Source: BIgstock

In another pro-Antifa puff piece in The New York Times, the objectively hideous Todd Gitlin quotes an anonymous self-described anarchist who brags about being violent in Charlottesville last August:

I fought them with the most persuasive instruments at hand, the way both my grandfathers did. I was maced, punched, kicked, and beaten with sticks, but I gave as good as I got, and usually better.

Perhaps unwittingly—he doesn’t seem very witty—Gitlin justifies Donald Trump’s roundly condemned comment that there was violence “on both sides” in Charlottesville. But the giant pillar of cognitive dissonance that we’re dealing with here is that if the violence is for a good cause, it’s not really violence. It’s like trying to distinguish between “good AIDS” and “bad AIDS.” As the thinking goes, since Antifa are the good guys, their abject dehumanization of anyone they smear as a “Nazi” is humanistic, whereas their gleeful violence isn’t really violence at all, since it prevents future violence. They are truly that full of shit.

The original Antifa was known as Antifaschistische Aktion and were formed in Berlin in the early 1930s by the German Communist Party. They claimed to be merely a reaction against German fascists, blithely sidestepping the fact that German fascists were a reaction to the German Bolshevists who’d been cracking heads in the streets ever since World War I ended. Modern Antifa members often wave the same flag—or a near-identical iteration—as the original German anti-fascist street thugs did.

Antifa’s American roots are intriguing, seeing as they involve organized crime. In the 1930s, when the German American Bund were holding fascist rallies across the US, perhaps the main person who nipped them in the bud was none other than Meyer Lansky, AKA “The Mob’s Accountant” and in many eyes the most powerful organized-crime figure in American history. Lansky claimed that influential rabbis and even an unnamed judge encouraged him and his criminal cohorts to shut down fascist rallies in ways almost identical to how Antifa operates today:

We got there in the evening and found several hundred people dressed in their brown shirts. The stage was decorated with a swastika and pictures of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action….We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out the windows. There were fistfights all over the place. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up, and some of them were out of action for months. We wanted to teach them a lesson. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.

Wouldn’t it have been more productive to argue why those “insults” were inaccurate?

Despite what Antifa and their countless enablers are insisting, speech is never the same thing as violence.

Anyone who says some things should never be discussed is someone who’d lose the argument if those things were discussed.

On top of that, anyone who endorses violence in order to shut down speech based on the flimsy premise that certain forms of speech always lead to violence is a lying sack of shit just squirming for an excuse to justify their own sadistic impulses.

I’m predisposed to trust someone who merely admits they enjoy being violent far more than someone who feels the wormy need to justify it behind the shield of a “good cause.” Because while both types are violent, the latter is also a liar.

If there are any who are wicked among us, it is certainly the self-righteous. I’d recommend hitting them, but it’d only make them feel more self-righteous.