Thousands of protesters swarmed the streets of Los Angeles over the past days, expressing their anger with the Trump administration's immigration raids. As demonstrations have grown bigger, even spreading across the rest of the country, law enforcement officers have used different tactics to disperse the crowd, including tear gas and rubber bullets. In response, some groups are urging protesters to turn the peaceful showings into violent ones.
A group of far-left networks online have encouraged protesters to wreak havoc in the streets and "give'em hell." Many of them have also expressed contempt for peaceful resistance and glorify acts of violence, a new report by NBC News details.
Unlike far-right groups, leftist networks typically are decentralized and have no leadership structures. They can be highly adept at using social media, and some have been striving to amplify and celebrate the acts of violent protesters in Los Angeles.
"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.
One of the groups in the ecosystem goes by the name of Unity of Fields. Last weekend, when some protesters in L.A. began to torch a row of self-driving Waymo cars, the group encouraged people in social media to continue, and escalate, those actions, writing "more. More and more and more," along with a video of the flaming vehicles.
The recent call to violence has been dubbed by the Network Contagion Research Institute as "anarcho-socialist extremism." According to the institution, the chaos and violence that have broken out at some of the major protests in recent years, like those against the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, weren't as spontaneous as they might have seemed.
"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," Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser to the Network Contagion Research Institute, told NBC News.
That involved demonstrators' surveilling police movements and sharing tips about making the more destructive Molotov cocktails, Goldernberg said.
"They were trying to exploit an already volatile situation in an attempt to provoke clashes with police, create viral moments to inflame tensions and draw in others through emotional triggers," he added.
In the case of L.A., some worry that increased violence— much of which tends to take place in the evening— distracts the general public of the original goal and focus of the demonstrations, in this instance, workplace immigration raids by federal agents, while also giving those who oppose them— President Trump and his supporters— a reason to dismiss them and even catalog them as "paid insurrectionists."
"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.
More than 300 people have been arrested since the demonstrations broke out Friday in Los Angeles, police say. The charges include failure to disperse, looting, arson and attacks on police officers. Police Chief Jim McDonnell said demonstrators have shot commercial-grade fireworks at police officers and hurled pieces of concrete at them.
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