This week in America with regard to matters domestic was nothing short of demonic.

It showed that a spiritual battle is going on of epic proportions. As horrible as it was, we are seeing only the surface. Things will get worse before they get better.

We know about the far right, so let’s look at the far Left, since the media won’t.

The Far Left

After Charlottesville, the Far Left continued their rampage by tearing down a Confederate Statue in Durham, North Carolina:

On Tuesday, August 15, the local ABC affiliate WTVD reported (emphases mine below):

Durham County sheriff’s deputies arrested a woman who said she took part in toppling the Confederate statue in downtown Durham. More arrests are expected.

Takiyah Thompson, 22, was taken into custody shortly after protesters held a news conference Tuesday afternoon at North Carolina Central University. Thompson climbed a ladder to the top of the statue to tie a rope around its neck before the crowd tore it down.

Thompson is charged with:

• • disorderly conduct by injury to a statue (Class II Misdemeanor)
  • damage to real property (statue as a fixture (Class I Misdemeanor)
  • participation in a riot with property damage in excess of $1,500 (Class H Felony)
  • inciting others to riot where there is property damage in excess of $1,500 (Class F Felony)

The protesters who took part in toppling Confederate statue in Durham on Monday held the news conference Tuesday to call for the dropping of any charges related to the incident.

Thompson was given a $10,000 unsecured bond. She bonded out at 5:48 p.m. The World Worker’s Party Durham chapter has set up a legal defense fund to help fight her case in court.

Deputies said Tuesday night that investigators continue to search for other suspects in the removal of the statue.

“The people decided to take matters into our own hands and remove the statue,” said Thompson, a member of the Communist-platform Workers World Party and a student at N.C. Central University. “We are tired of waiting on politicians who could have voted to remove the white supremacist statues years ago, but they failed to act. So we acted” …

At a news conference, Durham County manager Wendell Davis called pulling the statue down “unlawful and inappropriate”.

Wendell Davis is black. So are other Durham County officials.

The New York Post had details about the jail sentences accompanying the felony charges:

Takiya Thompson, 22, has been charged with disorderly conduct by injury to a statue, damage to real property, participation in a riot with property damage in excess of $1,500 — and inciting others to riot where there is property damage in excess of $1,500, according to the Durham County Sheriff’s Office.

The last two offenses are Class H and Class F felonies, with each carrying a sentence of up to 25 months and 41 months behind bars, respectively.

Interestingly, the left-of-centre and anti-Trump magazine The Atlantic recently published an article, ‘The Rise of the Violent Left’.

The author, Peter Beinart, posits:

Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

Yes, they are.

Beinart catalogues the various events that Antifa’s violence have cancelled in recent months. The Far Left group does not want any conservatives, Republicans or Trump supporters (not every Trump supporter identifies with either of those two groups) to hold or participate in any public gatherings.

Antifa and similar groups get a degree of ideological support from Democrats. Beinart explains:

For progressives, Donald Trump is not just another Republican president. Seventy-six percent of Democrats, according to a Suffolk poll from last September, consider him a racist. Last March, according to a YouGov survey, 71 percent of Democrats agreed that his campaign contained “fascist undertones.”

He’s anything but. Check YouTube for old videos of him helping the black community in New York. Here’s one for starters. I think it’s his Alpha masculinity that the Left — including Democrats — finds triggering.

Beinart goes into the history of Antifa:

“antifa,” which is short for antifascist or Anti-Fascist Action. The movement’s secrecy makes definitively cataloging its activities difficult, but this much is certain: Antifa’s power is growing. And how the rest of the activist left responds will help define its moral character in the Trump age.

Antifa traces its roots to the 1920s and ’30s, when militant leftists battled fascists in the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain. When fascism withered after World War II, antifa did too. But in the ’70s and ’80s, neo-Nazi skinheads began to infiltrate Britain’s punk scene. After the Berlin Wall fell, neo-Nazism also gained prominence in Germany. In response, a cadre of young leftists, including many anarchists and punk fans, revived the tradition of street-level antifascism.

In the late ’80s, left-wing punk fans in the United States began following suit, though they initially called their groups Anti-Racist Action, on the theory that Americans would be more familiar with fighting racism than fascism. According to Mark Bray, the author of the forthcoming Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, these activists toured with popular alternative bands in the ’90s, trying to ensure that neo-Nazis did not recruit their fans. In 2002, they disrupted a speech by the head of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist group in Pennsylvania; 25 people were arrested in the resulting brawl.

Then things went quiet. Beinart says that these activists focussed on anti-capitalist activities.

He says that Antifa re-emerged from the time Trump ran in the Republican primaries in 2016. The activists garnered support from the mainstream Left:

An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”

That includes violence.

Some Democrat-dominated cities, such as Portland, Oregon, have become defined by Antifa. Portland had days of violent protests after Trump won the presidential election on November 8, 2016. Other protests have taken place since then.

This sets a worrying precedent, because Antifa don’t like the police or local government, either, even when those officials are Democrats:

What’s eroding in Portland is the quality Max Weber considered essential to a functioning state: a monopoly on legitimate violence. As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifascists don’t want the government to stop white supremacists from gathering. They want to do so themselves, rendering the government impotent. With help from other left-wing activists, they’re already having some success at disrupting government. Demonstrators have interrupted so many city-council meetings that in February, the council met behind locked doors.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters are frustrated. They see Democrats buckling to Antifa demands:

Joey Gibson, a Trump supporter who organized the June 4 Portland rally, told me that his “biggest pet peeve is when mayors have police stand down … They don’t want conservatives to be coming together and speaking.”

Meeting with violence is another concern of Trump supporters and Republicans:

To provide security at the rally, Gibson brought in a far-right militia called the Oath Keepers. In late June, James Buchal, the chair of the Multnomah County Republican Party, announced that it too would use militia members for security, because “volunteers don’t feel safe on the streets of Portland.”

Beinart concludes:

Revulsion, fear, and rage are understandable. But one thing is clear. The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.

The media

Because the media are almost universally Democrats, they will defend Far Left groups and even deny their existence. After all, someone has to protest Trump and his supporters. If they have to use violence, so be it.

And, it is interesting to see who the Left defines as ‘far right’, for instance, this multiracial group of readers and contributors to /pol/4chan. It’s difficult to describe /pol/ fans other than to say that they are young people who oppose political correctness and enjoy making fun of the Left. For that, they get branded as a hate group. I’m not necessarily defending them, but activists can take things way too far.

Returning to — and closing with — the media, watch for the Charlottesville story to run and run, while other incidents past and present are conveniently swept under the rug.

The media are shameful.

Trump will have to direct his communications office to begin revoking press passes, starting with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who has been belligerent from the beginning and known for interrupting Trump. He did so again the other day. More on that tomorrow.