More than twenty years ago, as a very young man, I traveled in Ukraine. In one place, the local authorities were excavating a mass grave from the 1930s. Hundreds of skeletons, men and women, many with flesh and clothes still attached, had been laid out on wooden platforms, for attempted identification before reburial. If you looked, it was easy to see the cause of each person’s death—a square hole in the head. Why square? Because the Communists had hammered in a railroad spike. Why does this matter? Because what screams from every page of this book of Antifa apologetics is that the author, Mark Bray, and his compatriots, today’s direct ideological successors of those murderers, want to do the same to you.
Bray, who works as a “part-time lecturer” at Rutgers University, and who was a sometime organizer of Occupy Wall Street back in 2009, published this book in 2017. No surprise, he claims relevancy for his book based on a supposed surge in fascism due to Trump’s election. But it was only this past summer, with the rise of Antifa to prominence during the nationwide BLM-led Floyd Riots, that this book really became relevant. It is the only book-length treatment of modern organized left-wing violence directed against the Right, and although it is tendentious in the extreme, reading it is very instructive. (I bought it used, naturally, so that Bray didn’t get a cent from my purchase.)
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My first purpose is to understand the violence generated by Antifa. I mean not the fact of violence itself, which (and what should be the immediate response to it) is a tactical question, not difficult to understand. What I want to explore is the thought that drives that violence. And then I want to comprehend how that violence is organized, how it is funded, and how it interlocks with the broader Left ecosystem of today. Bray’s book, the goal of which is to justify the works of Antifa, not to man but to his political allies who have yet to fully publicly embrace violence, is a useful place to start this exploration, though we will have to go well beyond it.
The author begins, as we can all agree is necessary, with a definition of fascism, which he says is “difficult to pin down.” He endorses a lengthy definition offered by Robert Paxton, a historian of Vichy France: “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” This may be a good description of 1930s and 1940s fascism, or it may not be, but no matter, since Bray never recurs to any aspect of this definition. Rather, in practice throughout the book, fascism is implicitly, and often explicitly, defined as any effective opposition to whatever the demands of the modern Left are at any given time. And the more effective opposition is, the more fascist it is.
To his credit, Bray admits this. He seems personally offended by dissembling about his real goals, yet realizes it is necessary, which gives his book a schizophrenic feel. We should reject needing a “finely-tuned” analysis of fascism, he tell us. We should understand the term is actually “a moral signifier that those struggling against a variety of oppressions have utilized to highlight the ferocity of the political foes they have faced.” The key is “solidarity with all those who suffer and struggle.” In other words, the only thing is the victory of the Left, and anyone who opposes that, is fascist.
As I say, this is a book of apologetics, directed primarily at normies. (Keith Ellison, the former Congressman who is currently the Attorney General of Minnesota, was famously photographed endorsing this book.) The chief hurdle Bray faces in this endeavor is that he completely endorses the violent silencing of all opposition to the Left, yet knows that sells poorly in normie America, and to normies, you look bad when your own supposed definition of fascism centers on how fascists “abandon democratic liberties” and use “redemptive violence,” yet both those are the core of your own self-definition. Bray wrote this book in an attempt to square this circle. He doesn’t succeed, because not even God can square a circle. The result is instead protean word salad, where Bray returns again and again to halfheartedly trying to show that Antifa is something other than merely joint action to violently suppress all opposition to the Left, and fails. Then he gives up, and admits his project.
We will step backward into history in a moment, but the Left here, by opposition to which fascism is defined, is the modern Left—just as radical as the 1930s Communist-dominated Left of the West, but having little in common with it other than its basic premises and utopian vision. The focus today is any form of supposed “oppression,” which, as the late Roger Scruton pointed out, is the bedrock of all modern leftism. Although the modern Left pays lip service to economic oppression, the almost sole focus of the 1930s hard Left, there is no actual concern whatsoever in this book for the urban “worker,” much less the rural proletariat in flyover country, or the struggling lower-middle and middle class. Despite frequent obligatory references to “the workers,” what comes through loud and clear is that Antifa, just like the modern Left as a whole, is a movement of the elite, not the proletariat. Bray uses as the meat of much of his book anecdotes and quotes taken from Antifa pseudo-soldiers around the world; none of them, as far as can be determined, is a worker in the traditional sense. Almost certainly most or all of them are upper-middle class in background and work, if they work, in some nonprofit-type job aligned with their politics. Bray is part of the fraternity, as he gladly admits, and his own background is, naturally, of this type.
