Video has surfaced showing masked Antifa thugs in Berkeley, California, last weekend calling for the destruction of the United States.
“No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!” the large gathering of cowardly black bloc-style protesters chanted at a conservative “No to Marxism” rally.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Antifa, short for anti-fascists, are the de facto militant arm of today’s Democratic Party, just as the Ku Klux Klan functioned as the murderous terrorist wing of the party many years ago.
“This is a political militia that is doing the bidding, in effect, of Nancy Pelosi and Governor Jerry Brown and the mayor of Berkeley and all these supposedly mainstream Democratic politicians, and this is a militia hurting American citizens for saying what they think,” Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News Channel show Monday.
Democrat office-holders are loathe to condemn the Antifa terrorists because Antifa sympathizers are their political base. Antifa enthusiasts in the mainstream media and in social media treat Antifa like courageous Freedom Riders and liken them to the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day to liberate Europe from the real-life Nazi menace. There may be some radical, dangerous kooks in the Republican Party, but they are vastly outnumbered by the radical adrenaline-fueled crazies who run in Democrat circles.
Left-wingers like the stunningly obtuse media personality Touré romanticize Antifa. “If white supremacists are American terrorists then those willing to physically fight them are doing heroic work,” he tweeted.
But who’s to say which people are “white supremacists”? The Left smears everyone it doesn’t like as racists and neo-Nazis.
Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer is a leading apologist for Antifa violence. After the Antifa-initiated rioting that police allowed at the “No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley last weekend, he tweeted, “The narrative forming of today online is that it was super violent in Berkeley. There were some fights, but overall it wasn’t actually.”
Besides, the Antifa had good intentions, he implied. “There were thousands demonstrating against hate.”
Police said 13 suspects “were arrested on suspicion of various offenses, including assault with a deadly weapon, felony assault and violating the Berkeley Municipal Code.” Six people were reportedly injured.
This brings to mind the quotation attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”
And maybe one can’t, after all, expect much from the Democratic Party, which by way of a DNC resolution supporting Black Lives Matter, officially endorses black-on-white violence and the murder of police officers. Condemning vicious radical left-wing hooligans hurts their reelection chances as they risk being characterized as soft on “fascism.”
President Obama allowed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to run wild in recent years. Obama even rewarded riot-inciters and those who support killing police by hosting them at the White House. Instead of protecting citizens and their property, some politicians even admit pro-rioting policies openly, as when then-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) acknowledged in April 2015 that authorities “gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.”
Many of those same Democrats who stridently insisted to every TV news camera they could find for days that President Trump had to condemn by name, political affiliation, and ideological affinity the groups involved in the misnamed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over and over again are strangely silent when it comes to their terrorist Antifa friends.
No condemnation of Antifa has come from communist-sympathizing Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat who represents Berkeley. The far-left all-Democrat Congressional Progressive Caucus was also silent. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), likely a future presidential candidate, also refused to condemn Antifa. Ditto for Virginia’s Democrat governor and amoral Clinton bag man, Terry McAuliffe, and Charlottesville’s leftist mayor, Michael Signer. To them, Antifa can do no wrong.
But some on the Left seem to see the damage Antifa are doing to the Left and to what remains of the Democrat brand. A handful of columnists are urging Democrats to distance themselves from the phony anti-fascists of Antifa.
Remember that just a few weeks ago left-wingers were calling for the end of free speech, but now a few Democrats are beginning to resist the further radicalization of their party, Daniel Greenfield opines. They didn’t try to hold Antifa back previously “because there was no tactical reason to do so.”
He continues:
Instead the left had tactical reasons to open the door wide open. The radicals were better at accelerating change. That’s always been their calling card. And the Dems were far more afraid of their own left than any kind of mainstream opinion. That was the initial response to Antifa violence. But now the tactical damage is starting to pile up.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, on Tuesday House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents the latte liberals and Mercedes Marxists of San Francisco, apparently summoned the basic human decency to denounce the Antifa thugs who ran wild in Berkeley over the weekend.
“Our democracy has no room for inciting violence or endangering the public, no matter the ideology of those who commit such acts,” Pelosi said in a press release. “The violent actions of people calling themselves Antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.”
“In California, as across all of our great nation, we have deep reverence for the Constitutional right to peaceful dissent and free speech,” she added. “Non-violence is fundamental to that right. Let us use this sad event to reaffirm that we must never fight hate with hate, and to remember the values of peace, openness and justice that represent the best of America.”
According to Greenfield:
That statement could have come from a Republican last week. But to be fair to Nance, when she came in, she was the leading edge of the left. Among today’s radicalized Dems, she looks downright conservative. Even in her own delegation filled with raving angry demagogues like Ted Lieu or Brad Sherman, Pelosi seems almost statesmanlike in her opposition to impeachment.
Even the anti-American ultra-leftist academic folk hero Noam Chomsky has condemned Antifa, describing these people as “a minuscule fringe of the Left, just as its predecessors were,” to the Washington Examiner. “It’s a major gift to the Right, including the militant Right, who are exuberant.”
Whether the Antifa are in fact a miniscule fringe of the Left is debatable, of course, but at least Chomsky is heading in the right direction.
“What they do is often wrong in principle – like blocking talks – and [the movement] is generally self-destructive,” the professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and foreign-policy pontificator said.
“When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is,” Chomsky said. “That’s quite apart from the opportunity costs – the loss of the opportunity for education, organizing, and serious and constructive activism,” he added, sounding strangely like a green eyeshade-wearing banker or economist.
Political scientist Jo Freeman, who was part of the radical student movement at UC Berkeley a half century ago, said the efforts at stamping out opposition disturbed her. “It is not uncommon for societies to produce a hate squad,” Freeman said. “People who want to suppress the right to speak — they are everywhere.”
At press time early this morning around 321,000 people had signed a petition, well over the 100,000 required to force consideration by the White House, urging the administration to “[f]ormally recognize AntiFa as a terrorist organization.”
The proverbial ball is now in President Trump’s court. He recognizes the danger the Antifa terrorist-revolutionaries pose to the republic. Last week at a rally in Arizona, Trump told the crowd, “You know, they show up in the helmets and the black masks and they’ve got clubs, they’ve got everything,” he said, calling out the violent leftist group’s name — “Antifa!”
A group linked to George Soros called Refuse Fascism has announced plans to try to overthrow the U.S. government through occupations and crippling strikes. The Trump-resistance organization plans to organize demonstrations in urban centers across the nation later this year, according to Politico.
Eva Sahana, a 22 year-old organizer, was quoted saying their objective is to “drive out the Trump and Pence fascist regime.”
“They’ll march and demonstrate, as they have in the past, but this time, say organizers, they won’t go home at the end of the day,” the Politico report states. “Instead, the plan is to occupy city centers and parks and not leave until, and only until, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have fallen.”
Take them at their word.