Have you ever wondered what Antifa’s end game is?
Why they relentlessly target police officers and government buildings, achieving little more than occasional mass arrests, only to get released again?
Well, according to a pair of conservatives who went undercover to infiltrate the Antifa black block in Portland, the seemingly endless cycle of facing off with police officers and inciting a violent reaction is the whole point of their destructive and idiotic tactics.
Erin Smith is a transgender Trump supporter who has worked in Republican politics, Hot Air explains.
After witnessing Antifa in 2016 at a protest in San Francisco, Smith became curious about the group, and began collecting footage of their activities while striking up conversations with Antifa members.
Last weekend, Smith decided to dress in all black and show up at an event in Portland. Nancy Rommelmann of Reason decided to tag along.
Smith said:
I’ve studied them for a bit, watching videos and stuff. I wrote a piece on antifa tactics for a monograph that’s coming out next month, for the Center for Security Policy. And I have an advantage, having gone to the rallies. But they know who I am. When antifa hates you and know who you are, the best way to hide is right in the middle of their black bloc. That’s the last place they think to look. It’s one of the advantages of dressing in black and wearing your mask.
The evening the undercover conservatives showed up, Antifa members gathered and the pre-appointed time, then proceeded to set the Portland Police Association building on fire.
Smith explained the strategy afoot:
Strategically what they’re doing is, they’re forcing a dilemma action. A dilemma action is when you put your opponent in a no-win situation. Your enemy has to react. If they don’t react, they look weak; if they do react, they have to react in a certain way where it looks like it’s an overreaction.
When the feds were in Portland, they were presented as overreacting, a presentation helped by innumerable people with PRESS written across their clothing flooding the internet with images that presented protesters wholly as victims of an authoritarian regime.
That’s their [antifa’s] objective. It’s not a tactical thing. That’s why all the “press” is there, the sympathetic press. They’re trying to create propaganda. They know how the police are going to react, so they carefully calibrate what they do to try to provoke the police into reacting and then filming it. They want to try to push public opinion in favor of removing the police. The police aren’t perfect, but what a police force is, it’s putting force under an objective third party, under government control. Antifa wants to separate the police from the populace.
This is basically guerilla warfare. They’re trying to undermine legitimacy of the state. The police right now, I think some of them are catching up. There’s a playbook for how police respond to riots and they’re not actually doing it; it’s not an actual riot. I mean, it is a riot, but at the same time, it’s a specific type of riot that’s trying to make the police respond in a certain way.
Smith believes that Antifa is deliberately trying to maintain a constant stream of low-level violence, intimidating enough to make people pause before denouncing their methods, but not so violent that they’re leaving a bodycount.
If you just go in public and pick someone and start pushing them, if you keep pushing them, they’re going to slug you; it’s just how it’s going to work, at the individual level but also at the group level too. I’m also speaking metaphorically, in a sense. Of course if you hit them, they’re going to fall down and go, “Oh, God, you’re violent. You’re a Nazi!
Isn’t this essentially the broader approach of the whole of the left in the Trump era?
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