Violent, lawless Antifa forces deserve to be labeled terrorists

Sometimes good can come out of tragedy. So it seems that in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk this country might finally come to terms with certain violent extremist groups in our midst.

On Wednesday, President Trump said that he was willing to designate Antifa (“a sick, dangerous, radical left disaster”) as “a major terrorist organization.”

The move cannot come soon enough.

Despite the claims of Jimmy Kimmel and others, it is clear that the sick young man who assassinated Charlie Kirk last week was not a “MAGA Republican.” He is a young man from a Republican family who veered to the radical left, started living with a lover who had started to using hormone drugs to try to become a woman, and who admitted that he shot Kirk because the shooter had “had enough of his hatred” and because “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

The bullets he used were literally carved with Antifa slogans.

Of course if you live in an online Reddit-style subculture you can see how this might come about. Young radical leftists spend their days pretending that they live in a fascist, white-supremacist, transphobic hell-hole. They pretend that people with mainstream conservative views are “literal Nazis” and that anyone who says that there are two biological sexes is “literally genocide-ing trans people.”

The sick young murderer who thought that Charlie Kirk had to be killed exemplifies a whole ecosystem that has been allowed to spread in this country.

Antifa is simply the most organized and consistently violent front-group.

During the run-up to the election in 2020, I spent a couple of days undercover with the group in Portland, Oregon. Despite the hair-raising reporting that local journalists like Andy Ngo had already done, nothing prepared me for the reality.

In just a few years Antifa activists had managed to turn a once-great city into a third-world hell-hole. At night they blocked off roads and marched through town, screaming at residents and smashing things up. They effectively created autonomous zones where the rule of Antifa was supreme.

As they marched in their “black block” uniforms, faces covered with masks, they resembled nothing so much as the fictional people they claimed to be opposing. They even shot bullets into businesses they claimed were MAGA.

But if anyone resembles “fascists” in our day it is these people. People who dress in black uniforms, cover their faces, and commit violence on a nightly basis.

One night I joined them (it’s not hard to blend in when everyone hides their face) outside one of the few federal buildings they had not closed down. This was the local ICE facility. I watched in amazement as they hurled projectiles at the facility, abused the federal agents who occasionally burst out of the building, and tried setting fire to dumpster trucks and then wedging them against the doors of the facility in the hope of burning federal agents alive.

I have seen lawlessness in plenty of countries. But never, in a first-world country, have I seen a group of people allowed to terrorize a whole city night after night. The ICE officers behaved with frankly superhuman restraint.

A few weeks later, on election night, I saw a similar group, towards the north lawn of the White House, changing into their militia-style uniform, clearly with the aim of starting violence in DC. They tried to intimidate me and anyone else who took an interest in what they were doing.

They behaved as though they owned the streets of DC, as they undoubtedly owned the streets of Portland, Seattle and other US cities.

For years these terrorists have been allowed to attack federal buildings with impunity. They have been allowed to attack and hospitalize journalists (including Ngo) simply for reporting on their fascistic activities. They behave as though they are untouchable.

Of course at this stage many people, on right and left, will make a set of claims. They will say that designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization cannot be done, because this affects the group’s First Amendment rights. Some conservatives will argue the “boot on the other foot” rule and say that banning Antifa is government overreach.

But you do not need to designate Antifa as terrorist to pull the group apart. Democrat lawmakers in the past (under Obama and Biden in particular) have eagerly pulled apart right-wing groups like the Proud Boys. They have even taken conservative family values groups apart using the IRS and every other means available to them.

Why not use the power of the state to go after these actual terrorists of Antifa?

There is every reason to stop the group. The means of doing so can be debated. But however it is done, if these vile extremists can be stopped it would be a net gain for this country. And remove one of the nastiest streams of poison in this society.

Vile Kirk conspiracy theories

Talking of poison, various conservative influencers like Tucker Carlson, have decided to use the days since Kirk’s murder to pretend that someone else did the killing. Specifically, Carlson and other online influencers, have spent the past week trying to suggest that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk.

Their “rationale” is that they say Kirk — a lifelong supporter of Israel — was turning against the Israeli government. So of course the Israelis killed him. Or at least have “questions to answer.”

Naturally there is no evidence for any of this. But “just asking questions” is the great fall-back for the click-bait trolls of the right.

But is it not just sick but grotesque to use the death of a friend to cover for his actual murderer? It seems that for people like Carlson the Jews are behind everything. Indeed on 9/11 this year Carlson was due to drop a new set of conspiracy theories about the Jews and 9/11.

Interestingly enough, Kirk was often critical of certain tenets of the Muslim faith. But none of these right-wing podcasters have yet said “the Muslims did it.”

Perhaps they don’t have a Muslim fixation like they do a Jewish one. Or perhaps the Qatari money currently flooding through the American information-wars has something to do with it.