1. Posting a single image of a person in a helmet and holding a bat does not mean anything.
Yes, perhaps I should have clarified that this is a widely circulated photograph of an antifa "member", taken in Charlottesville at a time that strangely coincided with the clashes.
2. Assuming that's a legitimate picture of a counter protester... I'm failing to see your point. Defensive does not mean you hunker down with a shield and pray they don't have guns(They did).
Yes, they armed themselves went to a location where they expected armed people to hang out, many of them travelling from out of state. All in self-defence, of course. I, too, regularly arm myself and go looking for fights in order to best defend myself. Sometimes I even go abroad to get some diversity in who I'm defending myself from!
If cops need to defend someone from being killed, do they carry only riot shields or do they have batons as well? Or even *gasp* guns?
Now you're comparing domestic terrorists to law enforcement officers. You're about to go full BLM. Never go full BLM.
3. I say defensive based on movement patterns, not armaments. The counter protesters were largely stationary while the white supremacists marched towards them.
This contradicts witness accounts.
Violence and hate and blood, that’s what I saw. What happened in Charlottesville this past weekend wasn’t a rally. It was a riot.
I was on Market Street around 11:30 a.m. when a counterprotester ripped a newspaper stand off the sidewalk and threw it at alt-right protesters. I saw another man from the white supremacist crowd being chased and beaten. People were hitting him with their signs. A much older man, also with the alt-right group, got pushed to the ground in the commotion. Someone raised a stick over his head and beat the man with it, and that’s when I screamed and ran over with several other strangers to help him to his feet.
Naturally, many of these accounts come from the far-right domestic terrorists, and it's in their best interest to say that antifa were violent. But even the antifas readily admit that they were not just defending themselves:
We were coming off a hard won victory. Before the attack occurred, we chased the Nazis out of their park, removing their platform. They were on the move towards a community with many people of color. We mobilized to intercept. We were at our most powerful, all of us together chanting with enthusiastic support from the people of Charlottesville. That was the moment that we were attacked.
The "Anti-Facists" are being labeled as bad. Yet... why?
I believe terrorism is illegal in America, and illegal things are commonly described in a negative light. I'm also not convinced that domestic terrorism in the name of anarchism and/or communism is particularly worthy of your apologia.
I mean, if any group deserves to be actually resisted with physical force, it's the god damn Nazis.
No. Nobody deserves to be physically assaulted for protesting the idea of removing a statue. Not even the 50-ish Nazis that may have somehow found their way to that rally.
The way Trump talks, it's bad to punch Nazis
The way trump talks, it's bad to punch anyone. He's been pretty explicit and direct about that recently.