Psychology of Extremism
31st March 2021
Beginning more or less with President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, when white nationalist and future Biden voter Richard Spencer was sucker punched by a masked rioter on camera while being interviewed in Washington DC, the violent militia and online harassment network Antifa has played an increasingly central role in the accelerating destruction of Western liberal democracy.
Today connected to dozens of homicides, thousands of assaults, and hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage, the movement nonetheless continues to enjoy significant support from global corporate and political elites.
Social media companies allow Antifa accounts to orchestrate harassment and call for violence on their platforms with impunity; corporate media alternates erratically between celebrating Antifa and insisting that they don’t exist, and senior political figures including Republican Senator Mitt Romney and Iraq War proponent Jeffrey Goldberg compare the movement to the American soldiers who defeated Hitler.
Meanwhile, anyone reporting accurately on the reality of a movement which, despite anarcho-communist branding, functions in practice as a combination of the Sturmabteiling and the Stasi is subjected to a campaign of defamation and intimidation from pro-Antifa academics and journalists who tend to serve as apologists and spokesmen for the movement, rather than reporters on it.