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I am not exactly a Weekly Standard kind of reader. But I read Matt Labash's long piece about how antifa went apeshit on the Patriot Prayer people at a Berkeley "protest" (and by protest, I mean riot), and you should, too.
The takeaway from this story -- and from spending any random three minutes on Facebook or media comment threads -- is that America never will defeat the fascism of Donald Trump by adopting the violent Stalinism of "social-justice warriors" like antifa and all the other toxic granola of the radical left.
Likewise, there are none among antifa or other left-wing hate groups, which these assembled fanatics most certainly represent. The sulfurous, Satanic stench coming from each camp smells about the same, because the Nazis and the "antifascists" are about the same. The difference between the opposing vortices of hatred is a mere matter of targeting methodology -- one determines who is subhuman based on race and ethnicity . . . the other, ideology.
Given free run of the United States, each would leave a trail of corpses behind it as the fanatics rampaged their way toward their Father Below.
Below, a sampling of what Labash saw in what must be the first American insane asylum to actually incorporate:
On the walk up to the square, Joey’s several paces ahead, seemingly in another zone, not even noticing the protester in the “Nasty Woman” shirt who starts filming him, as though she’s doing surveillance. After all the hype, he is now so infamous in Berkeley his face is instantly recognizable, and people act like it’s Jesse James walking into a bank. They elbow each other, scandalized.LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Don't you just love it?
From the moment we hit the square, the “Nazi” catcalls start. Whatever’s happening on the stage seems to cease to exist, and the energy around us turns very dark, very fast. Joey, Tiny, and Pete start walking with greater purpose, on the balls of their feet, almost like fighters entering a ring or Christians entering the Coliseum, except instead of facing one lion, they’re facing thousands. As the chants rain down (“Nazis are here! . . . F— you! . . . F—ing fascists!”), we near the stage thinking we might find some kind of buffer zone, since the police knew that some of Joey’s original rally-goers would show up. But there isn’t one. Our progress is halted when we run up into a small clearing snug up against a barrier. And behind that barrier, near the park’s “Peace Wall,” is a wall of human blackness.
A hundred or so masked-up antifa ninjas and affiliated protesters seem to simultaneously turn. It looks like we’ve interrupted al Qaeda tryouts. Joey, Tiny, and Pete all raise their hands high in the air, and flash peace signs, a conciliatory gesture. But nobody here wants peace. Not with fascists on the scene. As Joey nears the barrier, one of the ninjas swings and misses. Then the barrier topples, and they pour over, chanting, “Fascists go home!”
As I’m reading the action into my recorder, antifa slides around me on all sides, nearly carrying me off like a breaking wave. The boys are about 20 yards off and walk backwards. Pete catches a shot right on his stars’n’stripes dome from a two-by-four and goes down, blacking out for a second. Tiny, trying to protect everybody, pulls him up with his massive Samoan hand and pushes him out of the scrum. The mob ignores Pete, as he’s just an appetizer. Joey is the entree.
There's more.
SAY WE ACTUALLY get rid of Trump and stem the tide of Trumpkin fascism in this country. What are we going to have left?First he catches a slap in the head, then someone gashes him with something in his ribs. He keeps his hands up, as though that will save him, while he keeps getting dragged backwards by his shirt, Tiny trying to pull him away from the bloodthirsty ninjas. Someone crashes a flagpole smack on Joey’s head, which will leave a welt so big that Tiny later calls him “the Unicorn.” Not wishing to turn his back on the crowd, a half-speed backwards chase ensues, as Joey and Tiny are blasted with shots of bear spray and pepper spray. They hurdle a jersey barrier, crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way while antifa continue throwing bottles at them. The mob stalks Joey and Tiny all the way to an Alameda County police line, which the two bull their way through, though the cops initially look like they’re going to play Red Rover and keep them out. No arrests are made. Except for Joey and Tiny, who are cuffed.
War is peace. Love is hate.
A crack reporter for the Los Angeles Times will later write that they were arrested for charging the police, which couldn’t be less true. A Berkeley cop tells me they were arrested for their own safety (and weren’t charged). When I catch up and reach the police line, the cops won’t let me past to follow my subjects. My reportorial dispassion has worn thin. I yell at the police for doing nothing, for standing by while two men could’ve been killed. One cop tells me there’s a thin line between solving one problem and being the cause of more, as though they’re afraid to offend antifa. I am sick at what I just witnessed. Angry, even. I wheel around on some protesters, asking them if they think it’s right to beat people down in the street. “Hell yeah,” says one. I ask them to cite anything Joey has said that offends them, as though being offended justifies this. A coward in a black mask says: “They’re f—ing Nazis. There’s nothing they have to say to offend us.”
All around me, good non-antifa liberals go about their business, pretending none of this has happened, carrying “Stand Against Hate” signs. There’s the sound truck with preachers in clerical garb, leading a “Whose streets/our streets” chant. There’s the gray-haired interdenominational “Choral Majority” singing peace songs: “There’s no hatred in my land / Where I’m bound.” I want to vomit on the Berkeley Peace Wall.
I’m made even more sick when I look down the road and see a punching, kicking mob form a circle around a new victim. By the time I roll up on them, an older man in camo-wear spits out from the maelstrom. As he runs to safety, an antifa thug runs up behind him, sucker-punching him as hard as he can in the back. I will go home that night and watch several more cold-blooded beatdowns on YouTube that I didn’t personally witness.
This?
What, then, will we have gained? Or, rather, will we have saved ourselves from the frying pan only to find America in the fire?
Remember, Communist tyrant Josef Stalin killed even more people than Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler. File under: Facts, Inconvenient.
We're supposed to embrace the ideological thugs and bullies to rid ourselves of the fascist ones? Really? When members of the Resistance glibly proclaim "By any means necessary!" are they aware they're coming out in favor of gulags in the name of staving off concentration camps?
I am a Catholic. Not a "progressive" Catholic or a "conservative" Catholic which, in my book, means you're leaving some Catholic out to better accommodate your politics. I am just Catholic in search of the authentic freedom that lies in my faith's tension between justice and mercy -- between dogma and "God created mankind in his image."
And, as a Catholic, this is what I know as surely as I know fire burns and ice freezes: Die-hard Trumpkins hate my guts, because "libtard." The left's "social-justice warriors" hate my guts, because "hater." Verily, in the open-air insane asylum that is the United States today, from Berkeley to Baton Rouge, there is no greater love than to hate.
For all the right reasons, of course.
Eventually, this, too, shall pass. Someday for America, in the words of the old hymn,
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh Lord I prayUNFORTUNATELY, that day probably will come because we've all killed one another. It will be the cold peace of those who rest six feet deep.
(There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, my Lord,
no trouble, trouble I see)
There will be peace in the valley for me
God bless America.