Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  Cato also asked respondents whether they thought it was morally permissible to punch someone for simply being a Nazi. Most people—68 percent—said no. The breakdown didn’t matter much here; a majority of Republicans and Democrats, white people and minority groups, and young Americans and older Americans all opposed Nazi punching.

  Just one subgroup offered dissent. Some 51 percent of strong liberals, or leftists, said it was morally permissible to punch a Nazi. With this fact in mind, occurrences of far-left violence seem less surprising.

  Much Ado About Antifa

  Columbia University provides another example of the self-defeating spectacle that arises when young activists succumb to their new censorious impulses. I visited the campus in October 2017, when Columbia’s College Republicans (CUCR) had invited Mike Cernovich, a far-right blogger with ties to the alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to give a presentation to students on how the traditional media is failing in the age of Trump.

  Cernovich’s views fall well outside mainstream conservatism, and indeed, many on the right would deny that the notorious pro-Trump troll deserves a seat at any legitimate table. When Fox News invited Cernovich to come on its program Red Eye, conservative writers Ben Shapiro and Ben Howe were apoplectic.29 (Shapiro: “Granting any legitimacy to a fringe kook like Mike Cernovich … is close to insane.” Howe: “They’re giving this motherfucker legitimacy? Oh my God!”) But CUCR leader Aristotle “Ari” Boosalis, citing free speech and a need for wider ideological diversity on campus, decided to host Cernovich.

  It’s perfectly legitimate to question the wisdom of extending a platform to such a figure; like Shapiro and Howe, I would have recommended ignoring him entirely. That was not the approach taken by Columbia’s leftist activists, who posted flyers calling out all the board members of CUCR by name and picture. This practice—revealing private information, such as names, phone numbers, and addresses—is called “doxing,” and it has become a staple of both far-right and far-left irritants looking to punish members of the other side. In this case, the doxing was the work of NYC Antifascist Action, a representative antifa group. Fearing for his safety, Boosalis filed a harassment complaint with Columbia.

  That might strike readers as an overreaction; it did to me, until the day of the event. Cernovich’s talk occurred in the basement of Lerner Hall, a building awash in purple concert lights for domestic assault awareness. I arrived early and was the first person to enter the staging area. Only ticketed attendees were allowed entrance, which meant that the event itself was largely civil. A handful of determined activists had been granted access, and though they occasionally heckled—when Cernovich asked the audience if anyone knew a victim of suicide, a voice rang out, “You should try it sometime!”—Cernovich was able to deliver his remarks.

  Said remarks mostly consisted of recycled complaints against the mainstream media. It was an unpersuasive shtick. While mainstream media outlets frequently make mistakes, the New York Times and Washington Post are inarguably more reliable stewards of objective reporting than The Alex Jones Show, a program that has advanced the idea that the moon landing was faked, the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11, and the government puts chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay (sad to say, I’m not making this up). As an occasional cohost of The Alex Jones Show, Cernovich is in no position to complain about inaccuracy in journalism.

  Nor did the CUCR group acquit themselves well. I overheard one member ask a reporter for the campus paper to make sure her write-up of the event included Cernovich’s advice to men about how to imbue their semen with magical properties. (Cernovich purports to be a sex and relationships expert, among other things.)

  I left the event thoroughly repulsed by Cernovich. Any fair-minded person would have felt the same.

  And then I stepped outside, into the cold night air. At least a hundred protesters had gathered—not just to denounce Cernovich but to denounce free speech, capitalism, Zionism, and “whiteness” (as in white people). Intersectionality, of course, requires all good people to oppose each of these things.

  “Whiteness is a bomb that incinerates!” intoned one of the protest leaders, a black male wearing a hoodie. His audience then parroted the statement back at him. “And this shit burns!” he continued. This was also repeated by the audience.

  Another protest leader, a female student of color, took the mic. “Columbia is the most conservative institution in the fucking United States!” she said. (Fact check: Columbia University faculty and staff overwhelmingly donate to liberal rather than conservative politicians.) She accused the university of emboldening white supremacy and vowed to “scam Columbia” by refusing to internalize the things she was learning as a student. She pledged to return to her community after college and teach “alt-history” rather than “learned history.” (A year of tuition at Columbia College costs about $56,000, raising the question of who is scamming whom under this scenario.)

  Other students chanted “No justice, no peace” and “If we don’t get it, shut them down” (“it” being justice). I saw signs reading “End fascism” and “End apartheid at Columbia,” referring to the system of explicit racial segregation that existed in South Africa until 1991. (Another sign, which criticized Cernovich for being against pedophilia, was actually a hoax perpetrated by the alt-right; the sign-maker’s intention was to frame antifa as being pro-pedophilia.)

