Antifa are Complete and Utter Morons - The Sargon of Akkad Event
As a left-leaning individual myself, I despise Antifa. They are honestly the best allies that the right-wing has right now, because they drive everybody who isn't a radical Socialist (or to the left of Socialism) away from the Left. They also seem to have no ability to learn, as evidence by what happened at King's College of London when they "shut down" a Sargon of Akkad event.
First, let's talk about who they shut down. Sargon is an English YouTuber and a Liberal in the English sense of the word Liberal. In the US he would basically be a moderate on our political spectrum. Before this controversy, he had a little over 755k subscribers. He is now nearing 770k due to publicity from this event. I have disagreements with Sargon - I am certainly to his Left, but he has some good criticisms of SJWs, modern Feminism, and radical groups like Antifa. He is a strong supporter of Free Speech. The event also featured Yaron Brook, a Jewish Israeli-American objectivist who heads the Ayn Rand Institute (another group I certainly have disagreements with). His Jewish background is relevant because Antifa tried to claime that Sargon, who again is moderate in his politics, was a Fascist/Part of the antisemitic Alt-Right. I don't know any Nazis for Fascists, but I don't believe they have a history of teaming up with Jews to work towards the same goals.
So what happened? As Sargon and Yaron were about to begin their talk, Antifa members pulled the fire alarm at the event and rushed the stage. Fighting broke out almost immediately, with one member of Antifa getting injured after he was punched in the head and hit several other times after he laid hands on an attendee at the event. Another Antifa member laid hands on Sargon, but was quickly pulled off. Neither speaker sustained any injuries from this. Other Antifa members had been stopped by security and thrown back. Those who did make it in were removed within one minute. Ultimately, Sargon's supporters grabbed an Antifa flag away from the violent protestors. Sargon now mounts the flag on his wall as a trophy. See the video below for proof of all of this:
These complete and utter fools at Antifa somehow interpreted this as a victory. Or at least that is what they posted publicly on Facebook. I personally suspect they know that they failed and are simply desperately trying to spin this story. The post, which can be found below, is dominated by those defending Sargon, both in the comments and in the reactions. Laugh reactions are by far the most popular, and angry reactions are close to being in third. Likes are in a distant second. So you all know what to do! Let's all go there and get angry reactions up to third (or even second, ideally) to show the world on Antifa's own page that they are a joke and just piss people off.
But that gets me to the point of this article. This was the most counter-productive thing Antifa could have done. Sargon has, so far, gained over 13k new subscribers. That is in less than two full days. I suspect, with the momentum he now has and given that he is soon to upload the speech he was able to end up giving, that he will end up getting anywhere from 20-30k new subscribers from this. Antifa's "Deplatforming" has given Sargon the largest platform of his life. On top of that, Sargon was able to give his speech to those who came at a different nearby venue, so he was not even deplatformed for that day. In addition, dozens of Conservative sites, and around 100 YouTubers, have covered this story so far. There is an even larger platform for Sargon. The story is now also beginning to make the rounds on Conservative Reddit. Antifa apparently is not smart enough to realize that all of the Conservative media is ready to respond whenever something like this happens. Antifa is so predictable that Conservatives can basically just turn on the auto-pilot to defeat them and amplify the Conservative message. So you shut down one talk (kind of), but then you get thousands, or even more, people talking about this who would never have heard of it before. How much more counter-productive could this have been?
I do want to be clear that, although Left-leaning, I strongly support Freedom of Speech myself, and disagree with what Antifa does on idealistic and ethical grounds, in addition to pragmatic considerations. I have some criticisms of him on the issues and some of his beliefs, but now, thanks to Antifa, I feel a need to solely defend him. Instead of an intelligent debate about the flaws in a few of Sargon's arguments, we now are focusing on Antifa's stupidity. Again, totally counter-productive.
All in all, I would like to congratulate Sargon on his win, and further disavow the idiotic, counter-productive, immature, and generally despicable movement known as Antifa.
Absolutely, the actions of the vocal progressives in the past decades all but drive regular people to the right wing of all stripes, who welcome them with open arms. Like it's not long until the crazy shit from them comes out as well, but for the time being they can get a lot of good will from people by staying calm and saying "see we told you about this commie shit for decades, this is what we mean when we go off about the commies infiltrating our society".
