Well, here’s a conundrum. What to do about Antifa?

We knit the fabric of our societies around our symbols, those we revere and those we deplore. In America, we revere the flag (the real one), the Constitution, the Statue of Liberty, mom, apple pie, baseball, Chevrolet, etc. So far so good. On the deplorable side, we have Nazis, KKK, dictators, police states, etc. In effect, they are the negative side of our identity – that which we as America could never be. But then, somehow, a small subset of society (any society) will inevitably embrace the symbols they are supposed to deplore, and work against the ideals they were raised to respect and live by. Why do they do that? I’d answer that question with another question: Why are bullies mean when we all agree it’s better to be nice?

Ah, but nice to whom?

Like Frank Burns famously said  – “It’s nice to be nice to the nice.” But what about the not nice? What about those who embrace the symbols of hate this nation was designed to deplore – the swastika, the confederate flag, the flaming torch of the rabble rouser, the KKK’s white hoods and cryptic logos?

What about the misfits?

Because lest anyone forget, these are misfits. They are the human dregs left over after society absorbs the useful people. These are human failures, who know they are failures. But they don’t know why, because another personality trait they share is a lack of curiosity regarding how they came to occupy their place in the world – as society’s rejects. Instead, they have comforting “lore”, which in this case translates to “lies”, since the lore they celebrate is phony. You know the lore I speak of – it has to do with Northern aggression, the “Lost Cause”, state’s rights, the inherent dignity of white men (as opposed to…other men?), the truculence of the “lazy” entitled classes who have been elevated above white people by America-hating leftists (translation: minorities, immigrants, single mothers). According to the tenets of our white supremacist citizens’ “social clubs”, these interloping “others” are part of a globalist cabal (WTO/EMF/UN/Media/Universities) that seeks to destroy America’s identity by marginalizing white people while the fruits of white men’s labor (i.e. the country itself) is handed off to waves of dark-skinned immigrants and the “undeserving” poor.

Of course, one easy way to debunk that theory is to look around you. Look at the white people. See them trodden underfoot by minorities? Losing their privileged place in society? Harassed by the authorities? Demonized by politicians? Me neither.  This is America – white people still run everything, and everything is run largely for the benefit of white people. Don’t believe me? Try this exercise: think of all the white people you know of in positions of power – the president, vice president, the cabinet, the corporate billionaires, everyone save one in the Senate, all leaders in Congress, the Supreme Court (save two), vast majority of governors, mayors, chiefs of police, state legislators. Now, think of all the minority people you know of in positions of power. (Hint: Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor at SCOTUS and Cory Booker in the Senate.)

But never mind, these misfits are not into truth or objective reality – they are into themselves and their fake dogma. They feel they are society’s “castoffs”, and ironically, they’re right. Of course, they are not castoffs because they’re white. They’re castoffs because they’re willfully ignorant racists who don’t respect their fellow citizens’ rights or, for that matter, the rule of law. They proved that last point in Charlottesville.

Charlottesville – where the shit literally hit the fan. Now that shit’s all over the country, feeling emboldened, like it doesn’t stink. But these people are, once again, just the dregs, the misfits, the ones society has no real use for. They don’t have nice things, or a future to look forward to, or the imagination to devise a future they can look forward to. So they sit, and they stew, and then they march, insisting that we all owe them something and that we’re somehow trying to “replace” them.

And why do they march? Do they want to start a “dialogue” as the pamphlets say? Do they want to exercise their First Amendment rights? You know, it doesn’t matter. Because once they get there, and start the violence, it’s all revealed as a scam, an excuse to act out their adopted role as society’s ignorant rejects bent on violence against people who don’t look like them. Second mental exercise:  imagine a group of these people arriving at the town square – unarmed and torch-free – standing together peacefully while listening to a speech, then quietly dispersing afterwards. Hard to do, isn’t it? Because although that’s what they say they want, it almost never happens that way, and that’s by design.

The police – where were they in Charlotte? They were nowhere to be seen for most of the day, which I suppose is understandable since the violent racists who marched into town and started beating everyone up were protected by heavily armed militia men, at least one of whom fired a gun at protesters as police looked on and did nothing (it’s on film). But if that is to be the police formula – violent armed white supremacists are to be left alone to attack peaceful citizens and even fire upon them while peaceful non-white protesters (BLM, Standing Rock, anti-Trumpers, etc.) are to be violently assaulted – then we are going to need another way to handle these violent racists when they descend on our cities.

