"They Won't Know What Hit Them" Shocking Undercover Footage Exposes Antifa's "Premeditated" Violence

As if the public needed any more evidence that violence is a central part of Antifa’s mission, conservative comedian Steve Crowder has published footage that he and his producer surreptitiously recorded after infiltrating a local Antifa cell and accompanying it to a protest at the University of Utah.

The shockingly candid footage offers a disturbing glimpse into the innerworkings of Antifa - a loosely organized band of far-left agitators - and the central tenant of violent resistance that encapsulates the group"s philosophy. The footage primarily focuses on a transgender woman, the purported leader of a small cell of Antifa protesters, who can be heard telling Crowder"s producer that she’s armed with a handgun, and that she expects reinforcements to arrive later with “two AKs”. The organizer can also be heard recommending that Crowder’s producer buy a small blade at a military surplus store and strap it to his ankle “just in case.”

What they show appears to confirm that the group protesters were planning to disrupt a speaking event hosted by conservative commentator and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, whom Antifa has accused of being a nazi despite the fact that he is Jewish. Shapiro"s recent appearances at UC Berkeley and other university campuses drew protests, with demonstrators labeling him a “fascist.”

But perhaps the most surprising thing about the footage was the fact that mainstream media reporters AND police essentially told Crowder & Co. to get lost when they shared it with them.

In another shocking excerpt, the Antifa leader – whom Crowder didn’t name because he said he didn’t want to “dox” anybody, though he added that police have confirmed that they have been monitoring her – described a plan to lure right-wing demonstrators to a secluded area where, presumably, they would be attacked by Antifa.

“Plain clothes, hard tactics, I don’t think they’ll know what hit them. Because they’re not prepared for what we’re planning,” the organizer says at one point.

In the video, another unnamed Antifa member who goes by the pseudonym Clark can be heard explaining that the difference between Antifa and other activist groups is a “willingness to respond with violence.”

As we’ve reported time and time again, Antifa protesters have been inciting violence across the country since Trump’s upset victory in November, beginning with protests during Trump’s inauguration that quickly turned violent in destructive.

According to Fox 13 News in Salt Lake City, Crowder published the undercover video Thursday that purports to show far left-wing protesters distributing weapons ahead of the speech. Crowder’s production team presented the video to police moments after it was recorded.

Yet after evaluating the video, the police determined that there was no credible threat.

“Police looked at the video, evaluated other information available to them, and determined the individuals did not pose a credible threat that warranted action,” Nelson told Fox 13 News.

Similarly violent clashes instigated by members of the far-left group erupted on the campus of UC Berkeley in early February, where members of the group hurled Molotov cocktails and attacked “facists” and “nazis” who were attending a speaking event by Milo Yiannopoulos, causing extensive property damage on campus.

While both the mainstream media and more mainstream leftists initially defended the group, public sentiment has soured on the group.

Several media organizations – including the LA Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal – have criticized the group’s violent tactics. A month ago, it was reported that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security classified Antifa as a "domestic terrorist" group in internal communications that described them as "primary instigators of violence at public rallies" going back to at least April 2016 when the reports were first published."

WSJ Turns On Antifa: Violent, Black-Clad Protesters Are "Dividing The Left"

Since Bay Area TV anchor Frank Somerville published an honest description of "the hate" he experienced from "violent, clad in black" protesters while trying to document a right-wing rally in Berkeley, the liberal media has decidedly turned against AntiFa – the loosely organized band of black-clad thugs who show up to “counter-protest” at conservative events and demonstrations around the country. WSJ"s report describes the group as the left-wing equivalent of the fascists and white supremacists that AntiFa claims to oppose - characterization that the media has so far been reluctant to embrace.

This week, The Wall Street Journal has jumped on the bandwagon, publishing a deeply researched history of the group, and interviewing other leftist organizers who’ve criticized the group for being too violent and damaging the credibility of the left. 

In one scene, WSJ recollects how Antifa protesters viciously attacked a small crowd of right-wing demonstrators who showed up last month’s “No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley, even though the rally had been canceled. Using clubs and wooden shields emblazoned with “no hate,” groups of around half a dozen beat and chased their outnumbered “adversaries” out of the park.

As one long-time liberal activist in Massachusetts noted, Antifa’s tactics are dividing the resurgent leftist movement that has coalesced around opposition to President Donald Trump.
AntiFa “doesn’t represent us,” she told WSJ.

