Protest Warrior

Protest Warrior is an Austin, Texas-based group formed in March 2003 in reaction to protests against the US 2003 invasion of Iraq. The group's slogan is "Fighting the left... doing it right."

Initially formed in San Francisco in March 2003 by Alan Lipton and Kfir Alfia, Protest Warrior was registered as a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in Texas in July 2003.

Ideology

Protest Warrior believes that left-wing politics and statism constitute a threat to the future of freedom and individualism, and that the left's ideas if taken to the extreme can lead to totalitarian police states. Seeing 'liberals' (in the United States usage of the term) as morally bankrupt and needing to be confronted head on, they feel that the voices of the left "are heard disproportionately, demoralizing our troops, and emboldening dictators around the world."

The stated purpose of the Protest Warriors is to provide an alternative ideological viewpoint to that of left-wing anti-war protesters and organizers.

Methodology

The group's primary method of activism is "crashing" left-wing events and counter-demonstrating left-wing protests, actions that the group itself gives names such as Operation Eagle Strike, Operation Liberty Rising, and Operation Wolverines (a reference to the film Red Dawn). The group engages in protests of their own, often against what it considers to be organizations in support of terrorism in the USA and around the world.

Protest Warriors often carry large signs with sarcastic or mocking messages. After large operations, videos are posted to the website documenting the events. The videos include confrontations with protesters and the unwelcoming, sometimes violent, reactions of the protesters. Protest Warriors claim that these videos show the hypocrisy of the protesters in their claims to being pro-peace and pro-freedom of speech.

Those who conflict with the Protest Warriors generally see them as acting in a provoking or aggressive manner towards protestors, and that the Protest Warrior signs are offensive. Many feel that the Protest Warriors are deliberately confrontational and hostile to antagonize the otherwise peaceful protestors. Some see the Protest Warriors' criticism of Islam as bigoted. Others feel that the Protest Warriors, by choosing groups likely to be agitated by their rhetoric as targets, are causing the very problem they intend to demonstrate.

Mission Statement

The following is posted on PW's Our Mission page:

"War IS an ugly thing, but as long as nations and leaders exist that detest freedom, sometimes it is the only way to secure a lasting peace. Most leftist anti-war protesters and pundits don't understand this. They state that this use of force is always unnecessary -- that war, ANY war, is never good. Some of them, born into the luxury of American freedom, believe that liberty can exist passively, that somehow the world's natural state will always settle into utopian harmony. Others, in an attempt to absolve themselves from the unearned guilt they harbor living in a nation of prosperity and wealth, try to buy morality on the cheap by pronouncing themselves for the 'good'. To them, the derivation of the 'good' is based on a simple, yet peculiar standard: the powerful and competent are wicked, while the feeble and impotent are innocent - regardless of the context. That is why they defend Iraq instead of America, and the Palestinian 'resistance' instead of Israel.

"These leftists usually carry the loudest megaphones. And left unchallenged, their voices are heard disproportionately, demoralizing our troops, and emboldening dictators around the world - dictators who dream of the day the 'Great Satan' disappears from the face of the earth.

"However, their self-righteous messages go silent quickly when the truth of history and reality is thrown back in their face. It's time to turn up the juice on OUR megaphones, as we will never keep our supreme values of liberty and justice without the will to fight for them."

PW tshirts

Slogans posted on PW tshirts include the following: [1]

"Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything"
"Right-Wing Extremists"
"WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER! UNLESS YOU'RE A SOCIALIST GUERILLA"
"The IRS Tax Code - Now that's a living, breathing document!"
"END RACISM AND SEXISM NOW! Kill All White Males"
"WHITE RACISTS FOR THE LEFT..."

Website

The group maintains a website as an organizing and information hub. The website is often zealous and confrontational. Although the Protest Warriors have been influenced by the right-wing website Free Republic, slogans such as "Saddam only killed his own people.. it was none of our business" and "Communism has only killed 100 million people... let's give it another chance" clearly set them apart in both style and attitude.

A motto from the website states:

Welcome to ProtestWarrior.com, a website created to help arm the liberty-loving Silent Majority with ammo -- ammo that strikes at the intellectual solar plexus of the Left. [3]

The active forums of Protest Warrior have a large selection of topics for discussion; the group prides itself on permitting people of any ideology to join in on the discussions, provided that they do not threaten the perceived moral and intellectual integrity of the Protest Warrior founders. However, it is often alleged that comments are deleted and users are banned from the site based on the opinions which are expressed. While some participants claim that such opinions are unfounded, offering as evidence the fact that members of many differing ideologies frequently post there, they fail to recognize that the range of allowable difference is minimal, that self-selection for ineffectual or mockable individuals is rampant, and that ProtestWarrior critics such as RocknRev's claims can be independently verified through exhaustive use of www.archive.org to compare the claims of site critics to those of site founders. [Surprisingly, said critics seem unaware of this resource.]

Chapters/Leaders/Affiliates

Also see List of Chapters.

Alan Davidson (West Coast) (a.k.a. Alan Lipton?)
Gil Knobrin [4]
Tom Paladino (New York)
Jason Taylor (Dallas) [5]
Steven Thunander (University of Wisconsin)

Contact details

Protest Warrior
4600 Seton Center Parkway Suite 821
Austin, TX 78759
Website: http://www.protestwarrior.com/
Website: http://hq.protestwarrior.com/
Forum: http://forum.protestwarrior.com/
E-mail: Kfir Alfia kfir AT protestwarrior.com
Alan Lipton alan AT protestwarrior.com

Related SourceWatch Resources

External Links

By / From Protest Warrior

Kfir Alfia, "Saddamized in San Francisco," www.Contumacy.org (FrontPageMag.com), April 14, 2003. Contumacy is a "campus journal of politics and culture at the University of Texas at Austin."
Kfir Alfia and Alan Davidson, "Operation Wolverines," Internet Archives, 2004.
"A.N.S.W.E.R. Infiltrated (May 17, 2003, worldwide conference)," Protest Warrior, 2004.
"Liberty Rising (2004)" (film), Protest Warrior.
Kfir and Alan, "Manifesto," Protest Warrior posted on GOPUSA Forum, August 17, 2004.
Kfir Alfia and Alan Lipton, "Entering Zion" (2005), IMDb: "Entering Zion will take you on a pilgrimage through the land of Israel. You'll go from the clubs of Tel Aviv to the shores of the Dead Sea..." See "Liberty Film Festival" entry.
Kfir Alfia and Alan Lipton, A Field Guide to Left-Wing Wackos And What to Do about Them (Hardcover), Portfolio, May 2007, ISBN 1595230378.
Kfir Alfia, Protest Warrior (Hardcover), Sentinel, June 26, 2007, ISBN-10: 1595230378 / ISBN-13: 978-1595230379.

Background

Protest Warrior Press Kit.
Protest Warrior; Talk:Protest Warrior; and history/edits in the Wikipedia.
Talk:Protest Warrior/Archive 3, Biocrawler.com.
"Protest Warrior Exposed!" rocknrev.com (cache file).
"Protest Warrior Exposed Again," rocknrev.com (cache file; other working links here, here, and here), October 13, 2004. Note: not all internal links work.