From the Desk of Bob Barr

Daily Caller by Bob Barr In 2008, Mark Bauerlein wrote “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” Judging by events in the intervening dozen years (and especially in recent months), it appears that Bauerlein’s assessment was premature and perhaps even too kind. Bauerlein correctly identified overreliance on the internet and social media (then still in its infancy) as the primary culprits for Millennials losing their ability to think, learn and communicate coherently. What his analysis perhaps did not anticipate is the number of adults who have come to encourage, empower and support Millennials in these efforts. It is almost as if adults in government, the news media and academia are competing with Millennials for the title. Consider, for example, the issue of providing college students with “safe spaces,” where they can shelter from the horrors of people, ideas and principles they consider “offensive.” The students may be the ones pushing for these accommodations, but it is the adult college administrators who cave in and make it happen. Young protestors in Seattle may “occupy” a sector of that once-respected city; they may scream “police brutality” and call for the police department to be “defunded.” Their  demands, however, would amount to little were it not for the city’s clueless Mayor Jenny Durken, who lauded the young occupiers as “patriots,” and her namby-pamby police chief, Carmen Best, who decided that barricades which had protected one of her department’s precinct headquarters should be removed as a “gesture of trust” to the mob. While adult elected enablers of today’s young mobs predominate in west coast cities such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, counterparts are found across the country. New York’s dynamic duo of Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly praise and encourage the demonstrators, even as they offer virtually no support for police who are left to deal with the looting, arson and violence in the streets. Meanwhile, Cuomo’s narcissistic brother, CNN commentator Chris Cuomo, muses on air that protestors need not be either polite or peaceful. On the ground in Seattle’s mob-occupied zone, a collegiate-type “safe space” was set aside, but only for individuals with “black ancestry” or who “have experienced oppression because [they] are black.” In an interesting role-reversal, news reports noted that this open-air “Black Healing Space” was enforced against non-black interlopers by young whites. The profound historical and cultural illiteracy of these young mobs repeatedly is confirmed by actions such as their indiscriminate destruction of public statues simply because they are, well, public statues. Reasoning with demonstrators who have shown themselves incapable of distinguishing between statues of musicians like Stevie Ray Vaughan and those memorializing Confederate civil war generals would be an obvious waste of time. In Lincoln County, Oregon, officials decreed that black Americans do not have to wear medical masks otherwise required for all citizens, because requiring African Americans to do so would in some way perpetuate “racial stereotypes.” Truly, there would be little point in arguing with adults spouting such nonsense; they have thrown in with the children. The depth to which these “adult Millennials” and their “true Millennial” cohorts have descended in their drive to protect themselves (and our country) from reality, is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the wrath just recently directed against “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling. Rowling’s “sin” was to publicly explain that only biological women menstruate, not men who had “transgendered” to women. Adult detractors were not only angered by Rowling’s refusal to kowtow to the New Age gender orthodoxy; they reportedly were deeply “devastated” by the horror of her words. One such person is a teacher at the highly regarded Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Devin Michelle Bunten. Ms. Bunten penned a New York Times op-ed declaring that people, like Rowling and President Trump, who employ terms such as “male” and “female” are “erasing” transgendered individuals and simply perpetuating what she considers our disgraceful social “patriarchy.” With adult teachers at institutions of higher learning like MIT spouting such nonsense, it is hardly surprising we have now two generations of illiterate snowflakes who cannot distinguish between Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stonewall Jackson. Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7^th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

Virtue signaling in corporate America has become as much of a marketing strategy as television commercials and magazine ads. Most recently, the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) demonstrations have provided ample opportunity for corporations to demonstrate how “woke” they are, by donating money to BLM and issuing self-serving tweets trumpeting their generosity and “wokeness.”

The ease with which groups like BLM are able to successfully pressure corporate leaders to bow to their demands may surprise some observers, but it is in fact nothing new. Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton honed the strategy to near perfection years ago.

At its core, such corporate capitulation reflects a deep, if unexplainable corporate sense of racial guilt that can be triggered by outside groups pressing the right buttons. The strategy appears often to work even though the true goals of those exerting the pressure may have little, if anything to do with racial justice, and everything to do with funding an anti-capitalist movement designed to destroy these very corporations in the name of “social progress.”

