Antifa

Two radical groups — the so-called Proud Boys and antifa came together in conflict over the past weekend in Portland, Oregon.
While the media framed the battle in stark ideological terms, it was mostly about young men doing what they like to do: engage in street combat and boast of their exploits, in this case by posting them online.
It all started when the Proud Boys — who combine small-government libertarianism, men’s rights and what they call the “Spirit of Western Chauvinism” — announced that they would rally in Portland on Saturday to “end domestic terrorism,” the “terrorists” being the so-called anti-fascists of ¬antifa.
Antifa views anyone who isn’t on the hard left as a “fascist,” and once the movement affixes that label on you, you are fair game for the brutality of its black-masked followers.
Portland was ready. Flyers everywhere announced that “armed white nationalists have come to our city to . . . terrorize and assault our community,” especially racial and sexual ¬minorities.
“Organize community self-defense groups,” blared the flyer. “Travel with a buddy.”
When they arrived, in what looked like painted-over school buses, the Proud Boys were a motley army indeed. The many video clips from Saturday posted to ¬social media show a small gathering of paunchy men, on average at least 15 years older than the average wiry, young antifa supporter.
The first thing the Proud Boys did was hold a prayer circle led by a bearded black man, not exactly a white-nationalist image. Video clips show sparsely populated parks with Proud Boys milling around, mostly filming each other, with more media and police than actual participants.
They stood manfully holding their ground while masked antifa thugs circled, until the antifa A Team took turns darting in and whacking the Proud Boys, while everybody filmed and posted.
Antifa, for its part, is all about provocation — from blocking city streets when tired workers are just trying to get home to shutting down invited college lecturers whom they deem “fascists.”
Sometimes they are about worse stuff than provocation — as when they targeted the journalist Andy Ngo, and sent him to the hospital with a brain hemorrhage.
Yes, the Proud Boys have some truly toxic folks in their ranks, but antifa is even scarier, ¬because its violent methods enjoy barely disguised backing of the city’s liberal elites — so long as the violence is directed at the right villains.
Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, for example, sounded like she was encouraging a “by-any-means-necessary” response to the Proud Boys, telling Portlanders on Wednesday that “the threat is real,” that “there are no two sides” and that “hate and ¬inaction against hate are unwelcome.”
Yes, it was provocative for the Proud Boys to pick a confrontation with antifa on its home turf, but it would be helpful if Portland’s progressive leaders would acknowledge that their antifa boys want to bust heads, too.
Perhaps this whole drama is better understood as a tribal confrontation, a young man thing, as old as humankind — think Bloods and Crips, Jets and Sharks, Gangs of New York. Being a “Street Fightin’ Man” is glamorous.
The ideological component is real, and let’s hope law enforcers are keeping an eye on what these groups are up to, given the history of far-left and far-right militancy in this country.
Still, the bulk of these groups are men (and some women) in search of a political ¬rationale for what violent types have loved to do since the beginning of time.
Just give these two groups of ¬idiots a field where they can have at each other and watch the fireworks.

