Tag: antifa

In Trump’s campaign against antifa, observers see an attempt to distract from protesters’ genuine outrage

Washington Post logoThe Trump administration on Sunday intensified its effort to pin blame on the far-left “antifa” movement for violent demonstrations over police killings of black people, as the president vowed on Twitter to designate antifa a terrorist organization and Attorney General William P. Barr asserted that it and other groups’ activities constituted “domestic terrorism.”

Trump cannot, for practical and legal reasons, formally designate antifa a terrorist organization, and neither he nor his attorney general has made public specific evidence that the far-left movement is orchestrating the fiery protests that have erupted in dozens of U.S. cities.

In Minnesota, where the unrest began after 46-year-old George Floyd died after police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, officials have alleged the violence was fueled by different external forces, including white supremacists and drug cartels. They, too, have not offered detailed evidence to support those claims. Continue reading.

Yes, Antifa Is Very Dangerous — But Not To Fascists

The following article by Gene Lyons was posted on the National Memo website September 5, 2017:

Call me unromantic, but I disliked a lot about the fabled “Sixties” the first time around. Some of the music was good, but otherwise 1968 was among the worst years in American life. The center nearly failed to hold.

As if the Vietnam War were not bad enough, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy made it feel as if America’s democratic institutions might not survive. Eager for “revolution,” hothouse warriors in the SDS and Weather Underground did everything possible to promote anarchy—from rioting to setting off bombs. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, pitched battles between street fighters and Chicago police brought chaos and a massive voter backlash.

The most immediate result, brilliantly chronicled in historian Rick Perlstein’s book “Nixonland,” was the criminal presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Continue reading “Yes, Antifa Is Very Dangerous — But Not To Fascists”