The author begins with the past. He is very offended that historians have treated anti-fascist movements since the 1930s as “marginal,” and that not a single academic book has been written about them in eighty years. Rather like the Freemasons retconning history to show how very relevant they have been since Hiram Abiff, Bray tries to show how various fringe leftist groups since 1945 have all been part of a loose-knit pursuit of the ultimate goal of total Left domination. To this end, we are first given a somewhat confused, but generally accurate, if highly selective, history of Europe between 1900 and 1945, as it relates to militant left-wing movements. Spain in the 1930s gets a lot of ink—Bray accurately points out that Franco was not by any definition a fascist, but he doesn’t understand that when Franco took over the Falange, it was to make it Francoist, not to make Francoism fascist, and that his idea that Franco’s Spain was fascist as a result is silly. But of course it’s not silly, if you realize that “fascist” means “effectively opposing the Left”—Franco was the master at that, which is why he is so hated today by the global Left, even though he died nearly fifty years ago.
Bray next spins his wheels trying to show Antifa was relevant, or even existed, after 1945 until well into the twenty-first century. He fails, being reduced to sputtering about Enoch Powell and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Yes, in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, Left political violence was very prominent (though who remembers the Red Brigades today?), but it was directed at the mainstream political establishment, not the Right, which in Europe and America was essentially non-existent (except for Italy, where there was an operating extreme right-wing that fought back against the Left). Still, it was during this period that the “black bloc” street fighting tactics used by Antifa today developed, a combination of monochromatic dress designed to conceal individual identities, various forms of armor, and coordinated assaults using a front-line of more sympathetic people, often women, backed by weapon-wielding men (though as we’ll see, there is no real toughness there). The phalanx, of course, has long been known to be an effective method of ground assault, and is even more so against those who are forbidden to fight back effectively, and concealing identity has long been known to be useful both to avoid the consequences of one’s actions and to encourage violence, since it accelerates the mob mentality Gustave Le Bon analyzed in The Crowd. In the context of Western democracies, where governments are broadly on the side of the Left and so will not mow them down with machine guns, the black bloc was a genius turn.
However, none of these people from past decades have anything to do with today’s Antifa, despite Bray’s attempts to draw out a hidden line. Flailing away, Bray gives us endless pages talking about fights over the past three decades among skinheads and soccer hooligans brawling in punk rock clubs and around stadiums. None of this has real political content; it is all simply the bad behavior that young men get up to in any society where their drives and talents are not recognized and channeled. It’s an updated (and deracinated) version of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. You can see this from an anecdote Bray tells—how some “Nazi” skinheads were persuaded to become “Antifa” skinheads. This is a very old phenomenon, young men switching from Communism to the far Right, and vice versa. It is a symptom of search for meaning and purpose in the world, nothing more, with no political meaning whatsoever.
In America, Bray traces modern Antifa back to the late 1980s Minneapolis group Anti-Racist Action. Supposedly they were organized to fight the Klan, but it’s quite clear this was just another fringe group formed out of the skinhead music scene, looking for meaning and a bonding mechanism. (When Bray refers to nonexistent “major Midwest Klan rallies in the 1990s” being the spur, you know the lies are multiplying.) In an exception from the general rule, this group was well organized and politically somewhat adept, and spread to other music scenes in a few other urban areas, in a decentralized and somewhat splintered manner. (They did have “four points of unity,” including “reproductive freedom,” again showing zero concern for the actual economic concerns of the workers they professed to admire.) But none of this was of any importance or relevance at all for decades, and it all received the public notice it deserved, which was none—although, to be sure, allies sympathetic to these far-left types were spending these decades seizing all the levers of American power. There just wasn’t any role for or relevancy of Antifa in those decades; the Left was steadily winning everything it wanted, and a few skinhead types searching for personal meaning were of no importance, whatever their personal delusions of grandeur.