“The antifa tactics are testing the liberal movement that has galvanized in opposition to Mr. Trump—creating a rift among its leaders, organizers and demonstrators about whether to denounce a radical fringe, some of whose antidiscrimination objectives, if not tactics, they share.

James Hannon, a psychotherapist and seasoned liberal organizer in Massachusetts who marched at a recent Boston rally against racism, said elements of the antifa movement that use confrontational tactics allow others to blur the line between leftist groups and the hate groups against which they protest.

“The social justice, the peace movement, the left or just progressives really have to start calling out the antifa and say, `Hey, hey, hey, you don’t represent us,’ ” said Mr. Hannon, 67 years old. “’We’re surrendering a moral high ground.’”

As we reported last week, one leader of an AntiFa group based in Washington DC explained in an editorial published by the Hill that violence is a core tenant of the group’s philosophy. He also explained his bizarre belief that Nazis and fascists have infiltrated the highest levels of US police departments and the military.

One WSJ reporter described being threatened by an AntiFa protester while attempting to peacefully document the rally.

“Protesters in dark get-ups set off smoke bombs, toppled police barricades and smashed the cameras of some journalists and bystanders. “You do it again, I’ll break your phone,” a man in a Spider-Man mask told a Wall Street Journal reporter who was taking photographs.”

Even Berkeley’s major condemned the black-clad protesters following last month’s rally.

Mayor Arreguin of Berkeley disagreed: “We saw a large group of black-clad extremists who really turned a peaceful protest on its head.”

A Green Party organizer who spoke with WSJ said she opposes AntiFa’s willingness to resort to violence, and its anti-democratic messaging.

“At a March antiracism rally in Minneapolis, she said, activists chanted “punch a Nazi in the face” and lighted on fire a scarecrow dressed as a white nationalist. “The people who end up taking the rap for it are black organizers,” said Ms. Pree-Stinson, 36, who described herself as a black Latina.

In Boston, masked counterprotesters distributed fliers titled “WHY ANTIFA?” The leaflets criticized the “liberal” approach of believing that elections, courts, the Constitution, a free press and other institutions would “prevent things from going too far.”

They called for “uncompromising militancy” against fascists and said antifa “must force their hate out of public spaces by any means necessary.”

By our count, WSJ is the fifth mainstream media organization to publish a story criticizing the group, which came to national prominence after its involvements with rioting at President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Here"s a collection of some of the other headlines...

Bloomberg:

The Washington Post:

The Atlantic:

The LA Times:

A Whitehouse.gov survey published last month demanding that the White House label AntiFa a terrorist group received the 100,000 signatures needed to demand a response. Meanwhile, last month, the media reported that the Department of Homeland Security described AntiFa as a purveyor of "domestic terrorism" in internal communications.

The Hypocrisy Of AntiFa

Authored by Jonathan Turley via The Hill.com,

The University of California in Berkeley was again the scene of violence recently, as protesters claimed license to silence those with whom they disagree. Their fight against “fascism” took the form of not just stopping a speech, but assaulting those who came to hear it.

For those of us at universities and colleges, these counter-demonstrators, and in particular the masked antifa protesters, are a troubling and growing presence on our campuses. They have been assaulting people and blocking speeches for years with relatively little condemnation. They flourish in an environment where any criticism is denounced as being reflective of racist or fascist sentiments.

However, as the latest violence in Berkeley vividly demonstrates, there is no distinction between these protesters and the fascists they claim to be resisting. They are all fascists in their use of fear and violence to silence others. What is particularly chilling is how some academics have given this anti-speech mob legitimacy through pseudo-philosophical rationalizations.

At Berkeley and other universities, protesters have held up signs saying “F--k Free Speech” and have threatened to beat up anyone taking their pictures, including journalists. They seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction in using fascistic tactics as anti-fascist protesters. After all, a leading definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”

CNN recently interviewed antifa protesters who insist that violence is simply the language that their opponents understand. Leftist organizer Scott Crow endorsed illegal actions and said that antifa activists cover their faces to “avoid the ramifications of law enforcement.” Such violent logic is supported by some professors.

Last week, Clemson University Professor Bart Knijnenburg went on Facebook to call Trump supporters and Republicans “racist scum.” He added, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy, violent or nonviolent. This needs to stop, by any means necessary. #PunchNazis.” He is not alone. Trinity College Professor Johnny Williams, who teaches classes on race, posted attacks on bigots and called on people to “let them f-----g die.”

