Martin Gurri and Arnold Kling have a dialog. I say,
It seems to me that the decentralized nature of these protests is a weakness. By 20th-century standards, a movement needs to mature into having an institutional structure.
He says,
I’m going to make an act of faith and say that new institutions will arise that account for the digital environment and the web culture. With luck, they will embody our ideals of democracy and equality—maybe even nudge closer to these ideals. But it’s early days.
Sorry, Arnold. I disagree with both Gurri and you. You look at the protesters as if they were independent of any organized political group. Behind the protesters, there are organized groups and more importantly some financiers. The case of the U.S. is very clear about both the organized groups and the financiers. At the national level, the D-Party has colluded –yes, colluded– with the radical left to the extent that has accommodated some of their people within the Party. Soros and other big guys have been financing campaigns to elect radical leftists at the local and state level, all disguised as Democrats. Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to track all these relationships (I work by myself far away from the U.S.).
The immediate objective of D-Party and the radical leftists is to grab power by January 20, 2021. If they don’t win the election, you better be ready for what will happen. They have yet to accept the 2016 defeat and they will never accept another defeat. Yes, Arnold, they have an objective –to grab power– like all the other movements that Gurri and you discuss. It’s all about power, about absolute power.
Gurri makes a brief reference to Chile but he doesn’t know what is going on in Chile. The social outbreak of a year ago (it started on 10/18/20) was triggered by a coordinated attack to Metro stations supported by most of the opposition to the President’s coalition. On October 25, there will be a national vote to approve or reject the idea of reforming the Constitution through a new Assembly rather than through the process established in the Constitution. This referendum was agreed on 2019 to put an end to the social outbreak but it has been postponed because of the pandemic. The President (my old colleague and friend before becoming a politician) has failed to stand up against the opposition, and he has supported the new Assembly –a change that most likely will escalate the political tension between the country’s two halves to the 1970-1973 level.
Arnold is right that the decentralization of these movements is a weakness. Martin backs up the point by highlighting the striking absence of any coherent and specific demands beyond a few catch phrases that mean lots of different things to different people.
But this very vagueness and decentralization, combined with social media, has fostered conspiracy theories on all sides like never before. EB-Ch’s reference to “Soros and other big guys” is a classic example. Soros is just standing in for the Rothschild’s here in a trope that is centuries old. For the left it is “the Koch brothers and other big guys.” In reality big money matters less than ever before when things go viral for free on social media.
The internet facilitates conspiracy theorists finding each other and the decentralization and incoherence of these movements allow the conspiracy theorists to see the imagined influence of the puppet masters everywhere they look.
My company donated hundreds of millions of dollars to these race agitators and is altering its hiring policy to achieve particular demographics in line with critical race theory. That’s not vague, its specific.
The county magnet school that matches the one I went to just abandoned its merit based admissions in favor of racial balancing.
The university of San Fransisco medical school just cut its asian enrollment from 60% to 20% in a year despite that being illegal in California (and I would argue nationally but for some bullshit 5-4 SC decisions). That’s not vague, its specific.
My local school district pays for critical race training and is going to be teaching it in elementary schools to my kids. Read it, its rather specific and not vague.
“Defund the police” is something so idiotic that it has zero chance in 99% of places, but that’s about it. And it doesn’t even matter if they defund because the main issue is police demoralization leading to policing pullback.
>—“That’s not vague, its specific.”
You are conflating two very different types of specificity.
Every organization necessarily makes a very “specific” decision (and not always a good one) about whether or not it will do anything to support the BLM movement and if so what.
That does NOT mean that there is any kind of “specific” consensus among protesters about what those decisions even should be or what would actually satisfy them and constitute success for the movement.
It was very different in the Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s. Back then there were clearly identified leaders and very specific goals and demands regarding desegregation and voting rights and exactly what legislation should be passed to facilitate the movement’s goals.
Today rather than pushing back against voter suppression, Colin Kaepernick urges his followers NOT to vote since that would imply a type of agency that would undermine the emotive victimhood he prefers to actual tawdry political power.
