Something hit me when I read your piece, and David Cearley hasn’t made this distinction (but his point is still valid, which I will get on to).

But your piece specifically points out, correctly, that the far right is nothing more than a tiny pack of losers. Antifa “is winning” — no, actually, civil society won against those people long ago. Antifa may have scared some of them further underground, but they were already ostracized in society everywhere on the political spectrum from Stalinism to conservatism and classical liberalism (Reagan, Churchill).

Even then, there is an amazing TED talk by the African-American musician Daryl Davis, about how he succeeded in having polite conversations with KKK members and eventually befriended them. It is possible to have political disagreements that deep, and yet share public spaces in work, sport, music, etc just as long as there is mutual tolerance. Davis concluded that they didn’t hate him, as we would typically understand hate; as long as he tolerated their opinion that racial separation was preferable, they were quite prepared to co-exist with him on shared interests outside of politics.

But returning to the point I started with, your piece completely omits Antifa’s shockingly bad-faith condemnation and treatment of people who are not “far right” at all, conflating them with the far right, calling them the same names, and justifying violence against them. They extend this treatment to people who possibly represent public-opinion majority. For example: people who oppose immigration of above a certain quantity on grounds of infrastructure capacity and economics — are “racists” and “white supremacists”. People who want a secure border, and those crossing it to be vetted — are also “racists” and “fascists”. Those who support traditional gender roles and marriage, are “bigots” and “rapists”. Those who expect immigrants to observe the same enlightenment values, embedded in law, as we ourselves are expected to observe (“or they should have stayed in their countries of origin”), are “phobic” of those other cultures, and “white supremacists”. A famous conservative British philosopher who is married to a black African woman, is a “white supremacist”. A Trump-supporting black woman is a “white supremacist”. A President who candidly said all along that he wants to increase his share of the minority vote by being the best President for their interests, that they have ever had, is a “racist” and a “white supremacist”.

I could go on, but you will have got the point by now. This is Antifa’s tendencies that David Cearley is referring to, but he didn’t stop to explain it explicitly like I just have. The incidents of violence, numerically exponentially greater towards ordinary Americans and public figures who are conservatives and classical liberals, than what there has been to actual far-rightists. Even in Charlottesville, the original demonstrators of the right, could well have been much greater numbers of merely ordinary people sick of political correctness; only these people were repelled by the neo-Nazi presence and stayed away. The small numbers of “whatever”, who demonstrated, were dispersed after only a short time, numerically greatly outnumbered by “Antifa” and others of the left. Antifa could have likewise gone home at that point, their job done — but they marched around Charlottesville disrupting the place for hours after.

To swallow the biased anti-Trump media version, James Fields running his car into a crowd of leftists (who were blocking an intersection, immobilizing the vehicles that Fields ended up ramming) was the culmination of a day of right-wing violence being nobly kept in check by moderate crowds of counter-protesters. Which is nonsense, and condemning both sides was entirely appropriate. Live footage on the day, shows marching leftist mobs singing “Happy Birthday, George Soros” (it was his birthday), which suggests a certain intentional, premeditated “organization” on their part.