Once the street brawls start, the capitalist political and media establishment will always create a both-sides situation where the leftists are “just as bad” as the fascists. The real problems occur when the leftists start buying into that characterisation, too, and begin initiating the fights in the same way the Nazis had all along. Eventually, it becomes “we have to support the Nazi thugs to counter the Commie ones” from the establishment, with the depressingly predictable result we’re all familiar with.
Fortunately (and to my pleasant surprise, given that it tends to attract anarkiddies), the antifa movement hasn’t fallen into the trap that Rotfont did in the 1920s and early 30s. They don’t throw the first punch, and I haven’t seen a whole lot of WTO-style pointless vandalism, either. Whoever wrote the current playbook for the movement has studied movement discipline and history and isn’t going to give the “respectable centre” a chance to make them into thugs on par with the Proud Boys and other far-right arseholes.