BLM’s leaders do not even feel the need to hide their true goals from their corporate victims. In a recent interview, BLM founder Patrisse Cullors identifies herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists.”  This is no slip of the tongue. Such language reflects the Movement’s philosophical underpinnings and goals — the dismantling of America’s capitalist economic system as a “racist tool.”

As with so many other contemporary “progressive” movements, such as “Fight for 15,” “Extinction Rebellion,” and “Occupy,” BLM starts with a superficially worthy niche to gain quick publicity and support. Many of the protestors who came out to support BLM in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, for example, may very well have been marching for genuine justice reform issues; unaware they were pawns in a much larger game orchestrated by Cullors and Garza. This is precisely how these movements have become so effective.

Leaders of these movements build strength of numbers around their particular public “causes,” then use the resulting influence to stealthily move the conversation to the real goal. This is how the Floyd protests morphed quickly from demands for reasoned reforms to violence, looting, and capturing a multi-block section of a major American city. Corporate CEOs who are more afraid of tarnishing their image than standing for principle, are then ripe for groups like BLM to demand ransom in the form of dollars; lots of dollars.

This also helps explain why BLM and other protestors have shown no discretion or logic in toppling public statues and monuments; lumping those of Confederate generals together with their Union adversaries, former presidents of the United States, abolitionists like Matthias Baldwin, and many more.

It gets worse.

Just as Karl Marx recognized the need to dismantle organized religion in order for his collectivist and statist movement to succeed, the current movement engineered by BLM and its cohorts has taken on a decidedly anti-religion tone. Shaun King, a high profile “justice” commentator, called for the destruction of “white” Christian artifacts including statues of Jesus and stained glass windows, declaring them tools of “white supremacy.” As it was for Marx one-and-a-half centuries ago, the goal today is the destruction of Western culture.

Those who believe this movement will stop with statues and monuments are hopelessly naive. The Marxist radicals directing BLM and the broader anti-capitalist movement are targeting the institutional underpinnings of American society. Their efforts to destroy institutions of higher learning have become disturbingly commonplace, with repeated purges of faculty, administrators, and even students who refuse or simply fail to bow to the demands of the mob.

In the political arena things are playing out according to script. Democrats willingly allow themselves to be led by the mob, and most GOP leaders are too meek to stand up to it; perhaps believing that if they bow just a bit they will not be consumed by the movement.

With such spineless leadership at the top corporate and political echelons of American society, it is becoming increasingly difficult to view the future with any degree of optimism.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7 District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

As the Supreme Court nears the end of its 2019-2020 term, it is becoming increasingly questionable whether the “conservative majority” that Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were supposed to have ushered in actually exists.

Ever since his legally convoluted majority opinion upholding Obamacare against serious constitutional challenge eight years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts has provided conservatives plenty of reason to suspect he is not the “conservative” jurist in whom many had pinned hopes. However, a handful of decisions by the Court in the past two months have raised new red flags that the problems with the “conservative” majority run deeper than a single jurist.

An additional concern is that recent public threats by leading Democrat senators directed against the Court’s Republican-appointed justices might well have intimidated some of them into tempering their views.

The refusal in late April by a majority of the nine justices to decide a Second Amendment case out of New York City that was ripe for such action was the first of these red flags. It came as no surprise that Roberts joined the majority in refusing to decide the case. What was surprising, however, is that Brett Kavanaugh, the most recent Associate Justice, joined Roberts and the four “liberal” justices in punting the New York gun case. It was Kavanaugh who was the victim of an especially vicious confirmation battle in 2018, and who was specifically and publicly threatened by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in March.

Just weeks later, the Court declined to accept another case that was ripe for decision. On June15, the Court refused to hear a challenge by the Trump administration to a California “sanctuary” law that prohibited state law enforcement officials from notifying federal immigration agents when immigrants convicted of crimes are to be released.

June 15 was the same day the Court issued what could best be described as a classic, activist liberal decision, reflecting the notion that the Constitution is a “living document,” to be interpreted by judges according to their contemporary views rather than what they might consider the “outdated” views of its original drafters. Leading the charge for this liberal decision, and actually writing for the majority (which, predictably, included Roberts), was none other than Trump’s first pick for the Court – Neil Gorsuch.