All this changed in 2008, as the arrow of history began to waver in its leftward travel. The catamite Right suddenly lost much of its relevancy, and the Tea Party arose. Although it was quickly and successfully destroyed, it heralded the new age of the Right, as the Republican Party began to fragment, and effective opposition to the Left’s march through the institutions appeared on the horizon. Right-wing political movements grew even more in Europe, sometimes based around economic and class concerns, sometimes based on opposition to unbridled immigration and the crime and cultural destruction that overran countries in its wake. To Bray, of course, all these effective movements are literal Nazis—what they say is beside the point, because he knows they are Nazis, because they must be Nazis, according to Bray’s ideology. Most of all, the mainstream Left began to fear that something more was needed to maintain and extend their grip on power—a fear that reached fever pitch in 2016.
Having trudged through this history-by-anecdote, we now get to the meat of this book, which is its apologetics. Bray’s goal is to justify any level of violence necessary to accomplish the goal of total Left victory. He prefers this to be calibrated, for public relations reasons, and to begin with as much suppression of Right speech without actual killing as possible. His case study for this is the Antifa riot that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at Berkeley in early 2017. Yiannopoulos’s sin was being effective at organizing the rising Right, that is, people other than Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, among the young. Bray offers a kaleidoscopic array of justifications for why not only Yiannopoulos, but anyone who is “fascist,” that is, anyone who does, or might, effectively oppose Left power, should be denied any freedom of speech, through unlimited violence if necessary. First, Mussolini and Hitler gained power legally, so that risk is present today in America, at least until full Left hegemony is attained. Second, nobody took Mussolini and Hitler seriously until it was too late; that mistake should not be made again. Third, rank-and-file leftists are more finely attuned to the dangers of fascism than their supposed leaders, so anything they do must be endorsed (as must also be anything endorsed by their leaders). Fourth, the Right has learned to use propagandistic imagery in the same way as the Left; this cannot be permitted, because it is effective. Fifth, “it doesn’t take that many fascists to make fascism,” so any silencing of a fascist is a major victory, justifying the action.
Thus, Bray states explicitly he rejects free speech as a value. “Instead of privileging allegedly ‘neutral’ universal rights, anti-fascists prioritize the political project of destroying fascism and protecting the vulnerable regardless of whether their actions are considered violations of the free speech of fascists or not.” What is “vulnerable”? Well, the only example of the danger of Yiannopoulos given is that when he arrived on a campus, “a trans student named Barbara was so terrified she fled campus for a day.” Also, Nazis! They’re everywhere!
You see, “free speech” doesn’t exist. “Black Lives Matter protests have been brutally suppressed.” (He gives no example of this fantasy.) Plus, detainees at Guantanamo Bay and teenagers incarcerated for drug crimes don’t have free speech, nor do illegal immigrants, since ICE is lurking around every corner waiting to deport them. Not to mention, the “marketplace of ideas” can’t be trusted not to “elevate fascism.” So, because Antifa wants to give free speech to those presently denied free speech, it is “actually far more pro free-speech” than liberals who claim free speech as a supposed universal value. In fact, we will all have total free speech, just as soon as we have built the classless society and eliminated the police and the prisons. Never mind the corpses piling up on the path to Utopia! After all, they don’t need speech anymore, do they? In the meantime, we can have “the free and open exchange of ideas.” We just need to “draw the line at those who use that freedom to promote genocide or question people’s humanity”—that is, anyone who opposes the Left. QED!
To be fair, this approach is not confined to Antifa. The desire to silence all opposition “by any means necessary,” as Bray is only too happy to put it, is and always has been a universal goal of the Left. You only have to witness the recent moves by the Lords of Tech to silence opposition, seeing that it is becoming effective, as the Right coalesces into a movement that actually seeks to gain power and achieve goals, rather than, as the Republicans have for decades, play act while giving the Left everything they want. To be fair, I somewhat agree with Bray. I think Bray, and all his colleagues, should indeed be silenced. They should be afraid to appear in public, fearing the same punishments they eagerly mete out to their enemies. Only in this way can they be defeated. (And the same treatment should be meted out to their allies on the Right—it warmed my heart to see some recent videos of Mitt Romney being shamed by ordinary citizens who came across him in an airport and on-board an airplane.) But, unfortunately, as I outline below, this is not possible, at least not today.
