Dislike Antifa? Blame the GOP. Barely even a thing until they partnered with the worst of America
I'm getting the sense that Antifa in the US up until a couple of years ago consisted of some hoodlums and some bookstores in Portland, Oregon.
I'm in the ballpark, yeah?
So take a look at this:
The first mention of Antifa in the United States in Wikipedia
That date is August 8, 2017.
And I looked at this, and I thought to myself, why is that date so peculiar? What stands out about it?
A couple of days later, the Unite the Right rally happened; August 11.
The page for the Unite the Right rally is older than the Antifa in US page, here is one such edit made, made on August 7, it describes antifa as "ANTIFA" (Yes, in all caps) and leads to the "anti-fascism" page (Telling, right?)
So here's another edit on August 7. And this is where I find it even more interesting.
Pay attention to this image, it's the template for a civil conflict.
It's weird how a bunch of anarchists nobody knows about and you think their name is an acronym with the whole ANTIFA thing I guess, but you know they will show up, and you know they will come in numbers that will be equal to that of the side they are against? Come on! There was an expectation that they would be "one side" to "both sides" of this conflict.
This template was used with "ANTIFA (Planned)" or some version of "ANTIFA" was used on and off. Most notably here, it includes a passing reference to what we would all come to know as the white nationalist terrorist car attack that murdered Heather Heyer, who was practicing her first amendment rights and was not a member of "ANTIFA".
So what's the point of highlighting this edit warring?
I'll go ahead and tell you... it's a microcosm showing that we knew, we all knew, nobody anywhere has any excuse to know that some group like antifa was not going to be the response to neo-nazis, white supremacists, these Qanon fairy believers, and so on. Antifa was one wing of the bird, what was the other wing? That was the wing driving cars into protesters, saying they couldn't wait for the "liberal genocide" and deportations of Jewish people to begin, the wing screaming "all lives matter" but shooting arrows at people, the ones talking about martial law and waiting for the "storm" to begin, making up conspiracy theories about "white genocide" and "cultural marxism" and on and on.
And it was one party giving a wink and a nudge to those people above, one party made this extremism possible, one party normalized this rhetoric, and it was one party counting on this response.
Every claim that antifa is "terrorist" or every building burned in their name; I, for one, will always see "Republican Party" right behind it.
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