Last year the Resistance to the Trump Administration, already unhinged, was joined by a pugnacious organization that calls itself Antifa, short for anti-fascist. But as even superficial accounts of its activities make clear, it is not opposed to fascism at all but mirrors Adolph Hitler’s Brown Shirts in the 1920s.

Oh, but there is one superficial difference: Antifa’s minions wear black rather than brown. But unlike their despicable forebears, they mask themselves to avoid being identified as they terrorize opponents with vitriol and violence. Their comforting delusion is that anonymity generates comradeship, which is a polite way of characterizing the herd instinct.

Because the left and the “mainstream” media are so determined to sanitize their most violent partners in the campaign to “transform” America, one must tread carefully, lest one be labeled “fascist.” So I deliberately consulted the (so far) respectable Wikipedia website.

The account is measured and, in only a few instances uses anodyne language to describe Antifa. The facts are so telling that the reader comes away with a decidedly negative impression.

Here’s the opening paragraph: “The Antifa movement is a conglomeration of left wing autonomous, self-styled anti-fascist militant groups in the United States. The principal feature of antifa groups is their use of direct action. They engage in varied protest tactics, which include digital activism, property damage, physical violence, and harassment against those whom they identify as fascist, racist, or on the far-right. Conflicts are both online and in real life. They tend to be anti-capitalist and they are predominantly far-left and militant left, which includes anarchists, communists and socialists. Their stated focus is on fighting far-right and white supremacist ideologies directly, rather than politically.”

Within that fact-filled summary, two elements are particularly revealing: “Self-styled anti-fascist” and “fighting…directly, rather than politically.” The first of these raises doubts about Antifa’s bona fides. Just because the organization purports to be antifacist hardly proves that it is. That realism is grounded in the evidence available to any rational person’s senses.

The second element is surely correct in that being “physical” is not, strictly speaking, being “political.” As tarnished as politics is in our cynical age, in its original and essential sense, it entails deliberation and persuasion, not coercion. The best way to understand a thing is to see it in its highest aspects rather than its lowest. Just because some politicians are scoundrels does not mean that they all are, or that all politics is beyond the pale.

It has been said that “war is politics by other means,” and that bears some truth even about conflict within nations as well as between them. But when the first sort is occurring it means that politics has deteriorated. What Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, has characterized as “the cold civil war” within our country (and no less in Europe), is about “regime” questions, meaning controversy not merely about how to achieve our purposes as a nation but whether those purposes should be pursued at all.

That this is where we are in our politics today, as this next Wikipedia reference makes plain.

“The idea of direct action is central to the Antifa movement. Antifa organizer Scott Crow told an interviewer: ‘The idea in Antifa is that we go where they [right-wingers] go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don't believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.’”

We are indebted to Mr. Crow for his candor. Earnestly, he tries to dismiss all conservatives indiscriminately as hateful, but honesty requires us to respond thus: conservative speech is not hate speech, and that’s because conservatives today mean to conserve the very regime which the left seeks to destroy, namely, the regime of free speech, not to mention, free press, free elections and free markets.

Thus, Mr. Crow has found the right mark for his cult’s regime-destroying passions. He knows who the serious enemy is of his truly fascist goals. The conservative movement in our politics has had its ups and downs, and is no more immune to mistakes than its opponents. But those are honest mistakes not borne of a violent temper but of genuinely good intentions.

As deplorable as Antifa is, it has done us the favor of clarifying what is at stake: Are we going to save what Abraham Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth” or are we going to let it be brought down by its enemies?

Richard Reeb taught political science, philosophy and journalism at Barstow Community College from 1970 to 2003. He is the author of "Taking Journalism Seriously: 'Objectivity' as a Partisan Cause" (University Press of America, 1999). He can be contacted at rhreeb@verizon.net