Antifa

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

Rules for anarchists

Anarchists have gotten a black eye over the past year, what with the antisocial cretins of antifa laying claim to a name that befits them as illy as ‘artist’ does Hunter Biden. It’s reminiscent of the late 19th century, when the A-word, which accurately described promising ventures in mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, was besmirched — and how! — by the disturbed Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in Buffalo, thereby casting a serious pall over the Queen City’s Pan-American Exposition and escorting into the White House the bloodlusting Teddy Roosevelt, whom novelist Henry Blake Fuller derided as the ‘Megaphone of Mars’. American anarchism has always been a literary conceit more than a political (or anti-political) program.

anarchists

Thursday

Sohrab Ahmari

Anti-anti-crime policies are ruining American cities

I didn’t meet Davell Gardner Jr. Yet his photo — and the bubbly personality it captures — will forever remain etched in my mind. The picture shows a baby with fuzzy curls; trusting, happy eyes; a beaming, gap-toothed smile. His chubby, loaf-like baby hands remind me of my own kids’ hands, which I often can’t help kissing or blowing raspberries on. There he is, crawling on his dad’s belly, enjoying one of the last playtimes of his life. On July 12 last year, a convoy of three cars pulled up in front of a residential building on Pulaski Street, in Brooklyn. Suspecting potential gang activity, officers in an NYPD cruiser flashed their lights, and one of the cars, a Volkswagen Jetta, sped away. The cops gave chase, exactly as the gangsters had hoped they would.

cities

Thursday

Charles Moore

Winston Marshall is more than a martyr

Is Winston Marshall — guitarist, banjo player, composer of Mumford & Sons, and father of the west London ‘Nu-Folk’ music that eventually conquered the world — a martyr to the Twitter mob? I find his story more interesting than that. He was trolled earlier this year for tweeting in favor of a book by Andy Ngo about the power of the far-left in the United States. (I haven’t read the book; I gather it is polemical, but in no way fascist.) Because of the difficulties this created for the band, he apologized, but later felt uneasy since he believed he had said nothing wrong. After consulting his fellow band members, he decided he wanted to be able to speak out. The best way to respect the mutual accountability by which they operate was to leave the band altogether.

winston marshall

Thursday

Cockburn

Long live the Riot Squad

Spare a thought for the joyless malcontents over at the Intercept, a website that once proudly defended journalists and fought government interference in the everyday lives of American citizens. Now the Intercept gleefully smears reporters who have dared to cover the protests-cum-riots of the past few years. The site's senior writer Robert Mackey and video producer Travis Mannion bothered to make a 25-minute-long video scrutinizing the coverage of 'the Riot Squad', a group of young journalists and videographers who film the violent aftermath of Black Lives Matter and antifa protests — among other riots. Some of these young reporters are, gasp, conservatives. Cockburn couldn't be bothered to watch the whole mini-documentary (seriously, must everything be a video these days?

riot squad intercept

Monday

Andy Ngo

Bristol is Britain’s Portland

Last night, Bristol’s city center erupted in violence as far-left rioters smashed up the police station, assaulted police — breaking some officers’ bones — and set vehicles on fire. The scenes of violence and arson were familiar to me. It looked like any night out of Portland, Oregon, where I’m from. Since May 2020, Black Lives Matter-antifa rioters have regularly carried out similar organized acts of carnage targeting courthouses and police stations. [caption id="attachment_23906" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Several police vehicles were destroyed in Bristol (Ben Crocket)[/caption] Some of the rioters in Bristol last night were dressed in black bloc as they set dumpsters on fire to block streets and used barricades as battering rams to attack police.

bristol

Wednesday

Cockburn

Sigh Ngo more: Mumford disowns a son

Pity the poor rockstar who finds himself embroiled in the culture wars because he liked the wrong book. Winston Marshall, banjo player for  the hugely successful band Mumford and Sons, almost certainly had no idea what he was getting himself into when he decided to tweet praise at Andy Ngo, the conservative journalist, for his best-selling book about the horrors of antifa. 'Finally had time to read your important book. You’re a brave man,' tweeted Marshall, referring to the conservative journalist’s latest periodical Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. The book describes itself as telling 'the story of this violent hate group from the very beginning'. Queue a barrage of condemnation from the Twittersphere, accusing Marshall of 'endorsing fascism'.

