The tears of antifa

While the President was being sort of presidential, trying to deal with the hurricane and flood damage down in Texas -- and it looks like he'll get another chance to do this sort of thing shortly -- last week was a bad one for the antifa movement. Not only did the mainstream media portray them as the aggressors in the latest round of violence in Berkeley, but the host of The Daily Show mocked them as a "vegan ISIS." There was definitely enough going on for antifa and their apologists to throw shit fits in social media, basically accusing anyone who criticized them of being soft on Nazism. They're accusing the media of playing the moral-equivalence game, as if anyone was saying that whatever ideology antifa espouses is morally equivalent to Nazism, white supremacy or fa. With fanatics like these, it's hard to tell whether they're missing the point of most recent criticism, or whether they simply don't give a damn what anyone outside their safe zone thinks. The reason it's hard to tell is that some of them probably believe that merely espousing white supremacist, white nationalist or even "white identitarian" views is a form of violence to which violence is an appropriate response. Most people won't go that far. They may find such views grossly offensive, but they can hardly be expected to equate them with a physical assault, unless you count the queasy gut feelings white supremacy may induce in some audiences. The antifa narrative is that the people they go up against actively advocate mass murder, but in practice they seem to go after just about anyone in a MAGA hat. They may assume that a person so topped has murder in his heart, but you know what happens when they assume? They make an ass out of themselves, and more and more people are noticing. Antifa is an embarrassment to anti-Trump opinion as a whole. By perpetuating the assumption that every Trump supporter is a white supremacist, antifa also perpetuates a stereotype of anti-Trump opinion, namely that it's founded on nothing but the assumption that Trump and his supporters are white supremacists. What does antifa have to offer as a positive, unifying agenda around which an effective anti-Trump coalition can rally? Nothing, really. Their entire existence seems founded on a belief that any threat to equality or social justice can simply be beaten into submission. That would be a puerile view of society, and just the one you'd infer from the their bullying tantrums. Sadly, their "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude is all too typically American at this point in history.