Center Left Growing Increasingly Frustrated With Antifa

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:

“Since 1907, portland, oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Next, the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.” When Portland police said they lacked the resources to provide adequate security, the organizers canceled the parade. It was a sign of things to come. …”

Bob Moser in The New Republic:

“On the second Saturday in July, more than 1,000 people showed up in a small Southern city to shout down the Ku Klux Klan. That very same afternoon, up North, left-wing counter-protesters chased a band of alt-right Proud Boys out of a public park where they’d tried to rally. It’s been like that throughout this Summer of Hate, fifty years removed from the so-called Summer of Love. Wherever they’ve tried to assemble, both old and new-school white supremacists have found themselves routinely outnumbered, outshouted, out-organized, and out-brawled by the left. …”

The Center Left grasps that these social media spectacles like Berkeley are the logical outcome of Antifa’s “no platforming” doctrine. They also understand that everyone on the Right from FOX News to Patriot groups to the Alt-Right to the Klan is taking advantage of it.

Antifa are showing America that the Left is exhausted and out of ideas, violent and unpatriotic, opposed to free speech and freedom of assembly, determined to censor social media, blacklist and persecute rightwing speakers and impose an orthodoxy on college campuses and public spaces. In particular, the Left generally hates White people and Southerners and rationalizes the destruction of private property. They also stand for housing, employment and public accommodations discrimination.

Yesterday in Portland, they demonstrated this again: