Tag Archives: antifa

Situation Brief: Alleged Antifa Gunman Shot Dead by Police

On Thursday evening, U.S. Marshals shot and killed a self-described member of Antifa who authorities believe is responsible for the murder of a Portland protestor last weekend.

Michael Reinoehl, who identified himself on social media as “100% Antifa,” and who was known fixture of Antifa protests in the city of Portland, was confronted by a U.S. Marshals Taskforce outside an apartment building in Lacey, Washington.

Details remain limited.

A law enforcement source reportedly told local media that Reinoehl produced a pistol before attempting to flee in a vehicle. Law Enforcement opened fire, and Reinoehl was pronounced dead at the scene. The New York Post quotes the same law enforcement source as saying that Reinoehl was “armed” and cites eyewitnesses claiming Reinoehl fired at officers’ multiple times with an assault rifle before being killed.

Reinoehl was known to frequently be armed, having been detained by police in illegal possession of a handgun on multiple occasion in the past few months.

Reinoehl had recently appeared in a pre-taped interview with Vice News. In that interview Reinoehl appears to admit to shooting the victim, Aaron Davidson, who had taken part in a a “Pro-Trump caravan” in Portland August 30th which resulted in fighting with Antifa counter-protestors. Davidson was reportedly a member of Patriot Prayer, a West Coast group whose protest events in Portland have ended in repeated scuffles with Antifa.

While Reinoehl claimed in the interview to have shot Davidson in defense of a third party, multiple videos capturing the incident do not appear to confirm that claim.  It is common for Antifa to make frequent use of the term “self-defense” or “community self-defense” in ways which do not conform to U.S. law.

It is not clear what ties Reinoehl had to the location where he was found by federal law enforcement. Lacey is a suburb of Olympia, Washington located approximately two hours from downtown Portland.

Law Enforcement should continue to investigate whether Reinoehl –who had addresses in Clackmas and Sandy Oregon—received aid when fleeing from Portland for Washington.

Antifa websites and social media accounts both around the United States and from as far away as Germany and Greece have already begun expressing support for Reinoehl, with some citing the Vice News interview while claiming he was murdered by police.

Pro-Antifa websites such as It’s Going Down and CrimethINC have not yet addressed the death of Reinoehl. In the case of Antifa member Willem Van Spronsen –who was killed in a shoot-out while attack an ICE Facility in Tacoma, Washington in 2019—pro-Antifa websites reproduced memorials and republished the shooter’s written manifesto.

Local and Federal Law Enforcement should be prepared for the possibility of reprisals. After the death of Antifa member Charles Landeros -who was killed by police attempting to shoot a school resource officer- an improvised explosive device was left outside the Eugene, Or police station but did not detonate. Individual officers should also take precautions as Antifa is known to utilize doxxing -the malicious spreading of personally identifying information- to target law enforcement, including federal law enforcement.

The U.S. Marshals Service continues to show itself adept at finding and successfully arresting Antifa members and serving as the tip of the spear in federal efforts to disrupt riots. In addition to playing a key role in the defense of the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Portland, U.S. Marshals Service has also successfully coordinated with local law enforcement in recent weeks to disrupt Antifa travelling and transporting supplies across state lines, including in the arrest of the Seattle-based “Riot Kitchen,” who were detained in Kenosha, Wisconsin filling up gas containers in what authorities believed were preparation for arson and rioting.

German internal security gives a quick and easy guide to Antifa

Antifa is an organized “left-wing violent extremist” network with ideological goals “to eliminate the existing state and social order and thus the free democratic basic order,” according to new German internal security report.

The report comes out as the United States grapples with Antifa-led organized violence coast to coast. It is important because Antifa is a trans-national network that originated in Germany, and is closely replicated elsewhere, including the United States.

Germany provides a teaching tool for the US

Despite years of violent and subversive organizing, Antifa appears to have escaped sufficient scrutiny from U.S. security and investigative organizations. The German report, nearly 400 pages long, provides a good basic unclassified understanding as seen by a Western professional security and counterintelligence service. It is not available in English. The report provides substantial attention to Antifa within the country.

In the United States, federal and many state and local officials must swear to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” There is no special US agency to defend the Constitution.

Since reconstruction after World War II, Germany has had a domestic intelligence service precisely for that purpose. The Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, is a domestic investigative agency that monitors right-wing and left-wing extremists, Islamist extremists, extremist foreigners in the country, and foreign espionage threats. The BfV’s parent organization, the Ministry of Interior released the annual report, titled Verfassungsschutzbericht 2019, about extremists including Antifa. We will call the report V2019 for short.

