Aware finally that the other guys have all the guns, the revolutionary media darlings known as “Antifa”–shorthand for antifascist–came armed to a rally Saturday at Washington Square Park just north of Crown Center. Novices to this game, the Antifa crew were apparently unaware of a Kansas City, Missouri, ordinance that mandates a concealed carry permit for those who carry open.
“To carry openly you have to be able to carry concealed,” gun rights activist Kevin Jamison told the Kansas City Star. “Welcome to my world.” The Kansas City Police made the masked mischief makers of Antifa remove the ammunition from their weapons. “A lot of things are legal,” said Jamison. “Whether they’re a good idea or not is another thing.”
As to why the good comrades of Antifa wear masks, one of its members told the Star “they were concerned about becoming the target of harassment if their identities became public.” Had this fellow followed the media more closely he would have realized it was his armed opponents who get harassed. The Three Percenters–the name a tribute to the 3 percent of American colonists who took up arms against the British–are routinely assigned career killing labels such as racist, fascist and white supremacist without evidence. And yet they are the ones who show up without masks.
The purpose of the rally was unclear. One attendee, Brendan Davison, a member of William Jewell Young Democratic Socialists, urged his fellow travelers to attend, “If you’re anti-fascism, if you’re anti-racism, get out here,” he told Star reporter Mark Davis.
Kudos to Davis here for peeking at least a little bit behind the masks. He identifies some of the Antifa crowd as members of the Progressive Youth Organization–KC. “Our orientation towards Trump should be the same as our orientation to Hillary, the Democrats, and the entire U.S. empire,” declares the PYO on its website, “militant resistance with the goal of smashing them to bits.” It is a good thing these guys are anti-racist. Otherwise, they might be worrisome.
One of the masked men with whom Davis spoke admitted to being a “partisan from the Kansas City Revolutionary Collective, which describes itself as an ‘autonomous Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective.’” The stark home page of the collective features few words and just two images: one of Chairman Mao and the other the Soviet hammer and cycle.
China’s Mao is universally awarded top honors for mass killings in the twentieth century with 60 million dead. The Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin gets second place with 40 million, and Hitler, who needs no introduction, comes in third at 30 million. It is understandable why defining oneself as a neo-Nazi would make people shudder, but why the Maoists and the Marxists get a pass is not at all clear.
Many of these same groups showed up at Charlottesville with violence on their minds. Said President Donald Trump that day, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.” In the not too distant future people may wonder why they rushed to condemn not Antifa, but Donald Trump.