[On advice of a friend I am publishing the following the following as the very modest beginning of an appraisal of fascism.]

LP’ full-throated attack on antifa is based entirely on tactical
considerations, principally because antifa break up events they have
nothing to do with creating and in so doing expose many to police fighting
they had no intention of engaging in.

J20 is a perfect example. Some 4-5 people pleaded long ago and the hundreds
who made up everybody else — whose trials were dropped this week — were
obviously bystanders.

I think there is a larger problem: in adopting political violence as a
tactic, even a countertactic, antifa do in fact, really, mirror the
fascists or protofascists or wannabe fascists in unpleasant ways.

They mirror them as follows: 1) willingness to engage in violence against
the other on sight; 2) costumery. You could call it uniforms. 3) Like the
fascists, antifa consider political violence to be their actual program.
They don’t explain themselves to the wider public, they don’t have a
newspaper, they don’t have conferences open to the interested public. 4)
They are indifferent to civilian casualties caused by their fights because
casualties are a part of war. 5) They never apologize for their violence.

It’s worth thinking about that public, unapologetic political violence was from
the very beginning a central strategic thrust of the Nazis — not a tactic — and they considered it vital to their recruitment. Their propaganda was always accompanied by
violence, leading to their term “power propaganda”. Their meetings were “defended” by armed uniformed thugs. They were always always willing to be more violent than their opponents, principally the Communists and Social Democrats because they believed the latter  should be not only vanquished politically but exterminated.

This is not a road to go down.