The Antifa street thugs who have rampaged on college campuses and cities long before Charlottesville have been embraced by the anti-Trump Democratic Resistance.
This should come as no surprise, because Democrats also embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement, from which the Antifa movement evolved, As discussed in my prior post, both are the outgrowth of the Black Bloc anarchists and Marxists, Gathering Storms And Threats to Liberty.
Embracing anarchists and Marxists didn’t help Democrats, if anything it contributed to the electoral carnage at the congressional and state level.
Democrats didn’t just embrace Occupy, they became Occupy. One of the most active and influential social media groups in the Resistance is named, you guessed it, Occupy Democrats. McCay Coppins featured Occupy Democrats in his article in The Atlantic, How the Left Lost Its Mind:
If Twitter is where liberal conspiracy theories germinate and spread among news junkies, Facebook is where anti-Republican propaganda can go wide.
Facebook pages like Occupy Democrats have millions of fans who ensure that every meme, video, and breathless blog post they publish has a good chance at virality. The content plastered across these pages includes standard-issue clickbait (“Trump Just Did Something Awful At His Golf Course”) and hyperbolic headlines (“Queen Elizabeth Just Told Trump To Go F*ck Himself And It Is Perfect”). But these feeds are also studded with straightforwardly fake news.
An analysis by BuzzFeed during the frenzied final weeks of the 2016 election found that nearly 20 percent of the stories posted by three extremely popular liberal Facebook pages—Occupy Democrats, The Other 98%, and Addicting Info—were either partly or mostly false.
The Black Bloc tactics of the Occupy and Antifa movements are now present at almost every anti-Trump protest, including Boston today where protesters against a pro-free speech gathering threw urine and rocks:
And ripped an American flag from a free speech protester:
The clashes with police in Boston looked just every other Black Bloc, Occupy and Antifa attack:
This is your 2017 Resistance and Democratic Party. Democrats openly cheered Antifa violence in Charlottesville, and compared Antifa to our soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, as we explored in Reversal of Reality. This tweet was from Hillary Clinton’s former spokesman:
This will not sell any better than Occupy sold.
The media and political elites are so out of touch that they think Trump criticizing both Neo-Nazi/White Supremacist AND Antifa violence was the greatest sin ever, the public supports tearing down Confederate statues, and are as OUTRAGED at Trump as they are.
A funny thing happened on the way to this groupthink, as Josh Kraushaar writes at National Journal:
The reaction after President Trump’s tepid response to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville was swift and severe. One broadcast network devoted its entire nightly newscast to Trump’s chaotic press conference on Tuesday. The next day, The Economist portrayed the president screaming into a bullhorn shaped as a Ku Klux Klan hood on its cover—with other news magazines following suit. Many Republican officials have denounced the president in the sharpest terms since his election. Business leaders resigned from the president’s corporate councils in protest.
But in a repeat of myriad Trump campaign controversies, voters didn’t share the same level of outrage as the elites. The latest wave of polling shows that the president’s overall job-approval rating has inched upwards since the controversy, that a sizable majority of Americans support maintaining Confederate memorials instead of tearing them down, and that a notable minority agree with the president’s use of “both sides” language during Tuesday’s press conference.
The polling is simply the latest illustration of the gaping divide between elite opinion and the views of average Americans. It’s clear many voters don’t share the same sense of alarm about Trump as political leaders and journalists.
At this point the media should stop acting surprised. They have not learned the lesson of the 2016 election.
And neither have Democrats. The Resistance has done a good job at slowing Trump down, much better than I expected. But that Resistance and the embrace of Antifa could prove toxic at the polls, because even after 8 years of Obama, people still don’t like seeing our flag burned, cops attacked, and urine used as a weapon.