The decision, which could as easily have been written by former ultra-liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren as by Gorsuch, held that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protected both “sexual orientation” and “transgender status” against workplace discrimination, even though neither term appears anywhere in the law.

Three days later came the final gauntlet thrown at the feet of the Republican president by the “conservative” Chief Justice. Roberts, in a hyper-technical majority opinion joined by the four liberal associate justices, ruled that the Trump administration could not shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program implemented by the Obama administration without statutory authority, even though the current administration had the lawful power to do so.

In another of his signature convoluted opinions, Roberts held that the reason DACA could not be closed down was because the Department of Homeland Security did not fully “appreciate the scope of its decision” to terminate the program. The gobbledygook in the opinion cannot disguise the fact that Roberts was desperate to find some reason not to terminate a politically popular program.

Still to be decided before the current term of court ends later this month is the Louisiana abortion case that precipitated Schumer’s public threats against Gorsuch and Kavanaugh three months ago. The law at issue poses no burden whatsoever on women seeking abortions in Louisiana. It merely requires that doctors performing such procedures have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, which is the very same requirement applicable to physicians providing other medical services.

If one or more of the Republican-appointed justices side with the four certain liberal justices in finding Louisiana’s law unconstitutional, it will signal clearly that the threats by Democrat senators, buttressed perhaps by recent polls indicating likely Democrat gains in November, have in fact intimidated at least some conservative justices into moderating their constitutional principles.

This happened once before when President Franklin D. Roosevelt openly threatened action against the High Court for hesitating to uphold his New Deal programs. The Court succumbed then, with disastrous constitutional consequences. Let us pray it does not happen again.

American Action News

by Bob Barr

The violent upheavals we have witnessed over the past three weeks in cities across America, coupled with the clamoring for “racial justice,” has elicited comparisons with events in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similarities exist certainly, but our country is a far different place than it was 52 years ago. Where we wind up when the dust settles after the votes are cast on November 3rd, will be far different from where we found ourselves on Wednesday, November 6, 1968, or, four years later the day after Richard Nixon was reelected.

The violence in America in 1968 and continuing for several years thereafter, was precipitated initially by opposition to the war in Vietnam but was seriously exacerbated by domestic events, notably the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy that Spring and Summer. King’s assassination in particular provided the other catalyst for the wave of violence – racial tension.

Today, while there is no discernible relationship between U.S. foreign policy and the turmoil rocking cities from Seattle to Atlanta, there clearly is a strong underpinning of racial animosity; more so than was the case a half-century ago.

Another common element between the political upheavals evident in these two eras is deep-seated personal animosity toward a national leader – Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and Donald Trump today.

In that first election, Nixon tapped into a profound sense of unease among middle-class voters, focused first on the antiwar demonstrations and later the violence following King’s assassination. In declaring himself the “law and order” candidate running against an entrenched establishment Democrat — Hubert Humphrey — who appeared to be baffled by the extent of that voter unease, Nixon opened a wellspring of support that carried him all the way through to his reelection four years later.

President Trump cannot be credited with “discovering” that undercurrent of unease – Nixon beat him to it 52 years ago. Perhaps even more than did his predecessor, however, Trump understands the timeliness and importance of the phenomenon, and he has masterfully calculated how to use it to his electoral advantage.

One could delve deeply, if not endlessly, into numerous statistical factors comparing voting in 1968 and 1972 with 2016 and 2020 – education levels, racial voting patterns, voting age, and the list goes on. Bearing in mind the truism that statistics are notoriously malleable, however, such analysis yields little of value in trying to understand how the current climate of extreme social unrest will affect this November’s election.

The only exception, perhaps, to not becoming bogged down in dueling statistics, might be to consider the substantial “gender gap” – currently at 20% – Trump suffers when matched against Joe Biden, his all-but-certain Democrat rival. Nixon did not face such a “gap”; in fact, it was not until the 1980 election that a discernible “gender gap” began to appear in presidential contests.

Statistics aside, our society truly is at a crossroads.

The current political climate contains the very real possibility, if not the likelihood, of recurrent urban violence at least through the November election. Voters in 1968 and 1972 faced similar threats, and not surprisingly responded positively to Nixon’s “law and order” campaign on both occasions. His victories were facilitated by virtue of the fact that his Democrat opponents, especially George McGovern in 1972, were perceived as weak in dealing with domestic violence.