  I saw antifa attack a Trump supporter, forcing him to beat a hasty retreat. As he stepped beyond the gate separating the campus from the rest of New York City, an antifa activist snatched the man’s cellphone and ran off with it. Toni Airaksinen, a Columbia student and writer for the conservative student publication Campus Reform, had a concerning run-in with protesters. She told me several people identified her as a member of a right-of-center news media group and yelled “Follow her” and even “Attack her.” “They then started advancing towards me,” Airaksinen told me. “I backed away and asked a security guard about what I should do, who shrugged me off.”

  In his book about antifa, Bray traces their current tactics to the Autonomen, a 1970s West German militant group consisting of antifascists, feminists, antinuclear groups, and squatters’ rights activists. They “dressed in black,” writes Bray, “with their faces covered by motorcycle helmets, balaclavas, or other masks to create a uniform, anonymous mass of revolutionaries prepared to carry out militant actions, sometimes involving weapons such as flagpoles, clubs, projectiles, and Molotov cocktails.”

  But even Bray notes, “Some have argued, however, that the ‘incessant invocation’ of the specter of fascism by the Left diluted its rhetorical value.” He later provides an example of the kind of thing one imagines could have had such an effect: in November 1989, just days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an antifa activist, Cornelia Wessmann, died after she was hit by a car while fleeing from riot police in Göttingen, Germany. “In retaliation, her comrades in thirty cities unleashed a coordinated wave of targeted property destruction against department stores, banks, and government buildings—appendages of the capitalist state responsible for her death in their eyes,” wrote Bray.

  Waves of “targeted property destruction” seem unlikely to convince the moderate masses that the anti-fascists are the good guys. But it is the position of antifa that fascism is on the verge of its ultimate triumph—or is already triumphant, given Trump’s ascendance to the White House—and so the time for half-measures has long since passed.

  Nowhere is this strategy more evident than in Berkeley (one of the main hubs of antifa activity, alongside Portland, Oregon), where antifa protesters—many, though not all of them, young people—routinely assault attendees at right-leaning rallies. The violent predilections of antifa were most obvious during the last weeks of the summer of 2017, when a Portland-based political group called Patriot Prayer attempted to hold a series of “pro–free speech” and “anti-Marxism” rallies in the San Francisco Bay area. Patriot Prayer is a difficult group to classify; many would call i
t far-right, alt-right, or at the very least pro-Trump, though its founder and leader, Joey Gibson, describes himself as a defender of liberty who makes efforts to exclude extremists and white nationalists from his movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center defines “hate group” broadly when it comes to the right, but it lists neither Gibson nor Patriot Prayer as an advocate of hate. The SPLC even noted in an article that Gibson denounced white nationalists and neo-Nazis at one of his events.

  Careful distinctions, though, are not a hallmark of antifa counterprotests. The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash reported in person on the mayhem that erupted during the weekend of August 27. He titled his piece “A Beating in Berkeley” and described the events as “the Crips vs. the Bloods for white people.”30 The rallies were formally canceled due to threats of violence from antifa, but Gibson and his friends made a public showing anyway at the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park—and the left was there, waiting for them.

  “A hundred or so masked-up antifa ninjas and affiliated protesters seem to simultaneously turn,” wrote Labash. “It looks like we’ve interrupted al Qaeda tryouts.”

  Someone smacked Gibson in the face. Then another black-clad antifa member cracked a flagpole over his head. He was pepper-sprayed by the mob at least five times, by his count. Eventually the police intervened—to arrest Gibson and his bodyguard. The police later claimed this was done for their own protection, to get them out of the area; Gibson and his bodyguard were let go without being charged. Labash confronted some of the antifa activists and asked whether the beating of Gibson and his friends was justified. The answer, according to Labash, was “Hell yeah.”

  “I ask them to cite anything Joey has said that offends them, as though being offended justifies this,” wrote Labash. “A coward in a black mask says: ‘They’re f—ing Nazis. There’s nothing they have to say to offend us.’”

  Gibson later vented his frustration during an appearance on Fox News. “We just want to be able to exist in America, we want to be able to exist in the middle of a public park in Berkeley,” he said.

  But antifa does not believe coexistence with a pro-free-speech and anti-Marxist group is desirable. Either you are part of the revolution or you are an enemy of it.

  I witnessed this firsthand when I came to Berkeley two weeks later, for the second Yiannopoulos event. Having triumphed utterly in their goal to shut down the planned speaking series, antifa took to the streets to harass whichever fans of Yiannopoulos remained. This time the police were prepared: dozens of them followed the demonstrators and counterdemonstrators wherever they went, stepping in whenever violence broke out between the two groups. I saw one antifa protester tackled and arrested by police for taking a swing at a Milo fan. Many alt-right attendees were just as eager for a scuffle, proving the symbiotic nature of the leftist and rightist versions of illiberalism.

  I made my way through the throngs of protesters, choosing to approach a young man wearing a black bandana and sunglasses over his face. I identified myself as a journalist and asked him what he was hoping to accomplish by participating in the protest. “We don’t talk to the press,” he said, pushing past me. I heard this over and over again; there was no interest in a discussion. The next day, I returned to campus just as an antifa-aligned group occupied the steps of a campus building, led an impromptu chant, and distributed literature. I approached them for comment and was once again rebuffed.