That’s the very important “if” – the vast majority of us are, of course, regular people who just want to get along with our lives, who have no interest in fringe politics and street drama. We have jobs and kids and mortgages. We prefer the citizen-paid police and other civil law enforcement to work on our behalf to limit the violence that lawless militias seek to inflict on their perceived domestic enemies (i.e. everyone who isn’t white and a Nazi), as well as those violent types on the opposite political spectrum who are so eager to, as the kids say these days, “punch a Nazi.”

But that “if” hangs there, insistently, the “if” of Charlottesville, where innocent bystanders and peaceful protesters were saved from beatings or murder at the hands of Nazi scum NOT by police, but by the black-clad Antifa, or Anti-fascists, who came in great numbers to, they hoped, silence the hate speech and meet the violence on offer by the alt-right.

They weren’t there to ask nicely or play defense. They were there to meet the threat head-on. And they did. And in this case – because law enforcement opted out – it’s a good thing they did.

But then this week in Berkeley a group of  five Antifa attacked a man who was offering no violence or, as far as I can tell, even hate speech. A journalist had to intervene to save him (the journalist was also beaten). So that’s a bad thing they did.

And that’s the rub – outside the governance of law, and acting in anonymity, no group can be trusted to act within the confines of law and in the interests of the greater civil society. They act in their own interest. And we don’t really know what that is. They may not either.

Antifa is not new, they are a loose-knit group of communists and anti-globalists with few visible leaders and no set philosophy apart from a zero-tolerance policy regarding white supremacists and fascists of all stripes. They do not claim to be non-violent, and many are armed.

But who Antifa “is” is less important than why they exist. They are not a proactive grievance group like our domestic Nazis. They don’t really have a message – they are the reaction to the message. They might be likened to the antibodies of the country, seemingly philosophically programmed to attack the Nazi virus before it spreads. And as long as the White House, Jeff Sessions, and law enforcement in general are determined to play footsie with white nationalists and give them some rope (as it were) in the form of  a wink-wink plea to the legitimacy of “both sides” or a stand down approach to armed Nazi/KKK rallies, it appears to me Antifa is necessary for the moment. I won’t say I welcome them – I welcome none of this nonsense. But if Antifa is a reckless endeavor – and it is – it would be much worse to nurture a pollyannaish pacifist ideal as the violence grows. To allow the current vacuum of moral authority to provide an opening for these loosely allied white nationalist groups to metastasize into a unified, out-of-control cancer causing the mutation and eventual destruction of our republic – of its ideals – that would be the real tragedy. To be standing amidst the wanton destruction of our own American Kristallnacht, pretending to wonder what went wrong, would be the unforgivable choice.

Both of these groups are fringe groups, and both represent a very small portion of society. But as we’ve seen, the smallest amount of encouragement from the White House/alt-right press sends ugly white nationalists into a state of dreamy delirium, and they act as if they are on the cusp of sparking the “race war” their hero attempted to jump-start by murdering those nine Black people in South Carolina as they prayed to a Christian god.  Each time they get a subtle nod or wink  from the president, or Stephen Miller, or Breitbart, it feels as if the nation’s leadership is secretly in league with the nation’s most vile enemies. It’s a terrible feeling. Whether or not it’s true, the important thing is that the misfits believe it to be true. They talk of the day being “closer” every time they are able to rally openly, to spread hatred and intimidation without resistance.

Antifa provides the resistance that law enforcement seems unwilling – at the moment – to provide. They, at least, seem to understand that you shut down these movements early. You don’t let them get a foothold or get normalized into the mainstream by the continued, unchallenged presence of their vile symbols of fascist nostalgia. You insist they are unacceptable. You do not back down from that.

As we’ve seen in the Charlottesville aftermath, many would-be Nazis are actually punk kids bored with their privilege. The tears flow pretty easily once they are separated from the group, brought into the light and relieved of their tiki torches. If law enforcement can break out the water cannons, rubber bullets, shock devices, mace grenades, etc., and bring all of that to the peaceful Native Americans protesting the rape of their land by big oil – and even bring in law enforcement from other states to get that job done – they should be able to handle a few misfit Nazis and their mentally unbalanced militia friends.

Until they do, we have Antifa. And until they do, we deserve Antifa.