Gavin McInnes: Fighting Antifas Is Fun

Can there be peace with the Alt-Lite?

I think we can all agree on anti-antifaism. In our various internet beefs, we often lose sight of the real enemy. The real enemy wants to spit on you, mace you, knock your teeth out with a lock, kill you. The real enemy is determined to deny you a platform on account of your political beliefs.

If you want to get philosophical about it, Carl Schmitt once said that politics is about the friend-enemy distinction. The enemy isn’t a personal enemy or someone you find to be immoral:

“Two.

The polar categories defining the political are, as such, those of the friend–enemy distinction — a distinction implying the possibility of physical killing between rival states. This distinction is based on antithetical categories distinct to the political — distinct in the way that the categories of good and evil are specific to morality, the beautiful and the ugly to aesthetics, the profitable or unprofitable to economics, etc.

Three.

Who is the enemy? For Schmitt, it is the superpersonal other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility and readiness for combat threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it.

The enemy is thus designated not on the basis of personal feelings or moral judgments (inimicus), but only in face of an intensely hostile power (hostis), which menaces the state’s existence.

An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one fighting-collectivity poses an existential threat to another collectivity.

In order to identify the enemy, it is necessary to experience it as a live-threat — in a way no rational analysis, no discursive logic, no objective judgment, no normative standard can possibly anticipate — for this experience is of a people, which knowingly senses whenever its existence is endangered.

The enemy here is defined in terms of criteria, not content or substance — which means it takes the form of something that is always specific and concrete and very intense — not being, then, just something symbolic or metaphorical.

“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.”

Usually the enemy is the alien “other,” whose threat comes from the exterior.

But the enemy can also emerge from internal differences, such as when domestic social, religious, sectional, etc., differences become so antagonistic that they weaken the unity of the state and the common identity of the citizenry, polarizing them into friends and enemies — i.e., into a state of civil war, as internal politics become primary.

Another, rarer example of an enemy situated in the interior (an example distinct to the United States,) is found whenever foreign culture elements take control of the state at its citizens’ expense (becoming what Yockey called “an inner enemy”).

The antifas are the enemy.

The Twitter trolling and internet beefs don’t rise to the level of the friend-enemy distinction. Those are private and personal quarrels. So, the antifa are the real public enemy whereas private enemies are just antagonists.