On Wednesday, July 12, Net Neutrality advocates are planning a corporate “Day of Action” for online lobbying against President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back the Obama administration’s policy. The effort is morphing into a 24-hour rage featuring 50,000 groups joining “hacktivist” wolf packs to fight Trump online.
Breitbart News reported in early June that Amazon, Mozilla, Reddit, Kickstarter, Etsy and Vimeo planned to rally corporate lobbying interests to oppose efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to overturn Net Neutrality.
But Breitbart warned that holding a protest on the 96th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s release of Vladimir Lenin’s Report on the Tactics of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which encouraged Russian communists to export “civil war” and “openly revolutionary uprisings,” could ignite Leftist violence from elements still seeking to sweep capitalism into the dustbin of history.
Hundreds of progressive web platforms — including George Soros’ MoveOn, Obama’s Organizing for America, Fight for the Future, Daily Kos, OpenMedia, Color of Change, Urban Dictionary, Bandcamp, Word Press, Discord, BitTorrent, Twitter, Mozilla, OK Cupid, Imgur and PornHub have renamed the July 12 protest as “Battle for the Net.”
Other organizations participating include: Fight for the Future, Free Press Action Fund, Demand Progress, Center for Media Justice, EFF, The Nation, Public Knowledge, OTI, Internet Association, Internet Archive, World Wide Web Foundation, Creative Commons, PCCC, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Greenpeace, Common Cause, ACLU, Rock the Vote, American Library Association, Free Software Foundation, Internet Creators Guild, the Women’s March, and many others.
The Battle for the Net is being led many groups that participated in the January 18, 2012 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) blackout and Internet Slowdown, which became the largest online protests in history. Wikipedia, Google, and about 7,000 progressive websites’ messages were seen by 162 million people, and led to withdrawal of SOPA legislation.
But progressives’ tactics have changed dramatically since President Trump was elected. California State University San Bernardino’s Criminal Justice Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism recently warned that the fastest-growing hate crimes are violent assaults and vandalism by the hard-left Black Bloc, Antifa and other armed rioters who target police, journalists, and Trump supporters in efforts to muzzle conservative free speech on college campuses and elsewhere.
The same “Op Resistance” groups — wearing black clothing and face-covering scarves, sunglasses, ski masks and motorcycle helmets — who shut down Berkeley in April and May by using fists, M-80 rockets, pepper spray, and heavy bike locks to prevent presentations by conservative speakers are also expected to start street-level protests on July 12.
Hackers/Founders has mobilized thousands of its members to join the “Battle for the Net” Action Day from 12:00 AM to 11:30 PM on July 12. H/F ominously promises: “Together, we will show the world what the web will look like without net neutrality protections.” So-called hacker wolf packs could cause serious damage.