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Essay
June 5, 2020
Understanding Antifa
How can black clad provocateurs wearing jackboots claim to be champions of democracy and “the people?†How is rioting and looting considered virtuous behavior? Why is there support for this anarchy among many Western elites? In 2017, for example, Keith Ellison, then the deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee and now the Minnesota Attorney General, spoke at a Netroots conference and promoted a book that is a handbook for violence in the Antifa movement. He tweeted that this guide to violence would “strike fear in the heart of @realDonaldTrump.â€
The anarchism of Antifa embodies the revolutionary outlook, common in the West since the 18th century, that reviles traditional institutions, that seeks to undermine authority through random violence and that assumes any violent spark that creates a popular uprising will usher in a utopian world of equality and justice. Antifa, like many revolutionaries before them, see themselves as midwives of true democracy, and violence is important in making certain that a new world is born. As one historian of anti-fascist movements wrote in Jacobin magazine, anti-facist movements begin as defenders of the vulnerable in society against fascists, but their positive goal is “a new, egalitarian economic system.â€
https://lawliberty.org/understanding-antifa/
