Over at National Review, Oliver Traldi wrote a great exploration of the Left’s instinct to couch its denouncements of Antifa, a reflex that appears to betray some level of basic sympathy for the rioters. The article includes a concise summary of reactions from progressive writers to recent violence instigated by so-called anti-fascists:
The Washington Examiner writes
Vox is worried that “deploy[ing] violence . . . could seriously backfire”; The New Yorker is concerned Antifa is “helping Donald Trump”; and the Guardian thinks the group is “undermin[ing] the Trump resistance.” A New Republic writer whose camera and phone were “jacked” “felt sorry” for his attackers, who had “real pain in [their] eyes” and seek “to stop [white supremacist] hate.” All across the funny papers, the message is clear: If there is a Trumpist rally in your town and you see a group of people with bats just whaling on somebody, their hearts are probably in the right place — they just haven’t thought hard enough about the “bad faith” right-wing arguments, based in “false equivalencies,” that their actions will legitimate.
This is interesting, Traldi notes, given that Antifa’s violence is not limited to conservatives. Recalling a statement anti-fascists spray painted around Berkeley earlier this year that read “Liberals get the bullet too,” he correctly observed, “It is indeed a value of Antifa to punch not just Nazis, but people in red hats; not just Trump supporters, but centrists; and not just centrists, but even liberals, if their rage so dictates.”
Most liberal commentators would not explicitly argue Antifa’s ends justify its violent means, though they may agree on what those ends should be. Nevertheless, some in the media’s instinctive lurch to “[muddy] the waters” when it comes to Antifa, as Traldi put it, warrants more than a moment of self-reflection.
“It’s not about the tactics,” he wrote. “And the reporters who thought it was, who thought they were themselves being tactically clever first in supporting Antifa and then in insisting that ‘their cause is just’ — for those reporters it soon won’t be about the tactics either, but about the broken cameras and broken bones and bodies that these groups leave in their wake.”