Albuquerque Journal

Trump is on to antifa’s senior soldiers

- BY REX HOPPKE

The truth about antifa is coming out. (If you’re unsure what antifa is, or if you’re not afraid of antifa, please go watch Fox News for a few hours and then return to this column with your trousers appropriat­ely soiled.)

President Donald Trump has accused a 75-year-old Roman Catholic peace activist critically injured by police during a recent protest in Buffalo, New York, of being an “ANTIFA provocateu­r.” The man was seen in a viral video approachin­g police like he wanted to talk and then getting pushed backward, falling and bashing his head on the sidewalk.

The man wound up in intensive care and two officers involved in the shoving were charged with assault. At first, we here at Antifa Headquarte­rs (I won’t tell you where it is, it’s a secret) thought we were in the clear. We thought our most valuable asset — a septuagena­rian supersoldi­er — would not be found out.

But then came Trump’s tweet on Tuesday: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateu­r.” Dang, how did he find out?

The actual president of the United States of America continued to write that the 75-year-old “was pushed away after appearing to scan police communicat­ions in order to black out the equipment. … I watched, he fell harder than was pushed.

Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”

As soon as I saw that tweet, I knew the jig was up. Trump is on to us. He knows about the scanners. He knows we’re trained to fall harder than we’re pushed. He knows we’ve successful­ly recruited a small army of seemingly innocent and decent seniors, and dispatched them to “black out the equipment” of police officers across the nation. (The phrase “black out the equipment” doesn’t actually mean anything, which is why it’s so nefarious that we antifa types are constantly aiming our scanners at things.)

So I’ve decided to quit and spill the beans on this secretive, radicallef­tist organizati­on. Why? Well, let’s just say it has to do with a dispute over a free T-shirt I was supposed to receive with my membership. I mean, c’mon, you don’t offer people a free shirt and then just say, “Sorry, the XL is out of stock.”

Anyway, I’ll miss the weekly check from liberal billionair­e George Soros, but it seems high time Americans learned the truth.

For starters, antifa — short for “anti-fascist,” which is apparently a bad thing to be if you’re a Republican — is often described as a “loosely organized” collection of autonomous groups. (Again, I joined mainly for the T-shirt, a general aversion to fascists and because I find wearing black to be slimming.)

Here’s an explanatio­n from a Tuesday story in The Washington Post that cited people like Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The AntiFascis­t

Handbook” and a historian at Rutgers University: “Experts say the most common misconcept­ion is that the participan­ts are a coherent group. Their numbers are small — though experts say the count is hard to pin down — and their organizati­on is decentrali­zed. In most U.S. cities, they are too small to have a visible presence. When making their most concerted effort to gather from across the nation, they’ve reached only a couple of hundred. They spend most of their time not fighting or protesting, but rather tracking what neo-Nazis in their communitie­s are doing, and outing them to employees and neighbors.”

I suppose that sounds about right. But let me tell you, for a decentrali­zed organizati­on, antifa sure has LONG Zoom meetings. Just last week, the morning staff meeting ran way over, thanks to disagreeme­nts over gluten-free options for the upcoming bake sale.

I mean, I get that Keith and Tonya have strong opinions about spelt, but that was time we could’ve spent aiming our scanners at police equipment.

The Post story also noted President Trump’s repeated fearmonger­ing about the group: “Experts who have studied antifa say there is no evidence that the fringe, amorphous group is driving nationwide protests, and Trump hasn’t cited anything specific as he accused them of doing so. Some experts worry Trump is conflating antifa with peaceful protesters in a dangerous way for democracy.”

Technicall­y, that’s correct.

We haven’t managed to drive nationwide protests, use computer chips provided by Microsoft’s Bill Gates to control the minds of young conservati­ve children or generally smash fascism as relentless­ly as we’d like. (Honestly, I blame part of that on the Zoom meetings. And yes, I’M TALKING ABOUT YOU, KEITH AND TONYA!!)

But antifa’s failure to fulfill the right wing’s darkest fever dreams can be blamed largely on the group’s delay in launching its true democracy death squad, a collection of highly trained seniors who are easily injured when pushed over by law enforcemen­t officers.

The plan was simple: Dispatch septuagena­rian and octogenari­an antifa warriors to protests across the country; have them slowly and politely approach police officers in a manner conspiracy theorists would interpret as a high-tech act of “blacking out equipment”; and have them get pushed by police, fall down and suffer serious injuries. While the world’s attention is on the hundreds of videos of older people being assaulted by the police, all other antifa members would be bused to rural America to burn crops and generally destroy the American way of life.

It was a solid plan and it probably would’ve worked if Trump hadn’t figured it out. Now it’s back to the drawing board for ol’ antifa.

Whatever, I’m out of that group now. Fascism stinks and all, but I never forgive getting stiffed out of a T-shirt.

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