Some far-left groups have encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent, experts say

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It was approaching nightfall in Los Angeles on Sunday when black-clad demonstrators began to torch a row of self-driving Waymo taxis. Within minutes, videos of the fiery scenes began to pop up on social media.
'MORE. MORE AND MORE AND MORE,' a group known as Unity of Fields posted on X, along with a video of the flaming vehicles.
The post wasn't an anomaly. Since the start of the demonstrations against immigration raids in Los Angeles, the Unity of Fields X account has been pumping out messages urging people to wreak havoc in the streets and 'give 'em hell.'
It's part of a far-left online ecosystem that has proliferated in recent years, experts say. Some of the groups behind the accounts express contempt for peaceful resistance and glorify acts of violence — and even murders, like those of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and two Israeli Embassy staffers.
The leftist networks tend to be different from right-wing groups in that they are typically decentralized with no leadership structures. But they can be highly adept at using social media, and some have been working hard 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.
The unrest in Los Angeles follows a pattern that has played out in numerous cities over the past five years in which protests that break out remain mostly peaceful during the day, but at night agitators engage in fiery clashes with police.
That dynamic tends to distract from the focus of the demonstrations — in this case, workplace immigration raids by federal agents — and provide fodder to people who oppose them. In this case, that's President Donald Trump and his supporters, who have sought to dismiss the broader protest movement as the work of '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.
He said the narrative pushed by some people on the right — in his words, that there's a 'roving band of antifa groupies who are following protests from city to city' — doesn't comport with reality.
But, Lewis added, there has no doubt been a normalization of violence in parts of the left, although it is more fractured than in right-wing groups.
'It's a little bit of anti-capitalist stuff in one case. A little bit of antisemitic stuff in another case,' he said. 'I think that reflects the nature of those online leftist movements where there is no cohesive, central structure.'
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.
Were they the acts of lone wolves seizing an opportunity to target police? Or was there a level of coordination and planning among the instigators?
Experts say it's likely to be a combination of both.
'You have the organized protests by people who are committed to a particular cause, and then you have radical fringes,' said Dan Byman, the director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
'They might put on airs and call themselves anarchists or something like that, but they're young people who like destruction.'
The Network Contagion Research Institute has been analyzing the rise of what it calls 'anarcho-socialist extremism.' It has found that 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,' said Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser to the Network Contagion Research Institute.
That involved demonstrators' surveilling police movements and sharing tips about making the most destructive Molotov cocktails, Goldenberg said.
'They were trying to exploit an already volatile situation in an attempt to provoke violent clashes with police, create viral moments to inflame tensions and draw in others through emotional triggers,' he said.
Soon after it launched in 2019, the Network Contagion Research Institute focused on right-wing threats like the Boogaloos, a loose-knit anti-government movement that calls for violence against law enforcement and political opponents. But it soon found that left-wing groups were using many of the same tactics to incite violence.
A 2022 report by the institute found that animus toward law enforcement among anarchist types had been proliferating online for years. The appearance of posts with anti-police outrage and/or memes and coded language increased over 1,000% on Twitter and 300% on Reddit during the period of the Floyd protests in 2020, the report found.
One anti-police group, the People's City Council Los Angeles, has taken to calling out the actions of officers at the protests, using expletives and slights.
Just before 1 a.m. Tuesday, it posted on X the name and picture of a police officer it said was firing rubber bullets at protesters.
He is 'f-----g unhinged and unloading on protesters at point blank range,' the post read. 'F--K THIS PIG!!'
On Sunday, the group posted a video showing a line of police officers in riot gear.
'LAPD trying to kettle right now,' the group wrote, referring to a crowd control tactic used by police. 'Oink oink piggy piggy, we going make your life s----y…'
The violent demonstrators seemed to represent a mishmash of causes.
Many of the people seen hurling objects at police and setting fires were dressed in all black, their faces covered in masks. Some waved Mexican flags, others Palestinian flags. At least one man was photographed wearing a Hamas armband.
'Angelenos throwing Modelo Molotovs at ICE while wearing Keffiyehs,' read a post on X by Unity of Fields. 'We are locked the f--k in, folks.'
Unity of Fields, which was formerly known as Palestine Action US, describes itself as a 'militant front against the US-NATO-zionist axis of imperialism.'
'The Unity of Fields concept comes from the Palestinian resistance,' the group said last year in a blog post announcing the name change. 'It refers to the coordination between all the factions on the battlefield despite their geographic fragmentation or ideological differences.'
Finkelstein, the co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute, said such groups and the people who follow them represent what he described as 'assassination culture' — in which targeted killings are considered acceptable by those who harbor an array of grievances.
Unity of Fields, for example, is helping raise money to cover legal costs for Elias Rodriguez, the Chicago man accused of fatally shooting the Israeli Embassy workers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington last month.
'My sense is that beneath these grievances is a shared sense of loss of control,' said Finkelstein, who is a psychologist and a neuroscientist. 'Who are the people that really feel a sense of hopelessness in their lives? Most are looking for significance, and they think they found it here.'
In response to a request for comment, Unity of Fields wrote: 'We will never condemn people who fight to free themselves. When the masses in Los Angeles began using direct action as a means of halting ICE-gestapo disappearances, the media saw only the violence of resistance and never the violence of the status quo.'
It added: 'All acts of resistance to state violence are justified and all power belongs to the masses.'
The People's City Council Los Angeles didn't respond to a request for comment.
While the violent parts of the protests in Los Angeles began to die down Monday, demonstrations against the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants have spread to several other cities, including Boston, Chicago, Dallas and New York.
So far, none has experienced violence at the levels in Los Angeles, but whether that will remain the case is an open question. Unity of Fields has made it clear it's hoping for a repeat in cities like New York.
'NYC, how are you gonna let Angelenos beat you at your favorite pastime (terrorizing police officers)?' the group said Monday on X. 'Hamas Marxist Army get down there and show them what New Yorkers can do when they put their heads together!"
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com