Antifa's influence may be exaggerated, but it's not a mythical Snuffleupagus, either, as they showed in attacking reporter Maranie Staab from our partner News2Share this past weekend.
My go to comment about all things Antifa: You're wearing black shirts and using street violence against your political opponents. Are you sure you're the anti-Fascists?
Plus the Antifa followed the Proud Boy demonstration, baiting at every turn. PB changed locations to avoid them, but they followed. Is it not obvious which side wanted violence? Why is it only one side is allowed to protest? How can anyone think Antifa is actually the good guys?
I grew up in Portland Oregon. It's my hometown. I attended Portland State University in the 80s and the only political violence that ever occurred on campus, was from the left. Never the right. To say otherwise, would be to spew nonsense. The only people who were allowed to speak on campus without issue, were leftist speakers. Anyone on the moderate side of right was always violently shutdown. It's a pattern of conduct for the left that has persisted to this day and is the reason that the Proud Boys were created. They were created exclusively to defend the rights of assembly and free speech for people who tend not to vote Democrat.
I despise the fact that the left now feels empowered to openly despise the working class. The worst behavior in this vein typically comes from the most privileged youth who work very hard to obfuscate class as an element of sociopolitical systems (because then they would have to indict themselves and can't have that. These brats are on the side of the angels, doncha know? If you didn't know this, they will be sure to tell you.). So, I share his frustrations about the working class becoming invisible and irrelevant. I mean, we are talking about human beings here. Creating a system that throws them away, dismisses their concerns, or shames them into submission is sure to bring trouble. They may be disempowered, but they are proud and feisty and will fight back.
I am not super sympathetic to communism as a solution although I do believe in the power of unions as a balancing force against the predations of capital on labor. But we are individuals at the end of the day and must be free to express that. I will never submit to group think no matter how utopian the promise of conformity to a top-down solution avers.
That said, capitalism itself has a very dark side and this must be addressed in some way. I believe that everyone has a right to the dignity of a living wage. We can argue about how we get there. I like that he was thinking about this problem and trying to find a creative path to get beyond the toxic aspects of capitalism without descending into a Chinese or Russian totalitarian state. Chewy problem but very on target. I hope some other creative philosopher picks up his thread.
Agreed. It took me decades to move beyond the idea that I had to belong to a tribe to be happy after enduring a strict, religious childhood. After being severed from the tribe, I had to create a new reality. It was tough going at first, but I figured it out. I now treasure my independence and my ability to choose the moments I must conform to societal mores instead of being ruled by some version of them 24/7. There is a great peace when you belong to yourself instead of a strong man or a mean girl or whatever flavor of thought dictator.
Well, you know Antifa are the brown shirts for the Dem party, right? That's how I see it based on everything I've read and seen over the past few years.
Not sure. Actually doubt it. Whatever they are fighting for, it's not the Democratic party except through confluence of interests on some occasions.
The whole streetfighting community is an interesting anthropological study. Hopefully someone is doing it. It was done in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and the way it worked was more like the Ulster conflict, people would have local bars they frequented that were associated with a party, and would go out and fight with their fellows there based upon local agitation and local issues. Each significant party in Germany had its own fighting force - the Reichsbanner for the SPD (Socialists), the Red Front Fighters' League for the Communists (KPD), Stahlhelm, the list goes on. Levels of organization varied. The SA (Brownshirts) only turned into a mass movement with membership cards and such after the Nazis took power, when millions joined. Before that, they weren't even in a majority in many places and probably got their asses kicked more often than not.
Incidentally the effective part of the strategy was making people feel unsafe. They welcomed totalitarian rule for the security of same.
I recall Biden and Harris posted bail for Antifa last year. When you consider a political party supporting a domestic terror Org like Antifa (yeah, people are debating this, but it's my opinion/assessment) then it appears to me they are closly aligned. I appreciate your comment though. It's worth looking further into to determine how best to classify them.
They don't seem anti Fascist at all though. Otherwise, why not go after Apple, Amazon, Google, (the big tech giants), Pfizer, Moderna (Big Pharma), etc... down the line, with more passion. Oh right, can't touch part of the fascist structure in play in the USA.
Kamala Harris' office accused him of pimping, including some counts involving minors. The Texas state attorney general said he was "making money off...modern-day slavery." Note: The scandalous court process is STILL ongoing…
Lacey and Larkin were also arrested and charged with "conspiracy to commit pimping." They spent four days jailed in Sacramento, California. Harris, who at the time was running for the U.S. Senate, called them "despicable" and labeled Backpage "the world's top online brothel."
News of the arrest was covered extensively in major media outlets, with Harris quoted prominently. Her complaint was that bad actors and teenagers sometimes used the site—and her evidence that Backpage "knew" this to be true was that it reported suspected underage ads to NCMEC and cooperated with police. Harris was using Backpage's history of working with law enforcement against it.
"Make no mistake," said Lacey and Larkin in statement that month. "Harris has won all that she was looking to win when she had us arrested. Like Sheriff Arpaio, she issued her sanctimonious public statement, controlled her media cycle and got her 'perp walk' on the evening news." While such targeting was not new to them, this was the first time a state had decided it was "okay to consider the First Amendment implications after, not before, hauling people off to jail."
In early December, a Sacramento Superior Court judge dismissed the case. On December 23, with just a few days left in office, Harris tried again, filing new conspiracy-to-commit-pimping charges against Lacey, Larkin, and Ferrer, along with allegations of money laundering. Ferrer also faced 12 counts of pimping. Again, all pimping and conspiracy charges were dismissed, though the judge allowed a money-laundering case to proceed.
"We've never, ever broken the law," Larkin says. "Never have, never wanted to. This isn't really—I know this is probably heresy—this isn't about sex work to me. This is about speech."
"This is the biggest speech battle in America right now," Lacey adds. "The First Amendment isn't about protecting the rights of the McLaughlin Group to speak their mind on television. This is specifically what the fuck it's about. Unpopular speech. Dangerous speech. Speech that threatens the norm. Not only do we have that right, our readers have that right. The [Backpage] posters have that right.
"We spent 40 years doing journalism, groundbreaking journalism, and they want to take all that away," he says—because "they don't like who exercised their constitutional rights to use our advertising platform. And that has no goddamn bearing. The law doesn't say, 'You get to pick and choose who exercises their constitutional rights by whether or not you like their lifestyle.' It's just incredible."
Well said Boris. Larkin and Lacey had been critical of the crony philanthropists Cindy and John McCain for years. The sex trafficking moral panic was just the tools they needed to punish the journalists who had spent the last 30 years reporting on their corrupt behavior.
In 1919 and early 1920's the Freikorps and the Communists were having actual wars with rifles, machine guns, field artillery, and hand grenades. These groups often had first hand combat experience, were absolutely ruthless, and their style, symbols, and culture was ripped off by the later political street brawlers.
True, however, the streetfighting stars of the later 1920s and early 30s were the generation too young to serve in WWI. They were sensitive to not having served. Admittedly led by the Freikorps type veterans of the war.
Respectfully disagree, HeathN. Antifa belongs to nobody except themselves. Like their right-wing counterparts, they all seem to be in it for the show--the issue is beside the point.
Absolutely. If the media would quit covering these meaningless “protests/counter-protests,” they’d stop. What’re they even protesting? “Fascism”? Where? Fascism in the US? Fascism in Portland? I wasn’t aware that Portland was living under a fascist regime. And what are the counter-protesters counter-protesting? They’re pro-fascism? Anti-anti-fascists? This is some silly shit.
It’s just a bunch of morons getting off on the undeserved media attention. That’s really all it is. It’s like a tiny group of people in fucking Portland, Oregon (I’m talking about both the protesters and the counter-protesters; looked like there were maybe 100 people total in that video) who have no bearing or influence on anybody’s lives, except maybe the people who get stuck in traffic during their protests (although it looked like traffic was flowing pretty freely in that video). Antifa doesn’t affect my life. And the anti-Antifa people don’t affect my life, either. Never have, never will. Why the ridiculous antics of two tiny groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is “news” is beyond me. And I would’ve thought that it’s kind of beneath Matt Taibbi, too. It’s silly, meaningless shit. Sorry that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but why was she even there in the first place? Why are journalists bothering with this? The only reason it’s even being covered is to perpetuate the idea that “We’re all at odds with one another! We all hate each other! It’s chaos!” No, man, it’s really not. Everybody I know couldn’t care less about Antifa. We don’t even talk about them, except in the context of something like,”Did you see that Taibbi wrote an article about Antifa? What a joke… Anyway, you want another beer?”
Um. Wasn't NAFTA negotiated and all but finalized by George H. W. Bush and his administration? When did NAFTA suddenly become a Democrat thing, New or otherwise?
Ist sentence: No, it wasn't. Didn't pass till '94.
2nd sentence: Wasn't sudden, and it "became a Democrat thing" when the Copyright portion was amended to benefit companies who just happen to be big Dem donors (https://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-497.pdf). Quite literally stealing back properties that had gone into the public domain.
I'm sure the happy smiles of the movie studios was payment enough for Clinton, et. al.
Are you projecting? Does NAFTA just *seem* like it belongs on the Republican side of the ledger, to fit neatly with all your preconceptions?
