Sad and Hilarious at the Same Time

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The Democrat Party loves its extremist activists, at least until they turn on the Democrats.

Radicalism is a luxury opinion among the Democrat Establishment. Walk through any room full of Democrat apparatchiks, and you will see at least a few posters with raised fists, Che Guevara and BLM signs and lots of rainbow flags will be on the walls and cubicles. 

But when push comes to shove, what these people want is power and prestige, and the calls for radical change are more about stacking the deck in their favor than anything else. Green energy is promoted to funnel money to favored friends; redistribution is about diverting billions to their constituents, and support for unions is all about getting electoral support FROM unions. 

But radical activists mean what they say, and they turn on the Democrats when they realize that their radicalism is more performative than real. 

One of the weird things, and there are many weird things, about this bullshit is that he believed the best target for this was UC Berkeley.

As far short of his far leftist ideals as Cal may have been, few actual real world institutions are closer.https://t.co/M8hW8hfwYN

— Lee Edwards (@terronk) June 19, 2024

One such example is Casey Goonan, a radical PhD who was just arrested for a series of arson attacks at UC Berkeley. 

Goonan is one of those radicalized rich boys who really does want to change the world, despite being the scion of a family with a million-dollar home (he lived at his parents’ house as a 34-year-old!). 

Casey Goonan was arrested Monday morning at his parents’ $1.1 million home in Pleasant Hill on suspicion of a string of arson attacks at UC Berkeley from June 1 to 16.

Feds, cops and CalFire allege the 34-year-old, a Northwestern University doctorate of African American studies, firebombed a Berkeley campus police car and carried out three other arson incidents on university grounds June 1, as well as last Thursday and Sunday.

Charges are yet to be filed by the Alameda District Attorney’s Office. His attorney, Jeff Wozniak, confirmed multiple law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, raided the home where Goonan lives with his parents in Pleasant Hill at around 10 a.m. Monday morning. A bio from a 2018 academic journal states Goonan “considers himself a scholar-activist” and an aspiring professor. No social media profiles, including LinkedIn, could be found for Goonan. 

“Casey got his PhD! Onto job apps,” Goonan’s mother wrote in a 2022 Instagram post. He previously completed his undergraduate degree at UC Riverside.

Another bio from 2019 described Goonan as an “abolitionist currently living and working in Chicago.”

A post claiming credit for the arson at UC Berkeley dubbed the school the “university of kkkalifornia berkeley.” | Source: Samantha Laurey for The Standard

In online articles, Goonan has described the United States as a “god-awful fascist hell hole” where social injustices are “concealed under the blinders of white supremacist American reason.”

One magazine article titled “Defining Social Reality in a Revolutionary Way” praises the Black Panther Party for establishing “a blueprint for U.S.-based radical organizations experimenting with the scientific, premeditated, and necessarily methodical artistry of social revolution.”

Goonan was not an example of radical chic–wealthy people performing radicalism at cocktail parties. He is, rather, in the mold of those Molotov cocktail lawyers reveling in destruction and working to bring down the system. 

It’s no secret why, of all places, he attacked UC Berkeley. The institution is performatively radical and indeed does much to contribute to the destruction of ordinary Americans. Ultimately, the professors and the university want the money to flow and their sinecures to continue. They are in Goonan’s eyes part of the problem, not the solution. 

Wozniak said the search warrant specifically sought “documents related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.”

Wozniak is already defending Goonan in a San Francisco felony vandalism case. Prosecutors say Goonan wielded a hammer during a protest outside the Women’s Declaration International USA conference in September last year. Court documents say police saw Goonan smash the Hilton Hotel sign on Kearny Street with a hammer before he was pulled from the crowd and arrested. Protesters had gathered at the conference, which they deemed anti-trangender.

Women’s Declaration International has said that the concept of “gender identity” threatens the rights of women and that transgender women “should not be included in the category women in the context of women’s human rights.”

Goonan pleaded not guilty to felony vandalism, and the case continues; the next hearing is scheduled for Friday in San Francisco. He is scheduled to appear Thursday in Alameda County court for arraignment on arson charges. His bail has been set at $1 million. 

A thread of posts Monday night to X by the Escalate Network encouraged support for “someone” who was “accused of using improvised devices to start fires and damage property in retaliation for police brutality against Gaza solidarity encampments.”

The revolution always eats its own because the various factions all want power, not improvements in social conditions. More often than not, the most radical win the fights because they are the most violent. It’s the Nazis and the Bolsheviks who win these power struggles because they are the most willing to destroy others in order to seize power. 

Even the anarchists and radicals, though, want to become the Establishment whatever they say. They want to bring down the system, but only to become it.