Antifa’s unhinged menacing of Riley Gaines

Anyone who may have hoped that the re-election of Donald Trump as US president would lead to the end of woke will surely have been disabused of the notion by now. American college campuses in particular continue to be roiled by extreme identitarianism.

This week’s evidence of the continued – in fact, increasing – derangement of the American left comes thanks to Riley Gaines, the brave female college-champion swimmer who stood up against men competing in women’s sports. Twice this week, Gaines has proved that young, supposedly progressive activists will react with violence if someone they do not agree with dares to speak.

These people’s views might be pathetic and childish, but their behaviour is scary. At the University of Washington’s Ethnic Culture Centre, Gaines was invited to give a speech by Turning Point USA (TPUSA) on Tuesday. In response, a mob of hulking figures from Antifa – the supposed ‘anti-fascist’ militants – turned up in force. Clad head-to-toe in black and covering their faces, they menaced, threatened and harassed the attendees. Reportedly, some of the thugs even wished death upon an elderly couple attending the event. The ‘protesters’ also threatened a disabled woman and a man who was holding a sign that said ‘protect women’.

Footage posted to X by journalist Andy Ngo captures the violence and hatred of these clashes. A large, male Antifa activist, with his face totally covered, stood in front of the police officers charged with protecting those waiting to see Gaines speak. ‘Kill yourself’, the activist said to the man holding the ‘protect women’ sign. The police remained stony-faced as the Antifa thug continued to verbally harass the man.

Some Antifa criminals even threw a bag of faeces at a TPUSA volunteer. They followed attendees leaving the event and said things like: ‘Have you thought about dying today? Do it, before someone does it for you.’ Another masked man confronted an elderly couple and told them that ‘it would be so beautiful to see your bodies hanging from the trees swinging back and forth’.

Yet according to reports, Seattle Police did nothing. ‘Authorities attempted to get the militants to leave the couple alone, but were unsuccessful’, wrote Katie Daviscourt, who was present at the incident, in the Post Millennial.

There were similar scenes the day before, at the Portland State University campus in neighbouring Oregon. Here, trans fanatics seemed to be trying to rip a door from its hinges, in order to gain access to the students’ union where Gaines was speaking. ‘Fuck you, pigs!’, they screamed, as police struggled to get the doors closed. Five people were later arrested, according to the Independent.

It has been obvious for years, thanks largely to the bravery of independent journalists like Ngo, that Antifa is a violent, hateful group. Yet its black-clad activists somehow remain free to harass, intimidate and abuse decent, ordinary Americans with little-to-no consequence, even with Trump back in office.

On Thursday, Ngo posted yet another video of a woke extremist, this time at Temple University in Pennsylvania. Wearing a face mask, the student openly called for the destruction of the university, as well as the United States as a whole: ‘We must accept the eventuality of bringing the USA to its knees.’ At the same university, two students were suspended this week for holding up a sign outside a bar that read ‘Fuck the Jews’.

This kind of rhetoric is now fashionable among a significant portion of American young people in and around prestigious colleges. As usual, the problem isn’t just the sinister freaks stomping around, hurting normal people – it’s also the supposedly respectable progressives running interference for them or failing to push back. It never ceases to amaze me how swathes of the comfortable American media class either dismiss or ignore these activists’ violence and overtly authoritarian, paramilitary behaviours. Just because they say they are attacking a phantasmagorical ‘far right’ or protesting against a supposed ‘genocide’, all objective evidence of their behaviour suddenly becomes null and void. Just because they stick the qualifier ‘anti’ in their name, it somehow annuls their obviously fascistic tactics and symbolism. At least Mussolini’s Blackshirts had the balls to show their faces.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here