After offering this sophistry, Bray turns to justifying violence as a political tool more generally, not just to suppress speech. He repeats the same rationales, and adds another, that all Antifa violence is just self-defense, and that Antifa correctly is “legitimizing offensive tactics in order to forestall the potential need for literal self-defense down the line.” That is to say, Antifa uses violence now because in the future, they might be attacked. This is the all-purpose green light for any type of action—fascists, even if only one man, may in the future harm us, so anything we do to that man today, including murdering him, is wholly justified. The irony is that on Bray’s premises, this is indeed true. This is just a variation on the standard Left reason justifying their inevitable mass murders—those killed are denying happiness to untold millions, and their death is a small price to pay. True, murder isn’t the first line of “defense.” That is, instead, “constant physical confrontation, technological harassment, and social ostracization.” “Violence, incivility, discrimination, [and] disrupting speeches” are to be welcomed when, and only when, used “against those who [serve] white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, class oppression, and genocide.”
Bray ends with a vicious screed against white people. And here we reach what the Left has become most of all today—a vehicle to whip up hate against white people, or at least normal white people, men and women, although it is interesting that Bray wrote this in 2017, and only in 2020 has this become Left orthodoxy. “Whiteness is indefensible.” Bray protests, without fooling anyone, that “this does not mean exterminating people who are currently categorized as white,” but rather “abolishing the classificatory scheme that renders them so.” It is impossible to think to what this refers other than exterminating any white person who cannot prove his “allyship” by “undermining [the fascist menace’s] pillars of strength in society grounded not only in white supremacy but also in ableism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, nationalism, transphobia, class rule, and many others.” Bray himself is a heterosexual white male; how he hopes to avoid his own inevitable Girondist fate in the future Left utopia is beyond me. But that’s his problem.
So that’s it. That’s a tour through the diseased mind of an Antifa apologist. He dreams of a bright, sunlight future, where happy men, women, and nonbinaries of a rainbow of colors other than white gambol through the meadows, covered in lush grasses growing over the rotting corpses of everyone who didn’t agree with them. Yeah, yeah. Let’s turn to some more practical topics. What is the relationship, or rather symbiosis, between Antifa and the mainstream Left, including the Democratic Party? Who controls Antifa? Who funds Antifa? Answering these questions is a form of triangulating Antifa, so they can be destroyed.
Before we get there, though, I want to explore the actual effectiveness of Antifa tactics in America. Historically, this has been difficult, since information is hard to come by—the media lionizes them, so it is futile to look for exposés or even honest information, and Antifa members don’t write anything but infantile screeds directed to each other, none of which offer much information. Fortunately, this past summer has given us innumerable videos of their activities, as well as fresh analyses provided by those very few journalists willing to cover Antifa, notably Andy Ngo. Let’s work backward, from the actual violence of Antifa, to what they have actually accomplished. Which is very little.
Certainly Antifa is violent, but the violence is sharply limited to certain areas, and not by Antifa’s choice, but because they know better than to do otherwise. True, it’s not always easy to separate the activities of Burn-Loot-Murder rioters during the Floyd Riots from those of Antifa. It appears most of the property damage to non-governmental property was the work of the former; Antifa, in their black bloc manifestation, was most evident in two major areas of crimes: attacking government buildings, and setting up roadblocks and attacking motorists. These crimes took place mostly in cities already with pre-existing Antifa groups. Smaller groups of Antifa appeared on the streets in other cities and towns, usually blocking roads, not attacking buildings. These may have been local or may have been shipped in. But crucially, Antifa, with rare exceptions, only appeared in places where two preconditions were met.
