Tag: Antifa

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture national politics & policies

The FBI vs. the Anarchs

antifa, gaslighting, terrorism, terrorist

Glenn Beck got a visit from the FBI.

It wasn’t one of “those” kinds of visits, where you don’t know whether to reach for your lawyer, your publicist or your … Get Out of Jail Free card.

The visit was arranged by Kash Patel, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As Mr. Beck tells the tale, this was all in response to his recent analyses of Antifa. 

“So we dove in head first, and we analyzed the Antifa network and we went from the street thugs to the support groups, eventually to the funding. To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement,” said Beck.

Beck is enthusiastic about the president’s defining of Antifa as a terrorist organization. 

Is this good?

Yes. And maybe no.

Yes, in that watching its leaders now flee the country is a joyous occasion; and yes, in that Antifa is a terrorist organization — and treating it as such is a recognition of fact, of reality. Governments shouldn’t operate under delusions or lies.

Antifa has been very localized in practice, engaging in violence on the streets of big cities from Washington, D.C., to Portland, Oregon.

And in most of those Democrat-​run cities, the authorities have turned the other way, saying (as covered last week) that Antifa “doesn’t exist” and “isn’t a real thing.”

Local law enforcement should have started rooting out this vile nest of anarchs years ago. Making federal cases out of Antifa should not be necessary.

But maybe it is — since Antifa’s mob violence supports one national party and is so often given license by that party. While police and voters are supposed to ignore the masked “protesters’” violence because “they do not exist.”

As Glenn Beck relates, this trickery does not appear to be working any longer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment media and media people

Antifa in Popular Ontology

Jimmy Kimmel, Antifa

What do Jimmy Kimmel and the late J. Edgar Hoover have in common?

A kink for women’s dresswear?

Nope. Both denied the existence of major criminal organizations. 

Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to 1972, refused to affirm that the Mafia crime syndicate existed. Repeatedly, over the years.

Rumors that he was being blackmailed by the Mafia itself, over his own cross-​dressing kinks (the mob allegedly had photos), is not affirmed by major historians, who say his denial-​of-​the-​facts was just politics. 

So when we encounter those rejecting the reality of Antifa, take them with a grain of salt. Truth is, Antifa has a long history. It had a beginning; it spread; it fell into disarray; it was revived (or mimicked) by young radicals wanting an excuse to commit violence against “fascists” — which proved, of course, to be anyone they disagree with. We see them today on the streets of major cities at night, black masks and their proclivity to beat up heretics to their variant of communism/​anarchism/​nihilism.

But comedian and ABC talk-​show host Jimmy Kimmel derides such observations. 

“There is no Antifa. This is an entirely imaginary organization,” he cackled, likening any claim for Antifa’s existence to announcing the capture of fictional creatures such as the Decepticons or the Chupacabra.

But Chupacabra didn’t beat Andy Ngo within an inch of his life; Decepticons have not been caught on camera throwing bricks.

Many other talking heads have made similar denials — despite the demonstrated fact that Antifa is well funded and that funding is directed by somebody.

Even a “grassroots” organization informally managed counts as an existing entity; just because a group looks more like a network than a corporate entity with an HR department doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. 

Philosophers might call these denials “ontic negative claims” — “ontic” as in ontology as in the Philosophy of Being. While I’m uncertain of many things, I am certain of this: Antifa exists and Jimmy Kimmel is no ontologist.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture judiciary

Violent Double Standard

law, justice, crime, double standard

Trying to find justice in the justice system is sometimes like panning for gold in a dry river. But what ho, hey, we’ve found some.

Victoria Taft points us to “a federal judge who believes in justice” … or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Recently, California District Court Judge Cormac Carney chastised a purportedly anti-​crime department of the Department of Justice for prosecuting two men who “became members of a group characterized as ‘white supremacist’” for alleged violence while carefully ignoring the often worse conduct of Antifa and BAMN members.

Carney dismissed the federal charges against the two men.

He argued that “prosecuting only members of the far right and ignoring members of the far left leads to the troubling conclusion that the government believes it is permissible to physically assault and injure Trump supporters to silence speech.…

“At the same Trump rallies that form the basis for Defendants’ prosecution, members of Antifa and related far-​left groups engaged in organized violence to stifle protected speech.”

There’s something wrong when people who had been holding a peaceful event full of speeches and flag-​waving are prosecuted — not just prosecuted, but selectively prosecuted — for defending themselves when violent leftists show up and act violently.

If a speaker commits an actual crime, sure, he should be punished, in a proportionate way and without regard to the ideology of the speaker. Equal justice under the law, that’s all.

