They have been arming and training all along. And not just for a Trump crackdown.
This article is from The New Republic. Sharing for your information. Because it’s critical for us to know what and how the enemy thinks and acts.
Liberals are notoriously loath to take their own side in a fight. But their reticence may well be changing in an age of vigilante, white nationalist terror—openly condoned and supported by an incumbent president who has suggested that his armed devotees won’t stand for his removal from office. Increasingly, the antifa left is arguing—and training—in response. They are worried not only about an armed reckoning following a contested election, but also about rising violence from the paramilitaries loyal to President Donald Trump.
Consider the tense political climate in the Pacific Northwest, where Washington state Representative Matt Shea, a dough-faced Christian dominionist from Spokane, made news last year when his instructions on how to build a “holy army” that would kill “all males” who refused to submit to biblical law leaked to the press. “Assassination to remove tyrants is just, not murder,” he wrote. The tyrant he referred to was not Trump, of course, but the communists he imagined running the government.
Such paranoid fantasies may be familiar to heavy consumers of YouTube and Reddit, but watching them transposed on to the structures of governance is a novelty. As a result, many leftists and even some liberals are beginning to reconsider their feelings about firearms, joining a loose amalgamation of gun groups, from John Brown Gun Clubs (which take their name from the abolitionist) to the Pink Pistols (an LGBTQ group), Liberal Gun Club, and Socialist Rifle Association. Some of these organizations are moderate and traditionalist, others radical and revolutionary. But all share one implicit goal: to normalize firearms ownership and training among liberals. Some of their members hope such efforts will at least make Republicans think twice before attempting a massacre.
by Corey Pein