These voices go beyond the troubling number of academics supporting speech codes and the curtailment of free speech. These are scholars who have embraced the antithesis of the life and values of academia. They justify violence to silence those who are deemed unworthy to be heard. Dartmouth Professor Mark Bray, the author of a book entitled “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” is one of the chief enablers of these protesters. Bray defines antifa as “politics or an activity of social revolutionary self defense. It’s a pan-left radical politics uniting communists, socialists, anarchists and various different radical leftists together for the shared purpose of combating the far right.”

Bray speaks positively of the effort to supplant traditional views of free speech: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase… that says I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” He defines anti-fascists as “illiberal” who reject the notion that far right views deserve to “coexist” with opposing views.

Bray says that the protesters do not “see fascism or white supremacy as a view with which they disagree as a difference of opinion.” Their goal is not co-existence but “to end their politics.” Bray and other academics are liberating students from the confines of what they deem the false “allegiance to liberal democracy.” Once freed of the values of free speech and democratic values, violence becomes merely politics by other means.

When pushed, Bray’s rationalization for the antifa movement rapidly descends into intellectual gibberish:

“There is a certain political lens that - agree or disagree with the lens - there is an element of continuity in terms of the types of groups targeted. I don’t know of any Democratic Party events that have been ‘no platformed,’ or shut down by anti-fascists. So there is a political lens, people will quibble about what the lens is, who designs the lens, but I don’t think the slippery slope is actually, in practice, nearly as much of a concern as people imagine it would be.”

There does not have to be a “lens.” Indeed, that it is the principle of the “liberal democracy” so casually cast aside by Bray and his braying followers. While Bray insists that he is not in favor of violent protests or even free speech, he insists that there is a duty to stop those who threaten the existence of others and the antifa protests are a form of “community self defense.”

Ironically, Bray and others have come to use the intellectual freedom of our universities to advance the most anti-intellectual movement in our history. They are destroying the very academic institutions that have protected their extreme views. Just as the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, said that “physicists have known sin,” the antifa movement is the sin of academia in abandoning our core values.

These protesters believe that history shows the dangers of free speech and the need to deny it to those who would misuse it. It is a familiar sentiment that “all the experience... accumulated through several decades teaches us... to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.” Those were the words of another early anti-fascist, China"s Communist Party leader Mao Zedong.

Milo Returns To Berkeley, Will Spend "Whatever It Takes" On Security

Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos says he will spend “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on security during an upcoming event at the University of California-Berkeley.

Yiannopoulos being led away from a 2016 event that was cancelled by violent protesters.

In an interview with Campus Reform, Yiannopoulos said that he is “prepared to spend whatever it takes” to provide security for the “Free Speech Week” that is scheduled for the end of September, underscoring his sincerity with the six-figure commitment.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the September 24 event at UC-Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza is slated to feature a lineup of popular conservative firebrands, including Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter, and former White House strategist Stephen Bannon.

Despite the university’s recent pledge to hold a “free speech year” and crack down on those who use violence to shut down speakers, however, the administration has come under increasing pressure to derail the upcoming event.

Earlier this week, for instance, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin asked Chancellor Carol Christ to reevaluate her commitment to allowing the conservative speakers on campus.

“I’m very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus,” Arreguin told The San Francisco Chronicle.

“It’s just a target for black bloc to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have it potentially spill out on the street.”

Other local lawmakers also echoed the remarks of the Berkeley mayor, citing security concerns as the primary danger of allowing Yiannopoulos and others to hold the event on a university campus.

"We don’t want the moral, psychological and fiscal expense of having these agents of hate coming to our town,” Berkeley City Councilman Ben Bartlett told The Los Angeles Times.

"We know the contest of ideas is at the very heart of freedom, but at the same time when the ideas are certain to cause bloodshed I’m inclined to err on the side of protecting the population, and I say that with a heavy heart.”

Councilwoman Cheryl Davila likewise told the publication that she does not “appreciate that there are racists coming to UC Berkeley to spew hate.”

A UC-Berkeley spokesperson told Campus Reform in an email that the speakers for the upcoming event are being hosted by independent student organizations, and that the school therefore does not have “the legal right or desire to interfere with or cancel their invitations based on the perspectives and beliefs of the speakers.”

“Where we do have discretion is around everything that has to do with the safety of our communities,” the spokesperson said.

“That priority, along with our commitment to Free Speech, remains at the center of our planning and preparations for future events.”

Yiannopoulos, for his part, is well aware of the severity of the threat posed by Antifa and other leftist groups, having been driven from Berkeley’s campus by violent rioters last time he was scheduled to speak at the school earlier this year.