05/14/2018
At in a post today callled THE CRAZY LEFT MIGHT BE SMALLER THAN IT SEEMS at Instapundit, Gail Heriot notes that antifa activist Yvette Felarca is actually being prosecuted for some violence she committed in 2016, and notes that although Felarca is a Left Coast loon, she’s associated with the "By Any Means Necessary" civil rights activists of Illinois:
Felarca was the subject of a fawning blurb in Newsweek back in September. This was during the period the media thought Antifa activists were the good guys, here to save us from the fascist right. By now, I think they’ve figured out the Antifa is at least as fascist as anything on the right — or at least I hope they have. But it shouldn’t have taken them (or anybody else) so long. Felarca is a member of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary (a Detroit/Oakland-based organization that calls itself “BAMN”). Alas, I’ve been dealing with BAMN for more than 20 years now. During the campaigns for California’s Proposition 209 in 1996, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative in 2006 and the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative in 2010, this violent offshoot of the Revolutionary Workers League was always there, often engaged in violent and disruptive activity. We just had to work around them. Mercifully I’ve never been in physical proximity to any of them, but my colleagues in these campaigns haven’t always been so lucky.
Just one among dozens of examples of BAMN’s willingness to use “any means necessary” was its attempt to intimidate the Michigan Board of Canvassers into refusing to certify the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative for the ballot. BAMN brought in busloads of mostly-teenaged protesters who shouted down officials, chanted “They say Jim Crow, we say hell no,” jumped on chairs, and stomped their feet, flipping over a table in the process. As the director of elections of the Michigan Secretary of State put it, “Never before have I see such absolutely, incredible and unprofessional behaviors from lawyers urging this disruption.” BAMN’s co-chair and attorney saw things differently: “Our tactics win. That’s the bottom line.” (They didn’t win in that case. The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was certified and passed by Michigan voters. BAMN even took the initiative to the Supreme Court, where in the final round, BAMN lost.)
I find some comfort in the fact that the same few people from BAMN turn up in so many places. Perhaps there really aren’t that many utter nut cases out there.
I blogged about that incident in 2005:
If you go to Chetly Zarko’s page, you can see video of an group called BAMN, (an acronym for By Any Means Necessary, which presumably includes violence) engaging in what the Detroit News called a "raucous, table-tumbling protest."
Students chanted "no voter fraud" and "they say Jim Crow, we say hell no," danced on chair seats and made obscene gestures at the board. At one point, many of the protesters rushed toward the board members, overturning a testimony table. Lansing police officers were called to restore order.
The argument was about the Michigan Civil Right Initiative, a chance to let Michigan voters decide if they wanted racial quotas favoring African-Americans and immigrants, or not.
While the BAMN supporters were disrupting the meeting, shouting, and generally making nuisances of themselves, this is only to be expected, that’s their "means" that they think is necessary.
Sadly, there’s no Chetly Zarko page anymore — anti-preferences activist Zarko died unexpectedly in 2010, age 39.
His report was preserved by American Renaissance:
BAMN Goes Violent at Michigan Board of Canvasser’s Meeting Chetly Zarko, Dec. 15, 2005.
You can watch Zarko’s video on YouTube below:
The only question we have to answer here is "Is this funded by George Soros?", and the answer, according to the Capital Research Center, is yes. See BAMN: By Any Means Necessary: How Radicals Use Race Preferences and Immigration to Change the Debate, August 7, 2010.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.