Antifa doesn’t exist – and Trump knows that

Ridiculous US federal officers say they have identified a key leader of ‘antifa’. But the guy they are accusing seems to be a local protestor who lets other protestors use his bathroom. Hardly the second coming of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh is it, you absolute buffoons?

If it needs saying at all, Antifa does not exist in the sense meant by US officials. It’s a vaguely defined political tendency. It cuts across socialist, anarchist, communist and even liberal groups who, erm, don’t like fascism. It sort of says so in the name: antifa = antifascist.

Antifa war is bullshit

To be clear, US president Donald Trump’s war on ‘antifa’ is a war on the left. It is one strand of his nativist plans for an America in which he cannot be challenged. It had nothing to do with terrorism or extremism – except his own.

Independent US reporter Ken Klippenstein’s work on Trump-era authoritarianism has been groundbreaking. On 3 February he published a new story. He’d seen internal documents which referred to the individual:

Twenty-nine year old Chandler Patey has been regularly protesting outside his local ICE facility in South Portland for months, offering up his apartment to fellow protesters to use the bathroom or wash off pepper spray, according to local news.

On the face if it Patey sounds like a normal guy. One of millions of Americans opposed to Trump’s so-called war on immigration.

However:

To the Department of Homeland Security, “he is the leader of Antifa in Portland, OR.”

Klippenstein explains:

That phrase appears in an internal report produced by DHS, the largest law enforcement agency in the country. As they see it, Patey—a young man accused of no crime and who looks like a random protester plucked off the streets of Minneapolis—is a domestic terrorist.

He noted that Fox News anchors had even discussed Patey’s home as being a antifa ‘safe house’:

This kind of idiocy is hardly unprecedented by the standards of cable news, of course; but the federal government is buying into the hysteria, too. Documents leaked to me show Patey and countless other American protesters have been branded as domestic terrorists. As a result, their private information is now being collected and stored in a DHS intelligence system.

American fascism

American fascism, embodied partly in the endless raids and beatings – and street executions – by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers, is thriving.

Klippenstein previously challenged the department’s claim that no database of ‘domestic terrorists’ existed. He asked them again in relation to Patey and got no answer.

Incredible work, guys. It would be funny, but as Klippenstein points out this kind of half-cocked intelligence gathering has consequences:

This bureaucratic imperative to find terrorists among protesters is what got Renee Good and Alex Pretti killed.

DHS shot dead Good and Pretti in January. Neither was engaged in any kind of behavior which would merit being shot. Video evidence from multiple angles shows that they presented no threat to federal officers.

The evidence suggests that like them Patey presents no danger whatsoever. Except maybe in one narrow sense and it is that basic human solidarity is a severe threat to the far-right and their vision of a cowed and obedient population which cowers while armed thugs cart away their neighbours.

Featured image via Unsplash/Julian Schneiderath