Minimizing left wing riots because of alt right terrorism

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Lost amid deserved criticism from media outlets and Republican officeholders alike of the president’s failure to unambiguously denounce violent extremism on the fringes of the political right is Joe Biden’s failure to do the same regarding the left.

Pressed by Donald Trump to denounce the loose amalgamation of extremists that constitute Antifa, Biden dismissed this entity as something that, by and large, doesn’t exist. “His own FBI director said unlike white supremacist, Antifa is an idea, not an organization,” Biden insisted, “not a militia.”

Biden is not wrong on the facts. That is the gist of what FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress during a September hearing on domestic security threats, which delved into the prolonged campaign of rioting, looting, vandalism, and harassment ongoing in American cities since late May. But Wray was not dismissing the threat Antifa and its allies posed with these comments. He was illustrating the challenge the agency has in confronting it.

No one should dismiss the threat posed by violent, organized white nationalist groups. The FBI certainly isn’t.

In the effort to quantify the “overwhelmingly peaceful movement” that swept across the country this summer, a Princeton University-affiliated study found that “violent demonstrations” “have been limited to fewer than 220 locations” around the country, many of which are major metropolitan areas, in the space of single summer. The study blames the “agents provocateurs—or infiltrators—instigating violence.”

The militant separatists who took over a police station and the surrounding blocks in Seattle, the mobs that repeatedly attempt to torch courthouses, the crowds that are responsible for vandalism and assaults on police officers in places like Los Angeles and Oakland, California, Washington D.C., Richmond, Virginia, and Aurora, Colorado were not fans of this president. To claim otherwise is silly and self-discrediting.

This is an outgrowth of a phenomenon dubbed “anarcho-socialist extremism” by researchers affiliated with Rutgers University.

Though this conglomeration of malcontents and instigators is for now “less lethal” than other extremist groups with different ideological predilections, that does not render it banal or anodyne.

If all this is merely the product of an idea and not an organized effort by some duly constituted assembly, that’s more frightening, not less. Violent radicalism isn’t something we should accept in degrees, and two opposing phenomena can be dangerous at the same time. Every responsible public figure—Joe Biden more than most—has a duty to condemn this violent idea. His failure to do so is both discouraging and revealing.

That's what a real initiated member of "La Cosa Nostra" would say.

There is no Mafia,the Mafia is fiction as the movie the Godfather.The Mafia doesn't exist,La cosa Nostra is all fantasy,that's what a real Mafia member would say.

I don't buy Antifa does not exist.

It's a shame Noah Rothman isn't being honest in his article. If only it was true he might have a valid point to make.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden ... mn-antifa/