In Kling’s previous post he included a “list of demands” presented by the protestors are Princeton. They are all pretty specific.
There are books and intellectual projects with specific proposals or action items that can easily be derived from the core themes. When all these companies pay Kendi to come and give a talk, it’s not as if he doesn’t have proposals. He wants an unelected and extra legal body to prosecute all instances of disparate impact. The corporate equivalent of that is an office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity with the power to reward or punish based on ability to fulfill hiring and promotion quotas based on race.
Anti-racism training is also pretty specific. If I read through this stuff they have specific actions to take (track and hire more minorities) and specific phrases people aren’t allowed to say (often directly quoted in the worksheets).
If you mean every single one of a million protestors doesn’t agree on exactly the same thing on all issues, that was likely true of the civil rights movement as well. But there is a narrative and there are specific actions based on that narrative that get copy pasted over and over across our society.
Even the Civil Rights Movement didn’t succeed in its goals. MLK didn’t just want classical liberal rights for blacks. Within a couple of years of the Civil Rights Act he was writing about how he wanted strict race quotas in nearly all facets of life (see “where do we go from here”). He protested crackers landing on the moon rather than giving more welfare to blacks. At the time of his death he had a 25% approval rating, Donald Trump is more popular than MLK in the late 60s.
There is no “good” civil rights movement with objectives that it “achieved”. There was a movement for which the civil rights was one step on towards the eventual goal of Kendi-ism based on a narrative that seeks to explain black failures as deriving from white racism (insert your definition of racism here).
asdf,
>—” (insert your definition of racism here).”
Yeah, let’s do that because the term means way too may different things to different people.
I would say that racism is when you are more inclined to judge people on the basis of what you perceive to be their race than as individuals.
Now let’s hear your definition.
As for your obsession with Kendi, his influence is a tiny fraction of the influence MLK had both within the movement and in the larger society. People are turning out in the streets now mostly because of these videos, not because they are reading Kendi. I didn’t even know who Kendi was until I read about him on this blog. Everybody in America knew who MLK was in the 60’s
And just because you can find specific people with specific demands in specific places today does not mean that the overall movement has a coherent consensus on goals and leaders that is remotely comparable to the Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s.
He’s been on the NYTimes bestseller list for 31 weeks, along with similar authors.
His book and other like it is on the list of anti-racist reading materials for schools, corporations, and government agencies. He and others like him are paid to teach their definition of antiracism and implement policies based on their definition.
The definition is clear. Any deviation by any oppressed group in any way from their population % when it comes to giving out “good” things or avoiding “bad things” is evidence of racism. It must be crushed immediately. Tolerating such outcomes is tacit admission of ones own racism. There is no such thing as “not-racist”.
If you’ve got any questions on this just look at the training every single large institution is officially recognizing. Let’s take Homeland Security
https://christopherrufo.com/department-of-homeland-security-training-on-microinequities/
Both meritocracy and colorblindness are identified specifically as racist and deserving of punishment. Criticism of affirmative action is specifically called out as racist.
This was built into the civil rights movement from the beginning.
“If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs… in all categories.”
— MLK (Where do we go from here? – 1967)
“overall movement has a coherent consensus”
Then why does all the training, policies, and instructors at every single institution look exactly the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/business/yelp-racism.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage
Yelp Says It Will Mark Pages of Businesses Accused of Racist Conduct
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/10/09/multimedia/09yelp-image2/09yelp-image2-superJumbo.png?quality=90&auto=webp
In one example in 2018, diners at a popular Brooklyn restaurant emptied out in the hours after HuffPost published an article saying that the restaurant owner’s sister was a firebrand Twitter user who frequently attacked Islam. The owner’s wife said at the time that she and her husband had little contact with her sister-in-law and that her views did not in any way represent theirs or the business.
NO SPECIFIC DEMANDS! Won’t affect anyones lives!
I agree that Kendi is peddling nonsense. What we disagree about is how much influence he has with the average American or even the average Democrat. I know lots of Democrats and I’m sure very few of them even know his name and exactly none of them believe that equality of outcome should be guaranteed.