Thanks for the link! My cousin and her hubby lived thru that. They excitedly moved to Portland in 2004 but escaped back to central CA after Trump was elected. They said the town had gone nuts and was frankly dangerous, no place to raise a family.
The FBI has also largely infiltrated and shut down the Proud Boys. They've seemed to do not a damn thing to Antifa or the left wing groups that burnt many cities throughout 2020.
If you’re so confident that you call them “absolutely fascists”, then I look forward to you presenting any kind of evidence here to back up that statement. I’m sure you’re not just making a completely baseless assertion, are you?
But, you see, Lily is using "fascist" in the way it has been used since the Comintern decided that fascists were right-wing (rather than left-wing as they saw themselves) as a meaningless pejorative for anyone opposed to the Left's latest utopia du jour. and their being opposed to the utopia du jour, definitionally makes the Proud Boys worse than Antifa, even if Antifa assaults more people and destroys more property (as I suspect is actually the case).
No she didn’t, you don’t seem to understand what “definitive” means. And you can’t then just assert that the Proud Boys fit that description. That’s begging the question. Precisely zero of the necessary work to justify the claim has been done here.
Again, it's an appeal to authority. A logical fallacy. She needs to explain and convince whoever she is talking too, of those points. She can take Eco and use that as her defining point, but she still needs to correlate between the two.
I think both have been so penetrated by government agents that by now they may even have some actors in common. Antifa seems to be much more widespread, and by far the greater nuisance.
I love Umberto, but every. single. one. of. those. points. applies. to. antifa.
Hell, it pretty much covers the Democratic party, New Yorks Governor, Florida Prison system, Jerry Brown, Sinn Fein, the CCP, Canada and whatever else you want to squeeze in there.
But the logical fallacy of an Appeal to Authority is as weak as it ever was. In the end, Antifa wants to control speech. And that is my first and last point of someone and whether to support or oppose them.
... How does Antifa's values apply to cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, fear of difference, obsession with a plot, the enemy is both strong and weak, contempt for the weak, machismo and weaponry?
That all totalitarians suck? My grandfather, did ETO from 1942-45, Tunisia, Anvil, ended up in the Czech Republic in 1945. He was the one who told ME this.
The Nazis used to be a pathetic bunch of losers who started fights in bars too. Beer Hall Putsch = 1923. Hitler’s ascension to power = 1933. Broad toleration for fascism, as in endemic among Matt’s subscriber base for instance, allows this to happen
Why are you accepting that we should have such a thing as a “Proud Boy demonstration” in the first place? Would you meekly tolerate an “ISIS demonstration” in your town? Are we so fucked up that we can’t concede that the ethnic cleansing of North America is not an acceptable political cause to rally around in broad daylight in a major city?
"Meekly" tolerate? Civil liberties may lately take a subordinate position to feelings, but as Skokie, Illinois "tolerated" the neo-Nazi march, we should "tolerate" civil protest....not violence...just the freedom to march. It does not denote approval -- just freedom.
This is the first appearance of “ethnic cleansing” I’ve seen amongst 2021 hysteria. I guess it was only a matter of time, it’s a logical step from “domestic terrorists”
I’m not being hysterical at all. I’m not sure how else you get to the stated far-right goal of having a white ethno-state in some part of North America without ethnic cleansing.
Sean you do understand that members of Proud Boys include those with brown and black skin, right? They may not be your cup of tea but they are still not what you think they are.
Race is a myth. There is no such thing as a “Caucasian race,” or any other race. Belief in the fiction of race, and viewing humanity through the lens of race…that is the actual definition of racism.
I’m Irish Catholic in addition to being a leftist, so I’m aware of this flaw in white nationalist ideology. This is just the language they use to describe their own goals.
If the ISIS supporters weren't committing crimes during their protest, and they weren't inciting violence (as defined by the actual US legal standard for incitement), then yes, I would tolerate the expression of a set of beliefs I strongly disagree with or even abhor -- that's what it means to be part of a liberal democracy with freedom of speech and expression. Alternatively, one could organize or take part in a *non-violent* counter demonstration. If I weren't willing to tolerate that, I'd move somewhere more repressive. If you desire that state of affairs, there are many countries in the world that are happy to accomodate such a preference.
My point was that counter-protest in such an instance would be assured and probably would not always be pleasant for the prospective ISIS demonstrators, not that the demonstration itself should be illegal. I’d rather leave the controversiality of demonstrations up to communities acting en made than to the police or the national security apparatus, who would be happy if there were no demonstrations at all.
Unpleasant is one thing, and I agree that the more extreme the views being expressed are, the more inevitable counter-protest becomes, but I think all of that is largely healthy and to the good.
Physical violence and/or crime (as in proper crime, not like jaywalking or littering or something), from any side, is where I depart the intellectual train. I think political violence has no place in a liberal democracy.
In my view, there are extreme scenarios that might be exceptions, but it would be along the lines of "actual Nazis enacting totalitarianism" or "a literal communist coup" (or similarly dire scenarios). It would not be to counter "nazis who prefer strict border control and don't believe in structural racism" nor "commies who don't believe in god and want a shit-ton of social programs spending".
Basically, I view political violence as a dangerous and extremely slippery slope that is justifiable only in very narrow circumstances, as a dire, deeply avoided, and self-defensive last resort. It's extremely rare that I would consider those criteria met. Suffice it to say that nothing in recent US events has done so.
If ISIS doesn't break any laws, then I would have zero issues with them demonstrating in my town. Likewise, if PB or Antifa wants to have peaceful demos in my town (and I am an hour south of Portland) then cool. Make their points, try to convince me. But when they reinact Krystalnacht in Portands the Pearl district, as they did after Trumps election, then they aren't protesting, but rioting. And they did that many times over the last half-dozen years. But, sadly, our gov. will not in any way deal with this issue, and the Portland DA will play catch and release with them.
Nobody has reenacted Krystalnacht in Portland. Who was the targeted group? Don't do that. Broken glass and police passivity does not make a Krystalnacht reenactment. The closest in these United States we've gotten were the mass crimes committed against Black communities in the early 20th century.
Targeted group? Perhaps white people? People have gotten decent grades in "anti-racist" ethnic studies courses in American colleges by doing word-substitutions on passages from English translations of Mein Kampf to make the target group all Caucasians instead of Jews.
Portland: Using rocks, batons & weapons, #antifa smashed up businesses and cars in the Pearl District overnight. They completely shut down the roads. The same area was severely vandalized by antifa back when Trump won election in 2016.
You're using the Holocaust to further your agenda. No particular race, ethnicity or belief group was targeted in those riots. Yes, businesses were destroyed and it was awful. And it was NOTHING close to Krystalnacht which was a precursor to millions of people being murdered which shouldn't have to be explained to you FFS.
Exactly. And the same people obsessed with "law and order" are also the same people stridently opposed to Sharia law. Shouldn't they actually support Sharia law? Isn't more law and order better than less law and order?
I was not aware that law and order came in quantities. Are you saying that if someone supports arresting shoplifters, they should also support stoning gay people and cutting the hands off thieves?
Is that what's happening in Michigan right now? I heard that Sharia law has been implemented in several cities in Michigan. And you're saying that they're stoning gay people in Michigan as we speak? That sounds terrible. No, that's not I meant at all. That would be really bad, if it was really happening. In Michigan.
I was just in Dearborn and Detroit last week, and while the hijab store was definitely a thing, I saw no evidence of Sharia law based on my time spent at the Greektown casino and surrounding environs!
Michigan? What the fuck are you talking about? Are you claiming that Sharia law does not condone both the stoning of gays and cutting off the hands of thieves?
Singapore is very law and order oriented, and also very much officially opposed to any sort of religious extremism. The concepts don’t run counter to each other.
Yeah, it’s the only example I’m aware of of a mostly non-corrupt and functional police state. I attribute it mostly to the personality of Lee Kuan Yew who by all accounts hated corruption and made it a point not to allow it. Dunno if it will survive as such forever though, as power corrupts etc.
I didn't say that there's a contradiction between secularism and law&order. Both religious law and order and secular law and order can work. But why are law and order enthusiasts so opposed to Sharia law? The "law" part is literally in the name. They should be ecstatic about more law and order... if they really were in favor of law and order like they claim to be. But since they're opposed to Sharia law, I somehow doubt that they are.
But you're OK with an Antifa occupation? I don't care for Proud Boys but they have the absolute legal freedom to gather in a park that you do not have to attend. Antifa just had to police them, as was obvious from Twitter organization prior to the event.
They both want violence and the PB's have a long track record of starting fights and baiting the other side as well. It's been recorded and several of them have been convicted of starting a riot in the past:
Antifa and the PB's are a Rorschach test for extremist political ideology. The side a person decides to take shows more about them than the group itself.
Baiting? How does "baiting" someone into shooting you work exactly? I somehow can't imagine anyone baiting me into shooting him, if only because I don't own or carry any firearms. But how would something like that even happen?
You don't know much about the human race, do you? People are dared to do stupid things all the time, just pick a few youtube videos of guys doing dumb stunts, mostly for the lulz. Now put that mentality into a political, ideological situation and you get violence. It's pretty damn easy to reason out actually.