There is a lot we can learn from V2019, which has not yet been translated into English. This article is believed to be the first to carry extensive translations of the document.

How Germany’s security services view Antifa

Antifa began in Germany in 1932, as the Center for Security Policy’s Kyle Shideler describes in a short history of the movement. It was reestablished in Germany in the 1980s, and later was exported to America.

“The ‘anti-fascist action’ (‘antifa’ for short) is not a clearly defined single organization or structurally consolidated group,” V2019 says of today’s German network.

“The term ‘Antifa’ is currently coined by ‘autonomous anti-fascism,’ which acts on a case-by-case or campaign-oriented basis. Under the motto ‘Antifa means attack,’ left-wing extremists regularly call for ‘counter-actions’ as part of the ‘Antifascism’ action field, to the disadvantage of ‘fascist’ people, groups or institutions, in their opinion. Ultimately, this means the commission of criminal offenses such as property damage, arson or, in some cases, serious bodily harm, in some cases at least including the death of people is accepted,” according to V2019.

Antifa’s symbols matter

Symbols matter, which is why Antifa destroys those it doesn’t like and makes careful use of its own, which dates to Germany in the 1930s. Antifa’s symbolism in Germany is identical to that in the United States: a red banner and a black banner superimposed over a white field and within a broad black circle. This symbol has special meaning, according to the V2019 report.

The black flag element pertains to the “autonomous zones” such as those in Seattle, Portland, and elsewhere. The red stands for building socialism and Communism.

The Antifa symbol “is widely used, particularly in violent left-wing extremism. The symbol of ‘Antifa’ therefore does not only stand for a confrontation with right-wing extremism, but also for the demarcation of ‘bourgeois’ or ‘state-conforming’ struggle against right-wing extremism with the rule of law,” the report says.

“For example, the black flag, which is used next to the red one in the ‘Antifa’ symbol, stands for autonomous anarchism. Autonomous zones are primarily formed in large and/or university cities. The respective zone usually has a central point of contact around which a network of small groups, individuals and local branches of national or nationwide organizations and structures is formed,” according to V2019.

In Germany, the biggest zones are in Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig. “Not only do they have an above-average level of action and mobilization potential, they also commit a large number of criminal and violent acts. In addition there is a wide, sympathetic and occasionally mobilizable zone environment,” V2019 continues.

Antifa’s ideology: Progressing toward the total destruction of free society

Germany’s security survey of left-wing extremists shows diversity in terms of which strain of anarchism or Marxism they embrace, but a common goal to destroy free democratic society.

“Left-wing extremists want to eliminate the existing state and social order and thus the free democratic basic order. A communist system or a ‘rule-free’ anarchist society should replace them – depending on the ideological orientation with socialism as a transition phase. Topics such as ‘anti-fascism.’ ‘anti-repression’ or ‘anti-centrification’ are event-related relevant, but ultimately interchangeable fields of action that only serve to implement your own ideological ideas,” the German counterintelligence report says.

“To achieve this, left-wing extremists are generally willing to use violence. The ideological families of left-wing extremism are communism and anarchism. Communists primarily rely on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in part on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Josef Stalin, Leo Trotsky or Mao Zedong,” according to the report.

Germany has more experience than almost any country in dealing with extremist intellectualism and politics, and V2019 draws distinctions that few American security and counterintelligence professionals are trained to address. Let’s dwell a little on it and take in the nuances of what is, in fact, a basic presentation.

Un-complicating the esoteric

“The foundation of this ideological worldview is the ‘historical materialism’ propagated by Marx as a scientific fact. According to this, the course of history is a development of human society that is legally predetermined by economic processes – from the primitive society to the slave-holding society and feudalism, ‘capitalism’ and socialism to communism,” the German report says.

Here we have a quick lesson about what Marxists mean when they call themselves “progressive” and why they base their frames of conflict on the lines of economic and social classes.

V2019 continues with what could be the easiest description of basic Marxist progressive theory to use violence destroy free societies worldwide: “In the currently prevailing stage of development – ‘capitalism’ – there is a ‘class struggle’ between the wage-dependent class (‘proletariat’) and the ruling class in possession of the means of production (‘bourgeoisie’). This ‘class struggle’ culminated in the revolution of the ‘proletariat,’ which would abolish all class differences. The ‘violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie’ by the working class led according to the lawfulness of ‘historical materialism over socialism (‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) to communism. Marxists strive for socialism as a transition phase, in which the state remains in parts until development to communism and the society should be prepared for communism.”

