The Antifa Industry at Work
Kyle Shideler and David Reaboi October 21, 2020
Originally published by American Greatness
Professional left-wing organizers, planning for post-election chaos, promise to “shut down” the capital and engage in “civil resistance.”
When, in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama’s career as a community organizer was lampooned at the Republican National Convention, few understood what the words meant. Most sympathetic voices in the media stressed “community,” evoking images of soup kitchens, clinics, and shelters. Republicans had every reason to look more darkly at what this kind of work meant and, probably due to Obama’s race, were inclined to associate the candidate’s time “organizing” in Chicago with New York racial demagogues and shakedown-artists like Al Sharpton.
That description was closer to the mark, but the full truth was deeper and considerably more sophisticated; left-wing organizing is a robust intellectual universe. Thanks largely to talk radio, conservatives soon learned the name Saul Alinsky and began to digest his now-infamous Rules for Radicals.
After several brilliant investigative pieces into Obama’s time among left-wing organizing meccas like the Northwest Academy, Stanley Kurtz wrote the valuable Radical-in-Chief. Unfortunately, for much of the public, the thread frayed shortly after the election that November; emboldened by Democratic control of both houses of Congress, the newly elected Obama would use what he’d learned from Chicago activism to instigate and win battles on more pressing political issues.
For those eight years, the organizing ecosystem that would eventually erupt into Antifa and Black Lives Matter street violence and direct-action grew in strength, sophistication, and funding. Obama’s own career in Chicago should’ve been a kind of clue: the former president served on the boards of Public Allies, the Woods Fund of Chicago, and the Joyce Foundation, which together distributed tens of millions of dollars to various local left-wing groups—some of which themselves were organizing for street-level direct action.
Antifa, of course, is far more than an “idea”—even as ideas, themselves, can be serious threats with which it is necessary to contend. But it is also far more than just an organization. Even as it traces its origins to pre-war Germany, one might think of “Antifa” as a relatively new product line from a larger industry that has existed for decades. That industry is the giant ecosystem of left-wing direct-action and organizing, with its own history, pedagogy, institutions, as well as tens of thousands of career professionals operating in the open, and funded every bit as well as the staid network of establishment conservative think tanks and magazines that tend to cluster along the Acela corridor.
Writing at the American Mind last month, Michael Anton, author of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, brought attention to a war game report issued by the Transition Integrity Project, an ad hoc group associated with the George Soros-funded Democracy Integrity Project. Anton’s widely read essay, “The Coming Coup?” was heavily discussed on social media and by conservative talk show hosts including Dan Bongino, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck.
What conservatives found so alarming was that the Transition Integrity Project urged Trump’s opponents to wage a “street fight, not a legal one” in the near-certain event of a contested election. In other words, forces arrayed against the president’s reelection should abandon the American political system—and pin their hopes of election victory not on the Constitution-mandated quest for the most electoral votes, but upon the street mobilization and direct-action capabilities of Antifa and the Left’s other professionally-staffed organizing groups.
As a heavily contested Election Day approaches, it is crucial for both conservative activists and officials in law enforcement to understand that left-wing organizing for direct-action and “nonviolent” civil disobedience is being planned by career organizing professionals working within well-funded, interlocking organizations.
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