ANDY NGO: Whatever happened to antifa?

Some Democrats still try to fearmonger. Claims about MAGA “fascism” were central to the Democrats’ presidential campaign strategy. Kamala Harris unequivocally declared she believed Trump to be a “fascist” in October, and the press shamelessly branded his rallies “Nazi” gatherings. But the strategy ultimately failed at the ballot box because the public knew better. Four years of the first Trump administration and another four years of his being in the public eye had neutralized the most excessive anti-MAGA fear mongering.

Antifa’s decline can also be explained in part by liberal buyer’s remorse. Some who chose to endorse BLM in 2020 were shocked and chastened when several leaders of Black Lives Matter groups were convicted of fraud and money-laundering, and were revealed to have spent millions on luxury homes in Los Angeles and Toronto.

Liberals across America might still call Trump a racist but they remember how their own neighborhoods were occupied and set on fire. They remember what happens when you actually succeed in defunding the police. No one wants another surge in homicides, overdoses and violence. Even states like Washington, Oregon and California have since reversed their once-radical laws, and the politicians who championed pro-crime legislation have mostly been voted out of office.

Crucially, George Soros-funded district attorneys have been fired by voters in favor of more moderate candidates. In Seattle, Republican lawyer Ann Davison defeated Democrat Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. Thomas-Kennedy was a vocal supporter of the violent 2020 riots and some of her social media posts were about looking for land for an antifa autonomous zone.

Former County district attorney Mike Schmidt is a progressive who chose not to prosecute over 90 percent of the hundreds of antifa rioters arrested in Portland during the uprisings. Last year he lost his re election bid to moderate Nathan Vasquez.

Then there’s Elon Musk. Following his takeover of Twitter, now X, in October 2022, many key antifa accounts involved in organizing, recruiting and disseminating propaganda and fundraising were suspended for violating rules against inciting violence. These accounts should have been suspended under the previous regime, but as the Twitter Files revealed, the company had a left-wing political culture and policies were unevenly applied.

In November 2022, after I reported on the violent extremists of CrimethInc., an antifa extremist collective that produces guides on why and how to commit violent crimes, Musk suspended their account. Other accounts escaped suspension but chose to de-platform themselves from X. They feared their private messages could be accessed and turned over to law enforcement. Most of them relocated first to Mastodon, and are now at Bluesky, two smaller Twitter alternatives where leftist violence and death threats are tolerated.

Because old Twitter gradually evolved into the playground of the DNC-MSM, where ordinary people could get deplatformed for repeating the DNC-MSM advice to coal miners and telling furloughed legacy journalists to “learn to code,” leftist journalists still long for what they consider the good old days there: New CNN Original Series Reveals Insider Story of “Twitter: Breaking The Bird.”