It was a small misunderstanding. A little thing, really.
The two men were prone on the ground face-first, fearing for their lives. A man with two Glocks and the tactical vest had ’em there. He was sure they were antifa.
Leave it to the media to make a big thing out of this: the fact that they were not antifa but roofing salesmen walking the streets of Loveland, Colo., wearing pandemic facial coverings, wearing company logos on their polo shirts, carrying clipboards and company pamphlets.
Also, the media made a big deal out of the fact that the one who is black, a member of the Colorado State University football team, had been secured by the man’s knee to his neck.
Big overreaction by the media.
As President Trump has advised, we should be on the lookout for antifa. They (it?) could be anywhere.
Glock-man Scott Gudmundsen was doing his job as a patriotic citizen. Why should a court order him to explain this to a shrink?
What about a man’s freedom to express himself with his carbine? That’s Amendments 1 and 2.
I know; a few who don’t watch Fox News ask, “What the ‘fa’ is antifa?”
What and where and who? Tell us where it is, so we can smite it and them.
Well, as Donald Rumsfeld once explained about weapons of mass destruction, antifa is there, and there, and over there.
So, yeah, what is this antifa? Is it the antifa? Is it an antifa? Capitalized or no? Anywhere, everywhere or nowhere?
The failing Washington Post sent out one of its two-bit, no-talent reporters, Isaac Stanley-Becker, with his worthless doctorate in history from Oxford, to ask.
His conclusion: Though antifa may actually be a thing, it isn’t much of one. Par for the course, lamestreamers.
After interviewing a raft of experts about domestic extremism, he reported, “The group the Trump administration has labeled a menace has mostly been non-existent.”
You mean Trump was misleading us when he said a bony 75-year-old white man pushed to the ground at a Black Lives Matter protest in Buffalo was not doing antifa’s bidding by menacing –"scanning" — police with his – um — cell phone?
Can’t be true. Trump always levels with us, he and Fox News. Don’t dare call this just another example of right-wing hysteri-“fa.”
Oh, sure, Fox on occasion has taken a speck of something and built an interstate with it, but it’s all for a good cause.
In 2008 with the threat of a black president looming over our nation, Fox News constructed a mortal threat out of a near-handful of Black Panthers – well, two — who showed up at a Philadelphia polling station looking intimidating. Fox News devoted 95 news segments to the matter.
That paled in comparison to the white rage over brown people coming our way in 2018 via a Central American “caravan” awash with criminals – 300, count ’em.
Inquiring, pain-in-the-patootie reporters tried to apply math to the claim. They asked the Trump administration to provide a list or actual evidence. But why provide evidence if straight-shooters like Sean Hannity will devote sufficient air time without it?
And now with marches about racial justice involving a goodly sample of multi-colored bodies, set your binoculars on the advance of antifa, the formless foe.
Sen. Chuck Schumer calls the whole thing an attempt to frame legitimate protests “as terrorist threats to justify unnecessary federal, even military, intervention.” What a snowflake.
“Antifa.” It means anti-fascist. And what is fascism? It’s a leader who puts himself above the people, who uses the military to bolster himself and his ego, who elevates the unholy to the holy and his kin above the whole.
Well, I’m against that. My wife is against that. So are the sons we’ve raised and all their friends and mine. So, Glock-man has a legitimate fear. Antifa is everywhere.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.