracting new businesses and residents, nonetheless the overall result has been 1 in 5 Americans behind on their rent or mortgage and possibly facing eviction, a growing stock of vacant or abandoned homes, and swathes of empty commercial real estate in once-trendy areas.

And today’s radicals have taken notice.

Both RHED and Moms 4 Housing are examples of successfully using occupations to force a change in policy, which is deeply concerning because both incidents undermined government legitimacy and authority, along with contract law, and property rights.

However, as previously covered in the discussion about antifa dilemma actions in Portland, one of the primary objectives is the undermining of the existing government and institutional legitimacy. Like an insurgency, they seek to build a cartelized de facto shadow government which provides for their supporters while eroding the authority of the existing government and its monopoly on violence, with the goal to eventually replace it.

The radical left spent most of 2020 on the offense, 2021 for them appears to be a time for consolidating gains and leaning into defensive strategies while building mutual aid communities.

The strategic logic is: Instead of attacking police stations, why not fortify a neighborhood and force the police to come to you while simultaneously building up credit with community members by providing resources? If the police come and win, at least you built up credibility within the community. If the police fail, you’ve legitimized yourself as an authority figure while carving out a small piece of the world to use as a base for your radical ideology.