Thus we see how Marxists and other extremists seek the violent overthrow of the Constitution.

The anarchists want to overthrow the Constitution differently

The other half of Antifa – the anarchists – are different in how they want to overthrow constitutional society, as V2019 explains: “Anarchists set themselves the goal of abolishing all forms of human rule over other people, unlike communists who make absolute the value of socio-economic equality. Anarchists reject socialism just as much as ‘historical materialism.’ They are consistently hostile to the state and want to replace the parliamentary democracy directly with a ‘grassroots democratic’ organized society.”

It seems that the anarchists and Communists would hate one another. But they didn’t during other stages in history like the Spanish Civil War, and they don’t today.

Indeed, as German counterintelligence explains, “Communists and anarchists agree on the absolute need to fight ‘capitalism.’ Left-wing extremists use this term to understand the inseparable unity of a market-based property system and a democratic constitutional state, which serves only to manifest the conditions of exploitation and oppression.”

“‘Capitalism’ as the ‘root of all evil’ is incompatible with the idea of ​​a society based on freedom and equality for all people. The necessary overcoming of ‘capitalism’ could not be achieved through political reforms, but only by overturning the existing state and social order,” according to V2019.

Overturning the existing social order includes defacing and destroying historical monuments, cultural and religious symbols, and places of worship. Overturning the “state” means attacking and de-funding police and opening prisons to facilitate society’s collapse.

Either way, the Communists and anarchists of Antifa agree, the Constitution must be overthrown.

Overthrowing a constitution takes time

The German report goes through a detailed set of statistics of political violence in the country, studying right-wing extremism, Islamist extremism, and left-wing extremism. For the latter, V2019 continues.

“The necessary overcoming of ‘capitalism’ could not be achieved through political reforms, but only by overthrowing the existing state and social order,” the report says, providing statistics to a 40 percent increase in leftist violence over the previous year, with a 58% increase in property damage, a nearly 52% increase in politically motivated arson, and two cases of attempted homicide. Most of the leftist violent extremism was concentrated in two regions of Germany.

No amount of political appeasement, as the mayors of Seattle and Portland found out, would satisfy the mobs. The same is true in Germany. “The elimination of the grievances can only go hand in hand with the elimination of the system,” V2019 finds.

Structures, non-structures, and alliances with non-extremists

“The rejection of any form of external determination also results in an aversion to fixed organizational structures. Most autonomists prefer non-binding structures and form small groups based on personal relationships (‘reference groups’). These small groups are in turn loosely connected to other small groups and cooperate with one another as the need arises,” the report says.

There is also the practical security problem to consider: “Other autonomous groups join together in long-term groups and networks based on strategic considerations. This is intended to increase political clout and ensure effective protection against political opponents.

“Depending on the occasion, autonomous organizations also cooperate with non-extremist actors and action alliances, the demands of which are to be specifically expanded to include extremist content and supplemented with a militant component political action. This is accompanied by a sporadic departure from autonomous self-image, which is consciously accepted in favor of better opportunities for social and political influence,” the intelligence report says.

The German Verfassungsschutzbericht 2019 report goes into further detail about the ideology of Antifa and affiliated networks and groups. We will discuss this in a subsequent article.  

Attacks on churches are the latest crimes of the Marxist insurrection

Originally published by the Hayride

For more than a month America has been wracked by leftist violence perpetrated by Antifa and the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement.

In addition to violent protests, rioting and looting, the insurgents started by targeting statues and monuments to Confederate figures from the American Civil War. But they certainly did not stop there. They quickly began to target statues and monuments dedicated to just about any historical American figure, including Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.

Clearly, the movement is anti-American.

But the latest acts of violent vandalism reveal vividly that the Antifa/BLM movement is a Marxist, communist insurrection.

Last weekend, Christian churches and religious statues were vandalized and attacked in New York, Massachusetts, Florida, California and Missouri. The attacks included the burning of churches and even a vehicular ramming incident. Pictured above is the Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Ocala, Florida, which was set on fire with parishioners inside.

Not surprisingly, the so-called “mainstream” media has mostly ignored these attacks and where they did mention them, they feigned confusion as to who could possibly have been responsible.

Even a cursory study of communism going back to its earliest days would provide solid clues as to who was responsible for the attacks on churches.

Karl Marx, the father of communism, the barbaric political system that ultimately was responsible for the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th century, particularly hated the church. He saw it as a chief obstacle to the utopia that the communist revolution was sure to usher in, which featured the State as god.