Once again, the national media in its coverage, left us all scratching our heads.
Who are these antifa folks? What in the world are they protesting?
Let’s start with who they are.
Antifa: The antifa movement is composed of left-wing, autonomous, militant anti-fascist groups and individuals in the United States. The principal feature of antifa groups is their use of direct action, with conflicts occurring both online and in real life. They engage in various protest tactics, which include on-line activism, property damage, physical violence, and harassment against those whom they identify as fascist, racist, or on the far-right.
Now we all know what is meant by being far right. But what again is this term Fascist?
Fascism: Fascism is a form of radical right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I, before spreading to other European countries.Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, and Francisco Franco were all Fascist Dictators Opposed to liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism, fascism is on the far-right when speaking of left–right political positions.
Let’s add one more definition before we start.
Collectivism: Collectivism is a political theory associated with communism. More broadly, it is the idea that people should prioritize the good of society over the welfare of the individual.
Now there was a great article about all this in the recent issue of “The American Thinker” by writer Paul Krause.
He made an interesting point when he stated “Antifa storms in and out of the news, despite that fact, the Left is unable to denounce this militant band of thugs. The Left cannot denounce Antifa because Antifa embodies the very ethos of war and violence that collectivism needs to thrive on. To assail Antifa would be to attack the heart of the cancerous poison that is destroying liberty oriented societies”.
This concept was first presented by a fellow named Michael Oakeshott.
Michael Oakeshott is largely forgotten.
Even at the peak of his powers, as a professor of political science at the London School of Economics from 1951 to 1969, he was overshadowed by other political scientists of his time.
Yet Oakeshott has more to teach us about our current times than any of the others.
Oakeshott’s focus was on the conduct of politics itself, especially when it comes to governing.
Unconcerned with policy proposals or manifesto pledges, his work was to explain the workings of politics and government to serve a nation.
He was writing at a time when –isms dominated politics. Keynesianism (the promotion of monetary and fiscal programs by government to increase employment and spending) , socialism and central planning had captured the politics of the West, while varying degrees of collectivism and Communism prevailed behind the Iron Curtain.
In his most famous essay, “Rationalism in Politics”, published in 1962, he attacked the intellectual conceit that underpins all these –isms, namely the misplaced faith in “rationalism” that stemmed from the 18th-century enlightenment. “
By ignoring what he called “practical knowledge”—custom or tradition, as he meant it—the rationalist, armed merely with “technical knowledge”, created the illusion that bureaucrats and governments could solve all problems, whereas, of course, they cannot.
By contrast, Oakeshott proposed what he called a “conservative disposition”, and this is what makes him especially relevant today.
He did not articulate or argue for a particular set of policies to define Conservatism as a doctrine or creed; rather, in his essay “On being conservative”, he argued that conservatism was much more a habit of mind, a practice of politics.
Sadly, Oakeshott clearly described our current government crisis, and the divisions that it has created as an “encounter of mutual frustration.”
Governing is described by Oakeshott as a “specific and limited activity”, but one of those very specific activities is to mediate differences, not to widen them.
These virtues of government, as Oakeshott would have termed them, can also be described as the virtues of pragmatism (a straightforward way of dealing with problems, focused on results, not policies).
When people say the federal government has lost its mind, this is exactly what they mean, the government can no longer mediate differences and is in a state of mutual frustration.
It is time they went back and reviewed the teachings of Michael Oakeshott. And if Conservatives do not, others certainly will.
It bears repeating that the conservative position is not confined to a Conservative Party, or to any centre- right party. It can be used by others, and has been in the past.
“We tolerate monomaniacs, but why should we be ruled by them?” asked Oakeshott.
That is the question for conservatives, and indeed for anyone in democratic politics. “Is it not”, he continues, the “task for a government to protect its subjects against the nuisance of those who spend their energy and wealth in the service of some pet indignation.”
The aim of collectivists in free societies is not to wage a bloody revolution like the Jacobins (France) or the Bolsheviks (Russia). As Oakeshott said, “modern advocates of collectivism disintegrate the integral and wholesome reality of liberty.
We are instructed [by the enemies of freedom masquerading as advocates of freedom] to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom, between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ freedom, between ‘social,’ ‘political,’ ‘civil,’ ‘economic,’ and ‘personal’ freedom.” By focusing on only one or two freedoms, we are distracted as we lose our other freedoms.
How many times have we talked about America’s current lack of attention span? How the media now leads us by the nose from one story to the next?
According to Oakeshott, liberals pose as champions of one type of distinguished freedom, while eroding and destroying all the other types of freedom. Rather than see freedom as interconnected and wholesome, the new collectivists see institutions as oppressive and our present society as backward and tyrannical.
The new liberal, therefore presents himself/herself as a champion of engineered liberty; which is to say that he/she controls what freedoms the population will be allowed to have.
Collectivism thrives on war. In fact, it needs war. Liberalism demands the mobilization of people to advance its aims.
As such, it is necessary for liberals to always have an existential threat. As Oakeshott says, “The real spring of collectivism is not a love of liberty, but war. The anticipation of war is the great incentive, and the conduct of war is the great collectivizing process.”
Abraham Lincoln began to collectivize the Union during the Civil War. Roosevelt further collectivized the “new nation” through the “war” on the Great Depression which was superseded by the Second World War.
Roosevelt subjugated civil society to the bureaucratic state and thrust the American economy into its perpetual war economy existence — if there is no war for the post-Roosevelt economy, the economy will decentralize back into the hands of those it was taken from under the guise of national emergency.
Antifa claims to be for peace. Its purpose is war. Beyond the insurmountable evidence that this is the case, the mere fact that Antifa exists to counter an imaginary existential threat should also give away its true, bloodthirsty, and violent purpose of being.
There is nothing libertarian about Antifa. It is a socially engineered monster meant to act as shock troops of the final collectivist campaign for the domination of what used to be free American society.
Antifa exists, as it does in Portland, above the law. Without the law to keep the peace, we are in a state of war which allows for collectivism to present itself as the new agent of order.
Because the Democratic Party has been controlled by collectivists ever since FDR, and because the collectivist psyche and ideology needs war to sustain itself, the Democrats will never be able to condemn Antifa.
Why? Because that would entail condemning its own philosophy of warring domination to “fundamentally transform” the United States. This is not a recent phenomenon, it is a deeply rooted one, though Antifa is the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon of collectivism.
We are told that there is a war on women. We are told that there is a war against minorities. We are told that there is a war on gays, lesbians, and the rest of the imaginary rainbow. We are told that there is a war on poor people. We are told that there is a war on decency and civility.
There is a war on everything, according to the Left. And they use this prop of war to front themselves as champions of the “new freedom” which is, in reality, a front for further collectivist control.
Collectivism in America gives the illusion of continuity with the American past and make us believe that we’re growing in freedom instead of receding in freedom.

Liberals in America do not openly seek the revolutions that tear down in an uncontrollable rage like the Jacobins or Bolsheviks of old but corrode and rearrange from the inside. They sneak up on you. They wage a revolution behind the scenes, only for us to wake up and ask what happened?
Antifa may come and go. But what it represents and embodies is nothing short of the bloodthirsty and domineering schemes that possessed the Jacobins to kill hundreds of thousands to try to reorganize French society in 1789 and the Bolsheviks to slay millions in their own citizens in a bloodthirsty effort to reorganize Russian society.
As Oakeshott says, in free societies (i.e. Anglo-American) collectivists cannot openly embrace such revolutionary tactics as they do in societies without the same longstanding traditions of liberty.
Instead, they slip into the system and reorganize from the inside — slowly taking away our freedoms under the illusion of new freedoms and new progress.
Antifa’s manifesto calls for the reorganization of American society and the creation of a new man.
That’s precisely what collectivists past and present have always dreamed of achieving. And collectivists need war, or, in more palatable contemporary terms, an “emergency,” to usurp power for themselves for their domineering and hateful ends.
Collectivists need an imaginary enemy, to continue fighting their war for totalizing control over all people and society.
So there you have it folks. Was Michael Oakeshott correct? Have we lost our ability to govern?
If so, is it by accident or design?
Is Antifa simply a tool being wielded by the far left to gain political control?