The Dawn of the Antifa War
Who wins the match between the Black Bloc and the Bad Orange Man?
We get some great comments on our Eurabiamania posts. But I wasn’t expecting our sit-down with
to result in one of the best analyses of Antifa I’ve seen to date. gets a lifetime Notes from the End of Time subscription for his contribution. Anybody else who wants a lifetime subscription is free to join my comments section and post thought-provoking commentary. Feel free to comment even if you don’t want to subscribe.As OM explains it:
If we take the parallel you all used (al Qaeda), the structure is a handful of leaders, a layer of lieutenants, a corps of followers, a mass of direct material supporters, and a significant population of indirect material and ideological supporters. I think this maps fairly well to the Antifa meta network, and I’m using that term specifically because while there is no known and official “National Antifa Organization,” there are scores of geographically tethered “chapters” that proudly claim the “Antifa” moniker.
Excellent analysis. All sophistry about “There’s no such thing as Antifa” aside, there’s no official Antifa pinky swear and no Antifa membership card. There are, however, people with shared ideals who wear Antifa images, chant Antifa slogans, and identify themselves as Antifa.
“Antifa” is a lot like a word I covered earlier (and turned into a YouTube podcast), “Whiteness.” It means a lot of things, and it means nothing at all. You can be Antifa by buying a T-shirt or burning a building. Both serve the movement’s purposes. We’ve seen how hard entertainment and social media companies have tried (voluntarily or under duress) to create the illusion of an overwhelming liberal consensus.
We’re pack primates, and most of us want to follow our pack. But we want to do so safely. Most of the people who identify with Antifa are doing so to impress their friends and prove themselves good people who want to bash the fash. They have no intention of participating in violence if there’s an actual risk of getting seriously injured or imprisoned. Many will leave their Antifa past behind them as soon as they graduate from college or get a job where a criminal record might be a problem.
The greatest danger from these people is that they draw others into their circle. Out of 10,000 self-identified Antifa members or Antifa sympathizers, I’d guess that fewer than 1% are actually useful as fighters. But that would still leave us with 100 dedicated Antifa warriors. In December 1956, Fidel Castro had fewer than 20 guerrillas at his side. On January 1, 1959, Bautista fled into exile and Castro took Cuba.
So let’s take a look at Outgoing Misanthrope’s analysis.
The “handful of leaders” category consists of matched pairs of known activists, professional ideologues, & non-profit CEOs, and their spouses, lovers, friends, associates, and acquaintances placed in or near the individual, geographically tethered chapters.
The category of “lieutenants” is blurry, crossing over into the persons referenced above, as well as explicitly titled “leaders” of the chapters. These can be full-time protesters and agitators (Yes, this is a real thing and has been since progressives conquered the public university system in the 1970s), non-profit managers and employees, small-time musicians, actors, and artists, and the widely known but rarely named Professors & Journalists.
The public-facing activists and ideologues are not difficult to spot because, well, they’re public-facing. I strongly suspect the government already has most of those leaders on several lists, as well as their spouses. Finding their lovers, friends, associates, and acquaintances would not require a great deal of work. In fact, I strongly suspect many, if not most, are already on their own list.
I would assume this circle consists almost exclusively of True Believers. They’ll respond to pressure by lawyering up or by going underground if that fails. But given Antifa’s nebulous nature, it’s not clear how important those leaders are. Seeing as how Rose City Antifa has remained an active and ongoing organization despite the founders’ emigration, it seems those lieutenants are the ones most responsible for the day-to-day operations. And in that, they have been quite successful.
The lieutenants pulled off a decades-long march through the educational system. But the educational system also relies on government largesse and corporate donations. And as tenured positions have become increasingly scarce, it’s much easier to get rid of radical professors — easier than taking an enormous hit to scarce funding. Most of those donor corporations depend on government contracts. All of them are subject to US tax and business laws. Tighten a few screws, and those donations will soon dry up.
I hear the gnashing of teeth. That’s fascist, that’s un-American, that’s illegal. My friends, you’ve been calling Trump a fascist for over a decade now. Why are you so shocked, just shocked, to find Trump doing fascist things? And what do you intend to do if Trump ignores those court orders?
As I noted in a May article, there are very few options for removing a sitting President. The Democrats were unable to do so in 2016 despite Herculean efforts. Unless you can get 35% of the Republican Senators to vote for Trump’s impeachment, he’s not getting booted out of office. You’re screaming that the norms of democracy have been violated. And yet you still expect those norms of democracy to be honored and upheld by the man who supposedly violated them in the first place.
Do you expect that Trump’s escalation will lead to widespread outrage? Let’s hop into our Wayback Machine and take a trip to a sleepy 1970 college town called Kent, Ohio.
They’re worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night riders and vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say this: They’re not going to take over a campus.
