Leftist Web sites have worried the police in New York City whose job is to prevent radicals and terrorists from disrupting and endangering the 2004 Republican National Convention. These anti-President George W. Bush Internet sites have encouraged protestors to bring slingshots to attack police horses, and marbles that can be thrown beneath those horses? hooves to make them slip and injure themselves and their police officer riders.
These sites have provided ?anarchist cookbook? recipes that tell protestors how to set off sensors used to detect terrorist explosives and chemical weapons. Such detectors sounding an alarm could cause panic, mass evacuations, a disrupted convention and the loss of scarce national television prime time for the Republican message.
During the 1960s, protest as a form of civilized dialogue began to be replaced in America by protest used as political theater, as political warfare and increasingly as political terrorism.
This article examines how one group of today?s uncivilized protestors is undermining our democratic republic. It also explores connections between this radical protest organization and both Teresa Heinz Kerry and a key operative in the highest echelon of the campaign organization of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry.
The Ruckus Society is a leftwing organization that advocates ? and trains radicals from a wide variety of other leftwing groups how to use ? ?direct action? and ?guerrilla communication? to promote ?progressive? politics. During the Clinton Administration it was given tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) ?charitable organization.?
The Ruckus Society was formed in 1995 in the San Francisco Bay area by two radical environmental activists. One was Howard ?Twilly? Cannon, who was on the front lines of seagoing confrontations for Greenpeace. The other was Mike Roselle, a co-founder of both the far-left Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the violent eco-terrorist group Earth First! notorious for spiking trees with concealed 11? nails that caused lumberjack chain saw chains to snap and cause severe injuries to the user.
This and related Earth First! techniques to jam and break the machinery of capitalism are called ?monkey-wrenching? by radicals after their canonical text The Monkey Wrench Gang, a 1975 novel by Edward Abbey that glorifies the burning of billboards and terrorist attacks on machinery. The Ruckus Society?s logo depicts two large meshed gears of a machine with a monkey wrench wedged into their teeth to stop them. The early Industrial Revolution spawned its own word with the same meaning ? sabotage, from the way French factory workers would shut down machines by throwing their wooden shoes, sabots, into the gears to jam them.
Earth First! begat the domestic terrorist group Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which along with related eco-animal terrorist groups (according to a May 2004 FBI statement before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee) have ?committed more than 1,100 criminal acts in the United States since 1976, resulting in damages conservatively estimated at approximately $110 million.? These included the torching of a large apartment complex under construction in San Diego, California and many more violent terrorist acts.
The Ruckus Society played a major role in the 1999 radical assault on Seattle, Washington to protest a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting there. Leftist activists, including ones who learned confrontation tactics and guerrilla theatre techniques at Ruckus training camps, smashed store windows, set cars ablaze and did millions of dollars in property damage.
?Violence to me is against living things,? Ruckus? Executive Director John Sellers told far-left Mother Jones Magazine. ?But inanimate objects? I think you can be destructive, you can use vandalism strategically. It may be violence under the law, but I just don?t think it?s violence.?
Prior to the protests, reported the Chicago Tribune, two Ruckus Society leaders made a deal with Seattle police. The Ruckus leaders promised that if a few hundred protestors could have the media photo opportunity to symbolically break through the security cordon around the WTO meeting, the protestors would then promptly submit to peaceful arrest. Police officials in liberal Seattle naively agreed. But when the moment for this photo-op came, thousands of protestors rushed aggressively through the police security line and refused to submit to arrest. Having been deceived, the police responded with enough force to stop the violent protestors.
?The police response to civil disobedience was brutality,? declared Sellers, who had learned to use such radical tricks when he was head of the Washington, D.C. office of another far-left organization Greenpeace. ?We had discussions with them and they were not supposed to use physical force unless there was a life-threatening situation.? But after the dust settled Sellers boasted to USA Today: ?We kicked the WTO?s butt all over the Northwest.?
At the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, Ruckus-trained leftists planned to bring the city to a halt with rioting. Well-prepared police stopped them, and in the process seized improvised weapons, gasoline-soaked rags, and piano wire that the protestors intended to string across streets to trip police horses. In the melee 23 police cars were damaged and 15 officers were injured.
Even the Executive Director of the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Larry Frankel said of the Philadelphia protestors: ?We believe that vandalizing property, turning over trash cans, assaulting persons and shutting down the city by blocking traffic are not activities protected by the First Amendment.?
More than 400 of the Philadelphia anti-Republican protestors were arrested. John Sellers (who during years of ?civil disobedience? has been arrested more than 40 times) was charged with ?obstruction of justice, obstructing a highway, failure to disperse, recklessly endangering another person, and conspiracy.?
?We think it would be terrible public policy for us to have people come, joining in what appears to us to be a very well thought out, well-planned conspiracy to shut down the city of Philadelphia and disrupt the convention that was here,? said Democratic Mayor John Street, ?and at the end of the day we say all is forgiven, go back where you came from. That will not be the case.? But as typically happens with property-destroying leftwing activist lawbreakers, all criminal charges against Ruckus Society leader Sellers were dropped three months later.
According to the Ruckus Society?s Action Planning Training Manual, what it calls its tactics of ?non-violent? destruction of property and disruption of other peoples? lives is as American as apple pie. ?One of the most famous direct actions ever, the Boston Tea Party,? it reads, ?is patriotically taught in school.?
The Ruckus manual argues that such lawbreaking is justifiable. ?It is also illegal to break into a home. But if that home is on fire and you fear someone will be hurt, it is OK ? in fact it is your responsibility ? to break in. This is the argument of competing harms: A smaller harm is accepted if it prevents a greater harm from occurring."
Such twisted sophistry is based on the arrogant aristocratic assumption by leftists of their own moral and intellectual superiority to everybody else. Such leftists believe that their radicalism makes them as noble as Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and entitles them to impose their superior ideology on the rest of us at gunpoint. The Ruckus manual to teach radicals how to manipulate the news media almost says this outright: ?As activists we often have a more sophisticated understanding of an issue than the general public.?
The same kind of belief in his superiority led demonic megalomaniac Adolf Hitler to propose that, for the ?greater good? of the human race, he had to set aside civilized law and commit the ?small harm? of eradicating the Jews. The Ruckus Society?s rationalization for lawlessness and destroying the property in which others have invested their lives is no better than that of their fellow socialist Hitler.
The Ruckus Society?s ?action camps? have also provided training to thousands of radical activists in the techniques of agitation, disruption and how to select targets. Those it has trained have come from many different leftwing groups, including RAN, Earth First! and ELF. ?Nearly half of Ruckus? roster of camp ?trainers,?? according to research by the Center for Consumer Freedom, ?proclaims membership in Earth First! as well.? Among the topics taught at these boot camps for radicals have been ?street blockades,? ?police confrontation strategies? and ?using the media to your advantage.?
Activists who have undergone Ruckus training are to ordinary protestors as a Navy Seal commando is to an ordinary foot soldier. Ruckus graduates have been armed with a huge toolbox of ways to goad police into overreaction, exploit situations, and cause problems for those they target. Ruckus has become the military academy where dozens of leftwing groups send their elite shock troop protestors to learn the skills of waging guerrilla street warfare against capitalism.
One such leftwing activist is Zack Exley, who was trained by and has worked as a ?workshop facilitator? for The Ruckus Society.
Since April 2004 Exley has been the Director of Online Communications and Online Organizing for the John Kerry-John Edwards 2004 presidential campaign organization. Are Senator Kerry (and the Secret Service agents who protect him) aware of Exley?s training with and for this law-breaking violent anarchist group, and of its links to members of domestic terrorist organizations?
