It’s tough being a heroic anti-Nazi street fighter when you’re the closest thing to a Nazi around.
Last week, anti-fascist protesters showed up in Berkeley, California, to courageously battle the Nazi supporters of alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos. Just the next day, they likewise put it all on the line to tussle with the right-wing mob supporting radical demagogue Gavin McInnes.
Well, that’s how they imagine it in their fever dreams, anyway. In reality, the Nazis didn’t show up and the protesters themselves were the only totalitarians in sight. The Black Bloc thugs—”about 150 masked agitators who came onto campus and interrupted an otherwise non-violent protest,” says UC-Berkeley—seem to imagine themselves as stars of a Weimar Germany reenactment. In their minds, they march through the streets as the phalanx of the center-left Eiserne Front (or, more likely, the communist Rotfrontkämpferbund), battling their deadly enemies in the Nazi SA between sessions at the beer hall.
But the anti-fascists couldn’t find any Nazis at Berkeley. So instead “[t]hey shattered the glass of our Amazon Pickup Center, one of the few places Berkeley students can receive packages without fear of them getting stolen. They created a bonfire of trash in the center of the chaos, picked up barricades to drive through the building’s glass walls, set off fireworks, and left a trail of rage-filled destruction in their wake as they stormed the very streets we call home,” in the words of a student who saw a peaceful anti-Trump protest hijacked by visitors from 1930.
Via Reason