Marx described religion as “the soul of soulless conditions” and the “opium of the people.” He called for the abolition of religion as an illusion preventing the people from having true happiness. It was based on Marx’s atheistic philosophy that communist regimes of the 20th century, led by the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s Red China, made atheism the law of the land.

Given Marx’s clear hostility to the church and BLM’s Marxist roots, as well as Mao Zedong’s attacks on religion in his cultural revolution in the 1960s, combined with Antifa’s Maoist orientation, it’s not a reach to connect the dots and come up with the likely suspects in these barbaric attacks on churches across America.

Until our elected and appointed officials on the state and local level across America wake up to the reality of the communist insurrection we face and choose a side—OUR SIDE—we cannot begin to roll up these violent revolutionaries and bring them to justice. We can do it, we just lack the political will to do so. Where are the leaders we need today?

The hubbub about ‘the boogaloo’ is the worst kind of fake news

Originally published by American Greatness

As self-described Marxists and anarchists rampage through American cities, threaten lives, destroy historic monuments, burn churches, and terrorize the public, the Department of Homeland Security’s crack analysts have emphasized the real threat: Hawaiian shirts and cartoon frogs.

Politico reports that the National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium (NTIC), a DHS Fusion Center for Washington D.C. and the surrounding area, warned of the threat of “Violent adherents of the boogaloo” ideology, which the outlet headlined as “far-right extremists.”

That headline caused the Department of Homeland Security to object to Politico’s mischaracterization of its sharp intelligence assessment, tweeting out,

Another work of fiction by @politico. The @DHSgov intel bulletin does NOT identify the Boogaloo movement as left-wing OR right-wing. They are simply violent extremists from both ends of the ideological spectrum.

It is true that the bulletin does not refer to “adherents” as “far-right.” But this is only because the report attempts to construct an ideology essentially out of thin air, based entirely on a set of internet memes largely created by activist trolls. The DHS report warns that violent Boogaloo extremists frequently wear Hawaiian shirts and may display images of “Pepe the Frog,” an internet meme of a sad frog that became popular with some elements of the Right.

From Memes to “Menace”

The term “Boogaloo” refers to an online meme about the potential for a second American civil war. The term is derived from the 1984 break-dancing movie, “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” and the subsequent movie meme which appends the mocking term “electric boogaloo” to derivative or uninspired sequels. Boogaloo memes often take the form of hypothetical discussions about what one would do “when the boogaloo”—meaning when civil war—begins. Boogaloo memes are often sharply fantastical or couched in video game language, referring to “equipment drops” or “leveling up.”

It is of course possible, even likely, that some individuals participating in this internet subculture could attempt to actualize such fantasies. Law enforcement should be careful and take such threats seriously. But this is not the same as being a “movement,” let alone a coherent ideology.

For one thing, fear of a second civil war is no longer an extreme idea. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed substantial numbers of Americans, on both the Right and the Left, are concerned about the prospect of civil war with just over a third (34 percent) of those polled saying they believe such a national catastrophe is likely within the next five years.

Despite DHS’s tweet insisting that its Boogaloo bulletin was intended to be nonpartisan, the reality is that the report relies almost entirely on biased reporting which attempts to portray the Boogaloo internet phenomenon as an overarching and coherent far-right movement posing a dire threat.

Substandard Sources

A look at the sourcing of the Boogaloo bulletin shows that the document, like other of Homeland Security’s NTIC products, cannot withstand objective scrutiny.

One of the NTIC bulletin’s primary sources is the Tech Transparency Project, a project of the Campaign for Accountability (CfA), which is a left-leaning nonprofit that “almost exclusively targets” conservative politicians and organizations for opposition research and dubious ethics complaints. One of CfA’s board members, Nick Hayworth, has been described as “Obama’s Opposition Researcher” while other CfA leaders have ties to groups founded by long-time Democratic “dirty tricks hitman” David Brock.

Such sources can be useful in any intelligence product, but the NTIC’s inordinate dependency on it as a major source betrays an unprofessional standard within Homeland Security’s NTIC unit.

Not only does the Tech Transparency Project’s article directly link the “Boogaloo” to the far-right, but this purported intelligence source deliberately blames President Trump personally for the threat, saying that he “inspired” and “energized” the Boogaloo adherents with tweets about the lockdown.

Other substandard sources for the NTIC report include Buzzfeed—infamous for releasing the Steele Dossier disinformation package that kicked off the debunked Russian collusion narrative against the president—and Vox, another heavily politicized site known for its explainer on a non-existent bridge between Gaza and the West Bank.

