Last week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Nazi, KKK, and white-nationalist participants in the Charlottesville rally. Good.

Then, the Commissioners voted down an amendment by Gail Heriot that would have added:

Though we support peaceful protest and note that most of the counter-demonstrators were peaceful, we condemn violence by anyone, including violence by so-called antifa demonstrators.

That amendment failed by a vote of 6-2, with only Gail and Peter Kirsanow (an African-American) supporting it.

Not good.

John Fund, writing at NRO, expresses his dismay. He sees the Commission’s vote as evidence that today’s American left, like the British left of George Orwell’s time, increasingly subscribes to the Marxist view that “there are no enemies on the left.”

Fund explains:

Sadly, a quarter century after the fall of Communism, too many leftists are still ignoring Orwell and refusing to acknowledge the reality of left-wing brutality. . . . Antifa. . .protestors came armed with pepper spray, bricks, and clubs. Antifa members believe that racist speech is violence and that they must counter it physically, not just oppose it with rhetoric or better ideas.

They used these weapons not just to attack racist protesters, but also bystanders, including members of the press. As the New York Daily News reported:

Taylor Lorenz of The Hill was punched in the face by an antifa for recording a fight between the two groups; she tweeted that her assaulter told her not to “snitch, media bitch.” A videographer from Richmond’s WTVR covering a counter-protest got a concussion from head blows with a stick.

In addition, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times tweeted from Charlottesville: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”

The fascist tendencies displayed by “antifa” in Charlottesville are consistent with its brown shirt tactics elsewhere. Fund observes:

Peter Beinart has a piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine noting that rioting by antifa forces forced University of California at Berkeley officials to cancel speeches by Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopolous earlier this year. In April, threats by antifa supporters convinced the Portland, Ore., police department that they couldn’t guarantee security for the annual Rose Festival parade. The parade’s sin? Allowing the local Republican party to have Trump supporters march under the GOP banner in the parade. The parade was canceled, to the delight of many in the hob-nailed boot Left that makes Portland, well, such a special place.

The Civil Rights Commission, like much of the mainstream media, wants to sweep this indecent left-wing assault on freedom under the rug. One almost has to laugh at the response of Civil Rights Commissioner Karen Narasaki to reports of violence by antifa in Charlottesville. “You can’t believe everything you read in the media,” this useful idiot retorted. As Fund puts it, apparently the “paper of record” for so many liberals is to be considered bird-cage lining material if it contradicts the left-wing narrative.

That’s why President Trump performed a service to the nation when, following the Charlottesville violence, he countered this willful blindness by insisting that politically motivated violence comes from both sides. By refusing to acknowledge this reality, six of the eight members of the Civil Rights Commission put the interests of the left above the interests of the nation.