Mephistopheles

I’ll give you my actual experiences.

TL;Dr, basically everything you read in the media is bullshite, antifa is basically a group that exists to get into fights with fascists/nazis etc.

I’m not from the US, I grew up in the the UK. By the time I was 16 I would go to demonstrations, eventually I met a group called the Wombles. They’re named after a British animated show from the 80s. The wombles weren’t really anti-fash, it was more a group that existed as a response to heavy handed police tactics at demonstrations. Anyone who has been to a larger demonstration with riot police will tell you, they tend to strike first and without warning, and I don’t mean one angry cop hitting someone with a baton I mean the line moving in unison in a violent way.

We would wear foam padding under what I can best describe as white jump suits (I think they’re for farming or construction maybe). We were not particularly effective, a couple of hundred well trained riot cops with good organization in real time coordination will tend to be able to shut down 5-10k people by closing off roads and kettling. Beating the cops on the streets takes either huge huge numbers and multiple independent coordinated groups, it wasn’t until about 2010 and the student protests that I saw that happen.

Don’t want to age myself too much here but around the late 90s I got involved with my local AFA (anti fascist action) group, after I found them through indymedia - some of you oldies may remember that. I was still basically a kid and they were old as frick and some were pretty “crusty”, but it was a great group for me since almost all my friends were entirely apolitical. We did exactly two things, 1 was get drunk together on the regular, and 2 was we’d go fight the local fascists - in the UK this was the BNP or the NF (often the same people). Main difference was we were going to find them directly at their events and the police were not always involved (also we didn’t wear home made body armor). Because I was so young at the time, I’d often get told I had to stand back, as I got a bit older and tried to bulk up a bit I did get involved.

Most times nothing happened except a bit of yelling, but when it did it was almost like a mass fight club, if a man went down or tried to get away, there was respect for that. I don’t remember weapons ever being used although we did hear of it sometimes. I think 4 times it actually kicked off and we “won” a couple and we “lost” a couple, on other occasions we just turned up with way more people than they had so they immediately fricked off - this tended to be more when they were trying to hassle a pub owner or some local business, they were more organized when they were having an actual protest. One of the times I could see we were getting smashed to bits so I just ran for it. Adrenaline is a crazy thing, I think I ran flat out through packed streets in London for maybe 20 minutes.

The reason I kept coming back to do it that straight up it was the most fun I’d ever had. It gave me a different sense of community and the adrenaline rush was unreal. As a young man I wasn’t finding that anywhere else in my life. But at the same time, I was quite ideological, and I began to become disillusioned - in particular, although I enjoyed getting physical it was soon pretty obvious we weren’t solving any problems in the world. We saw ourselves as the good guys because we would literally fight fascists, but then we just went home and did the same thing a few weeks later. On one occasion fighting had broken out near a pub, one of their lads got me in a corner, I’m not huge but he must’ve been 5ft 4 (he was an adult dw) and I hit him so hard I saw the spit come out of his mouth, that memory stayed with me since, I think I might have broken his jaw because he went down and just held his face. With that and then me getting old enough to go to university I moved away to what happened to be a small town with no such shenanigans. When I came back to London I was a grown man and had to work a full time job miles away from where I lived so I just didn’t get involved but even if those things weren’t true, I was no longer an angry ball of hormones and I’d found some other outlets.

That’s the UK but honestly I don’t see the US being all that different. The far right groups seem to be much more ideologically motivated here than there, but I can’t tell if that’s just because time has passed and things changed. Antifa here is a mix of crusties, true believers and/or people who don’t mind a fight. They’re not organized in any useful or meaningful way. The antifa group in Portland probably know the people in Seattle but there’s no “central hq”, neither of those groups would know the antifa in say Chicago, maybe one guy knows one guy. This is a massive contrast to say The Proud Boys or Oathkeepers which literally have membership fees and an organizational structure. The idea of antifa “bussing in” or that antifa are somehow behind riots in 2020 is laughable. The rumors and panic spread by attaching antifa to an article or a tweet is almost entirely unfounded and hyped by a right wing media ecosystem that (like others) thrives on clicks over reality - in December 2020 when some internet rando came up with the claim that the head of dominion was on a zoom with the antifa leadership and said that the election was taken care of got as far as OAN.

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Alina Habna saying there are names and flight logs

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So this is where the conspiracy almost reverses.

Habba, Bondi, Don Jr etc made something of this at one time. Why? Did they all independently choose to lie about something to make themselves seem important? I can believe they would do that. Were they being directed to lie by someone who they could trust? Why? Just to spin the narrative for a day? I can believe that too, but now were describing a conspiracy.

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man, we are toast if our leaders are hell bent on keeping pedos safe.

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Pedos stick together.

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October surprise is the entire entertainment industry goes down as pederasts

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I think this is another trick hoping it spreads so Trump speaks about it.

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Here's hoping he's dumb enough to say it. Laura Loomer come on and do your thing?

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think this is right. He used to know how to cross the info-spheres, but he's living in the Newsmax/Truth-Social universe now and losing some ability to relate to people not in that informational environment

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Yeah and to go further, this stuff was hitting in 2016, I remember spirit cooking, Hillary having strokes, Bill Clinton is a rapist - this stuff was in the right place and it was hitting with the right people.

Particularly on the Clinton rapist thing, Alex Jones was having fun with it and making people feel involved while Bannon was fricking ruthless and brought his victims to a debate, which was a more grave and serious look.

There was stuff about Isis using American military gear being passed around on Facebook and it was bullshite but it was only being passed around between the people who wanted to hear it. Trump is taking this stuff mainstream, and 35% of the voters are going to be cheering while the rest of us are gonna be shaking our heads.

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There’s no one supporting the notion that trump won this. Even his most ardent supporters admit that she did well and he didn’t.

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Fact check: not true. Trump is insisting he won. Also many, many of his big supporters in social media are now coming around to the narrative and calling him the winner after immediately calling for things like ABCs moderators to be imprisoned, desperately trying to make the eating cats claim valid etc.

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give me an example of a vice president who changed the policy of his administration, or STFU

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Joe Biden soft called out Obama for not supporting gay marriage.

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The moment that elevated Mr. Biden’s standing among gay and lesbian activists was his appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” as vice president in 2012 when, in response to a question, he said he supported same-sex marriage. His response, which aides said was not calculated or planned, blindsided the White House and Mr. Obama, who had not yet staked out that position.

Given that he was a moderate Democrat with strong ties to blue-collar workers, that response changed the contours of the discussion and, in the view of many activists, emboldened other elected officials to jump on as well. Ms. Hecht-McGowan said she was campaigning in a pitched, and ultimately successful, battle on an initiative permitting same-sex marriage in Maryland.

“He created this watershed moment for the movement,” Ms. Hecht-McGowan said. “I believe that moment was the tipping point for the movement on marriage. He did what he needed to do.”

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LINK

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I'm just really curious why it should be a Federal position. I like that it's put to vote at the state level. What am I missing here? I can clearly say I'm not the smartest dude on this topic. Educate me.

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Because it a federal law or case law upholds it as a right, and states like Texas, Mississippi, Idaho are forced to allow it, then the people there who don't want abortions are still free to not get one.

On an unrelated note, if you type Trump and Tarrifs in to Twitter it's basically just porn. Not in a metaphorical sense.