Last year, the violent clash at Charlottesville, Virginia saw two sides using violence. An alt-right racist plowed a car into a crowd, killing one. Thuggish Antifa militants included one who used a home-made flamethrower against his opponents. Almost as culpable? The mayor of the city. He ordered police to stand down. To let the two armed mobs clash. Instead of, you know, keeping the peace.

President Trump courageously condemned the violence on both sides. For that, he reaped a firestorm. Jason Jones and I came out and agreed with him. Please read what we wrote back then. It stands up remarkably well, if I do say so myself. Here’s the critical section:

Do you want to know how and why the Nazis came to power? Because the establishment let them. It considered them idealists — rough around the edges, but with their hearts in the right place. They were vigorous, even dangerous. But at least they were fighting the greater evil, the real threat — the Communists. So the authorities in Germany treated the Nazis as our authorities treat Antifa today.

…

When leftist thugs fought in the streets, the police waded in and cracked down on them hard. Whenever proto-Nazis and Nazis did the same … they got a pass. When Nazis terrorized moderates or religious conservatives, they got slaps on the wrist. You know, the way the authorities let Antifa off today, after they take over campuses and terrorize faculty and silence speakers while wearing hoods and wielding weapons … with a stern warning and a covert pat on the back.

Okay, they’re technically breaking the law, but it’s in a good cause. They’re just trying to stop those wicked villains, who threaten our values. Let them smash a few heads, and burn a few books, wink-wink.

When Hitler actually tried to overthrow the government in the Beer Hall Putsch, under German law he deserved to be shot by a firing squad. Instead he got a couple of years in a comfy cell with plenty of visitors — and a typewriter. On which he wrote Mein Kampf. (In our country, retired Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers became merely the mentor of a president, Barack Obama.)

I wish, I really wish, we’d been wrong. But the past 12 months proved otherwise.

Antifa: The New Brownshirts

I sat down to write much more about Antifa. But Steve Cortes has already done the heavy lifting. Even before the recent Antifa attack on the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. Speaking of the Antifa assault on ICE headquarters in Portland, Cortes wrote:

According to detailed reporting from The Oregonian, these supposedly tolerant radicals spewed racial slurs at ICE officers of color. Whenever honorable people of color disagree with this open borders lunacy and actually choose to do the hard work of defending America’s borders, it demonstrates the hypocrisy of a movement that purports to be all about protecting Latinos and fighting against “white privilege.”

One African American ICE officer reported in internal emails to DHS administrators that “protestors ‘began yelling racial slurs at him’ including the N-word.” He was also called an Uncle Tom, which I, too, am called just about daily on social media (though usually in Spanish – ‘Tio Tomas’). The ICE officer lamented that the “racial slurs have been directed at me throughout the entire length of the deployment.” A female Hispanic officer reported anti-Hispanic slurs and derided as a “weak female” by the protestors. These comments were hardly isolated, as she also reported that “I was berated for so long that I cannot remember everything that was said to me.”

These smug leftists that allegedly embrace a “woke” mindset of tolerance in reality hate the president and his insistence on enforcing immigration law so intensely that they display the very racial animus that they pretend to abhor. These irony-insensitive agitators would do well to study the actual difficult, dangerous law enforcement work of ICE. The radicals might be surprised to discover that ICE and the Border Patrol are highly diverse, boasting some of the highest Hispanic percentages of any federal agencies.

Democrats want to smear the millions of Trump voters (along with the President himself) as closet racists.

Want to see how truly diverse our nation’s law enforcement professionals really are? Check out this detailed breakdown. Black Americans serve in these agencies almost at their share of the general population. Hispanics? Over-represented. Antifa is almost lily-white. It’s far more segregated than any enforcement arm in America.

“Dead Cops, Dead Cops, Dead Cops”

Check out this video footage of an Antifa rally. It happened in Austin, Texas in 2017. They showed up to oppose an alt-right event. (Which never even materialized.) As Blue Lives Matter reported: “In the video, the group can be heard chanting, ‘Dead cops, dead cops, dead cops,’ and addition to their commonly used ‘Cops and Klan go hand in hand.’” Try to watch it all the way through.

 

 

The Stream already reported on the all-white leftist mob that menaced Candace Owens (who is black) and Charlie Kirk in Philadelphia. They called her a white supremacist, then abused the black cops who protected her.

Democrats must firmly and clearly denounce this violent movement. It’s just as vicious and hateful as anything on the alt-right. But much more dangerous because it’s vastly larger. Every Republican candidate in the upcoming midterm elections should demand that his opponent condemn Antifa. Most of them won’t. Those Republicans should make that a major campaign issue. Hammer it with ads. Mention it at every opportunity. Hang Antifa like a millstone around their necks. That, and the fact that the race is a referendum on Trump’s impeachment.

Democrats Won’t Condemn Them

Why won’t the Democrats take the simple and obvious step of condemning hooded and masked street thugs? Even when they menace citizens and peace officers? Or close federal agencies and terrorize whole cities?

Because they’re counting on the same energy and outrage that’s driving Antifa, and “democratic socialist” candidates, to win them this critical election.

So let’s confront them with facts like this:
 

Secret Service now “aware” of Antifa death threats against @realDonaldTrump and are “investigating” the protesters.https://t.co/KIzfkCWmMg

— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 13, 2018

 

The Infinitesimal Alt Right

Meanwhile, remember that big, scary alt-right movement? It was only able to muster 20 people. That served as the pretext for the Antifa assault on Charlottesville. The number of reporters covering the event surely exceeded 10 to 1.

But at least this year this repulsive event did not descend into gruesome violence. The mayor let the police do their jobs. They kept the tiny sect of white-nationalists from clashing violently with the much larger horde of violent leftists.

What do the laughable numbers of the white racialist turnout tell us? Was it simply fear of violence? Do millions of rage-filled white men, all across the country, stew in their mom’s basements, wishing they could have flooded Charlottesville, if only they weren’t too fwightened?

That’s what the left wants to tell us. They want to smear the millions of Trump voters (along with the President himself) as closet racists. On some college campuses, administrators ban a simple MAGA hat as a racist microaggression.

Happily, we have real numbers. A social scientific study reports the actual percentage of white American polled who share alt-right attitudes. It is tiny, nothing near the popular vote that turned out for Donald Trump. George Hawley of the Institute for Family Studies reported on his study August 9.

Hawley sought to find people who shared any or all of the following:

1) a strong sense of white identity, 2) a belief in the importance of white solidarity, and 3) a sense of white victimization. …

The survey included 3,038 non-Hispanic white respondents. Among these respondents, only a minority expressed high values on any of the above questions: about 28% expressed strong feelings of white identity; about 38% expressed strong feelings of white solidarity; and about 27% felt that whites suffer a meaningful amount of discrimination in American life. A much smaller minority, about 6% of respondents, expressed all three opinions. It is worth noting that a 2017 Washington Post-ABC News poll estimated that about 10% of respondents supported the Alt-Right.

So there you go. Six percent. I’d like to see a similar survey of Democrats’ attitudes toward Antifa. The CATO Institute did conduct a study along such lines. They found that 51% of people who considered themselves “strong liberals” thought it was morally right to physically assault someone whom they considered “a Nazi.”

You know what else I’d like to know? How non-white Americans score on the three questions posed above. What percentage of black, Hispanic, and Asian-Americans cop to a strong sense of racial “identity”? Or believe in the importance of “racial solidarity”? Or consider members of their groups subject to racial “victimization”?

That would be good to know, don’t you think? Just for perspective.