This is certainly a concern, that the 'professional protestors', anarchists and/or accelerationists are co-opting the situation.
Speaking of the instigators...
“MORE. MORE AND MORE AND MORE,” a group known as Unity of Fields posted on X, along with a video of the flaming vehicles.
The post wasn’t an anomaly. Since the start of the demonstrations against immigration raids in Los Angeles, the Unity of Fields X account has been pumping out messages urging people to wreak havoc in the streets
It’s part of a far-left online ecosystem that has proliferated in recent years, experts say. Some of the groups behind the accounts express contempt for peaceful resistance and glorify acts of violence — and even murders, like those of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and two Israeli Embassy staffers.
“Whether they directly threw a Molotov cocktail is actually not as essential as the ecosystem of encouragement and coordination they have created,” said Joel Finkelstein, a co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that tracks online extremism.
The unrest in Los Angeles follows a pattern that has played out in numerous cities over the past five years in which protests that break out remain mostly peaceful during the day, but at night agitators engage in fiery clashes with police.
Were they the acts of lone wolves seizing an opportunity to target police? Or was there a level of coordination and planning among the instigators?
Experts say it’s likely to be a combination of both.
“What we found in our research is there are groups that were attempting to exploit the situation, oftentimes after dark, and their coordination was somewhat sophisticated,” said Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser to the Network Contagion Research Institute.
“What’s concerning is the attempt to conflate the individual actors who do commit violence with the mass movement as a whole,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.