Historically, American voters have responded positively to candidates who convey strength in the face of domestic or international turbulence. While Biden does not yet personify the profound weakness McGovern displayed in 1972, the ambivalence he continues to exhibit is similar to that by Humphrey when he campaigned against Nixon in 1968 (and lost).

Thankfully for our country in both those cycles, and ever since, there has been a reserve of reason and maturity sufficient to push back successfully against the forces of chaos that tested us.

However, never before in our history have so many political leaders and citizens shown themselves willing to accept, if not encourage violence and chaos in order to defeat one individual, as we now are witnessing. If they are able to defeat Trump in November, the violence and chaos we have seen so far this summer will be but a harbinger of things to come.

Bob Barr (@BobBarr) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He won the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination in 2008 and currently serves as president and CEO of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation.

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

Marches, demonstrations and even riots have been sweeping cities across the country. Protesters have literally taken over a sector of downtown Seattle. Calls to “defund the police” are being heard even in the halls of the Congress. Some health experts are predicting a resurgence of COVID-19. Amidst all this chaos the U.S. Postal Service is begging Congress to give it another bailout. Congress should respond to this request with a resounding “NO.”

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has suffered from well-documented structural problems for years; long before the coronavirus pandemic hit early this year. However, in recognition of the difficulties the Postal Service faced along with almost every other business sector hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, it received $10 billion as part of the CARES Act. For any well-run business, that should have sufficed to get it over the pandemic hump. Not for the folks at the USPS.

Now, just a few months after that huge cash infusion, the Postal Service is coming back begging for another bailout; this time for a whopping $25 billion. In the absence of meaningful structural reforms to the failed business model under which the USPS long has operated, Congress should not even consider granting this request.

For one thing, in light of recent jobs numbers and other signs that the economy already is bouncing back, there may be no need to pass the most recent proposed COVID-19 “stimulus” package, the HEROES Act. Even aside from this broader perspective, however, it is clear that giving the USPS as it currently is structured more taxpayer money, would be throwing good money after bad. The Service needs reform – major structural reform – not a bailout.

The Postal Service operates according to a broken business model. It has lost billions for more than a decade and will continue to lose billions endlessly as it currently is configured. Its operational losses are continuing to increase, yet its leadership is not proposing any reforms. They are asking for debt forgiveness while facing a huge and increasingly negative balance sheet. The Service hides the revenues it loses on package deliveries by calling them “institutional costs;” it increases fees for First Class mail and for mass mailings. None of these steps have stemmed the fiscal hemorrhaging.

It is hardly a winning argument to say that giving money to the U. S. Postal Service is only fair because without such largesse it is forced to operate as a government-run service at a disadvantage in competition with private sector delivery businesses. Private sector delivery services are profitable and strong (especially in today’s economy) because of how they are structured, how they operate, and perhaps most important, how they respond to changes in the marketplace. Compared to companies like UPS and FedEx, the USPS is the Pony Express.

Numerous reforms have been recommended but are routinely ignored. The Department of Treasury conducted a comprehensive study of the USPS and recommended substantial changes. President Trump has called the USPS a “joke” and has demanded reforms. A 2018 White House Task Force issued recommendations, but the Postal Service failed to act on any of them. Congressional Democrats labeled the reforms “privatization” — the kiss of death for Democrat Party members of Congress and voters.

On April 30, 2019 the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing titled, “The Financial Condition of the Postal Service,” at which Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), now President Trump’s Chief of Staff, made a number of strong statements in support of reform measures. His suggestions for meaningful reform were, of course, summarily rebuffed by Democrats on the Committee. What did emerge from the hearing is that the Postal Service faces a $125 billion gap but has no plan to restructure itself now or in the future.

Adding insult to injury, at the same time that the USPS is demanding debt forgiveness, it seeks to have its retirees dumped into Medicare, so the taxpayers at large pick up the huge tab for health care benefits the Service promised its retirees.

The reforms must be real, and they must deal not only with the structure of the USPS, but also with the manner by which federal monies are used to disrupt market forces throughout the package delivery sector. Reform of the Postal Service is essential, and the time to do so is now, but not disguised as pandemic stimulus.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7^th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

Policing in the United States is overdue for reform. Admitting to this is not a matter of race, political party, or ideology. It is an observable truth, confirmed time and again by the lack of accountability in holding bad cops responsible for actions that should not be tolerated in a free country governed by the constitutional rule of law.

