Thread by @JewhadiTM

Antifa: Terrorists of the Bourgeoisie amgreatness.com/2019/07/04/ant…

Here is the danger that journalists like CNN’s Jim @Acosta constantly warn about from the comfort of their sinecures. But instead of blaming Antifa, the media responded to an actual assault on a journalist with equivocation and muted indifference.

Why this response? Journalists know that Ngo is not one of them, which is to say they are safe. They are “real journalists,” liberal activists who evangelize their “truth” behind a mask of neutrality.

Antifa are the untamed, unhygienic foot soldiers of the bourgeoisie. Antifa does the dirty work that’s too low for even the professional smear artists behind Covington Catholic, Russiagate, and the slander against Brett Kavanaugh.

Antifa members are terrorists, and their violence is no joke, yet their activism is superfluous, narcissistic roleplay. Antifa justifies violence by appealing to an urgent threat of “bigots” having a platform, as if Big Tech corps were not already taking care of that for them.

The most prestigious papers and universities, the most powerful corporations, share in common with these malcontents a liberal monoculture that has hollowed out and colonized American culture.

Their most relevant political ideas—open borders, kooky gender theory—have already been co-opted by the mainstream.

Historically, Marxists railed against the bourgeois. Today’s “revolutionaries” are the bourgeois. What could be more horrifying, more injurious to a Marxist’s self-esteem—to be on the same side as Nike?

Leftist revolt is, these days, a contradiction in terms. But a veneer of dissidence is politically necessary for their project. A dominant Left takes up the mantle of the underdog to justify chasing conservatives out of the public square.

Antifa shares with their journalist sympathizers a romantic, misplaced sense that they are persecuted rebels. It must pain Antifa and their cheerleaders in Brooklyn to know that their ideas have been absorbed into mass culture.

Having the same viewpoints as Fortune 500 companies and Stephen Colbert isn’t so punk, is it? It’s obviously not edgy or cool, but a desire to role-play as turn-of-the-century labor agitators persists.

The Left therefore has a dilemma: how to be transgressive, when the opportunities for transgression have been taken away? Answer: invent an imaginary, omnipresent threat of Nazis in need of being punched.

This is where the revolutionary make-pretend of Antifa and persecutory delusions of elite journalists solemnly intoning “Democracy dies in darkness” converge:

leftism is culturally dominant, but the Left can’t give up the label of the dissident to the very people they are forcing their ideology upon. So the Left convinces itself, and tries to convince everyone else, that there is an ascendant “fascist” threat.

Violent public tantrums are rationalized as the necessary pushback.

But these fancies of persecution are all backwards. Even the fringiest leftism is boring, milquetoast, and safe.

Despite Trump’s ‘attacks’ on the “free press,” journalists—at least liberal journalists—incur no risk when they tattle on Catholic high school boys for “smirking” at a Native American, or print libels about POTUS with impunity, or publish op-eds about how toxic the West is.

Journalists have worked to stifle democracy, not merely by discrediting an election but by forcing their unpopular ideas on a population that has rejected their elite ideology.

Journalists have a grandiose tendency to style themselves martyrs for democracy, but really they are paladins of the powerful, agents of the illiberal liberalism that Americans voted to reject in 2016.

Trump’s election was a true bottom-up rebellion at the ballot box against this oppressive monoculture. Their vote was for common sense over political correctness, national identity over open borders.

The Left remains firmly in control of the culture. So they invent an imaginary rampant bigotry and romanticize danger faced by brave journalists and activists “fighting for democracy” to justify the indefinite advance—by violence, if necessary—of progressivism.

What “fighting for democracy” actually means, it turns out, is fighting for leftism at any cost, whether by encouraging violence against dissenters or preaching about the pressing need for Portland, Maine, to accept Third World refugees.

On some level, it must bother the next generation of progressive activists-in-training at elite universities to recognize that they enjoy vastly more privilege than the downwardly mobile whites they castigate as the spawn of Satan.

That projection soothes the conscience, keeps the obvious contradiction out of mind: America’s most privileged people are constantly reminding everyone else, especially those on the decline, of privilege they don’t have.

Antifa offers something too useful to be rejected for the bougie progressives who occupy the halls of power. They are a threat, a warning, for those Americans who refuse to bow down before Progress and History.

One can only speculate about what motivates individual members of Antifa to wake up every morning, but quite a few of them seem to be mentally ill, maladjusted dropouts.

To hazard a guess, activism for Antifa members is a kind of public therapy, an excuse to be terrible people and unleash violent resentments on a scapegoat for their personal problems.