Given NTIC’s choice of sourcing, it is hard to believe that the Boogaloo bulletin’s release was intended to do anything other than achieve the exact interpretation that Politico provided, despite DHS’ social media protest to the contrary.

This incident yet again reflects a ongoing trend of politicized members of the intelligence community citing left-wing opposition research designed for political attacks upon the president, compiled into sloppy and sensationalist reports devoid of professional intelligence or analytical integrity, which are then leaked to a compliant media outlet to trumpet those extremist and unsubstantiated claims as authentic products of the nation’s “nonpartisan” security and intelligence bureaucracy.

“Imaginary” Antifa?

The leaked report to Politico whitewashes the organized criminal activity waged by Antifa which, as an avowed Marxist and anarchist entity, seeks to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. It also comes at a time when the president is attempting to spur federal law enforcement into action to target Antifa—which has a coherent ideological base and ties stretching back to domestic and international terrorism for over 60 years—for its role as violent agitators in the ongoing protests, despite claims by certain sympathetic lawmakers that Antifa is “imaginary.”

Meanwhile, some government officials, aided by the media, continue to lie about the role of Antifa in the protests. D.C. District Attorney Karl Racine claimed no local rioters had ties to Antifa, despite one arrested individual having been profiled by the Washington Post as an Antifa leader, according to independent journalist Andy Ngo, who recently testified before Congress on the Antifa threat.

The Department of Homeland Security is inverting reality. Its National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium wants people to believe that a nebulous group of Hawaiian shirt-attired individuals known for sharing Boogaloo and frog memes is an organized insurrectionist movement that threatens public safety, human life, and the Constitution, while simultaneously insisting that a highly developed and organized Marxist-anarchist network devoted to all those evils doesn’t really exist at all.

Photo by /XINHUA/AFP via Getty Images

Eerie parallels between Antifa and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Originally published by the Hayride

If you think the tactics and rhetoric of Antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrators in America’s streets are new, think again. They’re old.

The date is August 1966. Large numbers of students have organized themselves into a violent social movement to promote communism.

The students ransacked whole villages, burned down homes and killed thousands of civilians, all in the name of communism.

This activity 54 years ago happened in Communist China. The name of the student movement was the Red Guards. They were inspired and encouraged by the chairman of the Chinese communist party, Mao Zedong. He dubbed this violent reign of terror the “Cultural Revolution.”

The goal of the Cultural Revolution was to eliminate what Mao called the “Four Olds.” The four olds were Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas—everything that pre-dated communism in China. Mao saw them as a threat to his communist rule, so he unleashed the Red Guards to eliminate them. The Four Olds had to be replaced with new customs, new culture, new habits and new ideas—communist customs, communist culture, communist habits and communist ideas.

The Red Guards didn’t start out by killing people and destroying property. They started out with intimidation to back up Mao’s cultural revolution to change place names, especially street names. People even changed their own names so as to break with any association with the Four Olds.

The movement escalated from there. Anyone who seemed to cling to any of the Four Olds was harassed and intimidated. Property damage was next. Examples of old Chinese architecture began to be targeted for destruction by Red Guard mobs. Chinese literature books were seized by the Red Guard and burned. Artwork was destroyed by gangs of thugs who would go into homes to search for anything considered Old. The Red Guards ransacked homes of those who were not considered reliable supporters of the communist party. Ancient, sacred Chinese temples were destroyed. Cemeteries were desecrated and corpses were even dug up and torn apart. Monuments were taken down.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

I’m sure it does. And that’s not surprising.

Counterinsurgency experts, intelligence analysts, law enforcement officials and political scientists alike throughout America and the West are starting to wake up to the parallels between today’s insurrection and the Red Guards’ reign of terror during Mao’s cultural revolution in China.

Antifa rhetoric parrots Mao’s communist philosophies. Some Antifa affiliates have even called themselves “Red Guards.” Antifa’s modern roots in West Germany during the height of the Cold War included the notorious Red Army Faction terrorist organization, which had a Maoist orientation.

The Antifa insurgents started by targeting Confederate monuments, gaining sympathy, particularly from those on the Left, such as liberals and progressives. But it sure didn’t stop there. Just as the Red Guards did in China a half century ago, the Antifa thugs have moved on to statues and monuments of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus and even Mahatma Gandhi.

Now they are calling for tearing down statues and depictions of Jesus Christ.

There have been calls for renaming Columbus, Ohio and St. Louis, Missouri, as well as US Army forts named after Generals who served in the confederacy during the Civil War.

When and where will it end?

