{"id":5341,"date":"2017-08-29T09:22:18","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T07:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5341"},"modified":"2017-08-29T09:35:13","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T07:35:13","slug":"the-dangers-of-antifa-overreaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/5341\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dangers of Antifa Overreaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the comments beneath my most recent post, MC writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We might laugh at snowflakes, but when they are making the rules and have the power of the state to enforce their will, then we will be in trouble. We know that for them contrary opinions equal violence, so the imposition of violence on the opposition will come easily to them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would argue that the snowflakes are already<\/em> making the rules and have large swathes of the state on their side, plus the whole of the media and academia. As Streetwise Professor notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[I]n some jurisdictions, law \u201cenforcement\u201d is ceding ground to violent individuals and organizations, which will beget violence and the Weimarization of America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From what I can tell it is not so much the police that are ceding the ground but their political masters ordering them to. Quite what they think about that I don’t know.<\/p>\n

Antifa is a violent organisation for the simple reason that it has tested the waters and found they can get away with violence. Much the same is true for the BLM movement, and Antifa probably learned a lot from BLM, not so much by watching them riot but by observing the response of the authorities and noting the support the violent elements had from the media and other useful idiots on the left. At the moment Antifa has no real opposition: they can outnumber any groups that meet them head-on, and know that if they started losing badly the police would step in and bash up their opponents. But this depends on their operating only in friendly jurisdictions, where they can count on the local mayor or college administration to take their side. Provided they keep to these areas, they probably won’t do much permanent damage. Antifa are easily avoided: just don’t go to protests taking place in liberal college towns or cities with mayors who want to tear down Confederate statues to score brownie points with their liberal friends. The average American simply isn’t interested in going to these protests, so they’re not directly affected by Antifa any more than the average Brit is affected by football hooligans.<\/p>\n

What will be far more dangerous is when the movement, buoyed by their success on friendly turf, start taking on ordinary people. I suspect a quick foray into unfamiliar territory in a town where they don’t enjoy state protection would have them fleeing back to Berkeley and Brooklyn in absolute terror leaving behind multiple casualties, but unfortunately the war isn’t only being waged on the ground. Powerful campaigns are targeting providers of social media, email, web hosting, payment processing, and other services demanding they drop individuals and organisations the protesters don’t like. A combination of cowardly management and sympathy for the protesters’ views has meant the service providers have acquiesced to the demands far too readily: allegedly far-right websites have had their hosting accounts closed without warning and their domain names effectively stolen. Twitter is banning people faster than new people are joining, and PayPal has also got in on the act.<\/p>\n

As ZMan<\/a> has pointed out both on his blog and in his podcasts, people might shrug off a few fringe elements being denied access to the internet, effectively silencing them, but if ordinary people are getting caught up in it, things could get ugly. YouTube\/Google has gone into full-on panic mode over the past month or so, demonetarising tens of thousands of perfectly innocuous videos with no political content whatsoever having set their automatic filters to align nicely with Antifa’s core beliefs. Ordinary people suddenly found a handy source of income has been cut off simply because the tech giants were unable or unwilling to stand up to a gaggle of hard-left thugs. It’s only a matter of time before ordinary Americans find themselves denied access to the website or payment processing platform their livelihoods depend on, without ever knowing the reason why. If that happens, people will start throwing their support behind whichever outfit professes to be on their side and against the people responsible, regardless of how nasty and thuggish they are.<\/p>\n

I’ve long thought the authorities in Europe have demonstrated considerable irresponsibility by pandering to the sensibilities of Muslim minorities, thus luring them into a false sense of security that the state will always protect them from the native population regardless of how they behave. My fear has been that they will overreach and the much-predicted backlash will finally come to bear, and it will be devastating. The same applied to the BLM movement under Obama, and I thought there was a real danger they’d riot in the wrong city and casualties would run into the hundreds. We’re now seeing the same danger of overreach with Antifa.<\/p>\n

If Antifa start to disrupt the lives of ordinary people, either online or in the real world, they are going to make some very dangerous enemies. People will realise that tackling Antifa head-on won’t work, given the support and protection they enjoy from the state, so they’ll have to be more creative. A thousand years of guerrilla warfare has shown that if you can’t beat the main force you pick off the stragglers sending fear through the whole group. The Antifa warriors are brave when ten of them are beating the shit out of some bloke on the ground, but probably less so when walking home alone from the bus station that night. They’ve declared war and are more or less in uniform complete with a flag, so they’d not be hard to spot.<\/p>\n

If the American authorities don’t get a handle on this situation soon, we’re going to be reading stories of youths with Antifa hoodies in their backpacks being brutally beaten or worse in alleyways far from any protest. One of the remaining adults in Washington DC ought to take the Antifa leaders (and those who fund them) to a quiet room and tell them that war is unpleasant and rarely works out in favour of those who start them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the comments beneath my most recent post, MC writes: We might laugh at snowflakes, but when they are making the rules and have the power of the state to enforce their will, then we will be in trouble. We … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20,44,40],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5341"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5341"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5345,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5341\/revisions\/5345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}