There are steps that the federal and state governments can and should undertake to address deficiencies in policing. Defunding the police, however, is not an idea worthy of consideration. The fact that “defund the police” is actually being seriously considered illustrates the idiocracy that has infected public debate in 21^st century America.

Defunding the police because of a few bad police officers is akin to closing down hospitals as a result of an occasional malpractice incident by doctors; or closing public schools because there are some bad teachers. Such a move would solve nothing and in fact make matters incalculably worse for everyone (except perhaps for the very rich, who could afford private security services for their homes, property, and vehicles). Still, however, especially within the “Black Lives Matter” movement, the proposal lives.

Thankfully, amidst the cacophony, there are a few rational voices.

On Twitter, Washington Post columnist and noted police critic Radley Balko suggests we not get too hung up on the phrase “defund the police” as a literal objective, but rather take it as a call-to-arms for a host of sensible reforms. Balko’s approach should be garnering wide, nonpartisan appeal, but many Black Lives Matter activists still insist that the only solution is literally to get rid of police departments. “Please don’t misrepresent our demands,” Jonathan Ben-Menachem, who writes at the criminal justice news site The Appeal, replied to Balko — “It’s not a euphemism or an analogy.”

But advocates of this extreme measure should not be permitted to skate by without being forced to answer a host of hard questions. Who, if anyone, is to investigate crime, and what limitations, if any, would restrain them in their search and surveillance powers? Would the Constitution still apply to these New Age Peacekeepers, or would they be unrestrained by due process and equal protection of the law? In the society envisioned by Ben-Menachem, what authority would peacekeepers have to detain or incapacitate dangerous individuals – or would they be not be empowered to do so in the first instance?

Most fundamentally, what exactly is the goal for such radicalism? Perhaps, like the Bernie Sanders socialists who romanticize a future of complete economic and social equality, police abolitionists foresee a future miraculously free of crime, where community “peacekeepers” exist only to change tires and help old ladies across the street. But, just as socialists always have had to contend eventually — people can only be made equal through government power, ultimately enforced at the end of a gun; look no further than the chaos that grips modern-day Venezuela.

Both history and human nature confirm that there are sound reasons why policing is one of the basic functions of any government. In our society, police functions are designed to be a common authority to enforce the law equally for all citizens, removing the need for vigilante mobs operating without accountability. More importantly, the Constitution and the rule of law hold police accountable within defined boundaries.

Daily Caller

By Bob Barr

The FBI has long been considered America’s premier federal law enforcement agency. The Bureau has a storied history dating to the 1930s and was the subject of a laudatory television series from 1965 to 1974. The FBI helped bring down the Gambino crime family. In the 1970s, the Bureau aided in defeating the violent Weather Underground, which was led by revolutionaries Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

 

The FBI now has morphed into a pale reflection of its former self — almost a parody. Last week, in a scene I never dreamt I would see, a group of FBI personnel (“officials,” according to one account) were photographed kneeling before some of the protesters who had wreaked havoc on the streets of our nation’s capital city. The kneelers all wore protective vests with “FBI” emblazoned thereon and were equipped with holstered sidearms.

 

It is unclear whether these individuals knelt out of fear, were ordered by their superiors at the Bureau to assume such a submissive pose, or whether each was doing so because they personally supported the protesters and rioters. What is clear is that the display confirms that the Federal Bureau of Investigation in this 21st century has lost sight of its mission and purpose, and apparently no longer even acts on its own intelligence information.

 

This last point is especially relevant.

 

As Attorney General William Barr stated on May 31st, mixed in with the protesters, demonstrators, looters and violent thugs who smashed windows, burned churches and engaged in all manner of other violent acts in cities across the country were elements of antifa and other extremist organizations. The FBI is a component of the U.S. Department of Justice which is headed by the Attorney General, and if he states that antifa and other extremist groups are mixed in with the thousands of other riot participants, we can assume the FBI was aware of such evidence. The Attorney General also publicly declared firmly that it was time “to confront and stop [the violence].”

 

Either the kneeling FBI agents were not given a copy of the Attorney General’s order, or they chose to ignore it, as their response was not to “confront” the challenges posed by the rioters but to bow before them.

