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The gang that couldn’t bomb straight: (from l.) Brandon Baxter, Anthony Hayne, Joshua Stafford, Connor Stevens and Douglas Wright allegedly tried to take down the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge (above). (Reuters)
The Cleveland Five are a sad-sack collection of wannabe terrorists if there ever was one. The amateurish young men who plotted to destroy a bridge outside Cleveland last week give the impression of needing the attention of a guidance counselor as much as a federal prosecutor.
But there’s no mistaking the seriousness of their attempted act. They allegedly planted what they thought were live bricks of C-4 underneath a well-traveled bridge connecting two suburban Ohio communities and repeatedly tried to detonate them.
The Cleveland Five have the honor of being the first bombers spawned by Occupy Wall Street, and may not be the last. They rejected the nonviolence advocated by Occupy Cleveland’s leaders, but they were active in the movement and perfectly represent the “black bloc” anarchism that is a part of it. If their stupidity and recklessness are different in degree from their fellow self-styled revolutionaries, they’re not different in kind. They’re the left’s homegrown terrorists.
Accused ringleader Douglas Wright was noted for his quiet commitment to Occupy Cleveland. Fellow plotter Brandon Baxter got arrested protesting foreclosures and organized an event called “Occupy the Heart Festival” that was supposed to kick-start Occupy Cleveland after a moribund winter.
Another plotter, Josh Stafford, listed Occupy protests on Facebook as his job. Yet another, Anthony Hayne, signed the lease for a warehouse used as living quarters by Occupy Cleveland protesters.
The Cleveland Five are the pathetic sons of Occupy — rootless, underemployed, drunk on a sophomoric radicalism, alienated from the American system to the point of lawlessness. One Occupy leader told The [Cleveland] Plain Dealer that Wright — a drifter with no known address and a checkered past — struck him as “stereotypical.”
An FBI informant met Wright at an Occupy Cleveland event where he was part of a group wearing the traditional regalia of masks and black clothing. They struck up a relationship, and Wright confided that he and fellow anarchists wanted to make a dramatic statement against corporations and the US government. Wright talked about knocking the bank signs off buildings in downtown Cleveland. The plotters mused about bombing everything from the Klan to the Federal Reserve until they settled on the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge.
It would be instantly rendered a shovel-ready project as a symbolic blow against the system. Despite their exertions, the plotters couldn’t set off the inert explosives and were soon swept up by the FBI.
It had to be a relief to “99 percent” commuters who didn’t know they were participating in their own repression by driving back and forth on State Route 82 over Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
As far as terroristic “propaganda of the deed” goes, an Ohio bridge doesn’t make any less sense as a target than the Greenwich Observatory that anarchists wanted to destroy in Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Secret Agent.”
Blowing up a bridge is like smashing a window — a favorite pastime of the anarchists at West Coast Occupy protests — only on a much larger and more hazardous scale. The spirit of nihilistic destructiveness is the same.
As is the flouting of laws and authority. This tendency isn’t limited to anarchists but is at the heart of Occupy.
Writing in The Nation, Michael Moore imagines “nonviolent assaults” (whatever that means) on Wall Street and “wave after wave of arrests” in an attempt to shut it down. The romance of confrontation with the police is more central to Occupy than any specific agenda item. The movement welcomes a “diversity of tactics,” which means accepting the masked anarchists who are delighted so long as stuff gets, in the charming words of Wright contemplating his bridge, “f—ed up.”
If the Cleveland Five had been right-wing haters of the government, everyone in America would know their names by now. Instead, they’re a neglected sign of what nastiness lurks in Occupy’s fetid ideological stew.