How about it, Justice Department? Care to earn your name?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture insider corruption

Traditional Terrorism

Jamaal Bowman, Congress, antifa, false alarm, protest, insurrection,

It’s a mild form of terrorism … perpetrated by a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Jamaal Bowman (D‑NY) pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol, apparently to postpone a vote on a measure that would have kept the federal government operational, as it lurches into another of its periodic debt ceiling crises.

He denies the accusation … even as Breitbart News reports that he “ripped down two signs warning a second floor door in the Cannon House Office Building was for emergency use only before pulling the fire alarm and running out through a different door on a different floor.” It’s all “on tape,” requiring no advanced dialectic to determine the truth. 

I hazard that no one believes Bowman’s denial, not even his many defenders — for no one is really that stupid, not even in the Imperial City.

The go-​to interpretive of the non-​left commentariat is to compare it to the January 6 protests and riots. 

When those 2020 entrants into the Capitol disrupted the Senate’s ratification of the Electoral College results, they were accused of affronts to democracy, the peaceful handoff of power, and of obstructing the normal operations of government. Rep. Bowman, by misusing a fire alarm, was doing pretty much the same thing. But he is on the side of Big Government and the Democratic insider elite, so he’s probably not in as much jeopardy as those “losers” who found themselves stuck in prison.

But I notice another parallel: the juvenile stunt of pulling the fire alarm is a classic tactic of leftist protesters. Leftwing saboteurs of free speech have pulled many a similar alarm, if usually only to scuttle campus speaking events by the likes of Ben Shapiro, Cathy Young, et al. The saboteurs almost always get away with it. 

Bowman probably thought he would, too.

It’s tradition!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and PicFinder​.ai

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Haunted by the Specter of Mao

red guard, America, United States, antifa, revolution

“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” M.L.R. Smith tells Epoch Times.

According to Smith and David Jones, authors of The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), the conduct of the America’s radical Left resembles that of the Red Guards and others during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in China.

The authors got the idea for their study from the riots that swept the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd. These rage-​filled protests-​turned-​riots made them think of Maoism:

  • Defacing and toppling of monuments, reminders of the pesky past.
  • Shouting down and “cancelling” speakers. (Sometimes physically as well as verbally assaulting them.)
  • Abject kneeling and self-​criticism in response to alleged wrongdoing, including “‘white guilt’ genuflection.”

The parallels are real, even though the scale of the humiliations and destruction that we have seen is nowhere near that of the Cultural Revolution, when millions were tortured and murdered. 

Jones says Maoism was bred in China and hothoused in Paris but “achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States,” where it is manifest in thinking about race and gender.

The authors explore the nature of rage as a motivating force and strategy, “an energy to be harnessed as a mode of power.” This is the fuel of many a revolution, where mob action serves as a kind of open terrorism. Histories and treatises are filled with it.

America’s Founding Fathers feared such rage, hence in their revolution they stated principles in elegant but clear sentences. They expected argument and readily engaged.

But now?You can’t reason with rage.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder​.ai and DALL-E2

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment media and media people

Antifa Goons Give Up

Melissa Lewis and Morgan Grace, antifa, suit, copyright

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon of the Center for American Liberty congenially tweets: “A meet and confer that yielded an efficient result!”

The Center represents Andy Ngo, author of Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Andy has been extensively covering the riots and related violence perpetrated by Antifa activists.

He’s doing the job that many purported reporters can’t bother with, even when onsite. (“Mostly peaceful protest,” was a standard refrain in summer 2020, even if flames dominated the screen as the reporter intoned those words.)

Ngo has been a victim of Antifa rioters’ physical violence in retaliation for covering their doings in detail; more recently, a target of their attempted judicial violence.

The anti-​Andy lawsuit was launched by Antifa thugs Melissa Lewis and Morgan Grace — I mean, alleged thugs. They accused him of retweeting a video of rioting that they’d posted to Twitter as a way of saying “Yay! Look at our wonderful rioting!”

The retweeting infringed their copyright, they claimed.

Uh, guilty? Not the copyright-​infringement part. The retweeting part. Which everybody does all the time on Twitter. It’s how Twitter works.

So why did the Antifa thugs then decide to quit so easily?

Probably, opposing counsel Ron Coleman, Dhillon’s colleague, explained things very slowly and clearly. Then, probably, Lewis and Grace’s own lawyer took them aside and explained things.

“The more this drags on,” I hear them advise, “the more attention the video itself will get. The video with the criminal activity you’re implicitly endorsing. Think it through . . . .”

Call it Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Down Among the Non Sequiturs

BLM, Black Lives Matter, protests, riots, property, Antifa

There is a rule in respectable writing, particularly academic: don’t quote “down.”

