A counterterrorism expert testified at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday that antifa developed from communist domestic terrorist groups like the Weather Underground and has the goal of overthrowing the United States Constitution.
In his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Kyle Shideler, Director and Senior Analyst for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for the Center for Security Policy, said that antifa is an anarcho-communist movement that uses physical violence and intimidation to keep American citizens from engaging in the political process.
“While they do this under the cover of antifascism, the reality is that antifa defines the entire American political system, regardless of party affiliation, as fascism,” Shideler explained during the hearing entitled “The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble: Protecting Speech by Stopping Anarchist Violence.”
Also testifying at the hearing were Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), U.S. Attorney Northern District of Texas Erin Nealy Cox, Deputy Secretary of Department of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli, independent journalist Andrew Ngo, Brennan Center for Law and Justice Fellow Michael German, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley, and Ms. Nkenge Harmon Johnson, President and CEO Portland Urban League.
“Antifa developed out of the communist urban guerilla and terrorist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the Weather Underground and Germany’s Red Army Faction,” Shideler declared.
The terror expert explained that, as such, the tactics used by antifa had been developing for “over half a century of radical left-wing organizing and political violence.”
Shideler noted that while some analysts suggest that antifa doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense, “the reality is that antifa demonstrates an elaborate but non-hierarchical structure.”
“Antifa relies heavily on support organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, the International Workers of the World, Refuse Fascism, and the National Lawyers Guild and in coordination with other protest organizations,” he said. “It is not uncommon for antifa to require outside groups to sign what are essentially memorandums of understanding to ensure that allies agree not to interfere with criminal activity in exchange for protection.”
Shideler added that terrorism is a “low-cost form of warfare,” and pointed out that 9/11 cost less than half a million dollars.
“Claiming that antifa is too disorganized to understand should not be an acceptable excuse for law enforcement—federal, state, or local—to tolerate antifa’s private street war to overthrow the constitution,” Shideler argued.
“Like their predecessors in the Weather Underground and Red Army Faction, antifa will continue to escalate its behavior unless it is checked. There will be more attacks, and rioting techniques will continue to grow in capability and in sophistication, their cadres will grow, and there will be more autonomous zones for increased periods of time, and more Americans of all political persuasions will be terrorized,” he concluded.
Shideler’s testimony echoes what a former Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division of the FBI has been saying in media interviews about antifa and the terror organization’s apologists in the Democrat party.
Terry Turchie, the driving force behind the capture of two notorious domestic terrorists— Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph—also suggested that today’s antifa radicals sprung from the Weather Underground terrorists of the 1970s.
Turchie explained on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle in June that the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group (led by Bill Ayers, a former comrade of Barack Obama) was “responsible for over 2,000 bombings and attacks on government institutions [and] businesses in the United States,” and had the goal of fomenting a communist revolution.
Continually on the run from the FBI, the Weather Underground movement eventually petered out,” Turchie noted, but not before they released a manifesto that lived on.
“In 1974, they authored a document called Prairie Fire and they outlined their strategy and they outlined the way they could get to that strategy and actually bring down the U.S. government,” Turchie explained.
The document was authored by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other members of the Weather Underground.
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war. Revolution is the most powerful resource of the people. To wait, to not prepare people for the fight, is to seriously mislead about what kind of fierce struggle lies ahead.
Revolutionary war will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent, political and economic, cultural and military, where all forms are developed in harmony with the armed struggle.
Without mass struggle there can be no revolution.Without armed struggle there can be no victory. It will not be immediate, for the enemy is entrenched and intractable. It will require lengthy, deliberate political and armed…
“What was their strategy? Their strategy was resistance,” Turchie said, going on to compare them to today’s Democrats. “Not too long, maybe five minutes after President Trump won the election in 2016, Democrat Party leaders came out and said we’re going to resist. We’re going to embark upon a strategy of resistance of the President.”
Turchie noted that the document contained six strategies that the Weather Underground felt would help overthrow of the United States government, including fomenting racial hostility through the false allegations of systemic racism and police racism. The Weather Underground, like antifa, also sought to “attack and dethrone God.”
The former G-man said that the radical left was making the same accusations about systemic racism and police brutality in the 70s as they are now.
“Police racism then and police racism now is a phony issue,” Turchie said. “It has always been a phony issue. It’s the issue that Communist societies use to literally tear apart America and be divisive.” He pointed out that the Black panther Party in Oakland was demanding that the police leave black neighborhoods and let them police themselves.
Turchie went on to assert that “all of this has been adopted into the 2016 party platform in almost the same language you have on the screen.”
It should be noted that during the hearing on Tuesday, Democrats repeatedly brought up and denounced white supremacist groups, but refused to condemn antifa.