James Rhodes, Governor of Ohio, May 3, 1970
On the night of May 1, rioting Kent State students threw beer bottles at policemen, injuring five and breaking numerous storefront windows. On May 2, the ROTC building burned down. The next day, Governor James Rhodes called out the Ohio National Guard to restore order.
On Monday, May 4, 1970, National Guard officers fired live ammunition into a crowd that had refused repeated orders to disperse. Four were killed and nine were injured. Left-leaning politicians and pundits criticized the Guard for shooting unarmed students. Those on the Right felt the rioters had finally gotten what they had coming to them. A Gallup poll found that 58% of Americans blamed the students for what happened; only 11% blamed the guardsmen, and nearly a third, 31%, remained “undecided”.
Student protests against the Vietnam draft continued, but many of the most active leaders went underground. From 1970 to 1973, the Weather Underground bombed several police stations and the Pentagon. The Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped and brainwashed heiress Patty Hearst in 1974. But as Disco gave way to Punk and Carter gave way to Reagan, most of the surviving leaders came in from the cold, accepted guilty pleas, and retired from their armed revolutionary careers after serving their time.
There’s no reason to expect things will be vastly different this time. Trump still has a wide base of support within the Republican Party and among Republican voters. You can dismiss them as fascist MAGAt Trumptards, but their vote counts just as much as yours. And if you’re thinking about an armed revolution, you may want to think again. In November 2024, another Gallup poll found 60% of Republican men and 33% of Republican women owned guns. Among Democratic men and women, those numbers were 29% and 12%.
Twenty years before Kent State, we had Communist purges that left many fellow travelers unemployed. Those purges were largely, even gleefully, supported by those who feared and hated Communism. That spirit remains today, and Conservatives have now learned that they can also ruin careers. Create enough government-encouraged social stigma against Antifa, and you can expect it to be at least as effective as the government-encouraged stigmatization of “white supremacy” and “transphobia.”
Granted, events of 50 years ago may not map perfectly onto the upcoming crisis. The 1980s saw the Reaganomics boom. The 2020s are more likely to give us a Herbert Hoover-sized Depression. Pacifying our people with prosperity will not be an option. We may well see greater violence among both radicals and reactionaries, alongside violence from a government trying to keep both in check.
Hard times tend to bring out the radicals on all sides of the political and social equation. Hungry people want scapegoats almost as much as they want food. But unrest is also a great excuse for politicians of any stripe to grab more power. When the dust settles, you get a strong man who maintains order with brute force if you’re lucky. You get years or decades of squabbling strongmen trying to win the game of thrones if you’re not.
Let’s continue with Obvious Misanthrope’s description of Antifa’s foot soldiers.
The “corps of followers” category is more or less split between the types we all recognize as Antifa, that being the physically repulsive and obviously deranged protester / agitator types in Portland, etc, and the more clean cut (therefore harder to identify) antifascists gainfully employed but no less zealous and involved, be it in the legal realm, transportation & accomodation and recruiting & equipping.
↑↑↑ This is “Antifa” in terms of the domestic terrorist group. These are the ones that need to be identified, located, incarcerated, and punished. I am of the opinion that it should be severe and basically permanent. This is just a guess, but I would put the number at ~10,000, and I think that might be a conservative estimate
I’ve taken to using the term “Black Bloc” for the street fighters. If you’re dressing up in black clothing, wearing a mask, and showing up in the streets to fight, you’re a Black Bloc member. You’re also more immediately dangerous than the fat Funko Pop collector wearing an Antifa T-shirt for street cred. Neutralizing these people will be an important part of neutralizing Antifa as a functioning organization.
A fair number of the physically repulsive and obviously deranged protestors and agitators depend on disability checks and state aid. Cut off the SSDI payments of a few protestors charged with “sedition” and you’ll see much less interest in Antifa play-acting amongst the dole-dependent classes. You’ll certainly trigger piteous whimpering about such an approach, but we’ve been hearing piteous whimpering for a while now, and most Americans have learned how to tune it out.
The Black Bloc can best be handled with live bullets and lengthy prison sentences. I differ with Outgoing Misanthrope in that I don’t believe they all need to be rounded up in a CECOT-style prison or executed. A few deaths and a few hundred arrests would lead a significant chunk of Black Blocers (Black Blockheads?) to find new hobbies
It will also drive some to continue their work underground. If they follow the path of their 1970s grandparents, they’ll soon grow tired of hiding out and find other ways to occupy their time. But, as noted earlier, times are likely to get tougher as the 20s roll into the 30s. Don’t be surprised to see ex-Black Bloc members organizing resistance operations in hungry cities a few years from now. Should this arise, we can expect whoever is in charge to take stricter and messier steps against them. The jury is still out on who will win that conflict.
These suggestions may seem harsh and unrealistic. But given that Trump is having serious discussions about the Insurrection Act, I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand. He certainly has the support of his base and has shown a willingness to use lawfare against opponents like Letitia James. The Bad Orange Man ended his first term by dipping his toe in the Rubicon and then retreating. He spent the next four years learning the folly of this approach. In his second term, Trump has been quite willing to show his teeth as necessary.
