Thank you.
I do try to not ascribe malice upon a group for the bad acts of a small unaffiliated group.
Oh, to be sure, Antifa has, at least in the past, tried very hard to affiliate THEMSELVES with "the Left" by showing up at all manner of left-driven events.
Anarchist elements of Antifa infiltrated the Occupy protests in New York, then the beatings and vandalism began.
Of course, Occupy were almost "asking for it" by insisting "We are a leaderless movement" and of course Antifa in their cynical best, decided that they WOULD INDEED force some "leadership" upon Occupy...THEIR "leadership".
Similar things have happened to a couple of "women's march" organizing groups recently.
Teresa Shook expressed "shock and dismay" when "The Women's March" organizing group got taken over.
Suddenly Tamika Mallory was expressing admiration for Louis Farrakhan, hardly an empowerment figure for women, suddenly anti-semitism was okay in The Women's March and Jewish members had to walk on eggshells.
So finally in November 2018,
Teresa wrote that, "as Women’s March founder, I am
stepping up to bring focus back to the Unity Principles on which our movement began".
This was after Shook had written a dozen or so essays about "the importance of decentralized leadership" for two years prior.
Decentralized leadership my rosy red ass. If you decentralize your leadership, you are leaderless and if you are leaderless, you're asking for your core values to be overthrown, subsumed, and distorted to the point where your cause is no longer recognizable.
One could even argue that Antifa may have already done this very thing TO THEMSELVES, seeing as how they're no longer even fighting Nazis and fascists, but are instead using fascistic tools
to fight almost EVERYONE who doesn't agree with them.
So, should we sit around on our hands and wait for
"the left wing version of Andy Ngo" to go get THEIR head smashed in by Proud Boys or the Richard Spencer Blood and Soil contingent of white supremacists, or should we ALL, liberal and conservative alike, recognize that all of these violent fringe groups contribute absolutely nothing to rational discourse?
I understand that the temptation among some people here is too strong for them to resist but I refuse to give them what they want so badly.
I'm me, I'm Checkers, I own my own views on the issues, I own my own thoughts and I own my own voice.