First, the government, in the form of police and, more importantly, city government, and most importantly, local prosecutors, were highly sympathetic to their aims. Second, they believed there was no chance whatsoever that they would face any opposition from private citizens, either because none were organized, or, much more frequently, because Antifa knew any opposition to them would receive brutal treatment from both the police and the city government and prosecutors. Under those conditions, Antifa faced no challenges whatsoever to their activities, other than their occasional mild dispersal by police in cities where the government was somewhat less sympathetic to them. In fact, they repeatedly assaulted federal buildings in Portland, committing arson and property destruction, and when Trump attempted to stop this, the national media in coordination and cooperation with the Portland city government acted vigorously—against Trump. Thus, Antifa took no risks in this violence; it’s all a form of theater to benefit the goals of the Left more generally—or, more precisely, it’s domestic terrorism. It is just a brick in the wall of propaganda the Left as a whole is using to press their falsehoods about supposed oppression in America, the ending of which naturally requires total remaking of American society and, most of all, mass transfer of wealth to the unproductive and total power to the undeserving.
But—it is most instructive to watch videos showing those few times groups of Antifa were challenged by groups of men from the Right. This took place not in the major cities, where the government had openly given the streets over to thugs. Rather, they took place in smaller cities or towns, and often apparently at places not in the center of the town. Those men are never organized for combat as Antifa is (though some appear dressed for it and probably have experience) and, unlike Antifa, they do not conceal their identity. In most cases they appear to have semi-spontaneously appeared in the street to oppose rioters or those blocking streets. Every single time the Antifa group, if it is equally matched or merely somewhat larger, is quickly beaten and flees. Often a single motorist standing up to the terrorists blocking the street drives them away. Never, ever, does Antifa win or even stand their ground. They are cowards (and Bray’s repeated comparison to their 1930s predecessors, who were mostly very bad men but who at least were not cowards, laughable).
Watching these videos is also a way to get a humor break. Many of them show a fat Antifa girl shrieking in horror, as one of her male friends is beaten, and demanding through her tears that he be let go. It’s actually remarkably funny. Just as funny is that Bray is very concerned with “excessive machismo” among Antifa, certainly not a problem in his own particular instance. In fact, if you really want a laugh, go look up mug shots of Antifa arrested (none are ever charged or prosecuted, of course, for any significant crime); such specimens of degenerated humanity are unlikely to win any battles against any force that can push back. Which is why, of course, they never attempt to win any such battles. They’re classic simpering bullies. You can also see this from when on the few occasions police dispersed Antifa groups with non-lethal force, they ran like little girls. I can guarantee you that if Napoleon showed up with his whiff of grapeshot, it’d be all over for Antifa.
On the other hand, you do have to give points to Antifa for the ability to pull off coordinated action, often with a propaganda edge. They appear to use social media and, to a lesser extent, radios competently. Their creation of a Wall of Moms (with no real moms, of course) as the sympathetic front line of their attacks in Portland was pretty clever. They continuously coordinate with the media to achieve their joint goals. I’m very sure, though, that if they ran up against a few guys with tactical training and the ability to handle firearms competently, they’d come up short. And that’s exactly what would happen, either from the government or from private citizens, if Antifa ever tried violence in any place outside of the safe havens in which they operate. It’s all cosplay. Antifa knows they lose in practice. Bray also knows this, but he’s hardly going to admit it, so he makes claims such as “110-pound vegan girls” can “kick the shit out of fascists.” Uh-huh. Tough talk like that just shows you know you’re weak.
Bray knows that modern American Antifa actually is a paper tiger, a silly little club for out-of-shape losers who, after burning federal property with impunity, go home to eat Hot Pockets and play Call of Duty in their mother’s basement. (A very high percentage of Antifa also seem to be mentally ill, and a shocking number have been convicted of sex offenses.) Oh, sure, there are probably some genuine psychopaths among them, men who just want to watch the world burn, as there are in any movement that breeds violence (and if the level and range of violence increased, so would the numbers of such people in Antifa, perhaps reducing their overall cowardice), but not many.
True, Antifa does have actual power in places run by radical Soros-backed district attorneys (e.g., St. Louis). Antifa can show up at your house, threaten you with guns, and if you display a gun, you are the one arrested (and if you shoot a gun, you will spend years in prison, even if nobody is hurt). But in most of the country, this is still not the case (it’s certainly not the case where I live), although after the recent Capitol Hill protests by the Right, the Left is going to try to make it so. Whether they will succeed is the critical question of the next few years.