winston marshall mumford and sons

Tuesday

Bridget Phetasy

Letter from the online trenches

November 7, 2020 To my dear parents, Victory. Uttering the word feels strange after four long years of battle. But we persisted. After our devastating ‘loss’ in 2016, I ordered my pink-knit pussy hat from Etsy and answered the call to arms. I remember learning of the atrocities suffered under other dictators whose statues we’ve toppled, such as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. But after the horrors I’ve witnessed online, I would trade places with them in an instant. It’s hard to describe daily life when you’re living in a war. For four years I’ve woken up in my Brooklyn apartment, heart heavy with the knowledge that I am living under the tyrannical rule of a madman. Is this how Anne Frank felt?

online trenches

Sunday

Freddy Gray

‘He said, she said’ reports from the MAGA march

It’s all so infantile isn’t it? Antifa jackals harass Donald Trump fans during their ‘Million MAGA March’ on the streets of DC. The ‘protesters’ steal Trump caps and set them on fire. They throw fireworks at people. Skirmishes break out, some people get hurt. There’s a stabbing. Underpaid online reporters stalk the scenes with their iPhones, trying to record the violence and make it go viral. Social media users dutifully share scraps of aggro-porn. President Trump, sounding not unlike a teenager reporting on fisticuffs in high school, tweets: ‘ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.’ Which hills?

maga march

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Will the Plywood Party win?

As has been my habit for the last few presidential elections, the afternoon of Election Day found me in Manhattan at a discreet, semi-secure, undisclosed location for a long and thoughtful lunch. The 2016 iteration of this ceremony was exceedingly thoughtful and found some of our party pushing luncheon well into tea time. Indeed, it was about 11:30 p.m. on election night 2016 when, smiling in front of my computer, I had a call from the last hold out from our band of what Athenaeus called Δειπνοσοφισταί, 'learned banqueters’, still brightening the corridors of our place of congregation.

plywood

Friday

Dominic Green

American Weimar or American Hapsburg?

Aaron Sibarium has written a fascinating article for American Purpose on the parallels between the current American republic and the Weimar republic. It’s worth reading on its own merits as a history lesson, as a reminder that no people is immune to time and tide, as a reflection on how democracy can turn into disaster. It’s worth reading even if you disagree, as I do.

hapsburg

Friday

Bill Kauffman

The next so-called civil war

Batavia, New York On a brutally hot and wasp-swarming late summer mid-afternoon I walk our town’s old cemetery, as is my wont — hey, if I’m gonna live here for eternity I may as well get to know the neighbors. Walt Whitman swooned over one of this boneyard’s residents, and I have come to read the relevant passages to the boy who rests under the sod. His name was Stewart Glover, and he appears in Whitman’s diaristic Specimen Days to illustrate ‘the terrible and tender realities’ of war-death. Glover, Whitman tells us, grew up in Batavia with his father, John Glover, ‘an aged and feeble man’. (I dunno: his gravestone says Pop lived to the ripe age of 83, dying in 1873.

civil war

Monday

Chadwick Moore

The Pride Boys

‘They thought they were being gay as in homosexual but they were just being gay as in lame,’ Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, tells me. Since Saturday night the #ProudBoys hashtag has trended on Twitter — accompanied by photos of gay couples snogging, LGBTs flaunting their gayness, and a fresh dump of those milquetoast, cringe-inducing memes of the political left. The ‘real proud boys’ gay campaign comes after the Proud Boys group made national headlines last week. During the first presidential debate on Tuesday, Democrat nominee Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace insisted that Trump condemned the multi-ethnic, pro-Trump men’s group as an example of rampant ‘white supremacy’.

proud boys
antifa
Will Lloyd

No, antifa won’t destroy democracy

‘Are elk racist?’ It seems, on the face of it, a peculiar question; but this is a peculiar time. For 120 years a bronze elk sat atop a fountain between Chapman and Lownsdale squares in downtown Portland. Elk feed on grasses, leaves, and bark. They enjoy the shy seclusion of forest habitats and the untamable pride which accompanies being one of the largest terrestrial mammals in North America. Their political significance is oblique. But not in Portland. In Portland even the most blameless statue is a standing target and a symbol of oppression. Following the death of George Floyd, the elk was covered in graffiti over and over again by protesters. In an impromptu attempt at  barbecuing the creature, the mob tried to set the statue on fire.