  In a guest post recapping the scene at Berkeley for It’s Going Down, an anarchist news website that routinely runs content written by and for an antifa audience, an anonymous contributor described free speech as “a concept that has never truly protected meaningful dissent.” The title of the article was “Behind Every Liberal, a Fascist.” “As anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and autonomous individuals, we are all we got, and we will continue to fight the fascist creep in all its forms, on and off campus, through protest, disruption and community support and self defense,” wrote the author.31

  Antifa is well aware that this is an anti-liberal idea. But liberalism—by which we mean a representative democracy where all ideas are permitted and the best ones prevail—has failed to contain fascism, in their view.

  “At what point do you say enough is enough,” said Bray during an appearance on Democracy Now!, “and give up on the liberal notion that what we need to do is essentially create some sort of regime of rights that allow neo-Nazis and their victims to co-exist, quote, ‘peacefully’? And recognize that the neo-Nazis don’t want that, and that also, the antifascists are right in not looking at it through that liberal lens, but rather seeing fascism not as an opinion that needs to be responded to respectfully but as an enemy to humanity that needs to be stopped by any means necessary?”

  The chaos at Berkeley is as good an argument as any against this position. Antifa purports to oppose the kind of police militarization that is common to fascist societies. “The police serve as an occupying force,” claims another anonymously written article on It’s Going Down.32 But when I came to Berkeley, I saw a city and a university that were teeming with law enforcement personnel because of antifa’s threats of violence. Perhaps a hundred police patrolled the streets, maintaining order and ensuring that neither the far left nor the far right could kill anyone.

  There are historical examples as well. The Battle of Cable Street, an anti-fascist riot in the East End of London in 1936, is widely but incorrectly remembered as a successful mass movement against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Mosley attempted to march with thousands of his “blackshirts” but was prevented from doing so by twenty thousand anti-fascist counterdemonstrators, some of whom attacked the police as cops attempted to clear the streets for Mosley’s march. In the end, Mosley gave up and sent his supporters home.

  Antifa remembers the event fondly. Bray wrote that the Battle of Cable Street successfully mobilized “broader society to confront fascists” and “became a powerful model for collective anti-fascist resistance that has inspired many to this day.” That’s one view. Bray, to his credit, makes mention of the other: as historian Daniel Tilles persuasively argued in The Myth of Cable Street, Mosley’s fascist party “was able to convert defeat on the day into longer-term success and to justify a further radicalisation of its anti-Jewish campaign.” It is estimated that the fascists gained an additional two thousand members—which is quite a figure, considering that the party was only three thousand strong before Cable Street. According to Tilles, the fascists “thrived off the publicity that violent opposition produced. The national media, under pressure from the government, largely avoided reporting on Fascist activity other than when disorder occurred.”33

  Similarly, Spencer’s alt-right movement appears to have grown—in numbers and attention paid to it, if not in actual influence—at the same time it has become fashionable to punch Spencer himself on sight. The historical parallel is obvious: without the violence of antifa, Spencer, like Mosley before him, would find it much more difficult to recruit readers, fans, and followers.

  It would not seem to be the case, then, that antifa is preventing fascism. Rather, it appears Nixon may have been right all those years ago when he welcomed far-left violence as a boon to his administration: antifa creates the conditions that spread the thing it claims to oppose. Yiannopoulos, Spencer, and Cernovich are loathsome—and we will further explore the alt-right’s particular brand of loathsomeness in Chapter Eight—but it’s harder to fixate on their ugliness when the people who protest them are setting cars on fire, smashing windows, and throwing punches.

  One more example. In August 2018, a man named Paul Welch attended a Patriot Prayer event as a counterprotester. Welch, a liberal who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and Hillary Clinton in the general election, brought an American flag with him in an attempt to reclaim the symbol from the far-right group.

  Antifa showed up as well. Two masked agitators spotted Welch’s flag, explained to him that it was a “fascist symbol,” and dem
anded that he hand it over. When he refused, antifa attacked him. One of the agitators begun to beat him with a metal rod, finally striking him in the head. Welch slumped to the ground—he would need four staples to repair the three-inch head wound.

  Welch wasn’t a fascist by any stretch of the imagination. But antifa both endorses violence and defines fascism very, very broadly. If you’re not with them, you’re against them—and people who are against them don’t have rights, in their view. It’s easy to see how this is a recipe for total disaster.

  Thankfully, many in the liberal coalition are increasingly becoming aware that sacrificing norms of free speech is a terrible strategy for the anti-Trump resistance, as it plays directly into the forty-fifth president’s persecution narrative. Barack Obama himself has repeatedly warned liberals not to shut down people with whom they disagree. In a July 2018 speech, the former president criticized the left for doing just that.

  “You can’t [change minds] if you just out of hand disregard what your opponent has to say from the start,” said Obama. “And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you because they are white or they are male, somehow there is no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”34