 

Making this public display of kowtowing particularly ironic is the fact that the strategy, tactics and revolutionary goals of the current protesting groups before who the FBI employees knelt, are well-known to the Bureau. For example, the cries that America and its institutions are at their core systemically “racist” and must be dismantled is not a new battle cry of protesting groups. This was a recurrent theme in the book that served as the bible for the violent Weather Underground in the 1970s: Prairie Fire, The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.

 

More recently, the violent group antifa similarly has championed the discredited but politically correct theme that America is a country predicated on “systemic racism.”

 

In earlier times, when called on to assist in maintaining law and order, the FBI and its personnel seem to have understood its mission is to protect and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States. There also appears to have been a common understanding that those laws included prohibitions on looting, arson, assault and battery when crossing state lines or when targeting federal buildings and personnel, such as the Secret Service agents injured by rioters while protecting the White House.

 

Moreover, it always in the past was understood that personal political or social beliefs of individual agents were not to interfere with their official duties. No more.

 

Today’s FBI, as witnessed just recently by its employees kneeling before those who violate the very laws its personnel are sworn to uphold, and in the 2016-17 efforts by its senior officials to target President Trump, Gen. Michael Flynn and others for political reasons, has forsaken its fundamental and defining mission.

 

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

American Action News

by Bob Barr

On May 31st, in response to the violent riots rocking American cities from coast to coast and border to border, President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr issued statements that, among other things, condemned Antifa. Trump declared his intent to label Antifa a “terrorist organization.” The response from the mainstream media and leftist politicians was predictable — criticize Trump, not Antifa or the other groups and individuals involved in the violence.

The facts, as opposed to sentiment, support Trump and Barr. Antifa fits squarely within both legal and common-sense definitions of what is considered to constitute a “terrorist organization.” Moreover, if, as many Trump critics note, the federal government is permitted to designate organizations as “terrorist” only if they are “international,” a strong case can be made that Antifa satisfies that criteria as well.

While Antifa did not come into wide public consciousness in the U.S. until sometime around 2007 when “Rose City Antifa” was formed in Portland, Oregon, it has a far longer history in Europe, where it began as a movement to oppose the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1930s.

Exactly when the modern Antifa movement made its way across the Atlantic to our shores is not clear, but by the 1980s it was here. Its members openly have participated in and organized numerous demonstrations and violent confrontations in recent years, especially since the infamous 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Notwithstanding Antifa’s recent history of activity in the United States, its roots are in Europe where it remains active, most notably perhaps in Germany. In fact, when President Trump publicly said he would move to classify Antifa as a “terrorist organization,” it was Antifa members in Germany that quickly leapt to its defense, joined by media outlets such as the leftwing daily newspaper Neues Deutchland.

Whether in the U.S. or Europe, Antifa seeks always to cloak itself in “anti-fascist” rhetoric, and its defenders are quick to play the victim card whenever its true agenda as a purveyor of violence is called out. In 2019 Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a non-binding Senate Resolution labeling Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.” Antifa defenders complained that the move was totally unwarranted, then claimed absurdly that the Senator’s true goal was to protect white supremacy groups.

Despite its self-serving façade of anti-fascism, Antifa’s tactics are about as fascist as you can get, and its actual targets without exception are conservatives — conservative speakers, conservative journalists, conservative politicians, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), and law enforcement.

So, what is a “terrorist organization” and why is the Left so angry that the Administration would consider attaching the label to Antifa?

At its core, a terrorist organization is an entity that engages in acts of violence that endanger human lives, and which appear intended to intimidate or coerce the populace or to influence or affect the conduct or policy of a government. An organization that satisfies these criteria would, per the USA PATRIOT Act, be considered by the U.S. government to engage in “domestic terrorism”; therefore, reasonably considered a terrorist organization.

Check off all three of those criteria for Antifa — it engages in violent acts that intimidate and endanger lives, and it openly proclaims its goals of influencing government policies and conduct.

Delving a bit deeper into federal law, we discover that an organization engaging in acts of terrorism may be officially labeled a “foreign terrorist organization” if it also is — no surprise — “foreign,” and if its activity threatens the national defense or security of the United States. Here also, Antifa fits the bill — it acts internationally, was birthed overseas, and aims clearly to undermine our nation’s security by attacking law enforcement personnel and institutions.

