"Anti"Fa Attacks Two Hispanic Marines, Accusing Them of Being White Supremacists

As Amber Athey notes, Don Lemon's and Chris Cuomo's defense of "Anti"Fa isn't aging very well.

Two U.S. Marines testified last week that they were attacked by a "mob" of Antifa members who mistook them for participants in a right-wing rally in November.

Alejandro Godinez and Luis Torres testified in a Philadelphia, PA courtroom that they were attending a local event for Marines last month when they were confronted by members of Antifa, including suspects Thomas Massey and Tom Keenan.

Keenan allegedly demanded to know if Godinez and Torres were members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing group that was demonstrating nearby at the time. Godinez explained that he and Torres are Marines, but said that, nonetheless, the group of 10 to 12 Antifa members began mercilessly attacking them.

According to the Marines’ testimony, their attackers started calling them "Nazis" and "white supremacists" while they punched and kicked them. Godinez shouted, "I'm Mexican!" which allegedly caused the attackers to start calling them ethnic slurs like "spic" and "wetback."

Godinez said he was maced, punched in the head and kicked in the ribs. When the attack was over, Torres called 911 and the pair went to the hospital. Godinez still reportedly has eye issues from being maced and said he may need surgery in the future to deal with his other injuries.

John Sexton already wrote this up on Friday. He also wondered anew when CNN would correct Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo and declare that antifa is indeed a violent mob.

And, on this subject, if you read one post today, make it Sexton's post on a former leftist radical explaining the lunacy that he was once part of. You can check that post out for key excerpts plus an interview on Tucker (though note, he's an intellectual type, not a performer; some will find his television manner dry), and if you like those quotes do read his entire essay at Quillette. It's a very insightful piece.

Unfortunately, toxicity in radical communities is not a bug. It is a feature. The ideology and norms of radicalism have evolved to produce toxic, paranoid, depressed subjects. What follows is a picture of what happens in communities that are passionately, sincerely, radically woke, as seen from the perspective of an apostate.

Faith

Commentators have accurately noted how social justice seems to take the form of a religion. This captures the meaning and fulfilment I found in protests and occupations. It also captures how, outside of these harrowing festivals, everyday life in radical communities is mundane but pious. As a radical activist, much of my time was devoted to proselytizing. Non-anarchists were like pagans to be converted through zines and wheatpasted posters rather than by Bible and baptism. When non-radicals listened to my assertions that nazis deserved death, that all life had devolved into spectacle, and that monogamy was a capitalist social construct, they were probably bewildered instead of enticed.

Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one's own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their "analysis" and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn't see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my "chosen family."

Trent Eady says of his own radicalism in Montreal, "When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues." When my friends and I did have theoretical disagreements, they tended towards the purely strategic or to philosophical minutiae. Are cops human? If we pay attention to the few white nationalists in town, will that stir them up? Is polyamory queer, or privileged?

Deep and sincere engagement with opposing points of view is out of the question. Radicalism is like a clan too suspicious of outsiders to abandon cousin marriage, and, like incestuous offspring, radicalism's intellectual offspring accumulate genetic load.

Hispanic Marines, Accusing Them of Being White Supremacists&bodytext=As Amber Athey notes, Don Lemon's and Chris Cuomo's defense of "Anti"Fa isn't aging very well. Two U.S. Marines testified last week that they were attacked by a "mob" of Antifa members who mistook them for participants in a right-wing...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace of Spades at 07:26 PM

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