I also have to give credit to today’s Antifa for acting in a unified, coordinated fashion across time and space, avoiding the common historical occurrence of Left groups splintering over doctrine. Probably this success is some combination of having learned their lesson, that infighting defeats their ends, and the modern doctrine of intersectionality, which inoculates them against internal conflict by positing that all oppressions are linked, which papers over real differences quite effectively. Not forever, but for long enough to work to destroy decent society—after that, the internal purges will spin up, as they always do on the Left.
So if it’s theater, what is the purpose of Antifa? Why does the Kamala Harris-type Left, those who agree with their philosophy and ends but lie about it in public, exist in symbiosis with them? In those cities where Antifa exists in cozy relationship with the structures of power, they are very useful to those actually in power. Street violence with actual risk is not Antifa’s forte, but in those places are very useful to intimidate and silence enemies. However, this only works on a local, micro level. For example, the administration at Berkeley wanted Yiannopoulos silenced—but what really ruined Yiannopoulos, what really silenced him, was the Lords of Tech, not Antifa. And yes, some cities have caved to the terrorism this past summer—but they are only cities that are already failing cesspools run by the Left, and Antifa alone would not have been able to accomplish even that without the mass psychosis surrounding BLM. I think occasionally, therefore, Antifa is useful as shock troops for the Left, but in practice this is limited. I conclude that Antifa is probably a net negative for the Kamala Harris-type Left, which is more strategically oriented and, however briefly, has actual political power. But since there are no enemies to the Left, they cannot criticize, much less tamp down, Antifa activities. This presents an opportunity, because cutting the head off the Antifa snake if they try to extend their activities into normal America may be a good way to begin substantive push-back on the Left’s desperate attempts to achieve hegemony over normal America.
How is Antifa organized and controlled? I’ve spent quite a bit of time searching state databases of business organizations, and it appears that Antifa is always organized informally, with no paper trail. This is logical, since they don’t need limited liability (they are otherwise protected by the state) and this means there is no way to investigate their finances. (It does mean individual members who are in charge of a chapter can be personally sued for their group’s activities; that might be an amusing thing to do.) Bray denies that Antifa is “even an organization,” even though he narrates the specifics of many Antifa organizations. What he means is there is no central control. Usually the rationale for no central control is operational security, but neither Antifa nor any of its members has anything to fear from the government or any private individual or entity.
Nonetheless, there does seem to be some central control. For example, Antifa prominently participated in the burning of Kenosha this summer after an armed man named Jacob Blake was shot and injured during a confrontation with police. However, when a few weeks ago it was announced that no charges would be brought against the policemen involved, Antifa (and their allies, BLM) did nothing. This must have been something directed from a higher level, but the specifics are opaque. We’ll never know. We would if the government were not wholly illegitimate and effectively allies of Antifa, or if the press were not the enemy of the people. And perhaps it is just obvious to those who control local cells of Antifa that they will not benefit their ally Kamala by rioting. Nor did Antifa show up to the recent protest in Washington by Trump supporters. Probably in part because they knew they would get beaten down, but also because starting violence would have created bad optics for Kamala (they could not know that Kamala’s forces would do that anyway, by shooting the unarmed Ashli Babbitt, though their propaganda machine is, at least on the surface, managing to mitigate the problem).
How is Antifa funded? In a sense, this question is not hugely relevant, since Antifa’s activities don’t require massive amounts of money (and there is a lesson here for the Right, as the Lords of Tech attack them on every front). They use social media to organize (never under any threat of punishment from the Lords of Tech, of course). They don’t need to travel, or publish print publications, or do other things that require lots of money. They don’t run for office. True, when they are arrested for their crimes, they need money for bail and for a lawyer to show up when they are released without charge. But, as we saw in the Floyd Riots this summer, all those expenses are covered by third parties, upstanding members of the community. This may or may not be legal—for example, should taxes be paid on these donations? However, that’s the wrong inquiry, since never, ever, could anyone be punished in any way, legal or not, for financial crimes related to the Left. (This is just another example of the total erosion of the rule of law, as the legal system, on the federal and many local levels, is totally weaponized against the Right—yet another reason America is over, unless it is remade.) From a tactical perspective, cutting off Antifa funding isn’t a fruitful avenue.