It won’t end if American patriots who aren’t paying close attention don’t wake up to the fact that what Antifa is doing is waging a communist insurgency within our own country. We must stop the mass virtue signaling and capitulation and stand up for America, the greatest nation on earth.

Back in 1966, eventually even Mao and the Chinese communist party leadership had to rein in the Red Guards so that they did not become uncontrollable and threaten to compete for power. In just a matter of weeks they had murdered an estimated 10,000 people. Probably the only reason this episode is not widely known is because 10,000 deaths during the Mao Zedong era in China was barely a drop in the bucket. Mao was the largest mass murderer of the 20th century, responsible for the deaths of as many as 70 million people by forced starvation, exposure and execution. That’s more than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot combined.

One cannot help but be suspicious that, at a time when the Chinese communists have covered up the origins and spread of an unprecedented pandemic and used force belligerently on their border with India, in the South China Sea, in Hong Kong and over the skies of Taiwan, an insurrection reminiscent of the Chinese cultural revolution led by American communists has sprang up seemingly out of nowhere. Who’s been supporting Maoists in America and the West? Who is educating and indoctrinating them? Who is funding them? Who stands to benefit from the chaotic insurrection? These are questions that must be answered. I would not be surprised if the connecting of the dots leads to Beijing.

Meanwhile, today in America many Democrat party leaders have taken a paternal, protective view of Antifa, refusing to condemn their violence and denying that they are a terrorist organization. Like the Chinese communist party, the Democrats may find themselves wishing they could rein in Antifa as the violence escalates and further chaos ensues in cities that have been dominated by Democrat rule for decades.

‘US out of Antifastan’ – Let the cities handle their own Autonomous Zones

As gratifying as it might be to see a forceful response to the organized anarchy in places like Antifa’s enclave in Seattle, it’s better to wait.

President Trump can defeat his adversaries by being patient and not intervening in Antifastan.

His enemies expect him to overreact. They need him to overreact. Otherwise they have no glue to bind themselves together.

The president has surprised critics by respecting what’s left of our federalist system that the Founding Fathers designed to limit the power of central government. As with the Wuhan Virus relief efforts, Trump is leaving the work up to the states and cities.

With the special exception of the District of Columbia as the seat of the federal government, the Antifa violence and destruction are local problems.

Local and state authorities have the tools to take care of the problems if they wish. They can also ask the president for help if they wish. This is a key point: If they wish.

Let the corrupt city political machines stew

In Seattle where Antifastan has entrenched itself, or Minneapolis or New York where seasoned Islamists and Marxists dominate the local political machines, the leaders have brought these problems upon themselves. They enabled the violent extremists and worsened the situation by trashing their own police.

Presidential patience will let them sit in their fetid britches for a good, long time. The same goes for the voters who elected them.

Presidential restraint is sound constitutional policy. It keeps local problems local and lets locals solve their problems their own way. With the president remaining patient, as a good fisherman would do, federal law enforcement will have an easier time identifying violent extremists who operate interstate. This will allow the feds, already handicapped when fighting violent extremism, to track organized conspirators and take them down with their networks.

Patience is also sound politics. Non-intervention as mayors permit anarcho-communists to destroy their own cities will allow the progressives – as if this is progress – to overplay their hand. It will also permit the public to see what such progressives would do to America if allowed to control the levers of national power.

Deprive the extremists of the enemy they need

Presidential patience deprives the progs of the dangerous enemy they want and need. The specter of mass “repression” is the glue that binds them. Revolutions always eat their own. Deprived of repression, the progs will ultimately fight among themselves. They already have begun to bicker and blame each other, and denied an outside enemy, this will only get worse for them.

More broadly, many of the voters who elected the Antifa enablers will develop second thoughts. Suddenly this fanatical destruction isn’t abstract to them anymore, but right in their homes. This is good. Any outside intervention from the Trump Administration right now would only unite and energize an enduring, broader movement around Antifa’s hard core.

Create a lose-lose situation for political adversaries

This brings us to the outermost orbit around that core: That reluctant, confused liberal mainstream torn between old-fashioned patriotism and the desperation to pander to the hate-filled mobs.

The president’s patient non-intervention in Antifastan has the added benefit of forcing the mayors’ national-level political allies – the president’s personal adversaries – into a miserable lose/lose situation.

Liberal candidates for Congress and president need big-city political machines that the mayors control. Those machines turn out voters, stuff ballot boxes, and tally the results. Certain candidates for higher office can’t afford to alienate those machines. And so they must go along, or at least pretend to, with the machines that harvest their votes.