Kendi is using the current moment to cynically market himself. Very few people or organizations actually agree that equality of outcomes should be guaranteed. Lots are willing to let him appear on a reading list or at a training but you could count on your fingers (and have fingers left over) all the examples you have be able to find of genuine cases of guarantees of equal outcome by race.
The idea that all white people are racists is really beneficial for real racists because it totally destroys the stigma that used to attach to the term.
By the way, you ignored my request that you offer your own definition of racism. Why is that?
>—“Then why does all the training, policies, and instructors at every single institution look exactly the same.”
That is because there is a very small pool of people really interested in giving such trainings and a large pool of institutions interested in being able to point to a training showing they have addressed the issue so they can get back to their other various missions.
“but you could count on your fingers (and have fingers left over) all the examples you have be able to find of genuine cases of guarantees of equal outcome by race.”
Then why can I come up with lots of examples on the fly easily? Literally every major institution in our society either already does implement race quotas or is moving in that direction.
“By the way, you ignored my request that you offer your own definition of racism.”
Having irrational beliefs based on race when available evidence points to more rational beliefs.
“a large pool of institutions interested in being able to point to a training showing they have addressed the issue so they can get back to their other various missions.”
My company didn’t have to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to BLM to “get back to their various missions.” Their goddamn mission is the make money, not give it away.
The County School Board didn’t have to change the admissions requirements for the county magnet school, it wasn’t even popular with many constituents and has caused a huge fight.
They believe, really believe, this stuff. That’s the most plausible explanation for their implementing these policies. People who didn’t believe would just say no to the demands and then ride it out.
>—“My company didn’t have to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to BLM to “get back to their various missions.” Their goddamn mission is the make money, not give it away.”
Consider me skeptical that your company “donated hundreds of millions to BLM” unless you are defining BLM so broadly as to include any and all recipients you disapprove of. Care to provide any specifics or sources?
Most large corporations have substantial charitable giving programs. In large part this is because most are selling commodities that consumers choose because they identify with the branding as much as the product itself. Donating to a popular cause by a corporation is usually done from a calculation that the resulting increase in consumer loyalty will be worth the money. In any event, if you don’t like choices of the company you work for you are free to find another one to provide you with employment or products to buy.
>—“They believe, really believe, this stuff. That’s the most plausible explanation for their implementing these policies. People who didn’t believe would just say no to the demands and then ride it out.”
I just as often see the claim in this comment section that such behaviors are coerced. But yes, most people really do believe in the choices they make. Most people don’t find being a white man in America nearly as oppressive as you do.
>—““By the way, you ignored my request that you offer your own definition of racism.”
>—“Having irrational beliefs based on race when available evidence points to more rational beliefs.”
Everyone thinks their own beliefs are rational. This definition is free of actual content.
“Care to provide any specifics or sources?”
Care to doc myself?
“Donating to a popular cause by a corporation is usually done from a calculation that the resulting increase in consumer loyalty will be worth the money.”
I kind of doubt a sound level of hard headed analysis happened around this donation. It’s rather large relative to our ordinary charitable or marketing budget, and it was announced rather quickly in relation to current events. I don’t think it would withstand a shareholder value analysis in the long run. These people believe!
“Most people don’t find being a white man in America nearly as oppressive as you do.”
Most people in most societies comply with what they must and give themselves a rationalization for their compliance. Does that mean they aren’t oppressed?
Based on voting patterns, most white people don’t agree with this but are overwhelmed by a minority of white people allied with brown people.
Its kind of like what I found with my Malaysian dorm mates. The Chinese Malays simultaneously felt oppressed and also understood the Malays had the numbers to oppress them and what were they going to do about it.
“Everyone thinks their own beliefs are rational. This definition is free of actual content.”
And yet objective truth exists so some are correct in their assessment and some aren’t.
Greg G, you are wrong. Of course, you blame others for their conspiracy theories but your mistakes make me laugh. You have no idea first about the importance of financing for anything you do–if anything, the competition for funds has increased sharply anywhere. And second about coordination and collusion between the many formal and informal groups of leftists in all countries.
