Most people are totally unaware how far people in #Seattle lean to #TheLeft: They take great pride in this Seattle-based statue of the #CommunistRevolutionary, #VladimirLenin.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20023048/863152126.jpg.jpg)
Alot of noise pollution about Antifa. What is it and is it responsible for the recent riots?
A May 31 memo from the FBI’s Washington field office reported “no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence” in violent activities in the nation’s capital. Not a single one of the first 22 protest-related indictments nationwide indicated that antifa played a role in looting or property destruction. An Associated Press review of 217 arrests in Minneapolis and DC found that “of those charged with such offenses as curfew violations, rioting and failure to obey law enforcement, only a handful appeared to have any affiliation with organized groups.”https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/8/21277320/antifa-anti-fascist-explained
The dearth of antifa-linked violence reflects the fact that the protests are generally quite peaceful — and that the number of actual antifa activists nationwide is quite small.
“Northern California and Oregon are two of the most active places for antifa in the US. At their biggest events they have, like, 200 people,” Bray, the Rutgers scholar says, says. “Yet you’re seeing things being burnt down in Arizona and Salt Lake City. That gives you a sense that this is much bigger than [antifa].”
This is not to excuse any acts of vandalism or violence by antifa members that are eventually uncovered. Even Bray, who’s generally sympathetic to antifa, thinks it’s “plausible” that some of the movement’s members are responsible for some of the property destruction or other disruptive activities during the demonstration.
But it’s one thing to say some members are doing this stuff — a “faction of a faction,” as Bray puts it — and another to argue, as O’Brien does, that antifa is behind the overall tumult. The former is a reasonable suspicion based on antifa’s track record, the latter a political move designed exclusively to provide moral justification for a police crackdown on peaceful protesters.
While Trump’s threat to label antifa a terrorist group may be toothless, it serves an important ideological function. It helps fuel the argument that violent radicals are the driving force behind the current wave of protests — that they are at heart a kind of subversive force, rather than an expression of legitimate grievance, and can be put down as such. It is less an actual policy proposal than a rhetorical device aimed at giving the police and federal security services ideological cover.
We can then distinguish between antifa, the actual movement, and “antifa,” the thing that Trump has positioned as his enemy. The term has become a stand-in, a catchall for demonstrators the government doesn’t like.
