I have never seen anything like the circus surrounding Charlottesville. The neoliberal corporate media is stoking the fires by letting both sides say outrageous things - the same way the police stoked the riots by standing aside and refusing to do their jobs. The two sides seem to be the standard far right and a newly minted FAKE far left calling itself antifa.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a disparaging umbrella term for anti-facists of all political persuasions (Jews, gays, anarchists, socialists), which (based on Google trends) had no real circulation before April 2017. Interestingly enough, most of the queries came from Germany, which leads me to belief that this term was coined there and the American alt-right just adopted it, rather than invented it A reddit comment on "who is antifa?"

Here is more commentary on the fake-ness of ANTIFA from the real left (in fact, the website most heavily targeted by Google's algorithmic censorship):

While thousands of Berkeley students turned out to protest peacefully against Yiannopoulos, a reactionary provocateur who laces his speeches with Islamophobia, racism and right-wing nationalism, a minority of about 150 black-masked demonstrators organized under an amorphous coalition describing itself as ANTIFA, standing for anti-fascist, marched onto the campus and carried out acts of gratuitous violence that an overwhelming majority of the students at the protest opposed. The ANTIFA contingent smashed windows, set fires, shot fireworks at police, assaulted the few Trump supporters in the area and vandalized local stores, buildings and ATMs. The intervention by these hooded vandals managed to turn a mass protest into a police provocation. These actions were precisely what Yiannopoulos and his supporters desired, allowing them to drape their virulent anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism in the mantle of “free speech.” Trump responded with a threat to cut off federal funding to UC Berkeley, and the turmoil was seized upon by various politicians as a pretext for promoting laws to suppress genuine protests and strikes. There has been a long experience with the violence of the so-called “black bloc,” anarchist and ANTIFA protesters , not only in the United States, but in Europe and around the world. The politics of these movements are thoroughly reactionary, based upon a visceral hostility to any struggle to mobilize the working class and youth in an independent political struggle against the capitalist system and for socialism. They attract demoralized and disoriented elements from the middle class, along with a sizable number of police provocateurs who hide behind hoods and masks and egg on the violence to provide an excuse for repression. World Socialist Web Site comment on Berkely riots of February, 2017

The media gives as much free air time to antifa as they did to Donald Trump. They literally go to the bank on the controversy incited by over-the-top Antifa statements. Its all about riling up everyone while making the left (via Antifa) look as bad as the racist right. Just like Hillary wanted to run against Trump, TPTB want to run against the fake left. They want to reduce any public forum for politics to a riot so that they do not have to answer to the public.

The genuine left, the peaceful left, the thoughtful left - they are the victims of this political bustout[NOTE]. The bustout has embezzled the political credit of a century of progressive politics to publicize a bunch of grandstanding IdPol tools, leaving the real left to pay the bills of right wing reaction and inevitable media criticism for "extremism" as soon as Antifa has served its purpose of "dirtying up" the left.

The overreach of Antifa and other IdPol actors is creating a caricature of the left that corresponds to the worst nightmares of every right winger. The banning of people from webistes is a major escalation in the war on free speech; and it has been challenged by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (yeah, they are libertarian hippies, but they are on our side most of the time).

The blog post reflected years-long tension in Silicon Valley, where many company executives want to distance themselves from extremists but are concerned that picking and choosing what is acceptable on their platforms could invite more regulation from governments. "Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected," Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote. ‘We do it because the power to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't is just too dangerous to hand to any company or any government.’” "This Is Dangerous": Digital Activists Slam Tech Firms For Banning Neo-Nazi Websites

The temporary license given to the fake left by the corporate media is really like Chairman Mao's "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom" campaign - i.e., give people enough rope and they will hang themselves and their political group. Witness some idiot from Missouri:

Democratic Missouri Senator: "I Hope Trump Is Assassinated!"

We seem to be in the middle of an orchestrated propaganda campaign that is simultaneously a provocation (turn loose rightwingers and fake left wingers), a strategy for repression (wait for the violence to get out of control and impose Draconian police tactics), and a distraction (sucks all the oxygen - no time for the budget ceiling, our obscene military, police, and prison policies, climate change and fracking, etc.) I'm surprised no one has been able to blame all this on Putin yet. But its hard to simultaneously say "Putin supports Trump", and "Putin is behind those undermining Trump".

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Quite frankly, I give up. Even on this board, people (myself included, for one spin in the barrel, before I realized I was just playing the game they wanted me to play) are being divided and conquered over racism. That's really easy to do in an America that has never come to terms with slavery, Jim Crow, and the New Jim Crow. Discussing the treatment of the black population over the past three centuries (and its really hard to draw a line somewhere in that time period) is like Tasering the conversation. That's because the media, and the inevitable trolls, want this to be a fight, not a discussion.

What to do? Don't play. Work on and talk about anything but Charlottesville and all the other scripted-for-maximum-media-exposure terrorist attacks around the world. They want to paralyze us with fear and lobotomize us with hatred. My advice is to stay away from this topic. It does no one but TPTB any good.

NOTE:



Bustout - a confidence scheme in which an established business is taken over, a large stock of merchandise is purchased on credit and quickly sold, and the business is then abandoned or bankruptcy is declared