The point is that David is somehow blaming Antifas for "baiting" the PBs, but not blaming the PBs for shooting at Antifas. What I was trying to say isn't that this couldn't happen to anyone, but that this couldn't happen without the PBs being at least partially at fault. You know, for shooting people and stuff. A completely peaceful, non-violent and blameless person being "baited" into shooting someone? That's the part that I find hard to believe.
It doesn't matter what side of the spectrum of political views you have. If you're on the street fighting against your opponents, you're an extremist and probably a totalitarian in your own right.
Actually black shirts and street violence are have as much to do with fascism as boots. Fascists wear boots, so do construction workers, and people who ride horses.
Also I don't consider people who want to put me and my family into ovens my "political opponents." They're my existential enemy. It's insane that actual Naziism, including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever.
You can believe anything you want. If you want to be taken seriously, yeah, you do have to give respect to other points of view, even those you find abhorrent.
Do you think someone like Hannah Arendt enjoyed dissecting Eichmann? Perhaps she should have entitled her book "Fuck this dude, he's not worth my time". It would have been a lot less convincing. Would have saved a lot of ink and paper costs, though.
I think we differ on what "respect" means. Of course I want to understand and be informed about Nazis. I'm saying I don't think there's a need for me to dignify them by considering what they believe a legitimate political viewpoint. The phrase "political opponents" bugs me because waters down the reality what these people believe, as if it's a difference between tax rates or trade policy.
Also, we do politics so we don't have to fight - like try to kill each other - over every issue. Show me anywhere in reality where something like a Nazi ever had a chance to gain power since 1945? I mean, like, be real. Trump was no Nazi by any useful definition and your original post had it backwards. Nazis and fringe white supremacists tried to glom onto his movement in hopes of somehow enlarging their own. Without much success, mind you.
As long as you don't have to fight these people with weapons, you need other means of taming them, which is the very point here.
So Nazis have to actually take political power to be a threat? Mainstream and fringe white supremacists benefitted greatly from Trump's ascension, and vice-versa. On a personal level, his endorsement of the Charlottesville protest scared the shit out of me. Ultimately the "right" side won, mainly because of Trump's Icarus-like talent for self-destruction. But that kind of bigotry has been legitimized by trump and allied interests, which is a frightening first step.
The space program, and a technologic edge in the cold war. I don't think any German scientists given refuge in the US after WWII was done so because the government in the States were nazi sympathizers. It had everything to do with what those individuals in the Third Reich's rocket programs could offer the US before the Soviets.
Better on our side then someplace else. Many of them might’ve just been workers without the Nazi ideology. And hopefully they were watched. But I bet they were not.
But it is a political difference. Even the most odious policies remain policies.
You just have emotion wrapped around it. If you can't be dispassionate, you cannot be analytical. I can hate particular things without ruining an analysis by letting it get in the way of arriving at a conclusion.
Both the study and understanding of both Hitler and Stalin demonstrates how a perverted ideology can lead to the deaths of millions. We must carefully evaluate and critique our own beliefs to avoid similar scenarios
I'm just saying when someone comes at me and says "I want to eliminate you, your family and everyone like you from the planet" I'm not going to address him in the same way as, say, someone I disagree with about Fed policy or religion in schools. But I'm glad you can be so dispassionate in that way, makes you a superior human for sure.
“When someone comes at me”— Let’s unpack that. You might mean that someone grabs you by the shirt and starts yelling in your face. Or maybe you mean that they are holding a parade, marching right by your house, like the American Nazi Party did in Skokie, Illinois. Or maybe you mean, they are standing in the parking lot of a deserted mall on the outskirts of town, talking to others of like mind, which is what the Proud Boys did in Portland . Which is it?
Damned Skippy ! The stats for WWII dead, including the Camps, runs to 85 MILLION. Absolutely inconceivable, and you can easily *see how that experience made humankind swear *off of War FOREVER ! Oh, wait ....... maybe I "overstated" that just a bit.
It is always convenient to "wring our hands" over the horrors and iniquities of war, I mean, dang, General Sherman, setting the South on Fire all the way from Atlanta to the sea, allowed as how "War is Hell". There has never been a ground pounder known to disagree with him, at least since The Enlightenment, and yet, apparently human *nature .......
The interesting thing is that analysis of Sherman's activity has shown the casualties of that campaign to be overstated. People that were supposed to have died didn't die. Lots of property damage, not so much death.
However, WWII's casualties have been consistently understated. Stalin had an interest in minimizing the casualties. Khrushchev was the one who finally pulled out the 27 million figure for Soviet losses, which in itself is exclusive of purely internal casualties.
I'm flattered. I'm seriously just a dude running a tiny business who should be working right now. I kinda wish I was a paid plant or underground activist doing agitprop. It's more interesting than the work I'm currently avoiding.
Adolph Reed. Taibbi devoted a post to him a few weeks back. Here he provides real meaning to what the street people represent, the significance, influence and meaning of Trump, and the very aggressive and concentrated effort the revanchist "right" has made to seize power in this country after Goldwater went up in flames. Among other things.
I also push back against all of the "woke" bullshit, and *especially against any human walking who presumes to tell me how to think, speak, write, or make my own individual choices that affect no one but me.
That's conflating things. I don't think anyone can say with any level of seriousness that there is a holocaust happening in the U.S. today. I know that CNN and MSNBC spent four years saying that Trump is literally Hitler, but when people point to that sad lot with the tiki torches in Charlottesville as an example of how the U.S. is being run by literal Nazis it's hard to take seriously.
Of course the US isn't run by literal Nazis. I said nothing like that. But Unite the Right was organized by a group of white supremacist organizations who have histories of violence including body counts. Their ideology doesn't have to be dominant for them to be a threat. And the president calling them "fine people" (yes, he did) doesn't represent a good trend, politically.
It is certainly reasonable (and necessary) for people to defend themselves against violence. I have seen many instances of hyperbole, though, where people claim to be threatened by someone's viewpoint when there is no threat, implied or otherwise. For instance, when AOC accused Ted Cruz of trying to have her murdered. There is a very clear distinction between someone who is an existential threat and someone who really is just a political opponent, and those two things should never be conflated.
Trump never called them fine people. That has been thoroughly been debunked. Read https://finepeople.org/ which will lay out exactly how you've been mislead.
Me and my dad used to run a barely functioning small business, think Sanford and Son level of competence. I was once told by a college communist that I was a petit-bourgeois kulak and come the revolution I'd be put into a gulag or killed for being an enemy of the proletariat. Rather than clutch my pearls and scream about how I was being threatened I laughed at him and told him to keep dreaming. I suggest you do the same to anyone who ludicrously thinks we're going to start building Holocaust ovens in America.
Do you have any kind of stats on that? Because criticizing the Israeli occupation isn't anti-Semitism, so it doesn't count. Plenty of Israelis and diaspora Jews do it all the time.
Do you have any evidence that the Proud Boys are racist, Nazi, homophobic fascists that want to exterminate the Jews? Outside of a rogue sect and perhaps some loose ties to groups that have expressed a few off-color opinions Gavin McGinnis didn't set it up that way and straight from their POC president Tarrio, “I denounce anti-Semitism. I denounce racism. I denounce fascism, I denounce communism and any other -ism that is prejudiced toward people because of their race, religion, culture, tone of skin.”
I know if you do a Google search you'll come up with a bunch of baseless claims made by various "reporters" who are not just increasingly confused, but have apparently become COMPLETELY confused as to the difference between reporting a story and mouthing a mess of unsubstantiated opinions. Spent too much time on the frisbee-chucking side of campus IMO.
Speaking of Nazis. i believe it's the left who are completely running roughshod over the Nuremberg Code as we type.
Criticizing the world's only Jewish state as an "occupation" might not be necessarily anti-Semitic, but I would say it's presumptively anti-Semitic until shown otherwise.
'Because criticizing the Israeli occupation isn't anti-Semitism, so it doesn't count."
That's a standard response, but not the only one. I get different takes on that depending on which of my Jewish friends I talk to. Quite a few feel that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are unrelated, others that they are more or less synonyms.
So I'm not sure stats would help without contextualizing those stats, and that is far from being agreed on, almost begging the question.
Yes because antisemitism in America is more akin to spree shootings than they are to pogroms in 19th and early 20th century Europe. They're awful, but very rare and not going to become routine. I lived in post 9/11 America, the fear of jihadist terrorism was greatly overblown and did far more damage than the actual attacks and saying that doesn't minimize the deaths on 9/11 or Pulse Night Club or the like.
Just because we don't have pogroms doesn't mean that state level violence isn't possible and fast. Japanese Internment went from unpopular to official policy within 2 months after Pearl Harbor.
Something like 15% of the Japanese population on the West Coast subscribed to Japanese nationalist propaganda/societies. I’m not trying to justify the camps, but there was FAR more pro-Japanese government sentiment in the West Coast Japanese population than Nazi sentiment amongst German Americans.
"It's insane that actual Naziism [sic], including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever."
What's insane is that you and your "authoritative sources" have conflated and obfuscated so many different issues that you believe that "actual Nazis" pose a serious problem, let alone an "existential" threat in 2021. Meanwhile those same sources work tirelessly to erode the same sorts of freedoms the Nazis despised.
There are probably more Cathars in the world right now than there are Nazis. Unless everyone to the right of Mao Zedong is a Nazi, in which case, yeah, they're everywhere.
