What Is Antifa?

In a better world Donald Trump would have stifled his thoughts about moral equivalence yesterday. They made him look like he was taking back what he had said the day before. Unfortunately, we do not live in this better world and Trump continues to blurt out what comes to mind, regardless. Whatever else you think, he will certainly go down as the president who has most fully mastered the Freudian art of free association.

If psychoanalysts knew anything about psychoanalysis, they would acclaim Donald Trump the model of the cured patient.

Today’s radical and anarchist left, now going by the name of the Antifa, for Antifascists, is not a bunch of nice people. They have happily adopted the methods of prior fascist brigades, from the German Brown Shirts to Mao’s Red Guards.

According to Peter Beinart—not a right wing loon—the Antifa radicals have given themselves the right to determine who speaks and who does not speak, who can and cannot exercise the right to free and peaceable assembly.

But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not. That authority rests on no democratic foundation. Unlike the politicians they revile, the men and women of antifa cannot be voted out of office. Generally, they don’t even disclose their names.

The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.

Like the fascist right the anti-fascist left has no use for democracy:

Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.

In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down celebrated the “righteous beatings.”

Obviously, the antifascists are just as fascistic as the fascists they abhor. Beinart argues effectively that the fascist right and the antifascist left feed each other, provoke each other and produce a cycle of violence.

Some of the violence counts as relatively mild. Beinart reminds us:

On Inauguration Day, a masked activist punched the white-supremacist leader Richard Spencer. In February, protesters violently disrupted UC Berkeley’s plans to host a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart.com editor. In March, protesters pushed and shoved the controversial conservative political scientist Charles Murray when he spoke at Middlebury College, in Vermont.

On Inauguration Day antifa radicals committed numerous acts of violence, including firebombing cars. They did the same at Berkeley. At Middlebury they sent one woman to the hospital. We are not talking about engaging in free and open debate.

The Antifa radicals happily rationalize their actions:

Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.

Some of the fascist Trump supporters have turned to violence. This, from Portland, Oregon:

When antifascists forced the cancellation of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, Trump supporters responded with a “March for Free Speech.” Among those who attended was Jeremy Christian, a burly ex-con draped in an American flag, who uttered racial slurs and made Nazi salutes. A few weeks later, on May 25, a man believed to be Christian was filmed calling antifa “a bunch of punk bitches.”

The next day, Christian boarded a light-rail train and began yelling that “colored people” were ruining the city. He fixed his attention on two teenage girls, one African American and the other wearing a hijab, and told them “to go back to Saudi Arabia” or “kill themselves.” As the girls retreated to the back of the train, three men interposed themselves between Christian and his targets. “Please,” one said, “get off this train.” Christian stabbed all three. One bled to death on the train. One was declared dead at a local hospital. One survived.

The cycle continued. Nine days after the attack, on June 4, Trump supporters hosted another Portland rally, this one featuring Chapman, who had gained fame with his assault on the antifascist in Berkeley. Antifa activists threw bricks until the police dispersed them with stun grenades and tear gas.

Since they are anarchists, the Antifa radicals have no use for the state. One should add that fascist radicals are at permanent war against the state, also:

What’s eroding in Portland is the quality Max Weber considered essential to a functioning state: a monopoly on legitimate violence. As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifascists don’t want the government to stop white supremacists from gathering. They want to do so themselves, rendering the government impotent. With help from other left-wing activists, they’re already having some success at disrupting government. Demonstrators have interrupted so many city-council meetings that in February, the council met behind locked doors. In February and March, activists protesting police violence and the city’s investments in the Dakota Access Pipeline hounded Mayor Ted Wheeler so persistently at his home that he took refuge in a hotel. The fateful email to parade organizers warned, “The police cannot stop us from shutting down roads.”

Of course, this has been happening on college campuses for quite some time now. Dissident students are shut down, penalized for not being politically correct. On campuses professors have the power to grade students. Often that suffices as an instrument of mind control. On the streets anarchists try to impose their views with threats of violence. Their agenda, Kevin Williamson wrote, is their anger. But they are trying to show that they are so right and their opponents so wrong that any means of fighting them are justified. 

It is fair to note that Antifa radicals and Democratic politicians have never produced any outrage over acts of Islamist terrorism. Not a smidgen of outrage.... And have never even been willing to criticize them. Which is more of a threat to Western Civilization: the alt-right or radical Islam?