But for real, think about it if you were some ruthless Koch Brothers / Rupert Murdoch type capitalist scumbag, or someone more hidden just a Realist amoral scumbag who just wants to come out on top no matter what, wouldn't you just love the current crop of progressivism? Who do these SJWs actually touch with their political violence? Do you think the political establishment or corporations are shaking in their boots over what some woke millennials are gonna do? Fuck no, it's regular people who get scorned and shouted down as bigots for not going along with whatever 2 minutes of hate bullshit is the rage this week. While outright shilling for corporate censorship and diversity in media, brought to you by major corporations who have been ripping off real artists for decades.
It's all so heart breaking, I don't know what's worse, if people are actually manipulated into this shit in some massive social engineering political brainwashing and indoctrination, or this is just how stupid people are in general. The current doctrine of cultural marxism / intersectional feminism / postmodern critical theory, whatever you wanna call it, is just the worst ideological phenomenon in recent history. Aside from the fact how asinine and wrong it is about even basic aspects of the real world, to the point that a child can find the flaws in the reasoning, it's also so horrendously impotent and self-defeating.
Exactly, I think you are one of the people who gets it. I didn't put it in this article, but it has occurred to me that maybe some right-wing groups actually help fund Antifa, Women's etc. Studies Departments, websites that advocate SJW causes, and so on. It would really be a stroke of political genius. For all that most Leftists talk about "Left Unity", Antifa is the perfect way to break that up. In the U.S., I think a large part of why working class people voted for Trump is because he was anti-SJW. That's not the majority of it, but that group of voters was enough to make the difference I bet. People don't like being told what they can and can't talk about, and when they see crazy shit like this, they naturally want to fight back against it. If Left-leaning people do not denounce Antifa, then the Right-Wing looks like the only option if people want to fight against this. Like you said, it also justifies Right-Wingers talking about Marxist infiltration of the government and how everybody Left-of-Center is a secret commie. That hasn't become true, but now it looks like it to a lot of people.
Another think you brought up is also very important - these people never manage to touch the establishment. What change do they really threaten? I guess they want to launch a Communist Revolution, but that is never going to happen, so the only people who need fear them are other grassroots activists who disagree with them. They divide anyone who isn't part of the establishment - anyone who doesn't have power already. They ultimately help keep society as it is, except for all the poor activists and freedom of speech that get crushed along the way.
I've been on the internet long enough to know about the crazy shit people come up with, like that George Soros is personally responsible for everything that's wrong in the west lol. But like holy shit how the fuck would you not see the massive benefit in it lol, like if you were the Machiavellian capitalist powermonger you'd put money into the most cringe worthy, divisive, damaging "liberal" political causes and push those. Who's got time and actual brains to talk about actual finance reform and political corruption when you have our thinkers like idk Jordan Peterson and Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker and so forth busy talking shit about SJWs and whether or not trans people should be allowed into some bathrooms or not, or whether a white woman rapping is tantamount to a hate crime against humanity or some shit. It's like that joke people on 4chan make, that 4chan is where smart people pretend that they're stupid, but Reddit is where stupid people pretend to be smart. Well progressive politics right now is the Reddit of politics. People get up and say words they think are big and point to academics who also say this dumb shit like it's actually an argument, and latch on to whatever is trendy now and shit on anything that is even remotely actually successful. Like it's the ramblings of a madman dressed up as some kind of worthwhile discourse.
If people looked at SJW activists and talking heads the same way they look at politicians a lot of the agenda pushing and manipulation would be immediately obvious to anyone. And that's basically what they are.
But still man, holy shit poor Sargon. This is actual political violence and I bet you'll never hear about it anywhere but either full on right wing sites or anti-SJW ones. And people really do still go on about muh not real feminists or vocal minority no one actually listens to and so forth. They just don't own up to it.
My biggest concern immediately is that Antifa are going to start doing some real violence when they storm these stages. I mean, it would have just taken one mad man to bring a shank in there and give Sargon a couple pokes. And the worst thing is, you know it's going to happen eventually too with one of these events. The 18-22 year olds will probably grow out of this, but it's the older ones you gotta watch out for. A 35 year old AnCom just isn't right.
I'm strongly against a police state, but we need to have police do a little at least to stop this. Metal detectors should be required, and police should remove any protestors who try to shut down the event. I have no issue with people standing outside, or lining the entrance and chanting, holding signs etc. But they can't be in that same room. That's how violence will get started. Eventually, some crazy mofo will kill someone.