Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to tell the nation that Antifa (a portmanteau of “anti-Fascist”) was about to be labelled a terrorist organisation and accordingly outlawed.
Of course, Trump does not have the power to carry out his threat and so it was another pointless tweet. However, he did get the nation talking in very predictable ways. Let’s paraphrase the public discourse of the last fortnight:
Right-wing people: Yeah! Fuck Antifa! Those violent thugs!
Left-wing people: *No way, they’re freedom fighters. Fuck fascism, man! *
Nowadays, few sane people would admit to being a fascist. Yes, there are some open neo-Nazis but not as many as you would think. They certainly deserve opposition and I, personally, would not shed a tear if I watched a skinhead with swastika tattoos being beaten senseless on the streets.
So what is the problem?
Well, to be honest, the major issue is pretty fucking simple and I’m shocked the allegedly more intelligent people on the left have not yet picked up on it:
Antifa is a vigilante organisation that decides who is and isn’t fascist and punishes them according to its own version of justice.
I’ve seen my left-wing friends post countless memes over the past fortnight about the virtues of anti-fascism. The same people who cheer the vandalising of Churchill statues are also celebrating Churchill’s fight against fascism in Europe.
The hypocrisy is overwhelming.
The thing is, though, that we are no longer fighting vast armies of overtly fascist people. What is happening now is a culture war fought between extremely indoctrinated people on both sides. They have utterly dehumanised the enemy:
Liberals think conservatives are evil, racist scum who need punished
Conservatives think liberals are trying to tear down their own country
It is sad and it is frustrating. Both groups are utterly fucking blind to their own idiocy. In this case, the liberals are being more idiotic. Do you really want a vigilante gang running around, deciding arbitrarily whose skull to cave in with a brick? Is this really what the liberals of 2020 want?
Let's face it, that is how it could be. They could come for any one of us, and what would you say in defence? "I'm not a fascist!" Yeah, that's what the fascists say...
When you celebrate Antifa, you are celebrating the sort of thing that brought Hitler to power: Mindless, reactionary violence. You are exactly what you claim to hate. You are engaging in a very human – but very fucking stupid – behaviour, which is allowing gut feeling to result in violence.
Antifa choose targets based on bullshit media reporting, attack them physically, and then face no consequences. It sort of sounds like how they police are treating black people, right?
Get off your fucking high horses, talk with each other, and stop acting like pricks. Racist cops are scum and so are Antifa.
