Trump and his Republican enablers have long been obsessed with their fake antifa bogeyman, and it would be hilarious if it were not so pathetic. I’ll share my two favorite examples.
Last June, during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd, some MAGA paranoids in the Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven convinced themselves that antifa (a loose term for militant left-wingers who oppose fascism) had stockpiled a pallet of bricks on a quiet street, as preparation for an assault on suburbia. MAGA folks went ballistic on social media: “They are moving out of the big cities and now planning attacks on people’s houses! … If you live in Brookhaven, hopefully you believe in 2nd amendment rights!”
Turned out, the bricks had been delivered to a homeowner for a renovation project.
Also last spring, Trumpers shared a video tweet of stones encased in wire on a Los Angeles street. This was proof, said the tweet, that “antifa and professional anarchists” were “staging bricks and weapons to instigate violence.” Naturally, the Trump White House amplified the theory by circulating the tweet.
Turned out, the encased stones were part of a security barrier in front of a Los Angeles synagogue. The barrier had been there for a year.
So I couldn’t help laughing in disgust March 2, when Senate Republicans kept insinuating, during a Senate hearing on domestic terrorism, that maybe the deadly Capitol insurrection was the dastardly work of antifa provocateurs masquerading as Trump cultists. This crackpot theory has metastasized inside the GOP-MAGA bubble, and Senate Republicans fed it March 2 by suggesting that the FBI is maybe too invested in the “narrative” that right-wing extremists are mostly to blame for domestic violence.
But FBI director Christopher Wray, in the witness chair, repeatedly killed the Big Lie about antifa. When he was asked about rumors of antifa provocation in the Jan. 6 mob, he replied: “We have not, to date, seen any evidence of … people subscribing to antifa in connection with the 6th.”
Asked the same question later in the hearing, he replied: “We have not seen evidence of that.”
And he soon said it again: “We have not seen any evidence of that.”
Nevertheless, according to a new national poll, 58% of Trump voters believe that the Capitol riot was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.” Did they not see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears the events that unfolded on national TV?
What best explains this disease of self-delusion? I’ll give it a try:
They never take responsibility for anything, they can never admit they were wrong about anything, and they need a bogeyman to blame, because they’re terminally invested in victimhood.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Never mind the fact that far-right militants killed at least 136 Americans in the three years from 2017 to 2019 (according to the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist violence) – while there’s no evidence that anti-fascist activists killed anyone during those years. Never mind the fact that Trump’s 2020 announcement that he intended to name antifa as “a Terrorist Organization” was laughable because (1) there’s no evidence that antifa is an actual organization and (2) Trump had no legal authority to make that designation.
All that matters is that the violent right needs to concoct a fake scary enemy in order to sow fear, feed their paranoia, and justify their militant behavior. One classic example was what happened last spring in Klamath Falls, Oregon, when loons spread the rumor on Facebook that antifa was coming in buses financed by George Soros, “and said they’re going to burn everything and to kill white people, basically.” Hundreds of locals showed up with guns to confront the buses. They were the only ones who showed up. There were no buses. Somebody reported to the police that maybe antifa had arrived in a U-Haul that was parked in front of T.J. Maxx, or maybe it was parked outside the House of Shoes.
But to really feed the Big Lie, you need to get creative. Last spring, a white nationalist group posted a tweet masquerading as “Antifa America” and declaring “Tonight’s the night, Comrades! … We’re going to the white ‘hoods and we take what’s ours!”
Is it conceivable that FBI chief Wray can slay the lie by talking sense at a Senate hearing? Not likely. The loons need to take responsibility for their own insanity; only the loons can knock sense into their own heads.
And that has actually happened – at least once! After the non-existent antifa invasion of Klamath Falls, one armed guy, who’d shown up to livestream the battle retreated to Facebook and sheepishly told his compadres, “I know your hearts and minds were in the right place, but a lot of the info was bad.”
Hallelujah. We need a lot more guys like that.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2021
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