We just got off the phone with relations in Northern Thailand. Thaksin supporters are arming militias in Chiang Mai and Phrae. These are the guys that went to Bangkok and burnt the World Trade Center Mall and other malls and businesses down. They are intent on bringing Thaksin back as a authoritarian leader and taking revenge on their enemies. We have relatives on both sides.
Oh I remember that. Stupid move on the Reds part, they lost a lot of good will with those end-of-the-line arson stunts. Burning down the mall for spite really pissed off the Bangkok middle and business classes.
I will say one thing, and this is coming from a Yellow shirt supporter, the guards at the Red sites a few years back were actually very friendly and genuinely interested in conversing with us farang. This past January I got the exact opposite vibe from the Yellow shirt guards. These guys were completely masked and were fairly intimidating for no real reason. I understand they don't trust the police and there had been some grenade attacks on them, but lining up farang in queues and searching us fairly roughly wasn't a good way to win support of those who didn't know what was going on. I was already sympathetic to the Yellow protests, but they could use one giant lesson in public relations - at least the lot I ran into around Asok trying to get to upper Sukhumvit.
Now the audience was a completely different story. The 'Shutdown Bangkok 2014' protests were mostly sparsely attended during the day, but in the evening the numbers would increase dramatically as the Bangkok office workers filed out of work for the day and joined the protests. All of those people were friendly and seemed to agree the guards were overkill and doing their cause a disservice.