Friday

Luke Coppen

The new crusaders

In July, the world’s most powerful man tweeted the words ‘There Is A War On Christianity’. Donald Trump’s tweet referred, somewhat cryptically, to an interview on the One America News Network with a man the President identified as ‘Dr Taylor Marshall, author’. Marshall told the interviewer, Jack Posobiec, that the protests that erupted after the killing of George Floyd had spawned a movement seeking to ‘erase Christian civilization’ through mob violence. ‘The goodness that we have experienced in our nation emerged from a Christian culture,’ Marshall said. ‘And these atheists, these socialists, these Marxists, they know that and they are attacking it.’ Marshall is a prominent figure in the US Catholic online subculture.

churches

Monday

Chadwick Moore

Antifa made me Christian

It’s a putrid August night in Brooklyn, with hazy orbs floating around the orange light from streetlamps lining a block of bars and restaurants. A dull murmur drifts up the avenue from young drunks limping along toward last call. For S. and me, chain-smoking over pints at our favorite pub, it’s a night like any other we’ve spent together over the past five years or so. S. is a Black Lives Matter stalwart and budding antifa sympathizer. He’s also burdened with severe angst and around this time of night the gloom really sets in. He becomes angry and only wants to talk about love, or, more accurately, heartache. It’s only in hindsight I realize that, back when I traveled in progressive circles, all my friends were as miserable as S.

antifa

Friday

Matt McDonald

Antifa for Biden

Hey folks, it’s me, your friendly neighborhood antifa ringleader. You may recognize me from such news clips as ‘Small group of troublemakers seen smashing windows’ and ‘ANTIFA dude on fire in Portland’. That’s me in the black hoodie.I’m enjoying a bit of downtime ahead of another largely peaceful weekend (weather permitting!). Right now I’m changing flights — who knew there were flight changes in business class? — but I figured I’d take a break from my busy schedule of scheming to give you all an important message: vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on November 3.I know what you’re thinking: isn’t antifa a series of anarchist groups with little to do with center-left mainstream politics?

antifa biden

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Blaming Trump for the riots is a Democratic disaster

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

The Vicky Osterweil delusion

Vicky Osterweil, a trans woman who describes herself as a ‘writer, editor, and agitator’ and whose Twitter handle is ‘Vicky_ACAB’ (all cops are bastards), must have been overcome with joy when rioting and looting broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s death. This is partly because she is a radical leftist and partly because she had just finished writing a book called In Defense of Looting. What a stroke of luck! It's as if I had written a book called Beware of Pandemics in late 2019. I have to salute her timing.Osterweil is the classic sort of leftist who attempts to wrap enough pretty language around violence and destruction as to ennoble it. The riots, arsons and looting of 2020 needed such a character.

looting
law climate
Spectator Editorial

The terrifying truth — neither party cares about law and order

This week CNN’s Don Lemon finally made an observation that should have been obvious three months ago but somehow wasn’t: Democrats might want to stop encouraging rioters and looters in American cities. Not because they were hurting people, or risking wider political violence, or undermining public morale, or making cities uglier, but rather because it turns out nihilistic violence isn’t popular. Lemon’s remarks were quickly seized upon by the right as the gift that they were. It is not often that your political opponent openly admits to cynically evaluating an issue — not based on right or wrong, but on the RealClearPolitics polling average.

Tuesday

Charles Lipson

Playing with fire

Some conflicts begin with clear aims but morph into endless battles, the original motives forgotten. The timeless metaphor for self-sustaining battles is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the inheritance case at the heart of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. ‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on,’ he wrote. ‘This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means... Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it.’ Now we have Portland v. Public Order. What Jarndyce was for the law, Portland is for the lawless. For over two months, young demonstrators have gathered each night in Oregon’s largest city.

portland