There is nothing new in all these financing schemes and alliances: they were common when the Soviet Union attempted to infiltrate third-world countries since the rise of Fidel. On the other hand, there were similar schemes and alliances promoted by the U.S. government to contain Soviet expansion. You should have seen what happened in Latin American in the early 1970s when the Ford Foundation changed sides (fyi FF granted me first a good scholarship and then financed my academic position for 10 years).
I am not saying you are wrong about what went on in the 70’s and in the Cold War or that people don’t still engage in “competition for funds.”
I am saying you are completely missing all the ways in which Kling and Gurri are pointing out that the game has changed in response to social media.
I am also pointing out that leftists are much more disorganized than you imagine. It is always amusing to observe how a certain type of right wing conspiracy theorist thinks that leftists are completely incompetent at doing everything but running vast intricate well co-ordinated conspiracies “in all countries.”
Yes, thanks to social media, the noise in the game is much higher than ever before. But it’s noise and we have always been forced to deal with it. I understand that some people may feel annoyed by the high level of noise associated with social media.
I have been dealing with leftists since 1951, when I used to assist one of my uncles in the re-election campaign of Perón (my uncle was the personal assistant to the presidential candidate opposing Perón). In the past 70 years, I have often been involved in politics in many ways (including during my 3-year stay in China assisting in the reform of state banks and enterprises). If you want to understand leftists, I recommend you to study the case of Spain –you can start by watching Isabel, the tv series about the Catholic Queen of the late 15th century, to learn how cabals work and how they still work today (I mean Friday, October 9, where the leftists are playing simultaneous games across Spain). Pay special attention to how the cabals were financed centuries ago and how they are financed today. And remember the fact that they play or compete doesn’t mean that they win. Fortunately, the opposition is often quite strong.
You are presuming that the point of the organization is to bring about some sort of social change or action. Since they don’t have any real actionable demands, I think that unlikely. Rather, Black Lives Matter is a fantastically successful business.
By their own admission, they don’t do any messy and expensive programs to alleviate poverty or provide community outreach. Rather, their budget is devoted to “Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation will continue to work to impact culture and policy by developing a strong media presence as well as working to help support local organizers on the ground” says Black Lives Matter Global Network managing director Kailee Scales.
They don’t even file a 990, so the public has no information about how they spend the massive fortune that they have raked in this year. The “decentralized nature” of things seems to benefit them very much.
That sounds exactly like the digital- aware institutions Gurri was talking about at the end.
“But these street movements have yet to mature into anything that seems structured and organized.”
First, “these street movements” are funded by 501(c)(3)s. For example, BLM was funded by a 501(c)(3) called 1000currents up to earlier this year but now by an organization called Tides. See: https://www.tides.org/our-community/partnerships/tides-welcomes-black-lives-matter/. Similarly Antifa has One People’s Project, another 501(c)(3).
And the street violence is aided and abetted by a network of corrupt prosecutors like St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who received Open Society funding ( https://themissouritimes.com/soros-gets-involved-in-st-louis-circuit-attorney-race/ )
released without charging every single person arrested by police during riots there. These “street demonstrations “ are well-organized and funded.
And they are successful. They have totalitarian aspirations and those aspirations are adopted into the next administration’s policies and plans. In laying out his totalitarian plan to put local police under federal control ( https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-06/op-ed-joe-biden-protests-george-floyd-breonna-taylor-justice ), Biden regurgitates the demands of the antifa thugs disrupting people’s dinners at restaurants: “No one can stay silent. No one can ignore injustice.” Everyone will be required to think and speak the dogma.
And then there is the totalitarian green energy policies that will impose federal control over every aspect of our lives to ensure that they conform to the street protestors’ demands.
I don’t see how their success in achieving this level of totalitarianism can be considered anything less than mature, structured, and organized.
