Confusion and uncertainty are consistent and sometimes deliberate qualities of news stories about antifa. Everybody seems to know more or less what antifa does, but far fewer seem able or willing to say what it is.
It’s not complicated. For the record, antifa is a loosely affiliated network of violent criminals, anarchists, and terrorists working for the revolutionary destruction of what the rest of us understand America to be.
Nevertheless, much to the terrorists’ advantage, many stories are still framed as questions asking, “What is antifa?” and “Who is antifa?”
“Know your enemy” is an old adage, and if you can’t even say who your enemies are, how can you expect to defeat them? If you let the definition slip through your fingers and can’t get a grip on your antagonists, how can you get them under control?
Some of this perplexity is feigned by disingenuous leftist news outlets because, surely, they are sympathetic deep down to antifa. This is probably not simple approval of its mayhem and murder but due to the fact that it wants to push America irrevocably leftward. This is an idea many in the media plainly like. They approve the end, so they are vague about the means.
It’s akin to the sympathy that was common on the Left for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, notably by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who vacationed in Moscow. The Left’s unadmitted anti-Americanism and the Russian tyrants’ pretense of egalitarianism were all it took to deflect attention away from their military imperialism.
Lazy and gullible people tend to take others at their own estimation, so they think antifa can’t be all bad. After all, it says it’s antifascist. This means many failed to recognize and condemn antifa as the unalloyed evil it is, even when it murdered people during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The ludicrously reported “mostly peaceful” protests were seen as a good cause by news media and establishment Democrats, including their 2024 presidential nominee.
Likewise, not much attention or intelligent assessment is applied now to a recent antifa ambush in which an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was shot in the neck. Why? Because ICE is seen as evil for doing its job of deporting illegal migrants.
But such vapid and dangerous indulgence of antifa is about to end, following President Donald Trump’s declaration that it is a major terrorist organization. Constraints on the administration defining domestic organizations as terrorist will no longer be allowed to get in the way because individual antifa terrorist cells operating inside America are financed by Antifa International’s funding arm, which pays for the legal defense of American antifa terrorists.
CHARLIE KIRK SHOWED THE LEFT WON’T LET YOU THINK
Taking money from international terrorist organizations is a crime, and a designation of Antifa International as a terrorist organization would stanch the flow of funds to many dangerous people in this country. Trump has ordered federal agencies to “investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations” of antifa.
For too long, antifa’s loose organizational structure, plus the shallow view that self-styled antifascists can’t be all bad, and the fact that the terrorists hate Trump, gave the revolutionaries a pass. No longer. To which all sensible people will respond, “At last!”
