What do you mean “we,” lefty

Leaders of the National Lawyers Guild in San Francisco have written an opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle titled “We are all Antifa.” The truth of the statement depends on the meaning of “we.”

If the authors mean the National Lawyers Guild, their statement is accurate. This outfit is, and always has been, a far left organization. As Jesse Rigsby wrote in FrontPage Magazine back in 2003:

The National Lawyers Guild embraces every anti-America, anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-Israel, and “anti-imperialist” cause in vogue among the far left and declares itself “dedicated to the need for basic change in the structure of our political and economic system.” If this strikes the reader as a slight hint that the Guild’s underlying ideology is not exactly laissez-faire capitalism, that is because it is not. While the Guild is not officially communist or Marxist, its membership, leadership, past internal struggles, and adopted stances consistently point to an organization whose underlying convictions could best be described as such.

Antifa is just the latest in a long line of anti-America, anti-capitalist causes the National Lawyers Guild has embraced. It hardly needed to say “we are all Antifa.”

But if by “we” the Guild means the American public, from which it has always been alienated, then the statement is false. This is clear from recent surveys of likely voters by McLaughlin and Associates, a conservative-leaning organization that polled for the Trump campaign.

84.9 percent of respondents said they regard “freedom of speech as a fundamental right.” Only 9.3 percent thought “it should be restricted if it offends some people.” This result is consistent with a recent Rasmussen survey.

McLaughlin also polled about Antifa specifically. The question it posed was: “Given that Antifa advocates violence as the appropriate response to free speech they disagree with, do you support or oppose Antifa?”

The question is a fair one. Antifa is on the record as saying that violence is the appropriate response to speech it passionately disagrees with, including pro-Trump speech.

McLaughlin found that 63 percent of Americans oppose Antifa to the extent it attempts to silence those whose speech it disagrees with. Only 21 percent support Antifa.

Frankly, I’m slightly discouraged that the ratio of those opposing Antifa violence was only 3:1. Plainly, however, we are not “all Antifa.” This is true only of a rabid minority.

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