Three members of Antifa were arrested Wednesday night after they tangled with Chicago police outside of a courthouse on the city’s northwest side.
The “protesters” were clad all in black with black bandanas covering their faces. They claimed to be there to demonstrate against a man facing arraignment inside the courtroom, who they said had ties to “white supremacist” and “right wing” groups.
But what started out as a run-of-the-mill leftist rally featuring the same, old, tired, scripted chants (“Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Neo-Nazis go away!”), ended in a melee after Chicago police showed up to try to contain the demonstration. Protesters had wandered away from public property and blocked an intersection, making notoriously terrible Chicago traffic even worse for innocent bystanders, and causing havoc for local residents.
When law enforcement showed up, they found themselves in a tussle with the “anti-fascist” protesters, who used epithets like “pig” to entice Chicago police into a brawl. After police easily subdued their leftist attackers, three were led away in handcuffs.
Breaking: Scuffle ensues between antifa and police outside North Center courthouse pic.twitter.com/puGTNG91Cm
— Tony Briscoe (@_TonyBriscoe) August 15, 2017
Charges have yet to be issued against the protesters; police say they are still investigating what prompted the incident — because while the identity of the offending “white supremacist” they were protesting is unknown, lawyers for several defendants arraigned yesterday say none of their clients have ties to neo-Nazi groups or the alt-right, and that no one hauled into court yesterday is being charged with a crime related in any way to a racist, sexist, or anti-gay incident. So pretty much everyone remains confused.
Antifa did come prepared for their arrest, though, and while their colleagues were being shoved to the ground and handcuffed, they chanted “cops and Klan go hand-in-hand” and unfurled a crudely-painted banner likening Chicago police to the KKK.
If they did get it wrong, this is the second major mistake Antifa has made in the past 48 hours. First, they managed to vandalize a statue in Atlanta that they thought was a monument to the Confederacy, but was actually a “peace statue” designed to promote a sense of healing in post-Civil War Georgia. Now, it seems they probably got their dates or details wrong, and attacked a bunch of cops — something law enforcement doesn’t exactly appreciate — over an imaginary neo-Nazi offender.
If we were betting people, we might just say that these so-called “anti-Fascist protesters” don’t exactly have a top notch operation or, for that matter, a firm grasp on the Internet.
Ridiculous as they are, the trouble with Antifa is that they’re not only persistent in their attacks — and have no qualms about using violence, fomenting disorder, and attacking law enforcement — but that these sort of incidents go completely unnoticed by mainstream media. While CNN, NBC, and others focus on the dastardly threat around 200 alt-right figures and neo-Nazi marchers pose to the very fabric of our country, Antifa is racking up quite the rap sheet.
That’s not to say the alt-right or others should get a pass — after all, their “peaceful” rally in Charlottesville became a melee that ended up with a murder committed by one of their own. But its becoming impossible to ignore that the “anti-fascists” that the left has beatified over the past several days is no benevolent force, that will contain their violence to Richard Spencer-led rallies.