by VICTORIA TAFT
The local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) just noticed that antifa is a violent bunch of thugs after black bloc-clad attackers beat yet another reporter and tossed her into a busy Portland street for daring to do her job.
After years of similar attacks on reporters, SPJ was finally jostled from its slumber by an attack on reporter Maranie Staab, from a lefty news organization called “News2Share,” for disobeying her Leftist compatriots and doing some reporting.
Antifa responded in the same way they accuse police of doing: They sprayed her with chemicals and threw her into the street.
The attack on Sunday, August 22, wasn’t the first violent act against reporters and just plain folks that day, but it was the first time the journalism organization noticed.
The antifa black-bloc mob also was seen harassing and threatening photographers from Portland’s legacy media. They sprayed an older woman who dared to watch their antics and scold them, and chased a 65-year-old man on the downtown streets. He is seen on video shooting once at an unknown attacker or attackers. Video of the other side of that gun fight showed two black-bloc outfitted antifa.
The mayor and police chief announced before Sunday’s planned rally by mostly right-of-center citizens, the location of which was changed after antifa forward-deployed personnel and weapons, and allegedly positioned snipers, that Portland should “choose love” instead. “Choosing love” meant the depleted and defunded cops wouldn’t show up to stop violence between antifa and the right-wing “United We Win” rally.
However, Portland did muster a few cops, including an undercover officer, to tend to the shooting aftermath. Dennis G. Anderson was arrested. Antifa shooters were not.
There’s a reason for that.
For years antifa has conducted a long march to silence negative or merely honest coverage of the group. Everyone not them is a “fascist” or some gradation of “racist.”
The legacy media have played along.
Official Portland has chosen sides. It has endorsed the antifa message. It accords a disproportionate amount of virtue to a group that brands itself anti-fascist, and malevolence to anyone who dares get in the way. It’s straight-up viewpoint discrimination.
Reporters “allowed” to cover them must give the group their explicit allegiance. They must be fellow travelers.
The arrangement works just fine for antifa.
During the riots of the summer of 2020, The Washington Post did a fashion spread with dressed-up black-bloc antifa members receiving glowing blurbs about how wonderful and virtuous they are. To anyone who actually knew what was going on in Portland, it was a disgusting display of gaslighting.
Antifa loved the piece, by the way.
Their violence—from lasers in the eyes of cops to IEDs, looting, fire-bombing, and chemical spraying—is nearly always soft-soaped and blamed on a small subset of the “mostly peaceful” protesters. Media assume that antifa really is anti-fascist because, why, it’s in their name and everything!
But antifa isn’t anti-fascist, it’s anti-First Amendment.
And SPJ finally noticed.
Brave, courageous ANTIFA. It takes a gang to pepper-spray a woman. That’s who the left associates with. That’s who the Democrats depend upon to carry out their violence. Only in a Democrat-run city or state can such overt suppression of rights by a gang of thugs be permitted to occur.
Here’s an idea; send brave, courageous, tough ANTIFA to Afghanistan to show the Taliban a thing or two.
The original Antifa was a paramilitary of the German Communist Party before WW2. It was involved in uprisings to try to topple the liberal government. The antifa ideology then became state ideology in East Germany. “Berlin wall” was officially called antifascist defense barrier.
Allow me to posit this.
I would argue that the effort to marginalized those who choose not to be vaccinated to be the modern day equivalent of opposition the the Nazi Party. Also included in that group would be Trump supporters. The opposition presently to any anti-American(biden regime) agenda can only be considered to be an impediment and therefore must be demonized and cancelled.
Historically it is not necessary to go back to the 1930’s Europe. We have an example from the 1960’s and 70’s with a group known as The Weathermen aka the weather underground.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=larry+grohl+weather+underground&docid=607993075186031928&mid=47413CBE51E3498EA9EF47413CBE51E3498EA9EF&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
RIP Larry Grathwohl, Weather Underground Infiltrator