I never said actual Nazis pose a serious problem. I said I'm incredulous that many people, including supporters of this site, believe I should sit down and break bread with them and understand where they're coming from. Existential threat and existential enemy are different things. Even one lone crazy guy with a gun who really, really hates Jews is a threat to my existence. Doesn't mean he's got enough people behind him to take over the government.
Anyway I love the [sic], like you're a journalist quoting a source lol. But FYI, since you're affecting as such, I'll school you: putting quotes around a phrase indicates you're quoting someone, and I never used the words "authoritative sources."
Putting quotes around a word is also an indication of irony, and/or oxymoronic expressions like "Military Intelligence", redundancies like "free gift", etc. This is not new usage just among the kids. I am no kid, and I have seen this means of expression "forever". ;-D
Don't try. Just cash the checks Soros sends you. I've made so much trolling MAGAts that I have too much money, so now he just lets me stay on his island in Greece. Saw John Gault there, it was trippy.
I feel someone like George Soros would spend their money more wisely. Hiring people to troll Matt Taibbi's Substack comments just doesn't seem very... cost effective?
I’m just curious: how has Antifa affected your life, specifically? Conversely, have you ever been affected by the anti-Antifa people? And I don’t mean, like, you wake up and read the news and you get pissed off about some article you saw on your phone or something. Has your life ever actually been affected by Antifa/anti-Antifa? I only ask because I’ve never had a run-in with either of them. Both of those groups have zero bearing on my life. Why the media is spending this much time covering two tiny, meaningless groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is beyond me. I can only assume that it’s another desperate attempt on their (the media’s) part to try and convince people that,”Everybody hates each other! It’s chaos! We’re doomed!”
Who gives a fuck about Antifa? They’re not responsible for whether or not I get health care or what my tax rates are gonna be or whether or not I finally find a job. Have you ever wondered why this much time is being spent talking about an entirely meaningless, tiny group of dickheads in Portland, Oregon? Antifa is not the problem, dude. I understand that Matt is pissed that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but ultimately, Antifa and the people who counter-protest Antifa have zero impact on my life. I’m just wondering if they’ve actually had an impact on your life.
I don't live in Portland. In my mid-sized city things are... mostly normal? No riots, Proud Boys, Antifas, etc. I am hard pressed to believe that this is a serious national problem.
I'm guessing from personal experience that any so-called anti-fascist you made that argument to countered with something like "We're trying to stop fascists, so it's justified!" Now, if the only people whom they ever used these methods against were all honest-to-god believers in fascism and if it could be proven that anything less than this approach would result in the Nazi States of America being created, then *maybe* they'd have a point.
But it becomes clearer and clearer with every instance of these assholes getting violent tht their fascist-detectors aren't working properly. They're happy to assault and batter anyone who they think has it coming, and that isn't limited to neo-Nazis or even conservatives.
They almost beat up Michael Tracey, too. You might not like Tracey given some of his more dubious takes, but concluding that he is some kind of threat or the second coming of Joseph Goebbels and therefore is a valid target for violence is absolutely ridiculous.
Also, the days when antifa's supporters could smugly say "White supremacists kill people all the time. Antifa has never killed anyone" came to an end last year. So it could have possibly gone even worse for Maranie.
No one has ever made this joke before. We are in your debt, sir. If you were to tell me you identify as an attack helicopter, comedy as a discipline would be exhausted.
Ah, but that was the Nazis, the Fascists wore black shirts. But, come to think of it, once in power, Hitler got rid of the SA Brownshirts in the Night of the Long Knives, and went with black for the SS.
They're more numerous than one would think and fairly organized though not in any sort of top down vertical way. I went to a few protests in Raleigh, NC simply observing and was shoved immediately for simply standing on the side of the street, in my pink bicycling spandex, and filming their march. I was called a racist white piece of shit, a fascist, a gentrifier etc. The local news affiliate interviewed me due to the physical altercation and I stupidly gave them my name. Since I own my home antifa used my name from WRAL and found my home vandalizing it with the words "cracker" "fuck you die whitey" and "racist narc."
I never did anything to these people other than show up to their protests to observe them in objective manner as our local news didn't seem to be as critical of their tactics often leaving out their more violent acts.
At one point a photog from the N&O the major paper yelled at me, "you're making our job hard" I guess my mere presence causing such angst and vitriol amongst the protestors wasn't the narrative they wanted.
I have voted D my whole life, but the cognitive dissonance surrounding the left and Antifa is astonishing. Extremism of any type, left or right, is dangerous, but from the evidence I've seen leftist extremism is currently causing more damage to society.
Between Obama (and Matt brilliantly spelled him out), the reaction to Trump, and Oregon's harridan of a governor, I left and have not seen a way back. They would have to make serious amends to get me to vote for them at this point.
My go to comment about all things Antifa: You're wearing black shirts and using street violence against your political opponents. Are you sure you're the anti-Fascists?
Plus the Antifa followed the Proud Boy demonstration, baiting at every turn. PB changed locations to avoid them, but they followed. Is it not obvious which side wanted violence? Why is it only one side is allowed to protest? How can anyone think Antifa is actually the good guys?
I grew up in Portland Oregon. It's my hometown. I attended Portland State University in the 80s and the only political violence that ever occurred on campus, was from the left. Never the right. To say otherwise, would be to spew nonsense. The only people who were allowed to speak on campus without issue, were leftist speakers. Anyone on the moderate side of right was always violently shutdown. It's a pattern of conduct for the left that has persisted to this day and is the reason that the Proud Boys were created. They were created exclusively to defend the rights of assembly and free speech for people who tend not to vote Democrat.
Thanks for the link. Incredibly insightful article.
I was curious about this as well. This thoughtful article shed some light: https://www.newstatesman.com/mark-fisher-postcapitalist-desire-review
I despise the fact that the left now feels empowered to openly despise the working class. The worst behavior in this vein typically comes from the most privileged youth who work very hard to obfuscate class as an element of sociopolitical systems (because then they would have to indict themselves and can't have that. These brats are on the side of the angels, doncha know? If you didn't know this, they will be sure to tell you.). So, I share his frustrations about the working class becoming invisible and irrelevant. I mean, we are talking about human beings here. Creating a system that throws them away, dismisses their concerns, or shames them into submission is sure to bring trouble. They may be disempowered, but they are proud and feisty and will fight back.
I am not super sympathetic to communism as a solution although I do believe in the power of unions as a balancing force against the predations of capital on labor. But we are individuals at the end of the day and must be free to express that. I will never submit to group think no matter how utopian the promise of conformity to a top-down solution avers.
That said, capitalism itself has a very dark side and this must be addressed in some way. I believe that everyone has a right to the dignity of a living wage. We can argue about how we get there. I like that he was thinking about this problem and trying to find a creative path to get beyond the toxic aspects of capitalism without descending into a Chinese or Russian totalitarian state. Chewy problem but very on target. I hope some other creative philosopher picks up his thread.
Agreed. It took me decades to move beyond the idea that I had to belong to a tribe to be happy after enduring a strict, religious childhood. After being severed from the tribe, I had to create a new reality. It was tough going at first, but I figured it out. I now treasure my independence and my ability to choose the moments I must conform to societal mores instead of being ruled by some version of them 24/7. There is a great peace when you belong to yourself instead of a strong man or a mean girl or whatever flavor of thought dictator.
Well, you know Antifa are the brown shirts for the Dem party, right? That's how I see it based on everything I've read and seen over the past few years.
Not sure. Actually doubt it. Whatever they are fighting for, it's not the Democratic party except through confluence of interests on some occasions.
The whole streetfighting community is an interesting anthropological study. Hopefully someone is doing it. It was done in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and the way it worked was more like the Ulster conflict, people would have local bars they frequented that were associated with a party, and would go out and fight with their fellows there based upon local agitation and local issues. Each significant party in Germany had its own fighting force - the Reichsbanner for the SPD (Socialists), the Red Front Fighters' League for the Communists (KPD), Stahlhelm, the list goes on. Levels of organization varied. The SA (Brownshirts) only turned into a mass movement with membership cards and such after the Nazis took power, when millions joined. Before that, they weren't even in a majority in many places and probably got their asses kicked more often than not.
Incidentally the effective part of the strategy was making people feel unsafe. They welcomed totalitarian rule for the security of same.
I recall Biden and Harris posted bail for Antifa last year. When you consider a political party supporting a domestic terror Org like Antifa (yeah, people are debating this, but it's my opinion/assessment) then it appears to me they are closly aligned. I appreciate your comment though. It's worth looking further into to determine how best to classify them.
They don't seem anti Fascist at all though. Otherwise, why not go after Apple, Amazon, Google, (the big tech giants), Pfizer, Moderna (Big Pharma), etc... down the line, with more passion. Oh right, can't touch part of the fascist structure in play in the USA.
Kamala Harris tremendously increased risks for all sex workers in the US
http://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-larkin-and-lacey-speak
Kamala Harris' office accused him of pimping, including some counts involving minors. The Texas state attorney general said he was "making money off...modern-day slavery." Note: The scandalous court process is STILL ongoing…
http://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-larkin-and-lacey-speak
Lacey and Larkin were also arrested and charged with "conspiracy to commit pimping." They spent four days jailed in Sacramento, California. Harris, who at the time was running for the U.S. Senate, called them "despicable" and labeled Backpage "the world's top online brothel."
