Is Trump Staging Antifa Attacks for Power?
How the right’s boogeyman obsession masks a chilling plan for martial law
During the 57 years I’ve been alive, I have been an avid consumer of politics for most of them, watching it almost as much as I watch football, basketball, and baseball.
But I hadn’t heard of “Antifa” until 2016, during and after trump’s first presidential campaign. Nor had I heard about “caravans” coming from south of America’s border to “invade” our country. Come to think of it, I hadn’t even heard of the diabolical billionaire George Soros, who is alleged to be paying millions of people to say they hate trump.
And yet, mention any of these, or dozens more coded, fearmongering names or issues like “CRT” or “trans” to a Republican, and they will get a frenzied, rabid look in their eyes, as if you drew an obscenity on the face of White Jesus.
These ideas have been weaponized by the right, for the right, to be deployed whenever an outrage distraction is needed or a boogeyman is required to galvanize support against a common perceived enemy.
So let’s talk about the boogeyman du jour: Antifa. It’s an interesting word, isn’t it? It almost sounds Latin, imported from Mexico or “one of them other countries that don’t speak ‘Murican,” automatically making it easier for bigots to despise.
It’s actually derived from a phrase coined by Germans, “Antifaschistische Aktion” (“anti-fascist”), who were fighting the rise of the fascist Nazi party. Some years later, member nations of the Allied Forces were united in World War II, fighting the fascist Nazi threat in Europe. You could have rightly called those forces Antifa, since they were anti-fascist.
So, is there anything wrong with being anti-fascist, opposing fascism? Not if you believe in the democratic society we’ve been nurturing all these years.
Fascism is “a far-right, authoritarian political ideology. The ideology is characterized by a centralized, dictatorial leader, aggressive nationalism, and suppression of opposition…”
That sounds a hell of a lot like what trump has been trying to enact during his second time in office. He wanted to during his first term, but there were too many guardrails in place in his own administration to prevent it.
But he and his fellow right-wing conservatives were quick to lump all people who opposed him into one group called “Antifa.” Wearing a T-shirt that says “Fuck trump”? Antifa. Posting a meme mocking his orange hue? Antifa.
This became a useful tool for the right wing to deflect from trump’s weekly, and often daily, scandals. Suddenly, this boogeyman could be blamed for all the crime and extremist violence in America, despite the fact that 71% of extremist violence has been committed by right-wing perpetrators.
The problem, however, was that they needed Antifa actors to commit these violent crimes.
Enter the do-it-yourself victims: Who can forget the Minnesota homeowner who had the terrible misfortune of being visited in the suburbs by those nasty Antifa people and had their house and garage vandalized with spray paint saying “Biden 2020” and “BLM”?
Well, it was a fakery, of course, and they might have gotten away with it, but they got greedy with the stupidity and, thinking the capital letter “A” in a circle stood for “Antifa” when it actually meant “Anarchy,” was the dead giveaway. Suddenly anarchists are advertising for Biden? LMAO.
