President
Donald Trump’s recent threat to declare Antifa a terrorist
organization is
a reasonable and helpful response to the contemporary problem of disorder and
excessive violence in urban America.
Antifa
was founded in 2007 in Portland, Oregon, and is a decentralized
group of urban associations sharing the name that is a contraction of the
expression anti-fascist. It is an anarchistic and particularly anti-capitalist
movement that expressly favours violence, though sometimes confines itself to
non-violent but obstructive demonstrations. It has had recourse to violence on countless occasions and is
never apologetic for it. Its members appear in partially ninja-like outfits
that conceal their faces and make it impossible to identify them.
They are so
clumsy and brutal in their activities that even the staunchly leftist
linguistics professor Noam Chomsky dismissed them a decade ago as a gift to the
right because of their mindless violence. Trump’s announcement that he was
contemplating designating Antifa a terrorist organization raised
the hackles and attracted the derision of the American left, which claimed that
he had no power to make any such designation nor to give any effect to it. This
is itself an unusually stupid argument even by the standards of the radical
American left. The President of the United States certainly can announce that
an organization is a terrorist one and he can certainly deploy force against
it, including domestic espionage to facilitate the identification and prosecution
of its members and harass and disrupt it when it violates municipal ordinances
or commits more serious infractions.
All
indications now are that the Democrats have once again clambered aboard the
wrong side of an issue to champion the views of not more than about 10 percent
of Americans against an overwhelming majority that is being vacuumed up and
co-opted by the administration. On the matter of the deportation of the more than 15 million
people who have entered the United States illegally—of whom only about 1,200,000 have left, voluntarily or
otherwise—the Democrats were ostentatiously concerned with the civil rights of
certain of these people no matter how undesirable and recidivistic they were,
rather than with removing this terrible strain from the country’s social safety
net and law enforcement forces and educational facilities.
The
Democrats announced that Trump’s tariff program would leave empty shelves and
skyrocketing prices and misery. But the tariffs have reduced the federal budget deficit by
40 percent and the trade deficit by 50 percent without increasing inflation, and
without that progress costing the United States or any citizen of the United
States one cent.
America’s
trading partners had long enjoyed using the United States as a dumping ground,
exploiting first the Cold War tactic of effectively bribing wavering countries
from fraternizing too intimately with the Soviet Union by giving them access to
the U.S. market, and then the globalist delusions of liberal American
government that it was somehow appropriate to expiate the guilt complex of the
rich white West by allowing other countries to dump goods into the United
States at the expense of American workers. Foreigners are now paying these
tariffs to stay connected to the U.S. market.
In the
aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Democrats formulaically
regretted the murder but devalued Kirk as an extremist and racist, neither of
which charge has a scintilla of truth. In some cases they attempted to portray
the alleged assassin as an espouser of Trump’s social and political outlook,
which is also completely dishonest.
When
late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was fired at the request of a large
number of the individual ABC network’s television stations, the Democrats
attempted to set up a mighty chorus of protest that the administration was
launching a campaign of censorship and a full-scale assault on freedom of
expression as guaranteed by the First Amendment. They were effectively
defending Kimmel’s contemptible assertion that the American right was “doing
everything they can score political points” from the assassination, and mocked Trump’s grieving over Kirk’s
death as being like “how a four year old mourns a goldfish.” Once again,
voluntarily and without any coercion or entrapment by President Trump and his
entourage, the Democrats have solidly aligned themselves against the heavy
majority of sensible American opinion.
It is too
early to say if they will hurl themselves headlong into a new public relations
disaster on the Antifa issue. Intolerable crime rates in most large American
cities, and practically all cities governed by Democrats, have handed the
president yet another large stick with which to beat the Democrats. When a
series of spectacular and hideous crimes afflicted the city of
Washington, Trump exploited the fact that the District of Columbia is under the
direct authority of the federal government and deployed several thousand
national guardsmen to work with and assist the local police. The Democratic
leadership and their echo chamber in the national political media represented
this as the first stage in a military occupation of the United States and the
enforcement of martial law throughout the country. The crime rate decreased and there were no murders for almost two weeks, and
Washington’s mayor, a chronic Democratic partisan, said publicly that she appreciated the administration’s effort.
The Trump
administration is now taking the tactical step of responding to requests for
such assistance starting with Memphis, Tennessee. But the president has
announced that he will deploy forces to Chicago soon. That city has an appalling rate of violent crime and a minimal
percentage of successful convictions for it. Metropolitan Chicago and the
Greater Toronto Area have approximately the same population, about 10 million,
and Chicago has eight times as many murders as Toronto. The United States as a
whole, has four times as many murders per capita as Canada. It is obvious that
gangs in many urban areas have created no-go zones in which they either
intimidate or suborn the police. In many cases, the local courts are corrupt or
intimidated, and the profusion of violence is a national scandal, disgrace, and
tragedy.
Trump will
combine invitations from mayors of crime-ridden cities with direct
interventions, contrary to the will of local Democratic Party governments. But
an appreciably reduced crime rate will be a universally popular development,
and there will be no ambiguity whatever about which party deserves the credit
for it.
Antifa is an
abominable, criminal, and terrorist enterprise, and the sooner Trump wrenches
the task of dealing with it out of the hands of abysmally incompetent municipal
governments and brings the weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus down
upon it wherever it rears its furry head, the better. And there is no doubt
that that will be the view of the American voters.