News of the arrest was covered extensively in major media outlets, with Harris quoted prominently. Her complaint was that bad actors and teenagers sometimes used the site—and her evidence that Backpage "knew" this to be true was that it reported suspected underage ads to NCMEC and cooperated with police. Harris was using Backpage's history of working with law enforcement against it.
"Make no mistake," said Lacey and Larkin in statement that month. "Harris has won all that she was looking to win when she had us arrested. Like Sheriff Arpaio, she issued her sanctimonious public statement, controlled her media cycle and got her 'perp walk' on the evening news." While such targeting was not new to them, this was the first time a state had decided it was "okay to consider the First Amendment implications after, not before, hauling people off to jail."
In early December, a Sacramento Superior Court judge dismissed the case. On December 23, with just a few days left in office, Harris tried again, filing new conspiracy-to-commit-pimping charges against Lacey, Larkin, and Ferrer, along with allegations of money laundering. Ferrer also faced 12 counts of pimping. Again, all pimping and conspiracy charges were dismissed, though the judge allowed a money-laundering case to proceed.
"We've never, ever broken the law," Larkin says. "Never have, never wanted to. This isn't really—I know this is probably heresy—this isn't about sex work to me. This is about speech."
"This is the biggest speech battle in America right now," Lacey adds. "The First Amendment isn't about protecting the rights of the McLaughlin Group to speak their mind on television. This is specifically what the fuck it's about. Unpopular speech. Dangerous speech. Speech that threatens the norm. Not only do we have that right, our readers have that right. The [Backpage] posters have that right.
"We spent 40 years doing journalism, groundbreaking journalism, and they want to take all that away," he says—because "they don't like who exercised their constitutional rights to use our advertising platform. And that has no goddamn bearing. The law doesn't say, 'You get to pick and choose who exercises their constitutional rights by whether or not you like their lifestyle.' It's just incredible."
The irony of Kamala Harris complaining about prostitution.
Well said Boris. Larkin and Lacey had been critical of the crony philanthropists Cindy and John McCain for years. The sex trafficking moral panic was just the tools they needed to punish the journalists who had spent the last 30 years reporting on their corrupt behavior.
Biden and Harris posted bail for Antifa? Can't seem to find a news item reporting that. Source?
https://thepostmillennial.com/flashback-kamala-harris-encouraged-riots-promoted-bailing-out-antifa
That's because it's horseshit.
In 1919 and early 1920's the Freikorps and the Communists were having actual wars with rifles, machine guns, field artillery, and hand grenades. These groups often had first hand combat experience, were absolutely ruthless, and their style, symbols, and culture was ripped off by the later political street brawlers.
True, however, the streetfighting stars of the later 1920s and early 30s were the generation too young to serve in WWI. They were sensitive to not having served. Admittedly led by the Freikorps type veterans of the war.
Horst Wessel was a good example of this.
Not to mention Rudolph Hess and Ernst Rohm.
Very well said!
Yes, it is though the left somehow decided that peace and love is for suckers.
This left is not the left you’re thinking of, it’s the “successor ideology”.
It's a giant distraction, emphasizing the issues the plutocrats don't care about.,
Respectfully disagree, HeathN. Antifa belongs to nobody except themselves. Like their right-wing counterparts, they all seem to be in it for the show--the issue is beside the point.
Absolutely. If the media would quit covering these meaningless “protests/counter-protests,” they’d stop. What’re they even protesting? “Fascism”? Where? Fascism in the US? Fascism in Portland? I wasn’t aware that Portland was living under a fascist regime. And what are the counter-protesters counter-protesting? They’re pro-fascism? Anti-anti-fascists? This is some silly shit.
It’s just a bunch of morons getting off on the undeserved media attention. That’s really all it is. It’s like a tiny group of people in fucking Portland, Oregon (I’m talking about both the protesters and the counter-protesters; looked like there were maybe 100 people total in that video) who have no bearing or influence on anybody’s lives, except maybe the people who get stuck in traffic during their protests (although it looked like traffic was flowing pretty freely in that video). Antifa doesn’t affect my life. And the anti-Antifa people don’t affect my life, either. Never have, never will. Why the ridiculous antics of two tiny groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is “news” is beyond me. And I would’ve thought that it’s kind of beneath Matt Taibbi, too. It’s silly, meaningless shit. Sorry that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but why was she even there in the first place? Why are journalists bothering with this? The only reason it’s even being covered is to perpetuate the idea that “We’re all at odds with one another! We all hate each other! It’s chaos!” No, man, it’s really not. Everybody I know couldn’t care less about Antifa. We don’t even talk about them, except in the context of something like,”Did you see that Taibbi wrote an article about Antifa? What a joke… Anyway, you want another beer?”
Choose any wrong opinion and you'll find some deluded idiot who believes in it. Some people still think the Soviet Union had an efficient economy.
That would be AOC
please. she's fully steeped into the "New Democrat", NAFTA culture now.
Um. Wasn't NAFTA negotiated and all but finalized by George H. W. Bush and his administration? When did NAFTA suddenly become a Democrat thing, New or otherwise?
When Clinton passed it in 1994
Clinton did Nafta. Bill.
Ist sentence: No, it wasn't. Didn't pass till '94.
2nd sentence: Wasn't sudden, and it "became a Democrat thing" when the Copyright portion was amended to benefit companies who just happen to be big Dem donors (https://www.copyright.gov/history/mls/ML-497.pdf). Quite literally stealing back properties that had gone into the public domain.
I'm sure the happy smiles of the movie studios was payment enough for Clinton, et. al.
Are you projecting? Does NAFTA just *seem* like it belongs on the Republican side of the ledger, to fit neatly with all your preconceptions?
Like the designers of Obamacare
Good read on Portland: https://reason.com/2021/03/22/the-dream-of-the-90s-died-in-portland/
Thanks for the link! My cousin and her hubby lived thru that. They excitedly moved to Portland in 2004 but escaped back to central CA after Trump was elected. They said the town had gone nuts and was frankly dangerous, no place to raise a family.
I didn't know the PBs changed location and that Antifa followed. Significant.
The Proud Boys are absolutely fascists and are absolutely worse than Antifa.
Disagree. I am no fan of the Proud Boys, but they aren't being protected by the MSM and DNC like antifa.
The FBI has also largely infiltrated and shut down the Proud Boys. They've seemed to do not a damn thing to Antifa or the left wing groups that burnt many cities throughout 2020.
NYT and NPR.
That’s the sad truth.
Then narrative dictators wonder why they are despised and viewed as liars and hypocrites.
History repeats. Yawn.
How many acts of arson have the Proud Boys committed? I think they are silly in general, but they are not destructive nihilist wack jobs.
If you’re so confident that you call them “absolutely fascists”, then I look forward to you presenting any kind of evidence here to back up that statement. I’m sure you’re not just making a completely baseless assertion, are you?
But, you see, Lily is using "fascist" in the way it has been used since the Comintern decided that fascists were right-wing (rather than left-wing as they saw themselves) as a meaningless pejorative for anyone opposed to the Left's latest utopia du jour. and their being opposed to the utopia du jour, definitionally makes the Proud Boys worse than Antifa, even if Antifa assaults more people and destroys more property (as I suspect is actually the case).
She posted the definitive explanation of fascism, and the Proud Boys fit nicely into it.
No she didn’t, you don’t seem to understand what “definitive” means. And you can’t then just assert that the Proud Boys fit that description. That’s begging the question. Precisely zero of the necessary work to justify the claim has been done here.
Again, it's an appeal to authority. A logical fallacy. She needs to explain and convince whoever she is talking too, of those points. She can take Eco and use that as her defining point, but she still needs to correlate between the two.
These logic bros are so silly. By the way they talk, I'd be willing to wager they haven't even studied formal logic or epistemology.
In honor of Jolly Swagman, I shall call you out for doing an ad hominem!
I think both have been so penetrated by government agents that by now they may even have some actors in common. Antifa seems to be much more widespread, and by far the greater nuisance.
"I think both have been so penetrated by government agents that by now they may even have some actors in common"
I speculate that it's like le Carré's THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD.
"I thought Fiedler was our guy."
"Wrongo. Mundt is our guy."
Just my opinion, but at this point I think it's wise not to be out on the street.
Thank$ for $haring.
PB embrace every single one of these points: https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
I love Umberto, but every. single. one. of. those. points. applies. to. antifa.
Hell, it pretty much covers the Democratic party, New Yorks Governor, Florida Prison system, Jerry Brown, Sinn Fein, the CCP, Canada and whatever else you want to squeeze in there.
But the logical fallacy of an Appeal to Authority is as weak as it ever was. In the end, Antifa wants to control speech. And that is my first and last point of someone and whether to support or oppose them.
Good point about the vague universality.
... How does Antifa's values apply to cult of tradition, rejection of modernism, fear of difference, obsession with a plot, the enemy is both strong and weak, contempt for the weak, machismo and weaponry?
This literally addresses your question "Can you put this into words as to how they're fascists?"
Are you ok, Duff?
Dare you to offer this take on fascism to a World War II veteran.
Those guys who beat Hitler spent the next 30 years fighting against the guys who *really* beat Hitler. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Only 30? I take your point that everybody felt the Cold War was getting kind of stale c. 1975. Took Reagan to rejuvenate it.
That all totalitarians suck? My grandfather, did ETO from 1942-45, Tunisia, Anvil, ended up in the Czech Republic in 1945. He was the one who told ME this.
The Nazis used to be a pathetic bunch of losers who started fights in bars too. Beer Hall Putsch = 1923. Hitler’s ascension to power = 1933. Broad toleration for fascism, as in endemic among Matt’s subscriber base for instance, allows this to happen
Why are you accepting that we should have such a thing as a “Proud Boy demonstration” in the first place? Would you meekly tolerate an “ISIS demonstration” in your town? Are we so fucked up that we can’t concede that the ethnic cleansing of North America is not an acceptable political cause to rally around in broad daylight in a major city?
"Meekly" tolerate? Civil liberties may lately take a subordinate position to feelings, but as Skokie, Illinois "tolerated" the neo-Nazi march, we should "tolerate" civil protest....not violence...just the freedom to march. It does not denote approval -- just freedom.
You can still show up and yell at them. Counterprotest is also protected speech. Seems preferable to outsourcing the matter to the NSA/FBI/CIA et al
Is "yelling at them" all they did? No one would be complaining in that case. And the journalist was clearly not a Proud Boy.
Sean, if you are equating the Proud Boys to ISIS, you are either spastic or a moron.
Meh, he seems pretty capable of both ....
This is the first appearance of “ethnic cleansing” I’ve seen amongst 2021 hysteria. I guess it was only a matter of time, it’s a logical step from “domestic terrorists”
One of them is literally on video saying "we should have a holocaust"
To quote Sterling Archer, “Uh, phrasing!!!”
Sounds serious!
Super serious! Don’t believe nazis because they’re just joking. But also maybe they’re not?
I’m not being hysterical at all. I’m not sure how else you get to the stated far-right goal of having a white ethno-state in some part of North America without ethnic cleansing.
Sean you do understand that members of Proud Boys include those with brown and black skin, right? They may not be your cup of tea but they are still not what you think they are.
Indeed, their founder is Afro-Cuban.
Sean, "White" is not an ethnicity, nor is it a "race" -- the race is "Caucasian".... and America has many diverse ethnicities...
Race is a myth. There is no such thing as a “Caucasian race,” or any other race. Belief in the fiction of race, and viewing humanity through the lens of race…that is the actual definition of racism.
I’m Irish Catholic in addition to being a leftist, so I’m aware of this flaw in white nationalist ideology. This is just the language they use to describe their own goals.
Yeah sonny, you are.
Maybe not hysterical, but certainly delusional.
I’ll take it
If the ISIS supporters weren't committing crimes during their protest, and they weren't inciting violence (as defined by the actual US legal standard for incitement), then yes, I would tolerate the expression of a set of beliefs I strongly disagree with or even abhor -- that's what it means to be part of a liberal democracy with freedom of speech and expression. Alternatively, one could organize or take part in a *non-violent* counter demonstration. If I weren't willing to tolerate that, I'd move somewhere more repressive. If you desire that state of affairs, there are many countries in the world that are happy to accomodate such a preference.
My point was that counter-protest in such an instance would be assured and probably would not always be pleasant for the prospective ISIS demonstrators, not that the demonstration itself should be illegal. I’d rather leave the controversiality of demonstrations up to communities acting en made than to the police or the national security apparatus, who would be happy if there were no demonstrations at all.
Unpleasant is one thing, and I agree that the more extreme the views being expressed are, the more inevitable counter-protest becomes, but I think all of that is largely healthy and to the good.
Physical violence and/or crime (as in proper crime, not like jaywalking or littering or something), from any side, is where I depart the intellectual train. I think political violence has no place in a liberal democracy.
In my view, there are extreme scenarios that might be exceptions, but it would be along the lines of "actual Nazis enacting totalitarianism" or "a literal communist coup" (or similarly dire scenarios). It would not be to counter "nazis who prefer strict border control and don't believe in structural racism" nor "commies who don't believe in god and want a shit-ton of social programs spending".
Basically, I view political violence as a dangerous and extremely slippery slope that is justifiable only in very narrow circumstances, as a dire, deeply avoided, and self-defensive last resort. It's extremely rare that I would consider those criteria met. Suffice it to say that nothing in recent US events has done so.
If ISIS doesn't break any laws, then I would have zero issues with them demonstrating in my town. Likewise, if PB or Antifa wants to have peaceful demos in my town (and I am an hour south of Portland) then cool. Make their points, try to convince me. But when they reinact Krystalnacht in Portands the Pearl district, as they did after Trumps election, then they aren't protesting, but rioting. And they did that many times over the last half-dozen years. But, sadly, our gov. will not in any way deal with this issue, and the Portland DA will play catch and release with them.
Nobody has reenacted Krystalnacht in Portland. Who was the targeted group? Don't do that. Broken glass and police passivity does not make a Krystalnacht reenactment. The closest in these United States we've gotten were the mass crimes committed against Black communities in the early 20th century.
Targeted group? Perhaps white people? People have gotten decent grades in "anti-racist" ethnic studies courses in American colleges by doing word-substitutions on passages from English translations of Mein Kampf to make the target group all Caucasians instead of Jews.
Those must be Trump's "People say..." people.
And, hell, here's more:
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1365949720388988930?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1365949720388988930%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fnews%2Fantifa-rioters-portland-biden-immigration%3Futm_source%3Dmsnutm_medium%3Dreferralutm_campaign%3Dmsn_feed
Andy Ngô
@MrAndyNgo
·
Feb 28
Portland: Using rocks, batons & weapons, #antifa smashed up businesses and cars in the Pearl District overnight. They completely shut down the roads. The same area was severely vandalized by antifa back when Trump won election in 2016.
Andy Ngo actively works with armed fascist militias, which may undercut his neutrality… https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/journalist-andy-ngo-out-at-quillette-after-controversial-video-surfaces
https://www.koin.com/news/photos-windows-smashed-during-demonstration-in-pearl-district/
It might not be Kristallnacht to you, but it is to me. And don't ever tell me what to think. Only fascists do that.
Of course it's Kristallnacht.
In the same way an inappropriate joke about a Jewish person is identical to the actual Holocaust.
You're using the Holocaust to further your agenda. No particular race, ethnicity or belief group was targeted in those riots. Yes, businesses were destroyed and it was awful. And it was NOTHING close to Krystalnacht which was a precursor to millions of people being murdered which shouldn't have to be explained to you FFS.
Exactly. And the same people obsessed with "law and order" are also the same people stridently opposed to Sharia law. Shouldn't they actually support Sharia law? Isn't more law and order better than less law and order?
I was not aware that law and order came in quantities. Are you saying that if someone supports arresting shoplifters, they should also support stoning gay people and cutting the hands off thieves?
Is that what's happening in Michigan right now? I heard that Sharia law has been implemented in several cities in Michigan. And you're saying that they're stoning gay people in Michigan as we speak? That sounds terrible. No, that's not I meant at all. That would be really bad, if it was really happening. In Michigan.
I was just in Dearborn and Detroit last week, and while the hijab store was definitely a thing, I saw no evidence of Sharia law based on my time spent at the Greektown casino and surrounding environs!
Michigan? What the fuck are you talking about? Are you claiming that Sharia law does not condone both the stoning of gays and cutting off the hands of thieves?
Singapore is very law and order oriented, and also very much officially opposed to any sort of religious extremism. The concepts don’t run counter to each other.
Singapore runs itself extremely well. Can vouch.
Yeah, it’s the only example I’m aware of of a mostly non-corrupt and functional police state. I attribute it mostly to the personality of Lee Kuan Yew who by all accounts hated corruption and made it a point not to allow it. Dunno if it will survive as such forever though, as power corrupts etc.
I didn't say that there's a contradiction between secularism and law&order. Both religious law and order and secular law and order can work. But why are law and order enthusiasts so opposed to Sharia law? The "law" part is literally in the name. They should be ecstatic about more law and order... if they really were in favor of law and order like they claim to be. But since they're opposed to Sharia law, I somehow doubt that they are.
But you're OK with an Antifa occupation? I don't care for Proud Boys but they have the absolute legal freedom to gather in a park that you do not have to attend. Antifa just had to police them, as was obvious from Twitter organization prior to the event.
They both want violence and the PB's have a long track record of starting fights and baiting the other side as well. It's been recorded and several of them have been convicted of starting a riot in the past:
https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2019/08/26/27039560/undercover-in-patriot-prayer-insights-from-a-vancouver-democrat-whos-been-working-against-the-far-right-group-from-the-inside
Antifa and the PB's are a Rorschach test for extremist political ideology. The side a person decides to take shows more about them than the group itself.
Baiting? How does "baiting" someone into shooting you work exactly? I somehow can't imagine anyone baiting me into shooting him, if only because I don't own or carry any firearms. But how would something like that even happen?
Now if someone was 'bating... that's a different story. Different "shoot" too.
top comment
You don't know much about the human race, do you? People are dared to do stupid things all the time, just pick a few youtube videos of guys doing dumb stunts, mostly for the lulz. Now put that mentality into a political, ideological situation and you get violence. It's pretty damn easy to reason out actually.
The point is that David is somehow blaming Antifas for "baiting" the PBs, but not blaming the PBs for shooting at Antifas. What I was trying to say isn't that this couldn't happen to anyone, but that this couldn't happen without the PBs being at least partially at fault. You know, for shooting people and stuff. A completely peaceful, non-violent and blameless person being "baited" into shooting someone? That's the part that I find hard to believe.
Thank you.
It doesn't matter what side of the spectrum of political views you have. If you're on the street fighting against your opponents, you're an extremist and probably a totalitarian in your own right.
Actually black shirts and street violence are have as much to do with fascism as boots. Fascists wear boots, so do construction workers, and people who ride horses.
Also I don't consider people who want to put me and my family into ovens my "political opponents." They're my existential enemy. It's insane that actual Naziism, including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever.
You can believe anything you want. If you want to be taken seriously, yeah, you do have to give respect to other points of view, even those you find abhorrent.
Do you think someone like Hannah Arendt enjoyed dissecting Eichmann? Perhaps she should have entitled her book "Fuck this dude, he's not worth my time". It would have been a lot less convincing. Would have saved a lot of ink and paper costs, though.
I think we differ on what "respect" means. Of course I want to understand and be informed about Nazis. I'm saying I don't think there's a need for me to dignify them by considering what they believe a legitimate political viewpoint. The phrase "political opponents" bugs me because waters down the reality what these people believe, as if it's a difference between tax rates or trade policy.
Also, we do politics so we don't have to fight - like try to kill each other - over every issue. Show me anywhere in reality where something like a Nazi ever had a chance to gain power since 1945? I mean, like, be real. Trump was no Nazi by any useful definition and your original post had it backwards. Nazis and fringe white supremacists tried to glom onto his movement in hopes of somehow enlarging their own. Without much success, mind you.
As long as you don't have to fight these people with weapons, you need other means of taming them, which is the very point here.
So Nazis have to actually take political power to be a threat? Mainstream and fringe white supremacists benefitted greatly from Trump's ascension, and vice-versa. On a personal level, his endorsement of the Charlottesville protest scared the shit out of me. Ultimately the "right" side won, mainly because of Trump's Icarus-like talent for self-destruction. But that kind of bigotry has been legitimized by trump and allied interests, which is a frightening first step.
They benefitted how, exactly?
Rise in 401k value?
Better insurance?
More days off?
Since you mention it, please specify which benefits so called White Supremacists received "greatly" during the years 2016-20?
My kid learned German. Nazis were German. Frightening first step.
It has to be “real”’power, you see. Otherwise it doesn’t count and HBI’s view remains intact.
See what I mean? This guy’s on a mission.
How do you explain all the Nazis the US “recruited” after World War 2?
The space program, and a technologic edge in the cold war. I don't think any German scientists given refuge in the US after WWII was done so because the government in the States were nazi sympathizers. It had everything to do with what those individuals in the Third Reich's rocket programs could offer the US before the Soviets.
Are you implying that we used them in any way the Soviets didn't to accelerate their rocketry programs?
I'm aware Wernher von Braun got a nice bureaucratic life in Huntsville and a comfortable retirement out of his life journey to the US, but real power?
Most people are clueless about that American history episode. They won’t even know what you’re talking about.
You can just wish death on them, just like you do to everyone you disagree with.
Better on our side then someplace else. Many of them might’ve just been workers without the Nazi ideology. And hopefully they were watched. But I bet they were not.
But it is a political difference. Even the most odious policies remain policies.
You just have emotion wrapped around it. If you can't be dispassionate, you cannot be analytical. I can hate particular things without ruining an analysis by letting it get in the way of arriving at a conclusion.
Both the study and understanding of both Hitler and Stalin demonstrates how a perverted ideology can lead to the deaths of millions. We must carefully evaluate and critique our own beliefs to avoid similar scenarios
Just recently it’s looking like vaccine hesitancy people are being labeled as terrorists. That is absurd.
Gods forbid you have an emotional reaction to such tragedies.
No, better to just dryly discuss. The Holocaust and Stalin's lists were just odious policies.
Not at all what I'm saying.
I'm just saying when someone comes at me and says "I want to eliminate you, your family and everyone like you from the planet" I'm not going to address him in the same way as, say, someone I disagree with about Fed policy or religion in schools. But I'm glad you can be so dispassionate in that way, makes you a superior human for sure.
“When someone comes at me”— Let’s unpack that. You might mean that someone grabs you by the shirt and starts yelling in your face. Or maybe you mean that they are holding a parade, marching right by your house, like the American Nazi Party did in Skokie, Illinois. Or maybe you mean, they are standing in the parking lot of a deserted mall on the outskirts of town, talking to others of like mind, which is what the Proud Boys did in Portland . Which is it?
And by “comes at you screaming they want to kill you,” you mean “wear a MAGA hat.”
When someone approaches you in that manner you are called to defend yourself and your family.
@HBI
Damned Skippy ! The stats for WWII dead, including the Camps, runs to 85 MILLION. Absolutely inconceivable, and you can easily *see how that experience made humankind swear *off of War FOREVER ! Oh, wait ....... maybe I "overstated" that just a bit.
It is always convenient to "wring our hands" over the horrors and iniquities of war, I mean, dang, General Sherman, setting the South on Fire all the way from Atlanta to the sea, allowed as how "War is Hell". There has never been a ground pounder known to disagree with him, at least since The Enlightenment, and yet, apparently human *nature .......
The interesting thing is that analysis of Sherman's activity has shown the casualties of that campaign to be overstated. People that were supposed to have died didn't die. Lots of property damage, not so much death.
However, WWII's casualties have been consistently understated. Stalin had an interest in minimizing the casualties. Khrushchev was the one who finally pulled out the 27 million figure for Soviet losses, which in itself is exclusive of purely internal casualties.
I’d say he’s more covert- agenda driven than emotional.
I'm flattered. I'm seriously just a dude running a tiny business who should be working right now. I kinda wish I was a paid plant or underground activist doing agitprop. It's more interesting than the work I'm currently avoiding.
I'd say you're a paranoid boob.
So ignore his insults.
... because you "dignifying" them has any kind of significance outside your solipsism.
Adolph Reed. Taibbi devoted a post to him a few weeks back. Here he provides real meaning to what the street people represent, the significance, influence and meaning of Trump, and the very aggressive and concentrated effort the revanchist "right" has made to seize power in this country after Goldwater went up in flames. Among other things.
https://nonsite.org/the-whole-country-is-the-reichstag/
@martha
*PREACH the gospel, martha, preach it ! YES !
No more or less than yours. Point?
One has to be pretty egocentric to think that considering what other people believe adds to those other people's dignity.
@Telgram Sam
I also push back against all of the "woke" bullshit, and *especially against any human walking who presumes to tell me how to think, speak, write, or make my own individual choices that affect no one but me.
To quote Walter from the greatest piece of film philosophy ever “ Say what you want about National Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos”.
@HBI
"Catchy title, tho, no ? ;-D
That's conflating things. I don't think anyone can say with any level of seriousness that there is a holocaust happening in the U.S. today. I know that CNN and MSNBC spent four years saying that Trump is literally Hitler, but when people point to that sad lot with the tiki torches in Charlottesville as an example of how the U.S. is being run by literal Nazis it's hard to take seriously.
Of course the US isn't run by literal Nazis. I said nothing like that. But Unite the Right was organized by a group of white supremacist organizations who have histories of violence including body counts. Their ideology doesn't have to be dominant for them to be a threat. And the president calling them "fine people" (yes, he did) doesn't represent a good trend, politically.
It is certainly reasonable (and necessary) for people to defend themselves against violence. I have seen many instances of hyperbole, though, where people claim to be threatened by someone's viewpoint when there is no threat, implied or otherwise. For instance, when AOC accused Ted Cruz of trying to have her murdered. There is a very clear distinction between someone who is an existential threat and someone who really is just a political opponent, and those two things should never be conflated.
And they usually are, for rhetorical purposes.
Trump never called them fine people. That has been thoroughly been debunked. Read https://finepeople.org/ which will lay out exactly how you've been mislead.
You’re lying of course because you’re a liar.
You’re even lying about whst Trump said on video, where he condemned white supremacists explicitly, because you’re a liar. Paid to lie. Liar. Whore.
Ah, yes. The famously nuanced "you're a whore" argument. Can you elaborate on that?
@shallowfocus
What ? More ? Are you sure the commenter has not *already expended all the "gun powder" they came in with ? ;-D
Me and my dad used to run a barely functioning small business, think Sanford and Son level of competence. I was once told by a college communist that I was a petit-bourgeois kulak and come the revolution I'd be put into a gulag or killed for being an enemy of the proletariat. Rather than clutch my pearls and scream about how I was being threatened I laughed at him and told him to keep dreaming. I suggest you do the same to anyone who ludicrously thinks we're going to start building Holocaust ovens in America.
Ok I guess unless Anti-Semitism rises to the level of a Final Solution I should laugh it off.
More Anti-Semitism on the left than the right, these days, unless the Semites in question are Muslim.
Do you have any kind of stats on that? Because criticizing the Israeli occupation isn't anti-Semitism, so it doesn't count. Plenty of Israelis and diaspora Jews do it all the time.
Do you have any evidence that the Proud Boys are racist, Nazi, homophobic fascists that want to exterminate the Jews? Outside of a rogue sect and perhaps some loose ties to groups that have expressed a few off-color opinions Gavin McGinnis didn't set it up that way and straight from their POC president Tarrio, “I denounce anti-Semitism. I denounce racism. I denounce fascism, I denounce communism and any other -ism that is prejudiced toward people because of their race, religion, culture, tone of skin.”
I know if you do a Google search you'll come up with a bunch of baseless claims made by various "reporters" who are not just increasingly confused, but have apparently become COMPLETELY confused as to the difference between reporting a story and mouthing a mess of unsubstantiated opinions. Spent too much time on the frisbee-chucking side of campus IMO.
Speaking of Nazis. i believe it's the left who are completely running roughshod over the Nuremberg Code as we type.
Criticizing the world's only Jewish state as an "occupation" might not be necessarily anti-Semitic, but I would say it's presumptively anti-Semitic until shown otherwise.
'Because criticizing the Israeli occupation isn't anti-Semitism, so it doesn't count."
That's a standard response, but not the only one. I get different takes on that depending on which of my Jewish friends I talk to. Quite a few feel that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are unrelated, others that they are more or less synonyms.
So I'm not sure stats would help without contextualizing those stats, and that is far from being agreed on, almost begging the question.
Yes because antisemitism in America is more akin to spree shootings than they are to pogroms in 19th and early 20th century Europe. They're awful, but very rare and not going to become routine. I lived in post 9/11 America, the fear of jihadist terrorism was greatly overblown and did far more damage than the actual attacks and saying that doesn't minimize the deaths on 9/11 or Pulse Night Club or the like.
Just because we don't have pogroms doesn't mean that state level violence isn't possible and fast. Japanese Internment went from unpopular to official policy within 2 months after Pearl Harbor.
We can check back after America and Israel start a hot war
Something like 15% of the Japanese population on the West Coast subscribed to Japanese nationalist propaganda/societies. I’m not trying to justify the camps, but there was FAR more pro-Japanese government sentiment in the West Coast Japanese population than Nazi sentiment amongst German Americans.
Do you think human nature is static?
It's pretty consistent imo.
You know that there is, maybe, just maybe, some middle ground between those two extremes.
You mean that vast swath of ground where most people live? Yes, absolutely.
Yes there is. Let me know where in that spectrum I should stop laughing it off and become concerned.
No, the point is that YOU need to have an answer for that, not me. You tell me where it is.
"It's insane that actual Naziism [sic], including the Final Solution, is considered another viewpoint I have to give respect and equal time to, lest I be accused of gatekeeping or canceling or whatever."
What's insane is that you and your "authoritative sources" have conflated and obfuscated so many different issues that you believe that "actual Nazis" pose a serious problem, let alone an "existential" threat in 2021. Meanwhile those same sources work tirelessly to erode the same sorts of freedoms the Nazis despised.
There are probably more Cathars in the world right now than there are Nazis. Unless everyone to the right of Mao Zedong is a Nazi, in which case, yeah, they're everywhere.
I never said actual Nazis pose a serious problem. I said I'm incredulous that many people, including supporters of this site, believe I should sit down and break bread with them and understand where they're coming from. Existential threat and existential enemy are different things. Even one lone crazy guy with a gun who really, really hates Jews is a threat to my existence. Doesn't mean he's got enough people behind him to take over the government.
Anyway I love the [sic], like you're a journalist quoting a source lol. But FYI, since you're affecting as such, I'll school you: putting quotes around a phrase indicates you're quoting someone, and I never used the words "authoritative sources."
@Telegram Sam
Putting quotes around a word is also an indication of irony, and/or oxymoronic expressions like "Military Intelligence", redundancies like "free gift", etc. This is not new usage just among the kids. I am no kid, and I have seen this means of expression "forever". ;-D
Good point, I didn't think about "irony quotes." I stand corrected. He's still a putz though.
On that we can agree.
@Telegram Sam
It is certainly not *my place to "weigh in" on your personal opinions, nor on your right to freely express them !
Not a journalist, just a pedantic asshole. :)
@Thom
No, listen .... I can identify ! ;-D
You have no sense of irony, evidently.
Or you have a dull sense of humor and make dumb observations.
What’$ in$ane is that paid po$ter$ have completely overrun every comment $ection.
How do I convince you I'm not paid? Seriously. Or like most conspiracies, is yours air-tight?
Don't try. Just cash the checks Soros sends you. I've made so much trolling MAGAts that I have too much money, so now he just lets me stay on his island in Greece. Saw John Gault there, it was trippy.
I feel someone like George Soros would spend their money more wisely. Hiring people to troll Matt Taibbi's Substack comments just doesn't seem very... cost effective?
We trolls demand $15/hr!
Having fun yet you piece of fucking shit? Wish death on some more people today?
I’m just curious: how has Antifa affected your life, specifically? Conversely, have you ever been affected by the anti-Antifa people? And I don’t mean, like, you wake up and read the news and you get pissed off about some article you saw on your phone or something. Has your life ever actually been affected by Antifa/anti-Antifa? I only ask because I’ve never had a run-in with either of them. Both of those groups have zero bearing on my life. Why the media is spending this much time covering two tiny, meaningless groups of people in a mid-sized city in the Northwest is beyond me. I can only assume that it’s another desperate attempt on their (the media’s) part to try and convince people that,”Everybody hates each other! It’s chaos! We’re doomed!”
Who gives a fuck about Antifa? They’re not responsible for whether or not I get health care or what my tax rates are gonna be or whether or not I finally find a job. Have you ever wondered why this much time is being spent talking about an entirely meaningless, tiny group of dickheads in Portland, Oregon? Antifa is not the problem, dude. I understand that Matt is pissed that that journalist got pushed to the ground, but ultimately, Antifa and the people who counter-protest Antifa have zero impact on my life. I’m just wondering if they’ve actually had an impact on your life.
Hear hear.
I don't live in Portland. In my mid-sized city things are... mostly normal? No riots, Proud Boys, Antifas, etc. I am hard pressed to believe that this is a serious national problem.
The freaks get the focus.
It's not even a serious problem in Portland. People here go to work, walk their dogs, pick up their children after school.
If you live in Portland as I do, you watch all this stuff on Youtube like the people in Peoria, IL and think, "man, what city is that happening in?"
I'm guessing from personal experience that any so-called anti-fascist you made that argument to countered with something like "We're trying to stop fascists, so it's justified!" Now, if the only people whom they ever used these methods against were all honest-to-god believers in fascism and if it could be proven that anything less than this approach would result in the Nazi States of America being created, then *maybe* they'd have a point.
But it becomes clearer and clearer with every instance of these assholes getting violent tht their fascist-detectors aren't working properly. They're happy to assault and batter anyone who they think has it coming, and that isn't limited to neo-Nazis or even conservatives.
They almost beat up Michael Tracey, too. You might not like Tracey given some of his more dubious takes, but concluding that he is some kind of threat or the second coming of Joseph Goebbels and therefore is a valid target for violence is absolutely ridiculous.
Also, the days when antifa's supporters could smugly say "White supremacists kill people all the time. Antifa has never killed anyone" came to an end last year. So it could have possibly gone even worse for Maranie.
No one has ever made this joke before. We are in your debt, sir. If you were to tell me you identify as an attack helicopter, comedy as a discipline would be exhausted.
I mean, they’re not brown shirts!
Ah, but that was the Nazis, the Fascists wore black shirts. But, come to think of it, once in power, Hitler got rid of the SA Brownshirts in the Night of the Long Knives, and went with black for the SS.
This right here is one of the reasons reading comments on TK News is one of the few places I read comments. Brilliant.
https://americanmind.org/essays/the-real-history-of-antifa/
This should be on a t-shirt
They're more numerous than one would think and fairly organized though not in any sort of top down vertical way. I went to a few protests in Raleigh, NC simply observing and was shoved immediately for simply standing on the side of the street, in my pink bicycling spandex, and filming their march. I was called a racist white piece of shit, a fascist, a gentrifier etc. The local news affiliate interviewed me due to the physical altercation and I stupidly gave them my name. Since I own my home antifa used my name from WRAL and found my home vandalizing it with the words "cracker" "fuck you die whitey" and "racist narc."
I never did anything to these people other than show up to their protests to observe them in objective manner as our local news didn't seem to be as critical of their tactics often leaving out their more violent acts.
At one point a photog from the N&O the major paper yelled at me, "you're making our job hard" I guess my mere presence causing such angst and vitriol amongst the protestors wasn't the narrative they wanted.
I have voted D my whole life, but the cognitive dissonance surrounding the left and Antifa is astonishing. Extremism of any type, left or right, is dangerous, but from the evidence I've seen leftist extremism is currently causing more damage to society.
Yes. I used to be left as well but no longer vote Democrat. They encourage it when it suits them.
Between Obama (and Matt brilliantly spelled him out), the reaction to Trump, and Oregon's harridan of a governor, I left and have not seen a way back. They would have to make serious amends to get me to vote for them at this point.
I too had voted D my whole life. I grew up surrounded by ignorant religious fanatics immune to data and reality.
Now, the Dem