Antifa Has Awakened the Sleeping Giant

Before I begin today's piece, I want to step outside the proverbial box to take a moment and pass out a  public "thank you" or two.

First, to my BitsBlog following, which if I'm reading the metrics correctly, has followed me here to PJ Media. For 24 years, BitsBlog has been a labor of love. With the help of my good friend Art Smith, I've never commercially capitalized on it. That love causes me to say, it will not be going away. You will still see me posting at BitsBlog, perhaps a bit less frequently, mostly with shorter items, rather than the long form stuff I've been posting here. I do love the longer forms which allow me to more completely examine a topic... but sometimes I have a thought which while worthwhile, doesn't quite match and cannot be built into my usual long form style, and so you will see those quickies there. I must say, it is a wonderful thing to see your work appreciated, even to the point of following me over to this venue. I am grateful.

Grateful is also the word I'll use to describe my feelings for the folks here at PJ Media. Since starting again here a bit over a month ago (after an absence of many years), everyone here has been very patient and gracious in letting me feel my way through this different, and somewhat more structured environment. It's been a great pleasure working with all of you, and I'm sure you'll understand when I add that it is a particular pleasure working with my old friends from the Blogosphere. With your help and encouragement, I'm finding my way.

We now return you to today's column, which was already in progress: 

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It is recorded in our history books that when he looked down at the ship full of smiling, victorious faces… faces of his flyers, just having returned from Pearl Harbor, Japanese fleet Admiral Yamamoto was quiet, pensive, even apprehensive. He later wrote in his private diary, 

“I fear all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to awaken Americans to the threat that the world faced, a bit over 82 years ago. A couple weeks ago, in my daily column, I raised what I considered at the time an unlikely but logical parallel between the 9/11 attacks and Charlie Kirk's death. I may have even used the same Yamamoto passage in that piece. But in researching today's piece over the last few days, and particularly in light of recent Antifa activity, I find the comparison more even more apt than I did then.

It is axiomatic that you always catch the most flack when you are directly over the target. That truth has never been revealed in starker relief than when Donald Trump won the presidency… both times. Violent acts in this case, are what constitutes the figurative (and too often, literal) flack. Much has been written about the recent and alarming reincarnation of Antifa. It is pretty obvious that with every success of the political right in this country, the left in general and Antifa in particular, gets more violent.

To understand how these things are linked, we must return to the 1938 writings of Mao, whence comes all things Antifa:
 

Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the “omnipotence of war”. Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. 

This passage shows us two things: the reason why the left is so fixed on removing guns from the hands of the individual, and what passes for the reasoning behind the violent actions of Antifa. With these points in mind, declaring Antifa a terrorist organization, as Donald Trump has done (along with Hungary’s Victor Orban) makes complete sense. 

From the perspective of very recent history, however, the situation becomes even more clear. I’ve been going through Antifa websites recently, reading them so you don’t have to. Trust me; such reading gives one both a massive headache, and the decided impression that some folks are more directly descended from the apes than others. I always liked the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s quote, which given the attachment of Antifa to our supposed institutions of "higher leaning" seems very appropriate here:

“I prefer the company of peasants as they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”

I note that there seems to be an inverse relationship between educational credentials and  what we used to refer to as common sense. Alas, that sense seems lacking in commonality in those places, these days.

One website that stands out as particularly egregious, is the Corvallis Antifascists website, which posted something they called an “After Action Report” following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Their own words in those writings expose their fear that they have lost the ability to, without consequence, mark conservatives for death. For proof of this, they point to the huge outpouring of anger over Charlie’s death, and they point also at videos of masked Antifa mobs storming religious gatherings that were overtly Christian. Attacking women and children, they worry, will damage Antifa’s reputation.
 
Gee, ya think?

Andy Ngo (himself under death threats from Antifa) notes the same issues and says, in part:

The group admits these events, combined with the Kirk assassination, risk “galvanizing otherwise politically inactive conservatives.” They are desperate to prevent that.
 
 To counter a cultural shift away from their dehumanization tactics — now deeply mainstreamed on the left — Antifa recommend dividing the right against itself. Specifically, they point to Israel as the wedge issue, noting waning support for the war and growing criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu among prominent conservative figures and popular conspiracy theorists.

I’ve seen that shift of tactics myself in the last week or so on places such as Facebook and X, from the usual suspects, who astoundingly try to place the blame for Charlie’s death on Israel. This explains the rather muted reaction from some quarters over the peace deal I wrote about just a couple days ago now. Where I was cautiously hopeful in that piece, they’ve been outright hostile. These reactions seem very much a coordinated effort. How organized? Well that varies. Consider; these people hated Charlie Kirk because they claimed he was homophobic. And yet they are quite comfortable with Hamas and other extremist Islamic groups who routinely toss homosexuals off the tops of buildings. Their arguments tend to fall apart before the echo dies.

Immediately following Charlie’s death, we saw the chants from the far left, Antifa included, calling for “unity,” and comments that the person who killed Charlie really isn’t “radical left,” and how we should tone down the right-wing rhetoric. Frankly, what I’m seeing of Antifa… and trust me, I’m seeing more of it than you want to (and have likely tripped some algorithm with my research), these are folks you really don’t even want sharing the same air, much less comity or unity.

What exactly is it we’re supposed to unify with? If we hold, and I think properly, that this is a grotesque EVIL, then of what advantage is it to America and its people to unify with it?

I don't like saying this (because I know very well it'll be taken out of context to be used as a cudgel), but here it is: I suggest that were we to unify with what they’ve been doing, which is violence for political means, that within six weeks, there would be no more leftists remaining. Remember, we’re dealing with people who argue about which bathroom to use. 

No. If their desire is political power, our interests as a nation a culture, a people, are best served by preventing them from ever attaining that power.

Victoria Taft and her guest, Seamus Bruner. address some of this here. 

First step: arrests and convictions of the group where they have committed violent acts, along with shutting off their funding.

Second step, and most importantly, mid-terms.

The media insists that Antifa doesn't exist. At PJ Media, we know better, and aren't afraid to say so. Stay informed—become a PJ Media VIP today with promo code POTUS47 for 74% off VIP membership.