Is anyone on A2K involved with Antifa?

A friend writes, “For basically the past six months or so I’ve been trying to tell my lefty friends in so many words, ‘Hey, there are a bunch of people on the Internet who are waiting for someone to tell them it’s okay to start shooting at you.’” He became concerned when a thread at the non-political firearms-enthusiasts website he regularly follows became filled with comments in all caps referring to liberals as enemies who must be shot. Developments both online and off following Donald Trump’s election have caused me to share his concern.

(...)

Then came February 1 in Berkeley and things really started getting scary.

The saga of what happened when Milo Yiannopoulos came to speak at the flagship campus of the University of California has since become foundational, not just with the alt-right but with quite nearly the entire right. Alt-right provocateur Yiannopoulos was turned back by violent protests, which culminated in the burning of a portable generator. Stuffed down the wingnut memory hole are the events that preceded the mêlée. The violence was, in fact, preceded by peaceful protests by approximately 1,500 Berkeley students, until they were waylaid by a tiny handful of off-campus “Black Bloc” and “antifa,” or anti-fascist, cadres who believe racist speech licenses violent resistance. It was also preceded, less than two weeks earlier, by the shooting of a Milo protester in Seattle, by a gunman who has yet to be charged with any crime.

The Battle of Berkeley accelerated the construction of a body of mythology: the left has escalated its resistance to Trump into literal war, so Trump supporters must be prepared to resort to violence to oppose it.

How afraid of this should you be? The most interesting answers to that question do not come from the left. They come from concerned voices on the right, who’ve been monitoring the chatter with mounting alarm, going public with pleas to liberals to still the antifa renegades before bodies begin piling up. The most convincing evidence that they have a point comes in the ensuing comment threads, where the need to prepare for armed force is taken as gospel.

I almost know your answer — "I'd love to see someone run over a bunch of protesting liberals."

That's a very ugly sentiment.
You really want live gunfire at political demonstrations?

You think it would just stop there? Next thing the thugs will come armed — it's self defense, right?

How will you feel when someone behind the wheel of a concrete truck plows into a demonstration?

What I desperately want to see is some of these violent thugs attack a conservative march, and get gunned down in self defense.

You have no idea how much I would love to see that happen.

Antifa (Anti-Facist Action) was formed originally in Germany in the 1980's, its members taking the name of the communist paramilitary groups that engaged the Nazis in street-fighting in the 1930's.

These are all long-standing principles in our law. When did they become extreme?

The device of endorsing freedom of speech and expression for all but "extreme" positions to silence reasonable political opposition has a rich history in the late 20th century...

What I desperately want to see is some of these violent thugs attack a conservative march, and get gunned down in self defense.

You have no idea how much I would love to see that happen.

I'm not surprised to read this from you. Out of a sense of decency, an empathetic, normal human being -- conservative or liberal -- would not love to see that happen. But that is not your nature. The fact that you would love to see it happen speaks volumes about you

-- all of it bad.

No wonder you're not respected by so many of the members here.

You are easily one of the most hateful members of A2K or, for that matter, one of the most hateful posters I've ever seen on the Internet.

You're the same person who once posted a color photograph of the neck of the murder victim in the Amanda Knox case -- a young woman whose throat had been slashed -- and chortled over it.

I contacted you by PM to mildly question your shameful barbarism, but you responded by saying it was necessary in your important ideological battles online!

So, I seriously doubt that you would ever have trouble with nonviolent liberals being subjected to violence at the hands of right-wing thugs.

There have been instances of individuals who have physically attacked liberals simply because they disagreed with them, but what do you care? Have you ever disagreed with that?

Your assertion that liberals are wrong about virtually everything and that conservatives are never wrong is truly absurd, and vice versa.

Sad to say, you were born several generations too late. Undoubtedly, you would have agreed with the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and probably would have been an active member.

Ordinarily, I would call you a despicable little toad who lives in his mother's basement; but that would be unfair and unjust to toads.