The Biograph Theater was opened September 5, 1914. All 942 seats were on a single floor. This Lincoln Park neighborhood landmark is probably best.

Antifa Protest Movement & the Roots of Left- Wing Political Violence. There is currently, on the streets, smashing storefronts and setting things on fire, a group called “Antifa,” for “anti- fascist.” Antifa are not a new phenomenon; they surfaced during the Occupy movement, and during the anti- globalization protests of the late 1.

Antifa movements began in early- 2. Europe, when fascism was a concrete and urgent concern, and they remain active on the Continent. Lately, Antifa have emerged as the militant fringe of #The. Resistance against Donald Trump — who, they maintain, is a fascist, ushering into power a fascist regime. In Washington, D. C., Antifa spent the morning of Inauguration Day lighting trash cans on fire, throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, setting ablaze a limousine, and tossing chunks of pavement through the windows of several businesses.

Mindspark Interactive. Help Uninstall EULA Privacy. Tickets for Concerts, Sports, Theatre and More Online at TicketsInventory.com.

Directed by Robert Gordon, Morgan Neville. With Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley, Dick Cavett, Noam Chomsky. A documentary on the series of televised debates in 1968.

On February 1, Antifa set fires and stormed buildings at the University of California–Berkeley to prevent an appearance by Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The central word at issue is “fascist,” but there are others: “racist,” “sexist,” and the like. A great many people are currently involved in a turf war, aiming to stake out conceptual territory for these charged words: What is fascism? What isn’t it? Mac Donald is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, a prominent right- of- center think tank. She is a noted expert on law enforcement, especially the complex relationship between law enforcement and minority communities. She was among the first to theorize that anti- police protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and elsewhere have facilitated an increase in urban crime; the so- called Ferguson Effect is now a matter of consensus among experts on both the left and the right. Watch Can`T Stand Losing You (2015) Online For Free. National Review readers will be well acquainted with Mac Donald; she publishes in these pages regularly.

Mac Donald, they wrote, should not be permitted to speak; she is “a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.” Mac Donald was not offering any material for substantive intellectual discussion; she was, they claimed, challenging “the right of Black people to exist.”. The last is, to those who are familiar with Mac Donald’s work, an odd charge. Among her central claims is that the reluctance of law enforcement to police minority communities has disproportionately affected those same communities; more young black men are being killed by St. Louis PD’s hands- off approach than were being killed by “proactive policing.” Mac Donald does not oppose “the right of Black people to exist”; she maintains that it is being threatened by militant anti- police sentiment. The point is finding charged language to signify that Mac Donald ought to be persona non grata, without needing to prove the case. The outraged undergraduates of Pomona College and Antifa are different in only one regard, albeit an important one: Antifa are willing to employ muscle to achieve their ends.

Antifa’s reason for describing something or someone as “fascist” is not that it is actually fascist (although perhaps on occasion they do stumble onto the genuine item), but that describing it that way is politically advantageous. Likewise with any number of other slurs. Antifa are in effect claiming to oppose everything that is bad — and, of course, it is Antifa who decide what is bad. Hence the organizers of the Inauguration Day protests could write, as their mission statement, that “#Disrupt. J2. 0 rejects all forms of domination and oppression.” That is a good monopoly if you can get it.

Who and what are you? Those are the questions that plagued the Russian romantics, and to which they produced answers that mean nothing in themselves, but which dictated the fate of those to whom they were applied: . Who and what am I? An anti- fascist. Them and us, tidily distinguished.

Reality shapes language, but language also shapes reality. We think by means of words. Our perceptions change as the words change, and our actions often follow. Back to the Communists: No one killed affluent peasants. The Party “liquidated kulaks.”. Using words to cloak reality makes it easier to dispose of that reality. Antifa are not satisfied with labeling people fascists; they want them to bleed on that account.

On Inauguration Day, in Washington, D. C., an Antifa rioter sucker- punched white nationalist Richard Spencer.

Spencer is as near to a prominent fascist as one will find in the United States today, and a bona fide racist (an Antifa twofer). But the imperative of anti- fascism, to reject “all forms of domination and oppression,” applies by anti- fascists’ own inexorable logic no less to Heather Mac Donald — or to the Republicans of Multnomah County, whom Antifa threatened to physically assault if they were permitted to participate as usual in the annual Portland Rose Festival parade. Why not punch them, too? As a result, there can be little question of the necessity of “counter- violence” — “as in Ferguson, as in Baltimore, as in Watts, as in counter- riots against the Ku Klux Klan, as in slave revolts.” There are a great many questions ignored here — to take one obvious example, whether the riots that consumed Baltimore in late April 2. It depends entirely on accepting the premise that Donald Trump is a fascist.

Since fascism is “imbued with violence,” a violent response to the Trump administration is therefore necessary. Rensin purports to assay recent left- wing political violence, but his clear if unstated purpose is to defend it. According to him, questions of ethics — Is it right to commit violence? The answer, he says, is “intolerable pressure” on the lives of “the poor and oppressed”; “the intolerable pressure of a hateful and fearful world is always waiting to explode.”. This romantic pabulum conceals a salient fact: The victims and perpetrators of recent violence are hardly who Rensin makes them out to be. Muhammad Ashraf, the Muslim immigrant who owned the limousine burnt out on Inauguration Day, is not “the company” stamping its vulgar capitalist boot upon the downtrodden.

Rensin sidesteps this flaw in his analysis by offering a taxonomy of violence that, conveniently, theorizes away both leftist responsibility and non- “oppressed” victims: According to him, there is violence perpetrated by the state — e. U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, and the killing of Michael Brown (generally wicked); there is violence perpetrated by right- wingers that is tacitly endorsed by the state — e. Dylann Roof (always wicked); and there is violence that “explodes” from among the “oppressed” (understandable, and who are we to judge, really?). They are not so bold as to come right out and say it, but they are, in the final analysis, simply claiming that people who think like them should be exempt from the law’s constraints, and that people who do not think like them should not receive the law’s protections.

In an article published shortly after Inauguration Day, Lennard complained that prosecutors had brought up about 2. D. C. Writes Burrough: “Radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1. America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard- hit cities, accepted it as part of daily life.” When a bomb exploded at a Bronx movie theater on May 1, 1. Leftist radicals were immersed in revolutionary literature — Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, Malcolm X’s Autobiography — and those texts were candid.

In 1. 96. 3, Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, the first sentence of which read: “National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.” He continued, inverting Christian teaching. In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red- hot cannonballs and bloody knives.