Perhaps Dr Kling has become completely acclimated to the excesses of the age and is unable to see the forest for the trees, because the street demonstrators totalitarian ideology has bee so fully realized. It happens. In her excellent book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted:
“The experience of the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed and convinced Nazi among the German people, 90 per cent of whom probably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be taken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism. Nazism as an ideology had been so fully “realized” that its content ceased to exist as an independent set of doctrines, lost its intellectual existence, so to speak; destruction of the reality therefore left almost nothing behind, least of all the fanaticism of believers.”
With the government, schools, press propagandists, and industry leaders all promoting the same totalitarianism, it is difficult to see it for what it is.
Arendt also wrote about the organization of totalitarian movements:
“the totalitarian movement is really in earnest about its propaganda, and this earnestness is expressed much more frighteningly in the organization of its followers than in the physical liquidation of its opponents. Organization and propaganda (rather than terror and propaganda) are two sides of the same coin.
The most strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn between party members and sympathizers.
[…. …]
An anonymity which contributes greatly to the weirdness of the whole phenomenon clouds the beginnings of this new organizational structure. We do not know who first decided to organize fellow-travelers into front organizations, who first saw in vaguely sympathizing masses—upon whom all parties used to count at election day but whom they considered to be too fluctuating for membership—not only a reservoir from which to draw party members, but a decisive force in itself. The early Communist-inspired organizations of sympathizers, such as the Friends of the Soviet Union or the Red Relief associations, developed into front organizations but were originally nothing more or less than what their names indicated: a gathering of sympathizers for financial or other (for instance, legal) help. Hitler was the first to say that each movement should divide the masses which have been won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and members. This in itself is interesting enough; even more significant is that he based this division upon a more general philosophy according to which most people are too lazy and cowardly for anything more than mere theoretical insight, and only a minority want to fight for their convictions.
[… …]
For the front organizations of sympathizers are no less essential to the functioning of the movement than its actual membership. The front organizations surround the movements’ membership with a protective wall which separates them from the outside, normal world; at the same time, they form a bridge back into normalcy, without which the members in the prepower stage would feel too sharply the differences between their beliefs and those of normal people, between the lying fictitiousness of their own and the reality of the normal world. The ingeniousness of this device during the movements’ struggle for power is that the front organizations not only isolate the members but offer them a semblance of outside normalcy which wards off the impact of true reality more effectively than mere indoctrination.”
What we are seeing today in terms of organization is entirely consistent with Arendt’s observations.
>—“First, “these street movements” are funded by 501(c)(3)s.”
You are missing the point. A single free cell phone video of a cop refusing to stop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck even after the handcuffed man lost consciousness put more protesters in the street than a billion dollars in the hands of some revolutionary central planer ever could have. But these protesters are not unified and have a lot of different ideas about what their presence in the streets means beyond signaling that the police behavior in the video was unacceptable.
Take your hands and place them on either side of your neck beneath the ears and press together as hard as you can.
Is your breathing impaired?
Of course not. You can only be choked by compression in the throat area at the front of your neck.
Now watch the Floyd arrest video.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0NHjdslJ8TQ
At no point does the knee compress the throat. At all times it remains on the side beneath the ear.
The coroner’s report states that Floyd died of a heart attack. The heart attack might well have been brought on by the opioids found in his blood stream.
Yet the population was whipped into a fervor by plainly false assertion that police killed Floyd. Newspapers and other propagandists have relentlessly promoted the incendiary fiction that police murdered Floyd by choking him to death. The reality that Floyd had a fatal level of fentanyl in his system has been minimized.
It may not have been an aesthetically pleasing arrest, but it was consistent with Floyd’s best interests because Floyd may have been suffering from excited delirium for which medical protocols in place at the time recommended restraint.
The prosecution of the officers involved amounts to what Arendt called totalitarian lawfulness:
“Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to establish the direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law of History or of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior. It applies the law directly to mankind without bothering with the behavior of men.”
Arendt also offers an insight into “the millions “ in the streets:
“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. “
I didn’t say that Floyd was choked to death. I did say that what millions of people saw with their own two eyes on that video caused them to be outraged, not newspaper interpretations of it. They saw a police officer kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed and dying man until long after he lost consciousness.
