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1. Call me paranoid, but there are three things happening right now that I don't think are coincidental. First, the GOP in several states
2. is hustling to enact anti-protest laws. Second, the Federal government has rolled back restrictions on policie militarization. And third
3. the Justice Department has labeled something called "antifa" as a terrorist organization. As antifa is short for "anti-fascist", you can
4. where the conflation of these three events could lead. Any anti-fasctist protest could be met with militarized force and justified in the
5. name of combatting "terrorism." This is especially concerning because "antifa" doesn't seem to really be a thing in the sense the DOJ is
6. painting it. It's a very loosly associated bunch of disparate groups. There doesn't seem to be any central organization or even concrete
7. shared goals. Rock-throwers in Berkeley are only tenuously, if at all, connected to counterprotestors in C-Ville. But it can magically
8. all become antifa if the DOJ says so. This, to me, is one of the big issues with the rush to condemn "antifa". Now, I am by no means
9. on the side of people who want to burn it all down. I believe that voilence in many of these cases is counter-productive
10. and pointless. If Ann Coulter is coming to speak at your school ot town, protest the hell out of her. But there's no reason for violence
11. It's a disproportional response that only serves to undermine legitimate protest. But if Nazis armed with guns, bats, and torches are
12. threatening churchgoers, firing guns into crowds, beating innocent people half to death, and running over people with cars -- all things
13. that we know happened in C-Ville -- then singing kumbaya isn't likely to help much. Especially if the police are standing around with
14. their hands in their pockets. And cops teargassing what was by all accounts a non-violent protest in Phoenex before the police escalated
15. it could be only the tip of the iceberg. All the more easily justifyable now because "antifa". All to say, there's a lot more to this
16. than just "we condemn violence." To the extent that any group preaches violence as a first resort advocates violence as the means
17. to achieve their goals, absolutely, I would condemn that. People responding with violence in the face of violence to defend themselves
18. and others? That's a much murkier situation. You have to look at what was really happening. But the danger that I'm seeing right now
19. is the rush to pile on something called "antifa," which has no real definition. And to build it up into some sort of threat that is
20. both unspecified and overblown, if not completely made up out of whole cloth. Putting this "antifa" out there as the equivalent opposite
21. of violent white supremacists and Nazis...especially by a president and DOJ that are extremely slow to condemn Naziism...seems to me
22. to not only a convenient way to excuse and downplay Nazi behavior, but also to undermine any sort of protests they want, and justify.
23. a violent, disproportionate response because "antifa." Too many got caught in this game during the rush to condemn ACORN, only to find
24. out after it was too late that everything about ACORN was fiction. This smells a lot like that to me, only the stakes are higher.
25. So I'm happy to condemn unjustifyable violence, but I'm not jumping on the anti-antifa bandwagon, at least until somebody can tell me
26. exactly what antifa is. What its goals are. And show real evidence that antifa is engaged in terrorist acts. Until then, it seems to me
27. to be largely a very convenient label that can be slapped on pretty much anything for whatever purpose the labeler wants. And this is
28. true both of groups that appropriate the name for their own purposes, as well as the DOJ. End of rant.
