Radical Antifa Group Targets the Police
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Nationalization of the police is a longtime goal of the Left, and the targeting of local police by a violent Antifa group supports that goal.

Since President Donald Trump responded to the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, by condemning “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides,” it has become clear that the left-leaning media is going to cast the violent leftist Antifa movement as simply engaged in “resistance” to racist “hate groups,” such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. Then all persons opposed to the Marxist agenda of Antifa are falsely portrayed as the same as those two groups.

The reality is that Nazi is short for “National Socialist,” the political party of Adolf Hitler — a party of the Left in Germany that favored social welfare programs and heavy-handed government control of the economy and the culture. This clash between Antifa and the neo-Nazis, then, is really an intramural battle among ideological soulmates, and has nothing to do with constitutionalists, other than the use of the Klan and the neo-Nazis to smear Americans who believe in traditional American principles such as liberty and limited government.

The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM), an Antifa group, is organizing in Philadelphia. Its target is the police, as evidenced by their production of workshops such as “Our Enemies in Blue” and “Introduction to Anarchism.” RAM cites a “rich revolutionary tradition” in Philadelphia, offering examples such as Russell Shoats, who put five bullets into the back of a Philadelphia policeman in 1970. Another “hero” of RAM is Mumia Abu Jamal, a Black Panther who killed Daniel Faulkner, also a Philadelphia police officer, in 1981.

Writing in National Review, Ben Shapiro blamed former President Obama, at least partly, for this explosion of anti-police propaganda. He wrote that rather than use his office to “tamp down leftist racial radicalism,” Obama “made excuses for riots in Ferguson and Baltimore. He used the shooting of Dallas police officers by a radical black activist as an opportunity to lecture Americans about the evils of racist policing.”

And who can forget Obama’s comment in 2009 that the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police “acted stupidly” in arresting a prominent Harvard professor after a confrontation at the man’s home?

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who is black, was particularly critical of the BLM movement, and of Obama, charging that the president himself had “started this war on police” with his inflammatory rhetoric.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) staged a march in Minnesota in 2015, that included the chant, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon.” Despite this and similar incidents, Obama has defended BLM, even backing up assertions by Alica Garza, a BLM founder, who said blacks are “uniquely, systematically, and savagely targeted by the state.”

Marxist groups such as RAM target the police largely because they are seen as the protectors of private property. Karl Marx summed up communism as the abolition of private property. On their own website, RAM members proudly call themselves “revolutionary anarchists,” arguing that the “abolitionist struggle must be extended to the state and capitalism, the perpetrators of oppression. The revolutionary movement in the U.S. today is at a crossroads, as fascist movements are expanding, and the state becomes increasingly authoritarian.”

This “war” against the police is not new. James Fitzgerald, a former police detective in Newark, New Jersey, conducted a national “Support Your Local Police and Keep Them Independent!” speaking tour for The John Birch Society in 2016, and addressed this very issue.

Fitzgerald told his audience in Oklahoma City last May that the roots of the violence against police are decades old, and have continued to the present. He said that the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate had compiled a report in 1960 entitled “Communist Plot Against Free World Police.” The report concluded that communists were working to sully the reputation of the nation’s police forces.

A few years after the report was published, Sargent Shriver, a brother-in-law of President John Kennedy, became the director of the Peace Corps for President Lyndon Johnson. From that position, Shriver funnelled money to “community organizers” [remember Obama’s former role as a “community organizer” in Chicago] in Newark, New Jersey, who were working to radicalize young black Americans. Shriver was cautioned that these groups were led by ideological communists, who had posters of communists such as Mao, Lenin, and Che Guevera gracing the walls of their headquarters. He dismissed the concerns, but the agitation against the police continued until the infamous Newark riots occurred.

For those who are supposedly concerned about “Nazis” in America, they should note that the nationalization of the police was effected by the chief Nazi, Adolf Hitler, with his Gestapo. Fitzgerald noted in his talk that the Obama Justice Department was using something called the Police Data Initiative to achieve “federalization of the local police.”

The mainstream media obscures the Marxist and violent nature of Antifa-related groups. As confrontations between ideological cousins, the Marxist Antifa and the “neo-Nazis” escalate, the police will no doubt be portrayed as either overly brutal to supposedly peaceful leftist protesters or unable to control the violence of the neo-Nazis. They may even be charged with both failures, with the solution offered as nationalization of the police — a false solution that should be resisted by every freedom-loving American.

Photo: AP Images