This means that academics don’t cite newsletter writers as authorities, scientists don’t consult table-​rappers as purveyors of relevant data, politicians don’t quote tweets.

But of course that’s all changed now, thanks to Trump.

Which perhaps excuses me to deal with a simple Facebook “meme” that I’ve seen shared around among progressives. It’s a deceptively simple question; the point in criticizing it is not to castigate the person who first posed it.

Here it is: “Why is murder an appropriate response to property damage, but property damage isn’t an appropriate response to murder?”

I confess: this really startled me. Not because it is hard to answer, but because what it says about discourse in our time. 

Note what is obviously wrong with it:

1. Murder is not an apt response to anything, for murder is unlawful and/​or immoral killing. The premise is absurd.

2. Some people do indeed kill rioters and others who are attacking them or their property. This can be justified because self-​defense is the basis of all our rights, and a violent attack doesn’t just fit into neat little “I’m only destroying your property” box. 

3. The proper response to murder, after the fact of some violent moment, is lawful arrest and trial, not killing. Self-​defense is for moments of conflict. Some time after an illegal act? Then we proceed by the rule of law.

Of course, this little thought experiment was designed to justify riots.

It does not.

It justifies, really, only this episode of

Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Victimhood Conspiracy

riots, protest, BLM, antifa,

When a purported Antifa group tweeted an “alert” on Sunday, instructing “Comrades” to “move into residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours,” tagging it “#BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica,” Twitter closed the account. 

Few would object. 

That was criminal incitement to riot, and worse.

But when Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remove client content for arguing things about the coronavirus that does not fit with government bodies’ officially approved information, something else is going on. 

Last week, President Donald Trump warned of the dangers to election integrity of switching to mail-​in ballots. So Twitter flagged his tweet, implying it as non-factual.*

I am not going to defend the wisdom or legality of Trump’s threats — on Twitter or by executive order. But one characterization of the whole affair by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason seems a … bit … off.

“The order relies heavily on conservatives’ victimhood conspiracy du jour: that social media companies are colluding to suppress conservative voices,” Ms. Brown wrote last Thursday. “It’s an objectively untrue viewpoint, as countless booted and suspended liberal, libertarian, and apolitical accounts can tell you.”

The fact that non-​conservatives have been de-​platformed does not actually work against the supposition that the social media outfits are colluding against conservatives. It remains a problem if conservative thought is suppressed along with libertarian and anything else heterodox. These companies do conspire to suppress opinions they do not like, and influencers they regard as dangerous.

To center-​left establishment opinion.

These social media behemoths aim to defend their approved news and opinion against what they regard as “fake news.” Thereby suppressing free debate and inquiry.

Opposing Trump’s reaction does not require pretending that these companies’ policies are not deeply problematic.

Concern about open and robust debate is not a mere “victimhood conspiracy du jour.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* How a prediction can be a factual matter is a bit odd. But let that slide, I guess.

PDF For printing

Photo by cantfightthetendies

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
by Paul Jacob video

Less Hate — This Week

Reviewing this last week’s big stories:

Stay tuned for Part Two, for Saturday.
Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Ngo Go Zone

Last week, photojournalist Andy Ngo was attacked on the streets of Portland, Oregon, while video-​recording a Patriot Prayer march and its Antifa opposition.

As they attacked, one malefactor can be heard screaming, “F**k you, Andy!” Another cried, “F**king owned bitch.”

It was personal. They knew Mr. Ngo, who had been covering Antifa and other far-​left activists rioting in Portland for several years.

Ngo’s new GoPro camera was stolen, he was hit on the head, had eggs and milkshakes thrown at him, and shot with silly string. The aim, apparently, was to humiliate and hurt and incapacitate.

Aside from the Antifa terrorists’ personal sense of aggrievement, there is that odd element where the putative “protesters” just do not want to be recorded. Which, after all, is the whole point of actual protest.

Odder yet, while Antifa is allegedly for equality and inclusion, the faces of the arrested malefactors appear largely white, and from what we know in the past, the black-​clad, hooded-​or-​masked mob is mostly made up of white, twenty-​something men. 

A white mob attacking a gay Asian sure seems racist and homophobic.

So maybe there is a bit of truth to the notion that Antifa is mainly a bunch of guys unleashing their lust for violence and mayhem. “Anti-​fascism” is just a not very plausible excuse. 

But, significantly, it is one that major media continue to make for the group. And many in the media go further, apparently seeking to excuse Antifa by labelling Ngo as a “conservative” (!) and a “provocateur.”

There is no excuse for Antifa — or its apologists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts