Antifa Protesters Who Shut Down L.A. Freeway Complain in Op-Ed That LAPD 'Spies' 'Infiltrated' Their MeetingsDrivers in Los Angeles are accustomed to these unforeseeable events and most often bear them with aplomb. That aplomb is tested to its very limits when someone deliberately sets out to disrupt traffic, most especially when it’s done in the furtherance of a dubious cause. On two occasions in the fall of 2017, members of the group Refuse Fascism, in a display of protest against the “Trump/Pence regime,†walked onto the 101 Freeway in downtown L.A. and brought morning rush-hour traffic to a standstill, an act for which the participants were prosecuted.
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Prosecutors love going to court with a confession from the accused, but rarely is one provided in the form of an op-ed piece in the local newspaper. That’s just what Mr. Antonio and Ms. Hershberger offered in the August 4 edition of the Los Angeles Times. The first time they stopped traffic on the freeway, Antonio and Hershberger write, was shortly after “Donald Trump said there were ‘fine people’ among the torch-bearing white supremacists†at the August 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Antonio and Hershberger go on to lament that the Los Angeles Police Department used an informant to spy on Refuse Fascism meetings held in an Echo Park church, and they invoke the allusions to Nazi Germany that have become so tediously predictable in public discourse concerning the Trump administration. “Our group is concerned about fascist rule,†write Antonio and Hershberger. “Having our private meetings infiltrated by a police spy suggests that we’re right to worry.â€
Well, I certainly hope LAPD had informants at those meetings. That would be doing their jobs, because they were there to try to avert a crime, not a lawful gathering.
