It wasn\u2019t just lefties griping or working the refs, it really was striking that a bunch of power-adjacent media outlets ran anti-antifa pieces last week, after the issue had been relegated to millennial sites and millennial beats (and their sympathetic millennial authors) for so long.\n
\nMaybe latter-day aggression tripped some flag, I did hear sniffs on Twitter about them going after photographers (the media\u2019s #1 topic of concern being itself). But I suspected other causes, and I count this article as confirmation.
\nOh man, I\u2019m sure Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a guy halls-of-power enough to know how to build elite consensus before launching initiatives, is furious these auxiliary apparatchiks managed to obtain those interviews and confidential law enforcement documents.\nFederal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as \u201cantifa\u201d had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as \u201cdomestic terrorist violence,\u201d according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.
\nIt\u2019s like I\u2019d been saying, there are well-established countermeasures to \u201clet\u2019s publicly build a movement around punching our opponents in the head\u201d, and with a bit of care in lining things up and trading on tensions, authorities can unlock a fierce response within existing law.\n
\nI told you about the Multnomah County Republican Party, here in Portland, how they were kinda sympathetic, drawing threats and menacing for doing some really Norman Rockwell-type local politicking, and not getting backed up by civic institutions in the hands of a rival party.\n
\n(Portland recently replaced its police chief in part off of activist anger at the last one for cracking down too hard on black-clad marchers getting rowdy in the street)\n
\nWell, in recent interviews MultCoGOP officials have been mentioning that picnic rally and parade I did, but also saying that they feel intimidated from doing voter registration tabling at public events, and I don\u2019t know if anyone else notices but that is a loud, CLANGING bell. Because of the way history played out, the protection of voter registration drives is absolutely central to the same body of American civil rights law that Jeff Sessions has been salivating to deploy on behalf of Republican constituencies for a change.
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