So what should the Right do, against Antifa as an agent and weapon of the Cthulhu State, which is what it is? (It’s not just Antifa; as Bronze Age Pervert is fond of pointing out lately, the Lords of Tech are not our new rulers, they are merely agents of factions in the government, as can be seen by that if they, say, banned BLM from their platforms, they would be instantly destroyed.) This question will get even more critical if Antifa is turned by the state into a more competent weapon against normal America, which is entirely possible. Turnabout may be fair play, but it is not effective play—violence by the Right will earn them twenty years in prison (if caught), not release without charge, as Antifa receives. There is no purpose in doxing them; their employers, if they are employed, could never take any action against them, and there is no social penalty for their activities, rather there is reward, in their circles. There seems little that can be done.
So, what’s the answer? When I started writing this, I noted to myself that the Right has not engaged in any proactive violence. One might argue that has changed, with the brief occupation of the United States Capitol—though there wasn’t much violence to speak of, certainly not in comparison to the Floyd Riots (and some of what little there was might have been Antifa infiltrators, though I tend to discount that). This has taken attention away from the broader Washington protest, which was in a sense meaningless—just some normal people, though many believing kooky theories like Q, accomplishing nothing obvious.
But in a very real sense both the brief occupation of parts of the Capitol and the broader Washington protest mean everything—the first time the vast mass of normal, non-elite Americans, suffering actual oppression for decades (as opposed to the fake oppression falsely claimed by the various elements of the Left intersectional coalition), voiceless and endlessly hectored that they should hate themselves and be afraid, realized they can actually change the course of history, and throw off their chains. This is why the hysterical Left reaction across all their power sources (government, media, Big Tech). They are afraid, because they know their hold on power is so very, very fragile. We should always remember what Napoleon said when asked how he came to be Emperor of France: “I came across the crown of France lying in the street, and I picked it up with my sword.”
Thus, the answer is twofold, I think. First, to prepare to exercise power when the moment comes, which it will, because the nature of the Left is to deny reality, and for their reach to exceed their grasp. I suspect that networks to do this are already organizing, though nobody invites me to them. Second, to visibly show Right power, something the Right has never done in America. This should not be violence; we certainly don’t need the American equivalent of the Irish Republican Army of the 1970s. And true, street protests, marches and the like, are not historically the forte of the Right—in America. It is probably time for them to become our forte. There are enough justifiably angry, actually oppressed normal Americans to make this possible, and the Left is so deathly afraid of this—hence the lies built around the recent Washington protest, and the suppression by all social media of any video of the protests.
Most of all, their fear is shown by the vicious reaction in terms of criminal charges being discussed for the Washington protestors. They include charging them all with felony murder, a naked attempt to prevent any future protest of any kind against the Left. For in any future protest, the government merely has to kill one protestor—and then charge the rest with murder. This is state terrorism, effectuated by Gestapo tactics, no different than Stalinism. Yet it is also flailing, showing desperation, and eroding the legitimacy of the state to less than zero. It’s not an effective long-term strategy.
To be sure, this overreaction poses a tactical problem for those seeking to defeat the Left, in that any public organizing or event by them will be infiltrated to conduct and encourage violence, in order to enable the Left factions currently controlling the government to suppress all opposition. I haven’t figured out a palatable response to this, unfortunately.
Oh, I’m not ruling out future violence occurring—it’s already visited on us, obviously, as part of a deliberate plan. That’s the loud-and-proud message of this book, after all. I’d be surprised if the Right isn’t forced to act defensively at some point, but most likely there will first come fracture, bringing chaos, and in that chaos, the debilities currently accompanying Right violence will fade. The sooner that fracture, whether economic collapse or some other mechanism, comes the better, because the Left is ascendant and knows its danger, and is already making swift moves to kill us all—something in which Mark Bray will no doubt eagerly participate. In short—don’t be a patsy.
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