Don’t Get Behind Adam Kokesh (March on Washington)
When I first heard about plans this coming Fourth of July for an armed protest march from Arlington, Virginia, into and around the heart of Washington, D.C., I was all for it, and excited about it. I even thought I might join it, if the organizer’s stated sufficient numbers (10,000 people with guns) showed up for the event to be attempted.
Of course, I learned immediately that the march is supposed to be led by none other than the Alex Jones-like, rabble-rousing Iraq veteran & anti-war activist Adam Kokesh, a person of whom I have been pretty leery during these last couple of years.
I already knew, to some extent, that Kokesh is rather a rogue wild card in terms of his anarchist flavor of Ron Paul-esque, blame-America-first libertarian views and aims, and for his previous controversial protest exploits. Despite being a bit troubled by that aspect, I still thought the protest march to be a great idea, and high time someone stepped up to the plate and openly defied the unconstitutional regime in the District of Columbia and all that.
In earnest, I set about to argue the merits of joining the demonstration, along with others, against the myriad voices from all over the political spectrum who warned against it. I waded into various online forums and locked cyber-antlers with opponents, and as well, considered the evidence against Kokesh’s motives, character, and allegiances proffered by some friendlies on the right.
I still think such a protest is a great idea in and of itself, and high time for someone to lead such an armed march on Washington. However, having weighed more factors than I previously realized were there, I now believe that Adam Kokesh is the wrong person to lead it. Someone like Ted Nugent would have my support. But not Adam Kokesh.
I’ve learned (through the work of Michelle Malkin and various alert bloggers) that Kokesh is worse than I’d thought. As leader of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he has been closely, directly in league with the likes of anti-American, Marxist groups such as Code Pink and A.N.S.W.E.R., and with front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood such as the Muslim Society of America.
Kokesh and others admitted, in 2007, to papering the campus of George Washington University (where he was a student at the time) with hoax “hate-speech” posters, which were designed to defame people like David Horowitz and supporters of a week-long campus conference on Islamo-fascism awareness as irrational, rabid bigots.
During the 2007 Gathering of Eagles in D.C., Kokesh’s group Iraq Veterans Against the War garnered the following commentary from Malkin:
“IVAW is the group whose members included one loon who threatened to bomb the Gathering of Eagles and assassinate me, along with the notorious, fake Army ranger/anti-war poster boy Jesse MacBeth, and a cast of anti-American miscreants and liars.”
In May of 2007, Kokesh even traveled to Germany, illegally brought a civilian onto a U.S. military base, and made an overt effort inside a dining hall to try to persuade American troops to abandon their posts and join in his anti-war movement, giving a speech and circulating videos to try to convince soldiers to desert.
Kokesh himself really first came to my attention two years ago, during the controversy about the protests he organized in May and June of 2011 inside the Thomas Jefferson memorial on the National Mall in D.C. That was when he and his “flash-mob” pranksters became known on discussion threads as the “dancing douchebags” because they deliberately disrupted tourists’ solemn reflection while visiting that hallowed memorial, by dancing around in the sacred space of the place, in direct and provocative defiance of a court ruling against dancing at D.C. memorials.
Their intention was to cause a big scene, claim police brutality while getting arrested, and get lots of attention, all of which they did. The debate threads generated by the YouTube videos raged on.
