Pro-Illegal Immigration: An Organic Movement
Many conservative commentators call the anti-ICE/pro-illegal protests astroturfed. This is wrong: They have an organic social base, and it is a strategic error to ignore that (1500 words; 7 min.)
Numerous conservative and independent commentators have called the anti-ICE protests inorganic or astroturfed. This is factually wrong, and it will lead to strategic errors. While there is organization and money behind the protests, they also have social roots, and it is both tactically and strategically important to understand them.
Two things are true at the same time: The anti-enforcement protests have a real social and popular base, and the anti-enforcement protests also benefit from significant organizational and financial support from outside and sometimes hidden or illegitimate groups. These are not conflicting positions. On the contrary: Authentic social support and external backing work together to explain the size and influence of the protests.
It is tempting for conservatives and others in favour of law enforcement to point to the carefully arranged character of the protests and say, “Ah-ha! a conspiracy!” This may feel good, but it avoids the problem of popular support for those protests, and deflects our attention from the nature of that support. That support is significant in blue states, in urban areas, and most significantly among credentialed and institutionalized elites, who, while not good at governing, produce agitprop in large quantities.
The “Astroturf” Claim
Here is Laura Ingraham, a strong conservative voice, with Liz Collin of Alpha News and Asra Nomani of Fox News, illustrating my point:
Having covered the BLM riots, Collin (@lizcollin) knows Minneapolis and its progressive pathologies better than anyone (see her documentary on BLM here); Nomani of Fox has reported extensively on the funding and behind-the-scenes organization of the anti-government protests, and brings much relevant information. Her X account repays a follow: https://x.com/AsraNoman
In the clip, Nomani says that the anti-enforcement protests are, “absolutely an astroturfed movement. It is well-funded, well-organized, and well-coordinated.” Her second sentence is true, and she provides concrete examples to support her claims. There are many more in her X feed.
But the initial assertion that the movement is astroturfed does not follow from those important facts. The movement has a real social base and class and regional support. Astroturf is artificial grass, made of inorganic material. If we need a vegetative or horticultural metaphor, it would be more accurate to say that the movement is well-fertilized, and those who want a more graphic metaphor could refer to the bovine substance often used as fertilizer.
In the clip, Nomani speaks of pre-printed signs handed out to protesters off the back of a wagon. But those protesters were numerous and came from somewhere, and while degrees of commitment will vary -- some may just think protesting is kind of cool, or that it’s the happening scene, or a place to cruise -- even people who protest for social or personal reasons assent to some degree to the cause, and assimilate its premises and its vocabulary. There are a lot of such people, and neither the anti-enforcement protests nor the other leftist omni-cause protests, with which the current protests strongly overlap, could work without a large quantity of willing social cooperation.
The left tried the same tactic against the Tea Party
There is evidence that some protesters have been paid, but there are simply too many protests and too many protesters making too much noise for this to be a complete explanation. The left, with assistance from The New Yorker (see here), used to believe that the Koch brothers were behind the Tea Party or the Republican Party. But no quantity of Koch money could bring large numbers of people into the street. The idea that a significant popular movement is manipulated, contrived, or artificial is psychologically functional, offering reassurance that the enemy is not that frightening. For the left, which believes itself the party of the people, it also offered reassurance that popular support for the Tea Party was exaggerated, or even not real, thereby absolving progressive true believers of ideological dissonance, and the unfamiliar pain of further thought.
Conservatives should remember that shouting about astroturf did not help the left, even though not everything reported about the Koch brothers was false: the left’s avoidance of further analysis did not save them from President Trump, whom they hate so much more than the Tea Party or the Kochs.
Evidence of Inorganic Support
None of this means that the exposure of the networks of financial support behind the anti-ICE and other omnicause protests is not necessary or important. The networks are real and large, and their exposure is both tactically and strategically valuable, and we should value the reporting of Nomani and others who expose them. The author who posts on X as @datarepublican is another such voice, reporting on the funding of anti-ICE protests in Minnesota here, as is James O’Keefe, who has reported at great personal risk from inside the protests (link). Exposure is immediately damaging to the networks, and information is a long-term strategic gain.
In the clip above, Nomani mentions Neville Singham, a billionaire who lives in China, and organizations such as People’s Forum and the Answer Coalition. The presence of Singham does not mean that the protests are a Chinese creation, but it is a reminder that social discord serves Communist ends. The Answer Coalition has been around a long time, a fact which points to the social depth of the leftist anti-American movement. It did not appear yesterday, and unlike astroturf has roots both deep and organic, and well fertilized too. At the risk of going too far with horticultural metaphors, these leftist networks are old-growth, not new plantations.
The exposure of the left’s networks tells us not how thin and artificial they are, but how thick and socially rooted they are, and how long they have been around. They can best be fought by understanding where they come from, not by any artificially optimistic idea that mere exposure will cause them to wilt in cleansing sunlight. They are the effects of long-standing social pathologies, and exposure will help us to understand those pathologies, but it is only the first step to solving the problem.
The Social and Class Base of the Left
Any examination of the social roots of the omnicause will have to contend with what Marxists would call its social base: the large number of students, baristas, urban gig workers, teachers, academics or aspiring academics, and bureaucrats in the streets. They constitute what has been called an under-employed elite. They have been taught that they have special knowledge, acquired over many years in the madrassas of cultural Marxism that we call universities, and yet now they shuffle paper, rewrite emails, or serve cappuccinos or deliver Door-Dash, while Orange Man Bad makes decisions. Their feeling of impotence and of caste dishonour is as real as the anger it begets. That anger is socially important.
Also important are the credentialed elites who write for high-status newspapers and prestigious journals like The Atlantic and The Economist (links to examples of their falsehoods). Following those elites are the readers of those publications, both of which have large, paying, financially and socially upscale readerships. The Atlantic graces the tables of faculty clubs and lobbyists; The Economist those of CEOs. The social base of the anti-American omnicause combines an insurgent street-fighting Antifa sub-intelligentsia with a managerial class consisting of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and corporate executives. There are more than a few contradictions here, but many powerful social movements have brought together objectively opposed classes. The tensions can be productive, and it is usually only after the revolution that the Jacobins guillotine the moderates.
Too great an emphasis on the social base and structural roots of the left can lead to a paralyzing or black-pilling pessimism: how can one oppose a movement supported by so many powerful forces? But too great an emphasis on the mechanics of their movement can also lead to the opposite error, implying that it is all contrived by some guy in Shanghai, that nothing substantial is there, and that mere exposure will defeat the omnicause. Knowledge of their funding and methods is good intelligence, but intelligence must lead to analysis of the social roots of the anti-American movement, without which money and organization would have little effect.
Exposure is an immediate tactical victory, but tactics are not strategy. The information provided by the solid journalism of Nomani at Fox, along with @datarepublican and many other independents, is both tactically effective in the short term and a necessary form of intelligence-gathering. But we also need to know more about the organic social roots of what can only be called a low-level insurrection against the legitimacy of the United States.
Good article. I agree there is more real action and emotion (deranged as it may be) that just astro turfing,