Create terrible political alternatives

The more time passes, the tougher it’s going to get for politicians like Joe Biden who aren’t fanatics themselves but who desperately need those big urban machines. Presidential patience will deny those candidates the demonic enemy they need – Donald Trump – and force them into a hellish set of losing alternatives.

Look at the hand Trump’s patience would deal to them.

Trump’s rivals could appeal to the middle and condemn the violence and support law and order – only to get branded a racist or fascist. They would alienate their militant activist networks, special interest backers, and fanatical high-dollar donors.

Or they could try to appease the extremists by excusing, explaining away, or otherwise going along with the Antifastani destruction, thus alienating the millions of average American voters who dislike or feel ambivalent about the president but now see Trump as their only protection against violent extremism and the larger Marxist agenda that goes with it.

More likely, though, such politicians will wilt into a weak, wishy-washy position that pleases nobody and alienates all. Not a winning plan for them.

The practical side: Deny Antifa the martyrdom it needs

Then there’s the practical side of presidential patience. Antifa and its supporters desperately want to provoke a harsh police or military reaction. Revolutionaries need repression to create genuine, enduring public outrage against the system. Today they want to goad President Trump into over-reacting.

Any decisive uniformed action, under the current public mood, will inevitably result in some awful images and human casualties. Professional revolutionaries don’t tend to martyr themselves. They manufacture martyrs by offering up innocent dupes or idealists as sacrifices for the larger cause. This sick strategy can’t materialize with presidential patience.

Divide Antifa from its allies

Powerful actions from the central government, at present, will unite Antifa and its allies into a hard core, provide a common purpose between the violent extremists and angry citizens who have not yet gone violent, and risk creating an atmosphere that would justify the violent extremism further into the liberal political mainstream.

But with patience and restraint under current conditions, the less fanatical activists will ultimately get bored with inaction and lack of what they perceive as accomplishment.

Mob mentality requires constant action and stimulation. Once the excitement dies down, people start thinking about their own self-interest again. Some will fall away. Others will bicker with one another and start searching for scapegoats within their ranks. Many will lose heart with their leaders and their cause. Most will look for a way out of their mess.

The remains will be a San Francisco-like tent city of vagrants, needles, and feces.

Divide Antifa’s own hard core

The organized professional extremists will make their own mistakes, too. Like other fanatical movements, they will see complainers as traitors, treat people harshly, speak and act in more visibly extreme ways, widen fissures within their coalition, and start to self-destruct.

Naïve and devoted activists who get branded as traitors often become some of the best police informers and prosecution witnesses because, in the end, they want to do the right thing – or at least not pay a price for having done wrong.

Winning: The president becomes the rescuer

Once each Antifastan starts to self-destruct into its own fetid cesspool, average citizens intimidated by the extremists or alienated from the administration will overcome their fear. Many of these new deplorables will view President Trump as their rescuer, if only he would do something.

But the president doesn’t have to do anything because these are all local problems. Unless the situation gets so out of control that the most serious federal crimes are being committed. Then he is obligated to intervene and much of the public will thank him.

Or, even better, he won’t have to intervene unless the local authorities who enabled the crimes finally buckle under the anger being directed at them and, for their personal self-interest, beg Trump for relief.

The Joe Bidens of the world already have abdicated their role as mature, moderate leaders for the mayors to follow. All that remains for them is the humiliating option of lashing out madly but meekly going along as they turn to a patient Donald Trump.

 

Okay, so you’ve abolished the police

Originally published by the American Mind

Now what?

The Black Lives Matters organization, reinforced by their Antifa allies, has now declared that the abolition of the police is chief among their demands. This has led to a round of questions—and some mockery. But shortly after the demand was issued, the City Council of Minneapolis began efforts to sever its relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, promising a brand-new model for public safety. Other cities have hinted they may do likewise.

Elite media representatives hurried to explain that “Abolish the police” actually meant “defund” and “reform” the police. Never mind that police abolitionists explicitly reject notions of reform. As one Chicago Police and Prison Abolitionist declaration noted:

It is completely sensible to assume that this Settler government would permit and grant certain measures of reform over others to divide and demobilize the People. We imagine if they are to “defund” or “disband” the police, we will see the intensification of fascist paramilitaries and private armies form up to retain the fundamental oppressive apparatus. This after all was the central function of white citizens’ militias and fraternal orders for the last two hundred years, to which we today now have—no thanks to reformers—THE POLICE.

In other words, if neoliberals think they can support police reform and defunding efforts, then hide behind private security and gated communities, they have another thing coming. No, police abolitionists mean exactly what they say.

