Though Democrat officials deny aiding Antifa violence and making police stand down while Antifa commits violence and property damage, the pattern is obvious.

The deadly melee in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12 was a turning point for “Antifa,” the so-called “antifascist” thugs who have been rampaging and rioting throughout America for the past year. Thanks to the all-too-typical duplicity of the “mainstream” media, the tragedy of Charlottesville was turned into a great victory for the armed and masked Antifa anarchists/communists, while President Donald Trump, conservatives, and defenders of Confederate monuments were falsely presented as indistinguishable from violent neo-Nazis and Klansmen. Antifa were presented as heroes, with Harvard Professor Cornel West, a radical Marxist who has been active in communist causes for decades, claiming that Antifa “saved” him and other “peaceful” demonstrators from the white supremacists. West’s claim, repeated and prominently featured in multiple media reports, along with similar statements by other radical participants, conferred a new valorous glow on the masked hoodlums.

It is crucial to note, however, that the confrontation in Charlottesville turned in the fatal direction precisely when the city’s “progressive” Democrat Party machine ordered the police to stand down and allow the antagonists to fight — and then, going further, directed the police to corral the demonstrators and push them into one another. The results were as deadly as they were predictable.  

Charlottesville was not the first time local police had been ordered to stand down and allow armed and masked Antifa terrorists to attack opposing demonstrators. We have seen the same modus operandi at work in one Democrat-controlled city after another: Chicago, San Jose, San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, New Orleans, and many other “Deep Blue” towns. The main difference between Charlottesville and the other violent venues is that in Charlottesville the “antifascist” Antifa thugs had some genuine neo-Nazi, white supremacist, fascist goons to mix it up with, while in most of the other cases, the masked Marxist-Maoist ninjas and their non-masked allies have brutally attacked peaceful citizens merely attempting to exercise their rights to attend a Trump rally or listen to a conservative speaker who has riled the Left with politically incorrect speech.

Another major difference, of course, is that in Charlottesville the havoc concluded with a horrific, deadly incident: a white nationalist ramming his car into another vehicle, which then rammed a third vehicle into a crowd of Antifa demonstrators, killing 32-year-old demonstrator Heather Heyer and severely injuring others. Now, Antifa and their promoters had not only the dramatic images they needed — of “courageous” Antifa activists confronting vile neo-Nazis — but in Heather Heyer they had a “martyr” for the cause.

The violence had been escalating for more than a year, with mayhem recurring in the same cities, as though invited. The mounting evidence shows a pattern of complicity indicating that the violence was indeed invited. The Democrat politicians in charge of these jurisdictions — governors, mayors, city councils, police chiefs, and sheriffs — who have taken solemn oaths and are duty-bound to protect their citizens and the public peace, have instead aided and abetted the violent Antifa gangs and their demonstrator allies, including communist groups with long histories of violence, and radical lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who provide legal aid to the rioters.

The following list is by no means complete, but it is sufficient to show a pattern of complicity.

Charlottesville: Responsibility for the deadly melee in this Virginia city of 50,000 extends from Governor Terry McAuliffe down to Mayor Mike Signer and the Charlottesville City Council. Prior to his election as governor in 2013, McAuliffe, a wealthy, politically connected banker, was a top fundraiser for the Democratic Party and chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). A close pal of Barack Obama and the Clintons, he is credited with raising over a quarter of a billion dollars for Bill and Hillary. He has been a vociferous critic of then-candidate and now President Donald Trump. He also has close ties to Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer and Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, who, likewise, have been notable for their leftist politics and virulent anti-Trump statements. Each of the above politicians played a key role in decisions that guaranteed the lethal violence, such as:

Refusing to enforce Virginia’s anti-mask law. Enforcing this law could have prevented the confrontation, since the Antifa thugs themselves admit that concealing their identity is essential to their “direct action” criminal activity. Virginia Code 18.2-422 states: “It shall be unlawful for any person over sixteen years of age while wearing any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place.” Violation of the law is considered a “Class 6 felony.” The law makes exceptions for holiday festivals, masquerade balls, theatrical productions, protective masks, and other exceptions. Ironically, the Virginia law was passed, as in other states, to protect the public by unmasking the Ku Klux Klan. Incredibly, politicians such as McAuliffe and Signer are getting away with allowing (even encouraging) brutal Antifa terrorists to conceal their identities like the KKK and use violent KKK tactics, while chanting anti-KKK slogans! Thus, the masked Antifa activists became emboldened during the series of confrontations in the months leading up to the fatal August 12 conflict. In addition to failing to enforce the anti-mask law, Virginia’s “progressive” elected officials have failed to prosecute to the full extent of the law imported rioters (on both sides) who crossed state lines to initiate the conflagration.

