Despite incendiary news (propoganda front for the US Red Guards chapters, run by probably 5 dudes in total) trying to word this like they committed some righteous revolutionary violence against social fascism, what actually happened was these boys in blue stormed a library where like 3 DSA members were printing flyers for an antifascist event, read one of their stupid speeches, and then tried to steal all of the flyers and a library projector for some reason. At this point a man described by the KCDSA as an elderly, disabled veteran tried to confront them and the Red Guards (judging by the size of the group that is every single member of the KC Red Guards + some random schmucks they roped into going) beat the old man to the point that he was hospitalized, which is where the “bloodshed” part of the headline comes in.
In spite of all this posturing, the Red Guards remain a force of, at maximum, 50 people nationwide, and I don’t think they’ve ever successfully won a fight save for against this particular old man. It’s pretty easy to find out who they are if you are unfortunate enough to have a local chapter, and I can speak from personal experience when I say they are not a threat to anyone but the vulnerable people they manipulate into becoming economically reliant on them. They’re so ill-equipped to confront fascism in any meaningful sense that they’ve had to convince themselves that the DSA, the only people they’ve been able to successfully bully, are somehow as big of a threat to the working class as, say, the Proud Boys chapter that also meets regularly in Kansas City.
As easy as it would be to say these people are just undercover cops, the depressing reality is that this is a replicating network of pseudo-cultists that offer catharsis activism to frustrated young leftists. Oftentimes these people are economically vulnerable and come to rely on the group for transportation and even housing, which makes it even easier for the Red Guards to drag other people as far down the rabbit hole as they have gone. This particularly insidious recruitment design has been completely ineffective in retaining any genuine working-class membership, but excels at removing other leftists from other, more meaningful leftist circles. For that reason I can’t say I would be surprised if ground zero of this organization was some COINTELPRO type shit, but it has nonetheless succeeded in contorting the ideology of a nonzero number of people who used to be actual leftists.
The Red Guards have this organizing structure where they split up into these sub-organizations so that they can abandon the Red Guard name and distance themselves from their reputation. These orgs have specific purposes - the exact name and function of these sub-organizations varies from location to location, but this is generally the pattern you’re gonna want to look for. They have “LGBT liberation” orgs like “Stonewall Militant Front” that they use to lend credibility to the transphobic shit they frequently peddle. They have (usually cis) women-exclusive orgs like “Popular Women’s Movement” that focus on women-specific issues, and they are usually the main source of the transphobic shit that comes from the Red Guards. They have “Serve The People” orgs, which is the “mass” / working class outreach facet of the Red Guards. They scoop up well-meaning leftists and convince them to do outreach to working class communities - they never actually recruit any working class people, but it’s pretty good at melting the brains of the well-meaning leftists with this weird Chairman Gonzalo-centric drivel.
They start demanding more and more of your time, even eventually demanding you “self-criticize” if you are late enough times or do not show up to enough of their protests. They start demanding that you be willing to get arrested at said protests so that they can spin it as a “propaganda victory” on incendiary news. If you’re really struggling financially, they might even ask you to move in with them, where I can only assumed you are constantly corrected and criticized for revisionism/liberalism/rightism/etc.
Not everybody in leftist circles is going to be acting in good faith, and the Red Guards certainly aren’t. If you live in Kansas City, Austin, LA, Charlotte, or Pittsburgh, avoid these people like the plague.
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