The Evil That Is ANTIFA: Killing Kirk
Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)
This was written back on 18 May 2023:
A Congressman recently dismissed the Antifa danger by quoting FBI Director Wray who posited that Antifa is an ideology and not an organization.
Based on that, the Congressman concluded that only “organizations” pose credible threats.
The Congressman was wrong and his mistake was interpreting “ideology” and “organization” as a dichotomy, as a mutually exclusive “either-or” proposition.
Antifa is both. It is predominantly an ideology as Wray rightly stated but also an organization. Here is why:
Antifa comes from the German Antifaschischte Aktion – Anti Fascist Action. Antifa members back then were the storm troopers of the German Communist Party (KDP) who battled German fascist storm troopers – the brown shirts of the Nationalist Socialists (Nationalsozialistisches or Nazis). And both those “organizations” were driven by ideology.
American Antifa followers are direct successors to the old Antifa and share their radical leftist agenda and embrace violence, threats, and intimidation to achieve their aims.
Critically, American Antifa adherents are able to mass, arm themselves (in black body armor and masks), and then violently assault their target (a public protest or university campus meeting they oppose or a structure like a federal courthouse or public statue).
That clearly makes them organized but not a conventional organization. Because Antifa is anti-hierarchal (like many left-wing radicals such as anarchists) and decentralized it is more precisely an unconventional organization driven by ideology.
That is the truth.
And if you want to know more, this was written a bit over 2 years earlier on 2 March 2021:
Defining Antifa as a legitimate organization solely focused on opposing fascism and racism is a lie.
Antifa's ultimate objective is the end of the United States as a constitutional free-market democracy.
Antifa's ultimate objective is to bring down our government and replace it with Marxism intertwined with anarchism.
That has been its goal for decades and progressives need to quit lying to the American people and tell that truth.
If you think Antifa champion Mark Bray's sanitized (sterile?) description of Antifa in today's America gives you the whole truth then you are both ignorant and an idiot.
Here is why in one telling point: Yes, the original Antifa, the street thugs of the German Communist Party, did battle the brown shirt thugs of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party. Good on them!
But Bray downplayed and often ignored the fact that Antifa's German Communist Party and the brown shirt's Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party often worked IN UNISON to destroy constitutional free-market democracy in Germany because they both hated it.
Ninety years later the methods and aims of Antifa (and Neo-Nazis) have not changed all that much, the really big change now is that the target is the United States, not Germany.
If you want the unvarnished truth about Antifa in America read Gabriel Nadales' Behind the Black Mask: My Time as an Antifa Activist.
Like Matryoshka dolls, Antifa has cells within cells within cells vaguely akin to the 1960-70s SDS and Marxist Weather Underground -- only more complex and self-actualizing.
Consider these three factors to help explain the difference:
First, the revolutionary agenda of anarchism and Marxism overlap but their beliefs often are contradictory. Put differently, Antifa Marxists use Antifa anarchists to advance their cause - not the other way around.
Second, Antifa leads a loosely organized coalition of other radical leftist American organizations (whose names most of us have never heard of).
Third, while most terrorist groups seek to maximize the use of deadly violence, Antifa hopes to win its revolutionary struggle by using the least amount of violence necessary. Antifa does not renounce violence -- it seeks to control the escalation.
How deeply members penetrate Antifa's nested inner layers depends on commitment, skill, discipline, willingness to use violence, and critically, rigorous vetting.
This allows Antifa to use its outer shells to present itself as peacefully non-aligned activists who shield the inner core from close scrutiny.
This is the dividing line between members of little "a" antifa and Big "A" Antifa.
Big "A" Antifa is comprised of violent quasi-terrorist Marxist-anarchist militants -- and let there be no doubt that the inner cell leaders control things far more than it appears. In that sense its organizational structure is more akin to al Qaeda in its first decade.
Secrecy also is paramount. Some inner cell members are overt Antifa members while others are truly clandestine operatives.
That means that the large majority of Antifa's followers have very little or no knowledge of either the existence of the inner cells or who are members.
Thank God we are finally denouncing, actively pursuing, and prosecuting violent and unlawful members of White supremacist organizations.
But things only are going to get worse if we do not go after the violent and unlawful radicals on the left as well.
And the first step is telling the American people the truth.
