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Don't Laugh Too Much About The CHOP

AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

For many of us, the CHOP in Seattle has been an endless source of amusement. I mean, how can it not? You’ve got their “farm” which is really just a pathetic excuse for a garden and not even close to enough to feed a family for more than a meal or two, much less provide for six city blocks worth of people. You’ve got a rapper who has basically decided he’s a warlord, and you’ve got them constantly begging for donations of all the essentials that capitalism provides while they bash capitalism.

Honestly, if they do a movie about this, they’re going to have to make it a comedy.

Yet as humorous as it is, I wouldn’t be too quick to laugh too much about the CHOP.

You see, as ridiculous as it all looks, it represents something that we should all be at least somewhat concerned about. You see, the ties between the CHOP and Antifa are clear. After all, the Antifa-aligned group the John Brown Gun Club are acting as police within the CHOP, so one has to wonder just how else Antifa might be involved.

And you should.

Antifa calls themselves anti-fascist, but the truth is that they’re really nothing more than communist anarchists–yes, somehow that’s a thing–that seek to undermine the United States of America. They want to force their militant brand of communism down people’s throats and aren’t afraid to commit violence to make that happen.

There’s reason to believe that Antifa was behind all the riots that took place surrounding the George Floyd protests. Black Lives Matter likely knew that riots wouldn’t serve them well, but peaceful protests would. Antifa, however, seems to come in and turn the protest violent. They want unrest.

However, the CHOP is slightly different.

While it came up in the wake of the protest, I believe it’s a test. They’re looking to see if they can set up true autonomous zones in American cities. They’re trying to figure out the logistics of such a thing.

While the area was originally called the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone), the CHOP stands for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest tells us a great deal about the origins of the CHOP, at least in spirit.

Yet when you compare the CHOP with, say, Occupy Wall Street, you see something very different. You see a progression.

Before, the occupy protests were merely people squatting in an area. A culture popped up around it and methods for handling issues were developed, but they weren’t very secure. An Occupy protest in Oakland was pushed out rather easily by police, for example.

With the CHOP, they learned from that. They set up defined borders and tried to provide barriers that would inhibit law enforcement from entering en masse. Of course, the City of Seattle opted to help with that one.

They learned.

Also, the Occupy protests relied on people being able to get food and bring it into the area. No one had any intention of trying to stay there permanently or anything, so what else would you do?

However, as laughable as their garden is, the CHOP’s attempt at agriculture is still a step toward trying to learn some degree of self-sufficiency. It also makes it clear they’re not planning a short-term protest. No, they’re in there for the long-haul. It seems they really believe they’ve created a new land that isn’t subject to the laws of Seattle, the state of Washington, or the United States.

And that’s where Antifa comes in, at least in my mind.

Antifa wants a violent revolution. They know their strongholds are in the cities and that food comes from the rural areas. It seems to me that the CHOP is really a trial run for Antifa to attempt to take and hold territory in a long-term way. That’s something you have to believe Antifa is thinking about.

“Oh, we could kick their butts even without the military,” many of you might argue. And, well, you may be right. We have a lot of combat veterans among the ranks of law-abiding gun owners.

However, Antifa has some combat vets of their own. That doesn’t count any American military vets who might have also signed on with Antifa-aligned groups.

Right now, the CHOP is kind of ridiculous. The problem is, I believe this represents an attempt at learning how to take and hold territory, something that will be used again in other places. At some point, though, we have to view this as an insurgency and determine how best to address this.

There’s nothing funny about that.

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