Good police work does not require or even permit kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed man while he dies of a heart attack. It is beyond bizarre that you think Arendt would have approved of this use of policing power.
It is simply Orwellian that you claim this “was consistent with Floyd’s best interests.”
I’ve seen enough of these incidents to know that the media inflames rather than informs. Sometimes through outright lies (hands up, don’t shoot!), sometimes through omission (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJlQvOgEx58&feature=emb_logo).
It’s also the case that how events are interpreted is shaped by the media narrative. Is George Floyd a tragic outcome that is statistically inevitable unless we abandon policing to a degree that is net negative (current murder spike and similar one in 2015)? Or is he the final in a long line of horrid systematic racism responsible for every black failing in the world that can only be solved by infinite white guilt (White Fragility) or a tyrannical body of race experts with extra legal powers (Kendi)?
A random video of fentanyl overdose giant with a violent criminal record that resisted arrest forever before getting kneeled on doesn’t cause these riots. A narrative does. There is a reason they are spray painting 1619 on these statues they are tearing down.
Of course it was in Floyd’s best interest, he had already injured himself once in the back of the cruiser.
Ah, so he wasn’t choked to death. So the drug overdose and heart attack were delivered through the knee to the back?
All we need to do is incorporate the following Progressive principles into our governance:
Gender is a social construct; there are no differences between the sexes. All men are bad.
Race is a social construct; there are no differences between the races. All white people are bad.
No culture is better than another. Western Civilization is bad.
Diversity of skin color is good. Diversity of thought is bad.
Religion leads to conflict and war. Islam is the religion of peace.
An especially harsh winter in one part of the globe does not disprove global warming. A single extreme weather event proves it.
Marriage is oppression. Opposing same-sex marriage is oppression.
Segregation is bad. Black college dorms and black graduation ceremonies are good.
“White flight” from inner cities is bad. White migration to inner cities (aka “gentrification”) is bad.
Diversity strengthens us by bringing in different viewpoints. Adopting diverse viewpoints is “cultural appropriation.”
Government must be directed by the will of the people. Government must be directed by a technocracy that is shielded from politics.
The Constitution is a living document. The Supreme Court’s “Roe v Wade” decision is carved in stone.
Raising the cost of cigarettes will discourage people from smoking. Raising the cost of employing workers will not discourage businesses from hiring.
Slavery – an economic system in which people can arbitrarily demand others’ time, labor, and produce – is bad. Social Justice – a philosophy that holds that “the oppressed” can arbitrarily demand others’ time, labor, and produce – is good.
Monopoly by corporations – which must satisfy their customers to survive – is bad. Monopoly by government – which can use deadly force to survive – is good.
My impression is that the online world and real world are such different habitats that they restrict the range of distinct species of phenomena of social coordination and organization, which are only well-adapted to those particular ecosystems and economies.
We shouldn’t dismiss antifa (or similar Woke movements) as ineffectual given that the leading candidate for mayor of Portland is pro-antifa, and she has a double-digit lead over her opponent, the incumbent. In any event, I err on the side of caution when evaluating groups like these.
Nancy Rommelmann at Reason is doing the essential reporting here. Groups like antifa have organizations and leaders, but none of those organizations or leaders is essential to the movement as a whole. Antifa organizations and leaders exert influence locally (indeed, the atomic unit of antifa is a small “affinity group”), but they are not critical pieces of infrastructure. The movement is defined by a loose set of tactics and principles that work for gaining traction on social media, or at least are working for the moment.
For example, antifa activists know that antagonizing the police is useful because their dedicated social media users can capture footage of the cops reacting (perhaps overreacting) to the provocation. Extreme violence doesn’t play as well on Twitter, and they generally avoid it.
Another example: threatening outsiders who record antifa’s actions is useful because it helps them control what the media reports about them and how they are generally perceived, so that is encouraged as well.
Their actions move the needle on social media and by extension wield influence over the Democrats, the media, the Overton Window, and the country as a whole. So they’re making a difference, even if not every city elects a pro-antifa mayor or cedes their streets to antifa, as Portland might do.