Inviting the neo-Nazis. Mayor Signer and the Charlottesville City Council engaged in an inflammatory campaign to remove statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from city parks. Many locals who have no sympathies whatsoever with the KKK, neo-Nazis, or “white nationalists,” but who object to the campaign to erase Southern history and culture, peacefully opposed the monument-removal effort. This was not providing the desired intensity of conflict, apparently, so more incendiary theatrics had to be imported. The mayor and council claim they were “forced” to issue a permit for a “Unite the Right” rally due to a lawsuit brought on behalf of rally organizer Jason Kessler by the ACLU. How Kessler, who was until recently a supporter of President Obama and a left-wing activist with the Occupy Wall Street movement, became a leader of the “alt-Right” is something of a mystery. Kessler’s rally brought in mostly out-of-town racists, including prominent leaders who, like himself, have very suspect backgrounds. These provocateurs conveniently provided the precise optics the anti-Trump Democrats and their media allies were waiting to exploit. Vice Mayor Bellamy, who is black, had been forced to resign from the Virginia Board of Education (a McAuliffe appointment) when his racist tweets against white people and his vulgar, sexual tweets about women were revealed. As vice mayor of Charlottesville, he stoked the fires, referring to President Trump as the “leader” of white supremacists.

Inviting Antifa. It takes two to tangle, so Mayor Signer and company had to set up the confrontation with an opposing force. Professor Walter Heinecke of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, an Antifa leader and “direct action” instructor, applied for and received permits for two counterdemonstrations near Kessler’s band of misfits. Naturally, most media reports are sympathetic toward Heinecke and refer to his training program as “nonviolent direct action” — which, somehow, seems invariably to go violent when put into practice. Tyler Magill, who is a 46-year-old employee at the university library, a longtime host on the university radio station, and perpetual local activist, is identified in the local media as “one of Heinecke’s marshals to keep order” at the counterdemonstration. He obviously didn’t succeed, if keeping the Antifa crowd from initiating violence was the true goal. And the following day, celebratory Antifa video footage went viral showing Magill chasing Jason Kess­ler as police escorted Kessler away from a press conference at the park. When Magill suffered a stroke on August 15, his Antifa comrades immediately tried to invest him with martyr status, claiming the stroke resulted from being hit with a tiki torch wielded by the neo-Nazis. However, Magill’s brother-in-law, Loren Mendosa, who was staying with him at the hospital, said there was no evidence he had been hit, and that the Antifa propagandists are engaging in “pure conjecture” in order to whip up a frenzy on social media. They are saying “what they want to hear,” Mendosa said, because Magill being hit by a Nazi “made for a better story” than a stroke caused by smoking or lifting heavy objects.

McAuliffe forcing conflict. The video evidence, as well as eyewitness accounts from reporters and participants on opposing sides of the demonstrations, indicates that the Virginia State Police knowingly shoved unarmed members of the Unite the Right demonstration directly into the arms (and bats, fists, and other weapons) of the much larger Antifa mob. During the morning of Saturday, August 12, groups of Unite the Right and Antifa sporadically faced off and scuffled at Emancipation Park, while Charlottesville Police and Virginia State Police stood by and watched. Shortly before noon (the scheduled starting time for the Unite the Right rally), Governor McAuliffe declared a state of emergency, and the state police took control of the situation. State police in riot gear then used their shields and batons not to keep the opposing sides separate or to escort the vastly outnumbered white supremacists out the north end of the park, but to drive them directly into the mob of Antifa hecklers on the park’s south side. One could hardly ask for a better guarantee of chaos and violence than if it were planned that way. Was it? Charlottesville city officials have appointed Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney under President Obama, to head an “independent investigation” of the Charlottesville violence. Heaphy, a protégé of Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, is the son-in-law of General Eric Shinseki, Obama’s secretary of veteran affairs (and a member of the globalist Council on Foreign Relations). Heaphy’s appointment does not inspire confidence that we will see a genuine, thorough investigation.

San Jose: Although the “mainstream” media largely played down or ignored it, millions of viewers have seen online videos of the vicious attacks on Trump rally-goers by anti-Trump mobs in San Jose on June 2, 2016. “Law-abiding citizens leaving the Trump rally were victimized by being forced by armed police to walk into a riot in full swing where many were assaulted while police looked on,” said attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon, who is representing victims of the mass assault in a suit against the city and the mayor. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton, and Police Chief Eddie Garcia dismissed as “absurd” the charge that they had ordered police to stand down. However, internal documents obtained by Dhillon in the lawsuit and reviewed by The New American support the manifest evidence from videos of the event and support the plaintiffs’ claim that the stand-down was an official policy.

New Orleans: The Jefferson Davis monument in New Orleans became a target, particularly in May of this year, as Antifa and Black Lives Matter hoodlums physically attacked citizens (including black citizens) who were defending the statue. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Deputy Mayor Ryan Berni sided with the monument’s masked attackers. Berni, who previously served as chief of staff in Washington, D.C., to Clinton political strategist James Carville, was reported to actually have been “riding shotgun” in a vehicle with the Antifa/BLM activists at the monument while their colleagues were attacking the peacefully assembled statue defenders.

Berkeley: Mayor Jesse Arreguin and the Berkeley City Council are being forced to respond to a lawsuit claiming they violated the rights of University of California, Berkeley, students by ordering police to stand down – on multiple occasions. This allowed Antifa mobs to violently attack students, vandalize public and private property, and force speaker events to be canceled, thus preventing students from hearing speakers with viewpoints the Antifa militants object to.

Photo: Thinkstock (not actual Antifa protestor)

This article (along with other related material) appears in the Octobrer 9, 2017 issue of The New American.