Source: BIgstock

If you’re even barely intelligent and mildly educated, you’d realize that ideas such as “guilt by association” and “two wrongs make a right” are commonly accepted logical fallacies. One needn’t be particularly bright, nor even fully pubescent, to grasp this.

But for growing swaths of the pro-globalist—and therefore the unwittingly pro-corporate, pro-capitalist, and pro-banker—radical left, even “two wrongs make a right” is no longer sufficient. For them, it’s now “Commit the first wrong based on the theoretical possibility that a second wrong will be committed if you don’t hit first.”

Such is the “thinking” of Antifa—a portmanteau of “anti-fascist”—a loosely associated gaggle of far-left malcontents and trust-fund babies who justify their totalitarian tactics by claiming that if they don’t shut down speech and crush skulls, people whom they’ve tagged as “fascists” will do so, and no decent person would tolerate people shutting down speech and crushing skulls, which is, naturally, why they have to shut down speech and crush skulls first. Since these “Nazis”—who usually don’t identify as Nazis but are never even permitted to have that discussion—dehumanize others, they must be preemptively dehumanized and destroyed. Or so goes the “reasoning,” which is not reasoning at all but rather a cowardly, self-exculpatory dodge.

After all, those Nazis killed—what was it?—six million? Twenty million? Naturally this had nothing to do with competing economic superpowers who had massive armies—and the bankers who supplied their bombs and greased their gun barrels—fighting over land and resources, because we all know war never has anything to do with competing elites trying to seize raw power. No, it’s because their ideas were allowed to flourish.

And never mind the inconvenient truth that those who adhered to Marx’s ideas piled up far more corpses than the Nazis ever dreamed of doing. Many of those in the media and academia who endorse Antifa’s tactics are open Marxists; it’s that they’re unwilling to make the same inexorable connection between ideas and death with Marxism that they do with fascism, however they define the latter. Even though Marx’s ideas led to far more deaths than Hitler’s ideas, at least Marx’s ideas were for a good cause, and sometimes when you make an omelet you have to break 100 million eggs. It doesn’t even matter if the omelet was never made—it was the thought that counted. To a fanatic who mostly lives inside his head, it is thoughts that are either objectively good or evil, while actions can be praised or condemned solely on the thoughts that spurred them. Therefore, kicking in someone’s head isn’t seen as universally malicious and harmful—it all depends on what thoughts were inside the head being kicked.

These types will often invoke John Brown and the abolitionists’ notion of “righteous violence”—that if you’re slitting a slave owner’s throat, that’s not nearly as bad as the fact that he may have whipped one or two of his slaves. Even though throat-slitting is objectively worse than whipping, it’s always the thought that counts to these people.

In my endless sojourns through the ideological wastelands, I have yet to come across an alleged “Nazi” who says that Marxists, blacks, lesbians, trannies, Jews, Muslims, or anyone should be denied the right to speak. OK, maybe you’ll get one rabid commenter here or there—almost always an anonymous one, of course, so they may just be plants—who says such things, but I’ve seen nothing remotely equivalent to the broad brush of “hate speech” that the globalist/corporate left now wants to use to smear and silence anyone who doesn’t toe their delusional and historically disastrous line.

In my years, my weary eyes have come to conclude that there’s no one more dangerous than someone who’s blindly convinced that they are fighting for an irreproachably good cause, because such fanatics are therefore able to justify behavior that would almost universally be condemned if it were stripped of ideology and shown to be the naked, bald, sadistic, dehumanizing violence that it is.

What’s most troubling is that the media and academia are indulging this egregious double standard when it comes to Antifa. Since the group defines itself in negative terms—they don’t really claim to stand for anything so much as they’re against fascism—if one even mildly criticizes their tactics, one invites being called a “fascist.” It’s a very clever strategy for winning over the stupid.

Last week, without a droplet of irony, The New York Times published an article called “What to Wear to Smash the State.” The essay refers to Antifa as “anti-fascist activists” rather than, oh, “communists” or “anarchists” or “violent and emotionally stunted masked street thugs who are entirely intolerant of opposing ideas.” And, yes, the article is roughly as dumb as its title—it’s a largely superficial guide to looking sharp when you take to the streets to punch “Nazis.” It approvingly mentions an October article called “The Femme’s Guide to Riot Fashion.”

The Times article also refers to Mark Bray’s recent book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook as “incisive.” Bray—who doesn’t look quite ready or able for street battle, although these types rarely do—is a lecturer at Dartmouth and a former organizer of the insipid Occupy Wall Street fiasco. In his book, Bray argues that it’s morally acceptable that Antifa is “turning over the tables” at alleged “fascist” meetings—which in most cases aren’t even remotely “fascist”—and “giving them a good pummeling.”

Naturally, Bray was roundly condemned for endorsing political violence…right?

Nah.

The New Yorker called his book “focused and persuasive.” The Washington Post called it “enlightening” and “relevant,” applauding its “justification for stifling speech and clobbering white supremacists.” The San Francisco Chronicle called it “incisive and cohesive.” The Los Angeles Review of Books deemed it “commendable” and praised Bray’s “well-reasoned defense of controversial tactics.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gullibly slurped up Bray’s shallow propaganda and dubbed Antifa a “misunderstood group looking to keep the genocidal past from repeating.”