By Roger L. Simon
Don’t think we’re having a nervous breakdown? When can you remember two New York corporate attorneys tossing a Molotov cocktail into a cop car?
Or how about the city executives of Santa Monica, warned via social media that their many trendy shops and upscale restaurants were about to be looted en masse the day after similar actions had already occurred, doing nothing as millions, perhaps billions, of damage was done to one of the wealthiest parts of our country?
That pattern was repeated throughout the land in areas rich and poor as liberal mayors and governors demonstrated what I suppose we could call their “liberalism.”
How far would it go? Would they allow their daughters to be absconded for the good of the cause? It’s hard to know because several of those daughters had already joined Antifa.
As for the media, they’re doing their best to deny what’s happening and blaming Trump when they can’t. What else is new?
The mysteries in all this are who’s behind it and where will it end?
The latter was ironically answered for us by the Ancient Romans who at some point must have stomped their sandals on the ground and declared regarding civilizations that had come before, “Non fiunt.” “It can’t happen here,” in Latin. (I’ll leave it there.)
Police Killings
As for who’s behind it, of course, it’s caused superficially by the murder of George Floyd—whether by asphyxiation or a combination of what we have recently learned are called co-morbidities—is ultimately irrelevant.
But his death is what the shrinks term the “presenting complaint” because the real causes are more complex and much deeper.
Besides, there’s a Big Lie attached to Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police and that lie—call me a racist, if you will—is that such things are a common occurrence. They decidedly are not, as Jason Riley, the African American columnist for the Wall Street Journal, reminded us the other night. In fact, it’s the reverse. It’s quite rare and increasingly so. The facts bear him out.
Last July, Heather Mac Donald wrote in “There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings”:
“A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. … In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.”
Oh, no. That can’t be—except, as anyone paying attention knows, for the last decade at least police have spent more time in sensitivity training than in learning how to shoot. “Community Policing” has been the watchword of the day since 1994 (actually considerably before) when the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act established the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).
Perhaps the Minneapolis force needs a refresher course but basically they were victims of the old rotten apples syndrome that, in the grand scheme of things, is always hard to avoid anywhere, although we should try.
Also, as most people interested know, black on black killings outnumber police (black, white, or Hispanic) on black killings somewhere in the vicinity of ten to one. If you’re really interested in the welfare of our black population, why aren’t you paying more attention to that? (There apparently is little profit in it, just as there appears to be little profit in reversing the precipitous decline in the black family.)
Communist Groups
Meanwhile, neat, construction-size stacks of fresh bricks that could only have been expensively trucked in are appearing on street corners and in alleys everywhere close to protest sites, ready to be utilized as darkness falls. (Some disturbing examples are currently available on ZeroHedge.) Who’s paying for that? Is it Antifa? Who’s financing Antifa?
Also available at the same ZeroHedge link is a fascinating video shot by a black woman near LA’s Farmers Market where two white and Asian seeming Antifa operatives are graffitiing “BLM” (Black Lives Matter) on a Starbucks. The black woman tells them they are actually hurting black people by their actions when the Antifa pair start to tell her what’s best for black people. Go figure. Or better, go Marxist.
According to a friend who has been researching a book on the subject, there are several dozen branches of Antifa in this country at various levels of the clandestine. They claim to be anarchist but they work behind the scenes with By Any Means Necessary or BAMN (more or less Trotskyite), Refuse Fascism (formed out of the remnants of the Revolutionary Communist Party and with a Maoist tilt) and a surprising number of other groups of similar ilk, including the Revolutionary Student Front (Austin) and the Democratic Socialists of America.
The latter, once genuinely democratic under its founder Michael Harrington, is, my friend told me, going progressively hardline and anti-democratic (as Antifa has been for a long time) and now has as many as two hundred thousand members.
In all, the numbers for Antifa and Co. on the left completely dwarf those for the dwindling white supremacists, although that’s news to Governor Walz of Minnesota who thinks, or did anyway until he was disabused, that such supremacists are responsible for the violence in his city. (Undoubtedly he wishes they were.)
He and a host of others should get a clue before it’s too late. Maybe it already is.
And it’s just not the reactionary liberals of our culture who need to wise up fast. Many on the right got on their high horse when Trump said he was going to declare Antifa a domestic terror organization, saying that was legally impossible. That was only for foreign groups like ISIS.
Besides the fact that Antifa is global and started in Europe, in this instance at least, so what? Trump’s declaration was a way of dramatizing the imperative that they must be stopped. And indeed they must. His critics vitiated this in their pomposity.
As for where the group gets its money, there are undoubtedly many cutouts. But I have two suggestions to offer up: George Soros and the Chinese Communist Party. There are probably others.
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Roger L. Simon is an American novelist and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. He was formerly CEO of PJ Media and is now its CEO Emeritus. He is the author of eleven novels, including the Moses Wine detective series, seven produced screenplays and two non-fiction books. He has served as president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, and was on the faculty of the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute.
His many journalistic articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Commentary, Real Clear Politics and City Journal, among others. Mr. Simon has also been a Hoover Institute Media Fellow. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama.
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