Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of social media posts showing what looks like Antifa protesters pulling intimidation tactics with cops looking on and doing nothing. For an organization that is supposedly loosely affiliated and, according to FBI Director Chris Wray, "more of an ideology than an organization," Antifa sure does a good job of showing up in a coordinated way.
The behavior is the type of color revolution, in-your-face tactics ordinary people would consider to be assault, the destruction of property, and intimidating behaviors like repeated whistling and bell ringing and throwing rocks, all at an uncomfortably close range. For those making fun of people who think these Antifa whistlers are assaulting people, try standing next to a whistling Antifa member two centimeters away from your ears for a couple of hours. In any case, in my experience, when bad behavior goes unpunished—or rewarded, it usually continues.
Sometimes, the behavior is outright rewarded. Just last week, the city of Philadelphia agreed to pay $9.25 million to 343 left-wing protesters who say they suffered "physical and emotional injuries" when police used tear gas and pepper spray to clear them off a major highway" during protests in 2020, according to investigative journalist Andy Ngô. According to Ngô, individuals aligned with "leftist legal groups," like the National Lawyers Guild, show up at protests and riots as observers. They document protests, take videos of the riots, and then conveniently portray the police in the "worst possible light," purposefully leaving out evidence of bad behavior on the part of their leftist pals. Ngô writes: "When the NLG's legal observers and their comrades are arrested, they're immediately provided with pro-bono legal aid and connections for bail money (rioters often write the NLG's phone number on their body in anticipation of arrests.) And then the lawsuits come." Independent reporters are regularly targeted and attacked to intimidate them from further reporting. Savanah Hernandez was "hunted down" because of her reporting at UC Davis. 18-year-old former trans-teen Chloe Cole says she has been threatened because she dared to speak up about her regret over gender-affirming procedures. She says, "activist and Antifa members threaten[ed her] with rape and sexual assault and with pepper spraying [her] in the eyes" before a rally in March. These riot scenes from France are eerily similar to the ones I saw unfolding at Trump's inauguration in 2016 in the heart of D.C. I don't know how France handles this stuff, but in the U.S., it seems the leftist groups are often rewarded. Reporting from April 2021 indicates some inauguration rioters were paid $1.6 million in a class action settlement "alleging police unlawfully detained more than 200 protesters in mass arrests" during the 2017 Presidential inauguration. Two separate lawsuits were brought against the MPD. One was filed in 2017 by D.C. ACLU, and the other was filed in 2018. Individual payouts of $4000 to $5000 were expected. Ironically, much of what was charged in the class action lawsuits reflected police behavior that was hauntingly similar to how j6ers were treated. Flashbang grenades and pepper spray were used, and protesters were detained "for up to 11 hours without food, water, or access to restrooms or medical care." Some J6 defendants have been in the D.C. Gulag for over two years, often subjected to unwarranted and cruel treatment. But the ACLU has been strikingly silent about those cases. Public doxing is also a consistent and dangerous tactic used by these color revolutionaries. A March 26 post on the Scenes from the Atlanta Forest blog points to the targeting of two DeKalb County judges who are "holding two comrades without bail on bogus charges." The creepy post, entitled "Places You can watch T.V.," exposes the locations where these judges "are often found watching T.V." A March 27 post from DeKalb County Police shows law enforcement officers found Molotov Cocktails and buried boards with nails sticking out in the process of clearing the Cop City area where Antifa members have been entrenched in DeKalb County for months to protest the building of a public safety training center. Antifa sees its protests and riots as self-defense, according to its members. When they "disrupt" the organizing of other causes, such as pro-life protests or the inauguration of Trump (whom they believe to be a fascist leader), they are defending themselves when they retaliate. An excerpt from this 2019 interview speaks to their rationale: "I think self-defense can look violent if you're looking at it as the person who responds in self-defense is as culpable. But we don't see it that way. We see ourselves as engaging in self-defense from groups who want to do our community harm, whose ideology is the ideology of genocide and mass murder. So in the sense of reaction we see, fascism is inherently violent ideology, so when we disrupt its organizing, we see that as self-defense." There seem to be plenty of good reasons a cop might fail to step in when the reward for intervention is bail and a $5000 reward for bad behavior. The leftists have figured out how to manipulate all the levers of our "free society" to their benefit; the law, the press, our politically correct culture, and the judicial system. It is no wonder Antifa so often goes unpunished.