In Seattle, the revolutionary Left took things a step further, seizing six square blocks of the city’s Capitol Hill district and declaring the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” after Seattle police evacuated a nearby precinct.

As of this writing, armed Antifa members were seeking to flood into the zone. Barricades were being manned by—among others—members of the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, an armed Antifa group, one of whose members was killed last year in Tacoma after assaulting an ICE facility armed with a rifle and Molotov cocktails. Other leaders of the curious newly formed collective include soundcloud rap artist Raz Simone, whose armed cohort has undertaken to enforce his own brand of order, to the consternation of some of the Zone’s residents.

Despite the colorful antics, this is far from a pipe dream. Antifa has a very clear vision of how it will enforce public order after it has expelled and abolished the police.

They call it Community Self-Defense.

In an essay entitled “Liberatory Community Armed Self-Defense,” Scott Crow— editor of Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense—writes:

Liberatory community armed self-defense is the collective group practice of temporarily taking up arms for defensive purposes, as part of larger engagements of collective autonomy in keeping with a liberatory ethics.

I am proposing liberatory community armed self-defense as a distinct idea borne out of a reassessment, spanning decades, of the historical experience of armed struggle and broader theories of the right of self-defense.

Self-Defense usually describes countermeasures employed by an individual to protect their immediate personal safety, and sometimes their property. Within the US, self-defense is discussed almost exclusively in legal terms relating to “rights” recognized by governments or constitutions, and only occasionally as human rights. By limiting the discussion to the rights attached to individuals, this framing fails to consider community interests, structural violence and oppression, and collective actions. The discourse thus completely neglects the defense of communities as such, and especially leaves out the political demands of people of color, women, immigrants, queers, and poor people.

While traditional policing implies deputized professionals enforcing laws passed by the legitimate representatives and—it is to be hoped—duty-bound to respect individual rights, Community Armed Defense rejects the individual rights upon which the U.S. system is built in favor of the collective communal “rights” of identity politics. It exists not to uphold law, but to enforce the “political demands” of favored groups.

The image of a volunteer fire department but with guns may suit the anarchist ethos, but in fact Community Self-Defense is about establishing revolutionary shadow governance.

Far from simply providing armed enforcement, the term covers a full panoply of activities, providing all manner of services traditionally provided by the government—from food banks and co-op gardens to housing and medical clinics.

This may seem overly ambitious. But for the revolutionary insurgent it is just good policy. And as a tactic, it works. From the Taliban to FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) to the Mexican drug cartels, the language may be different but the model is the same. Create instability, force out the government, and finally replace it. Reports from Seattle suggest that, already, groups are “requesting” $500 per business owner to help support “community protection and security.”

In areas where the logic of revolutionary politics is operative, those who can provide services and a sense of stability, even for a fee, reign. Whether they were the ones who caused the instability to begin with is immaterial. In revolutionary periods, groups that demonstrate even a modest ability to perform this function should not be underestimated.

Attempts to abolish police, including the most recent Seattle Autonomous Zone, may seem risible. They are likely to be short-lived and collapse upon themselves as revolutionary ardor wanes. But they provide a short-term proof of concept, a propaganda victory, and justification for future efforts. Abolition of the police—whether by groups like Antifa, or through elected radical city councils—is now officially on the menu. The establishment of Community Self-Defense and its standards of collective group rights will represent a kind of de facto regime change.

Shideler: ‘The goal of Antifa Is to overthrow the government’

Originally published by the Daily Caller

Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, spoke with the Daily Caller’s Samantha Renck about the history of Antifa, Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and more.

“You probably started hearing the term ‘Antifa’ maybe back in the trouble with Berkeley and some of the cancellations that were taking place of conservative speakers on college campuses,” Shideler said. “But that’s only about two, three years ago.”

The reality of Antifa, as Shideler explained, dates back to the 1930s.

“We traced it in the article all the way back to 1932 when the Communist Party of Germany founds Anti-Fascist Action.”

Shideler expressed concerns for the amount of support Antifa receives from local and state officials.

“What is distressing is the level of support that Antifa does get from local and state officials from some of these more radical areas,” Shideler said. “We’ve seen these in Portland, we’re seeing it in Seattle with the mayor and some of the city council members who are essentially supporting this insurrection.”

Shideler emphasized that the ongoing situation in Seattle can and will also be used as fuel for future movements.

“Even though this won’t last, this zone is not going to last, the people who took this action are learning lessons, they are creating propaganda, they are motivating new followers, and we’re going to see all of those things happen again.”

Shideler talked more about the situation in Seattle, the future of Antifa, its threat to the country and more.