Antifa cleverly tries not to expose to the public a visible formal organization structure, thereby claiming it is not an “organization” at all; ipso facto cannot be a terrorist organization. Such sophistry does not pass the common sense test. There are autonomous, self-labeled “Antifa” groups spread across Europe and the U.S. They employ a common flag and other symbols (often defacing public monuments), they call themselves “Antifa,” they dress in black as a uniform, wear black masks to minimize identification, have social media accounts, and have been videoed numerous times directing activities in protests and riots.

Whether it is labeled “domestic” or “foreign,” Antifa is a terrorist organization; and it defies common sense (and the clear meaning of federal laws) to pretend otherwise. Minneapolis City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison last week “officially” declared himself a “supporter of Antifa.” If Antifa does not exist, is he delusional? Perhaps, but not for that reason.

 

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

For three months Americans in all parts of the country have meekly submitted to government mandates to “shelter in place” and “social distance.” Then, in a matter of days last week, cities large and small descended into chaos at the hands of violent mobs facing hesitant police.

Institutionalized obedience to government that so easily had maintained compliance with measures designed to slow the spread of COVID-19, quickly vanished in a rash of burning, looting and violence against police and civilians alike. The speed with which this descent took place is alarming, and the damage wrought as a result will have long-lasting and negative effects.

There may be a widely held perception that the important institutions undergirding our society are sufficiently strong to withstand repeated pressures, and that they will erode if at all only after many decades. While such a view might have been accurate in ages past (after all, it took centuries for the mighty Roman Empire to crumble), the technology and instantaneous communication that have infiltrated every aspect of our lives, businesses and governments, has condensed that timeline dramatically.

The social adhesive that law and order provide for our society to function properly is unravelling before our very eyes.

This is not to say what we have been witnessing in the riots that have rocked cities from Milwaukee to New York and even to our nation’s Capital, sprang full born within just the past week. What we are in fact seeing is the blooming of a poisonous plant, the seeds of which were sown in many ways over at least the past several months.

Last summer, for example, we watched videos of New York City police officers being doused with water by taunting young men and not responding. Those seeming inconsequential acts, however, sent an important message to individuals with designs for violence and destruction – police in major cities can be publicly humiliated and will not respond forcefully or at all.

In addition to the police, prosecutors play a key role in maintaining stability in our social system that allows our institutions to function productively; and here, too, there have been significant failings.

In recent election cycles, we have witnessed the rise of a cadre of local prosecutors (many of whose campaigns were funded significantly by liberal benefactors such as George Soros and Michael Bloomberg) who openly campaigned on platforms of “benign justice.” This prosecutorial philosophy carries with it a vow not to prosecute whole categories of offenses because doing so would support what they see as a racist and “classist” society.

The corrosive nature of these lenient prosecution guidelines – according to which, for example, theft cases under $1000, and most shoplifting cases and vehicle thefts will not be prosecuted — cannot be overstated. The message to criminals and criminal wannabees in jurisdictions where these soft prosecutors have been elected (Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and many other cities) is crystal clear: commit property crimes and you will not be prosecuted, even if you are caught.

The damage in these jurisdictions is made worse because many of the same prosecutors have vowed not to demand cash bonds for those arrested, as this would unduly penalize persons who are not “wealthy.”

Couple these policies with public statements by a number of mayors and police chiefs that they will resist engaging in actions that might “place an officer at risk,” and you have a toxic environment in which individuals bent on criminal activity are emboldened to do so without fear of consequence. Further encouragement for those bent on tearing down our institutions can be seen in recent days by the number of police officers (and even their chiefs) openly supporting and praising the demonstrators.

The spark that ignited the ongoing chaos in cities may have been the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, but the kindling was put in place months ago by timid mayors and police chiefs and affirmed by “woke” district attorneys. We now are reaping what they have sown, and it is the law-abiding citizens who live and work in those burning communities who will pay the price of their appeasement for many months and years to come.

The pièce de résistance to this tragedy is the recent public declaration by Minneapolis City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison that he proudly supports the militantly violent Antifa. In this environment, it hardly should surprise us that the institutions that long have protected the ordered freedom that has allowed America to flourish, are succumbing to the forces of anarchy.