Miranda Devine: Hard-left organisation Antifa has been dismissed for too long

Former US President Donald Trump has been proved right after he said during last year’s election campaign that far-left radicals Antifa were extremely dangerous, writes Miranda Devine.

Andy Ngo, the courageous independent journalist who covers anarchist riots in the US, was reportedly chased down and assaulted by a black-clad mob of militants in Portland, Oregon, on Friday.

He has been forced into hiding since the publication of his bestseller ‘Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy’ which examined the threat of hard-left revolutionaries who fomented riots across the country last summer.

That threat, obvious to anyone with  eyes, was famously downplayed by FBI director Christopher Wray, who told lawmakers in Washington last September that Antifa is just an ideology, “not a group or an ­organisation”.

In a presidential debate a week later, candidate Joe Biden defended Antifa as “an idea, not an organisation” and said white supremacists pose a greater danger.

Journalist Andy Ngo was attacked at an Antifa protest in Portland, Oregon.

“When a bat hits you over the head, that’s not an idea,” then-President­ ­Donald Trump replied.

Trump railed against Antifa, but nothing characterises the peculiar ­impotence of his presidency better than a summer of unchecked riots which demoralised a nation already reeling from a pandemic.

Now a new book, by former naval intelligence officer Jack Posobiec, called ‘The Antifa: Stories from Inside the Black Bloc’, sheds light on the ­battle behind the scenes at the White House to take the militant organisation seriously as a domestic terrorist threat.

But before we get there, with Democrats and their media enablers still hyperventilating over the January 6 Capitol riot, which Biden calls the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War”, it is worth recalling how Antifa terrorised the nation in an election year.

It was a year ago last Friday that Minneapolis’ soy boy mayor Jacob Frey issued the order to police to evacuate the Third Precinct and leave the station to be overrun by the mob and burned to the ground.

Protests had quickly turned violent after the death of a black man, George Floyd, under the knee of white officer Derek Chauvin three days earlier and Frey’s surrender only empowered external agitators who were whipping up the crowd.

Members of Antifa at a protest in Washington, DC. Picture: Getty Images

Frey’s capitulation to the forces of violence lit the match on a summer of rage across the country that has ­lingered beyond November’s election. Statues were toppled, the White House was besieged, looters had a field day and police were assaulted with bricks, Molotov cocktails, bottles of urine and lasers. More than 30 people were killed, 700 police officers were ­injured and insurance damages topped $US2 billion.

Posobiec quotes former Australian Antifa leader Shayne Hunter saying Antifa “is more dangerous than ISIS”.

But the violence was minimised, normalised and, in some cases, ­applauded by the Democratic Party and Trump-deranged media.

Until he was against it, Biden was all for “Defunding the Police” — or “absolutely” redirecting funds away from police, as he put it. Kamala Harris promoted a bail fund for rioters.

US President Joe Biden was at one time all for defunding the police. Picture: AFP

No one will forget how Democrats played footsies with the thugs for ­political advantage. They fed the ­malicious lie that police are “systemically” racist murderers of black people.  “This is our moment to root out systemic racism and ensure justice finally rings out for all in America”, Biden tweeted while cities were burning.

At the same time far left politicians, such as Minnesota’s Attorney-General Keith Ellison, tried to divert blame onto Trump voters who he pretended were the agitators in Minneapolis’ riots. “White supremacists,” he called them.

It was a narrative that would stick.

On election eve, retailers across the country boarded up their storefronts, in anticipation of extreme violence if Donald Trump won.

Far-left groups promised rioting if Donald Trump won last year’s election. Picture: AFP

He lost. And there were no riots. What does that tell you?

Through it all, the Democratic party and their media allies characterised what was happening as “mostly peaceful protests”.

What may have begun as peaceful protests under the banner of the Marxist-based group Black Lives Matter had been hijacked by Antifa.

Videos on social media showed shadowy figures in black bloc, wearing oxygen masks and goggles, toting backpacks full of weapons, strategic­ally corralling crowds, systematically smashing store windows, cutting through fences outside police stations, lobbing rocks and Molotov cocktails, carrying umbrellas to ward off tear gas and scrutiny.

They blockaded roads and highways and terrorised ­motorists.

Mug shots showed these people overwhelmingly to be white and many were seemingly drug affected. A good number were the children of privilege.

Of those who were arrested, almost all were released with a slap on the wrist. Trump declared he would have Antifa classified as domestic terrorists. But nothing ever happened.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has in the past infamously dismissed Antifa. Picture: AFP

Posobiec describes why, opening his book with a meeting in the Oval Office between Wray and Trump, a few days before the election.

The President expresses his frustration at the FBI’s inaction on Antifa, for the third time in six months.

“Antifa, they’re a non-factor,” Wray told Trump, citing the extremism/domestic terrorism database compiled by FBI analysts.

“That’s a damn lie, Chris, and you know it,” the President shot back. “I see this stuff night after night on Twitter. We’ve got Homeland Security up in Portland getting attacked by gangs of these thugs and you’re going to sit there and tell me it’s not happening?

“Sir, we’re working on it”, Wray said.

Posobiec says the analysts who create the domestic terrorism database are left-wing Democrats, like the rest of the DC bureaucracy.

Far-left groups are getting off scot-free in the US. Artwork: Terry Pontikos

He quotes an unnamed member of the US Special Operations Command who claims analysts were working from home last year because of Covid, “so they’re sitting home using Google and CNN to write OSINT (open-source intelligence) and everyone wants to write about the same

QAnon or white supremacist nut, so we end up with 15 reports about one event and ... then they brief the director about it, and he goes to Congress and tells them it’s the biggest threat in the country.”

Wray baulked at the President’s order to crack down on Antifa, records Posobiec, just as the Pentagon baulked at Trump’s order for 10,000 troops from the National Guard to be acti­vated to defend DC on January 6, the day of the Capitol riot.

A senior Trump White House official is quoted on the tug of war: “It mostly consisted of Wray playing ­[Antifa] down as a minor inconvenience with no real training … or saying the FBI can’t go after a political ideology. Wray would say Fox and OAN were exaggerating. He always promised to come down harder after every scrap but obviously never did.”

Since January 6, Wray has focused the FBI’s efforts almost exclusively on Trump supporters, in one of the largest, most complex investigations in the agency’s history.

Antifa remains untouched.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph