Tag: anti fascist
Sen. Kelly Loeffler

Without Arrests Or Evidence, GOP Alarms Over 'Antifa' Fall Flat

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) claimed on Thursday that "antifa" was behind violence that occurred during anti-racism protests.

The Department of Justice has found no evidence linking people associated with the anti-fascist movement to acts of violence. No one who has been arrested for such violence has any links to the movement.

The nationwide protests against racist police brutality were sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes.

"I signed on to a resolution calling on investigations into antifa and similar activity because this is criminal and we need to get to the bottom of who is causing violence in our cities, looting, police officers lost their lives," Loeffler told a CBS affiliate in Atlanta. "Hundreds of officers were injured trying to keep the peace for those peaceful protesters."

When he analyzed court documents on those arrested at protests, NPR reporter Ryan Lucas said, "I didn't find any mention or reference to antifa. None of the 51 individuals are alleged in these court papers to have any link to the antifa movement, broadly speaking, or to antifa ideology."

Antifa, short for "anti-fascists," is a term for far-left groups and individuals who confront neo-Nazis and white supremacists at rallies across the nation. There is no "antifa" organization, and people affiliated with the ideology sometimes engage in violence.

As Loeffler lobbed an evidence-free claim of far-left violence, she failed to mention concrete evidence of far-right groups seeking to incite violence.

In early June, federal prosecutors charged three Nevada men affiliated with a far-right group with attempting to incite riots in the Las Vegas area. The men were arrested with Molotov cocktails in glass bottles, and an informant told police the men "discussed causing an incident to incite chaos and possibly a riot."

Loeffler is one of several Republican officials who have made unsupported claims about anti-fascist involvement in violence at recent protests.

On May 31, Attorney General William Barr issued an official Justice Department statement in which he said, "The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly."

"This has gone beyond a peaceful protest. Members of Antifa are domestic terrorists burning American cities down to the ground," Sen. Marsha Blackburn tweeted on May 31.

Donald Trump has made numerous references to antifa, including an unsubstantiated suggestion that a 75-year-old man pushed to the ground by police in Buffalo may have been an anti-fascist activist who faked his fall.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Yes, Antifa Is Very Dangerous — But Not To Fascists

Yes, Antifa Is Very Dangerous — But Not To Fascists

Call me unromantic, but I disliked a lot about the fabled “Sixties” the first time around. Some of the music was good, but otherwise 1968 was among the worst years in American life. The center nearly failed to hold.

As if the Vietnam War were not bad enough, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy made it feel as if America’s democratic institutions might not survive. Eager for “revolution,” hothouse warriors in the SDS Weather Underground faction did everything possible to promote anarchy—from rioting to setting off bombs. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, pitched battles between street fighters and Chicago police brought chaos and a massive voter backlash.

The most immediate result, brilliantly chronicled in historian Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland, was the criminal presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

So I found it heartening to see Perlstein take to Facebook to scold the latter-day anarchists of “Antifa.” There was nothing subtle or scholarly about it.

 “Stop destroying the left, you infantile [bleeps],” Perlstein wrote.

Can I get an amen?

In a subsequent post, the historian quoted an eyewitness account of  Antifa goons assaulting KKK-style marchers at a “white-power” demonstration in Berkeley, CA, of all places.

“Yesterday, at the anti-Alt-Right rally in Berkeley,” Leighton Woodhouse wrote, ‘I watched groups of masked Antifa members in Black Bloc formation swarm individuals who were apparently antagonizing them, and pummel them with their fists, feet, and flagpoles. When the victims tried to escape, they were run down, and in at least one case, cut off by the Antifa mob and beaten down some more.”

A similarly vivid account of Antifa bullying by photojournalist Mike Kessler appeared in The New Republic. The irony was that until the masked, black-clad social justice warriors appeared, the Berkeley crowd had decisively outnumbered, ridiculed and shamed “alt-right” marchers as the pathetic goobers that they are.

Much as thousands of peaceful citizens on Boston Common had so outnumbered white supremacists a week earlier that they took off their little bedsheets and went home without even trying to harangue the crowd.

That’s all that ever needs to happen.

But I don’t even need to turn on Fox News to know that Sean Hannity and the rest of the merry band of Trump apologists on right-wing media are playing up Antifa as the moral equivalent of Bolshevik revolutionaries.

Well-meaning journalists such as the Washington Posts Margaret Sullivan and Atlantic Monthlys Peter Beinart are certainly correct to argue that there’s no real comparison between left- and right-wing political violence in the United States. The “alt-left” Trump described scarcely exists, and had almost no role in the Charlottesville tragedy.

Beinart cites Anti-Defamation League statistics showing that 74 percent of politically-motivated murders in the US since 2007 were committed by right wing extremists; versus 2 percent by leftists.

The news media’s tendency to soft-pedal the far-right motives of killers from Timothy McVeigh to Dylan Roof has long been an instance of willful blindness.

Journalists on the left correctly fear that won’t be the case with Antifa.

Also on Facebook, Lindsay Beyerstein explains that she’s covered many protests halfway sabotaged by Antifa antics: “I always thought of them as self-indulgent parasites because they’d show up at demonstrations organized by other people and capture the news cycle with petty property destruction.”

 But when masked intruders quit breaking windows and start carrying weapons, things can change fast. “Paramilitaries facing off in the streets is God’s gift to fascism,” Beyerstein adds. “Not everyone likes racism and militarism, but everyone likes safety and order. If we’ve already got safety and order, fascists have nothing to offer casual supporters.”

But she predicts that if real “violence comes the backlash is going to come down as hard against the entire left as it did against the alt right after Charlottesville.”

That’s certainly what happened during the Sixties.  

eMy late father taught me an oft-repeated expression I always took as the essence of Americanism. “You’re no better than anybody else,” he’d growl, “and nobody’s better than you.” There was more than a little Irish nationalism in what he said, but he definitely meant it. So do I.

Most Americans do too. Even under Donald Trump, the great majority remains deeply attached to the fundamental premises of democratic citizenship. They want to believe that we’re all in it together—America, that is—and they react against anybody threatening that belief.

So that when Alabama segregationists attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators with clubs, tear gas and dogs, the majority sympathized with the victims—and brought about the end of Jim Crow. But after rioting tore Chicago apart in 1968, they went the other way. Hard.

Nobody needs the help of Antifa militants and the idiot professors making excuses for them to reject the KKK.

But let them start real trouble, and we’ll all end up wishing we’d never heard of them.