Whether you’re Antifa or Profa, you may want to start thinking about how well your political ideas will survive a hard economic downturn and rising political persecution. The ideas spawned in a 1970s academic bubble generally fared poorly when taken outside that rarefied air. Ideas spread on teens and twenties social media will have to be retuned to fit the outside world and an increasingly hostile environment.
Sir Misanthrope goes on to suggest that each of these street supporters are backed by a network of broad-based supporters that he estimates is somewhere between the hundreds of thousands to “in the single digit millions.”
The “direct material support” category is relatively vast, consisting of spouses, friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances. They provide shelter, clothing, equipment, cover, and the accouterment of postmodern living (references, jobs, alibis, internet access, food & drink, “per diem,” etc). Given the maturity of the great progressive crusade, that being the atomization of persons and the dissolution of family and small communities, the DMS network is counterintuitively vast because, unlike Muslims in general and Arabs in particular, inclusion in this group doesn’t overlap with ethnic or tribal identifiers. The number balloons further when you include the various flavors of migrants and illegal immigration sympathizers.
How much of that direct support would fade if people started losing jobs or getting arrested for “aiding and abetting sedition?” What if the government began weaponizing the IRS against Antifa-adjacent supporters? Or what if the general population started treating Antifa supporters the way they treated “fellow travelers” in the 1950s during the Red Scare?
Hard to imagine? A few strategically placed bombs would do the trick. If Antifa radicals start playing at being the Red Brigades or Shining Path, they’ll soon find themselves facing a serious backlash. Many will see their friends and relatives disavow them or even turn them in. And if the Black Bloc isn’t motivated to murder a few dozen citizens, nothing is stopping a sufficiently determined government from making those explosions happen anyway.
Sure, there will be lots of speculation about false flags and smear tactics. We’ve been hearing that noise since the Sandy Hook shooting. By now, we all should know that people will believe whatever they want to believe. We should have figured out by now that most will trust the official narrative without hesitation and dismiss anything else as “fake news” and “misinformation.” Especially when a crisis has people fearing for their lives.
The “indirect material & ideological support” category is immense. These are the source of all the quiet “Likes” we saw attached to the multitude of posts and statements reveling in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. These are the people who hate and fear Trump, despise Whites, and build their ideolectual worldview from mainstream media, progressive propaganda, and woke narrative fiction (Marvel movies, prog slop TV/streaming services, etc).
While the Harris campaign lost, demonstratively and decisively, it’s still garnered a huge amount of support in terms of heads counted. Nearly everybody that voted for Harris also provides soft support for Antifa, be it in the form of an idea or organization or person. Because there is almost no real cost to this, it is easy and therefore widespread. That may change depending on how serious the Trump regime is about treating antifa as the domestic terrorist group it is.
This indirect support group is important, but it’s also easily swayed. The prog slop era has left many movie studios and game development companies in a great slump. Add to that a conservative administration that has proven itself willing to tighten the screws by rejecting mergers and auditing books. At the end of the day, every corporation is in the game to make money and avoid trouble. Antagonizing the government and preaching to a shrinking crowd is not sustainable in the long run.
In the 1960s, hippies were cool. By the 1980s, they were figures of fun. Jerry Rubin, who co-founded the Youth International Party (Yippies) with Abbie Hoffman, reinvented himself as a stockbroker and motivational speaker. Hoffman committed suicide in 1989. Abbie’s son, America Hoffman, wonders if it was a government action or a side effect of his Prozac prescription.
When Antifa goes the way of Nehru jackets and mood rings, its indirect support group will vanish alongside it. You will still have some anachronisms reminiscing about the glory days as they sit on their barstool. A few will get eyeballs and upvotes for confessionals about their Antifa days and how they discovered the political and/or spiritual Truth. A few diehards will make their way into exile, where they will remember what they had and lament what they lost.
Could Antifa serve as the shock troops for an Anarcho-Communist Revolution? Anything’s possible after your government collapses, and the people who accept bloodshed as a political tool are going to go further than those who don’t. A war against Antifa would separate the iron from the dross. It would create a class of cadres hardened by battles and prison, people who have seen death firsthand and who have no qualms about dealing it. Nicholas II Romanov and his family discovered this the hard way.
I expect the pressure on Antifa will continue and that Antifa will become a convenient tool for power-hungry politicians (but I repeat myself). I am less sure about whether those revolutionaries will crack or grow stronger beneath that pressure.
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I think first thing, go after the funders. Pritzker, Hoffman, bezos ex, jobs widow, etc, by way of Tides foundation etc. A lot of these antifa would starve without it.
See Aether's discussion on Isaac Simpson's podcast, about "reconstruction."
Play be their rules and be extinct! The road the stars is the road to glory! Be victorious or be murdered!