The Antifa Industry at Work

American Greatness:

When, in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama’s career as a community organizer was lampooned at the Republican National Convention, few understood what the words meant. Most sympathetic voices in the media stressed “community,” evoking images of soup kitchens, clinics, and shelters. Republicans had every reason to look more darkly at what this kind of work meant and, probably due to Obama’s race, were inclined to associate the candidate’s time “organizing” in Chicago with New York racial demagogues and shakedown-artists like Al Sharpton. 

That description was closer to the mark, but the full truth was deeper and considerably more sophisticated; left-wing organizing is a robust intellectual universe. Thanks largely to talk radio, conservatives soon learned the name Saul Alinsky and began to digest his now-infamous Rules for Radicals. 

After several brilliant investigative pieces into Obama’s time among left-wing organizing meccas like the Northwest Academy, Stanley Kurtz wrote the valuable Radical-in-Chief. Unfortunately, for much of the public, the thread frayed shortly after the election that November; emboldened by Democratic control of both houses of Congress, the newly elected Obama would use what he’d learned from Chicago activism to instigate and win battles on more pressing political issues.  

For those eight years, the organizing ecosystem that would eventually erupt into Antifa and Black Lives Matter street violence and direct-action grew in strength, sophistication, and funding. Obama’s own career in Chicago should’ve been a kind of clue: the former president served on the boards of Public Allies, the Woods Fund of Chicago, and the Joyce Foundation, which together distributed tens of millions of dollars to various local left-wing groups—some of which themselves were organizing for street-level direct action.  more