Antifa Is the Natural Product of Our Educational System

Antifa Is the Natural Product of Our Educational System
A protester wearing Antifa’s typical “black bloc” style in New York City on Nov. 16, 2019. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Roger L. Simon
8/3/2020
Updated:
8/4/2020
Commentary

Antifa or antifa—lower case a, if you prefer—may have gotten its start in Germany, but it’s flourishing here in the United States as never before.

This growth occurred even though truly achieving the movement’s stated goal—anarchy—would create chaos, leading to civilizational destruction of a likely unparalleled extent in human history in our industrialized and high-tech nation of almost 330 million.

The deepest causes of their violent and more than slightly deranged behavior are undoubtedly personal and psychoanalytic in nature. The story of the Seattle grandmother who identified her bomb-throwing grandson from video of a protective vest she bought him—he said he was “peaceful”—is a novel crying out to be written.

But whatever the psychological profiles of the individual Antifa members, almost all of them share one thing in common:

They went to American schools.

And those schools, with only a few notable exceptions, talked down and continue to talk down the United States of America to one degree or another from kindergarten through doctorate.

It is, to my knowledge, unique in history that the public and private educational systems of a country so thoroughly and consistently criticize the country itself. (The Chinese Cultural Revolution did it briefly, but Mao’s immediate central government was always supported.)

For decades, our schools have been self-replicating machines, preaching to college students, directly or indirectly, the left-wing gospel according to Howard Zinn (and the Frankfurt School and so forth) and sending them out in turn to preach this junior varsity, critical theory Marxism themselves as teachers at whatever level at all manner of institutions throughout the country.

The youngest of those levels is perhaps the most dangerous because it’s the most impressionable.

Antifa members are therefore only doing what they have been taught all along, getting rid of a cancer called the United States.

This connection between Antifa and the teaching profession is so profound that some insist the majority of those hidden behind the black masks are indeed teachers. Others, needless to say including the liberal media, have denied this.

It’s impossible to know for certain. Antifa, like some Islamic terror groups, doesn’t have a formal leadership structure; why would they need it? They also don’t keep records.

This, however, is probably a case where the cliché about smoke and fire applies. Whether Antifa is 50 percent teachers or 20 percent teachers, it’s a lot of teachers.

Any reader of websites such as The College Fix or Campus Reform can see the extent to which almost all our schools have their tentacles buried deeply into the supposed social justice causes espoused more militantly in the streets by Antifa.

The governors and mayors of the localities where the riots are taking place are themselves the products of the same educational institutions. This may account in part for their reluctance to crack down. Some part of them is identifying with the rioters.

They want to burn it down, no matter if the violent protests lead to the renaming of this country as New Venezuela, figuratively and literally.

Antifa is an excruciating public manifestation of a very deep infection that has metastasized throughout our society from the schools.

It will only get worse if we don’t change our educational system—pronto.

Ironically, the beginnings of this change are one of the few, perhaps the only, good things to emanate from the pandemic.

With schools shut or online, many are evaluating whether the system serves our young people, practically (in terms of careers) or ideologically.

What kind of education is it when 95 percent of college professors vote Democratic, and mostly left Democratic at that?

Viewpoint diversity, anyone? Shall I homeschool my child? Shall I send him or her to college, so they can come back at Thanksgiving in an Antifa T-shirt and accuse me of being a capitalist pig when I just spent 50 grand for their tuition?

Something is wrong with this picture.

Change is undoubtedly coming. As a wise man once said, “Faster, please.” I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of mush-brains throwing firebombs at police stations.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning author, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and co-founder of PJ Media. He is also a graduate of two Ivy League institutions to which he no longer donates—not that they need the money. Find him on Twitter and Parler @rogerlsimon.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, columnist for The Epoch Times. His latest book “American Refugees” can be ordered on Amazon. “Roger Simon is among the many refugees fleeing blue state neoliberalism, and he’s written the best account of our generation’s greatest migration.”—Tucker Carlson.
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