Dirty Business Up in Portland: Klantifa
2nd July 2019
Below is Mark Steyn’s take on the Antifa-generated street violence in Portland last weekend. He includes a useful portmanteau word to describe the self-appointed arbiters of public ideology: “Klantifa”. I looked the neologism up, and it was evidently coined sometime last summer, but I’d never heard it before.
The Antifa groups (which were all but non-existent in the USA before the election of Donald Trump) are the enforcers of the Democrat party line in major American cities. The cities are run by the Democrat political establishment, which approves of Antifa’s choice of targets. The police stand down because the mayors order them to stand down and let their pet street thugs bash the fash. The Antifa bully boys are ostensibly independent of any party or government or political organization, which provides the plausible deniability that the pols require. The city fathers can then wring their hands and deplore the “violence”, as if it were a natural disaster, like a flood or a tornado.