For six years, Americans who raised concerns about Antifa were handed the same answer, delivered slowly, as though to a child. Antifa is not an organization. It has no leaders, no membership, no structure. It is an idea.
On Tuesday the State Department sanctioned the idea's IT department.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced designations against Autistici/Inventati, which State refers to as the A/I Collective, an Italy-based outfit that builds and maintains digital infrastructure for violent left-wing networks in the United States, Europe and beyond. Rose City Antifa and Jane's Revenge were named as well.
Let us take a moment with the service catalog, because it is not what you would expect from a spontaneous decentralized non-organization. According to the department, A/I provides encrypted chat, encrypted email, web hosting, secure video conferencing, and streaming.
Streaming. The leaderless movement has a streaming service.
Whatever else you want to say about ideas, they do not typically require uptime guarantees. Ideas do not need server capacity or a European provider handling their email. A thought that occurs to thousands of people simultaneously does not need a vendor. What needs a vendor is an organization, and organizations are the thing we were assured did not exist.
There is also a delightful contradiction sitting at the center of this. These are anarchists. The whole intellectual proposition is the abolition of centralized authority and hierarchical control. And yet when it came time to handle their communications, the movement that rejects all centralized power quietly consolidated onto a shared hosting provider run out of Italy.
Anarchy in the streets, managed services in the back office.
Now the part that is not funny at all.
State's designation is not built on hosting alone. The department says A/I's tools are used to circulate target information, tactical manuals and militant communiqués among some of the most active violent Antifa groups in the United States. It further ties the same infrastructure to Islamic terrorist organizations, naming Hamas and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Read that again, because it is the actual news here. The State Department is asserting that the same digital plumbing serving Portland-area militants also serves Hamas and the IRGC. Whatever your priors about Antifa, that is a serious claim from the United States government and it deserves to be examined rather than shouted about.
The department also connects the platform to European sabotage. Anarchists who claimed the attack on the Transalpine Pipeline, a major crude artery into Central Europe, used A/I tools. So did Vulkangruppe, which has been hitting German infrastructure since 2011 and claimed responsibility for a January attack that cut power to roughly 45,000 households in Berlin.
Forty-five thousand homes in the dark in a Berlin January. That is not a protest. That is an attack on civilians who had no idea they were participants in anybody's revolution.
Two notes for conservatives who want to use this well.
First, sanctions are executive determinations, not criminal convictions. The designations are significant and they carry real financial consequences, but they are not the product of a trial. Say what State said, cite State as the source, and let the strength of the allegation do the work.
Second, expect the immediate counterargument, which is that A/I is a privacy-focused hosting collective used by many people who have nothing to do with any of this, and that sanctioning infrastructure sweeps in the innocent. That objection is not frivolous and it will be made loudly. The answer is in the specifics: the department is not alleging that A/I hosted opinions. It is alleging the distribution of target information and tactical manuals.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department charged fifteen people in Minnesota this summer over an organized campaign against federal immigration enforcement, laid out across a 94-page indictment describing training in surveillance, shield tactics and blockade operations.
Ninety-four pages. For an idea.
At some point the people who spent six years insisting there was nothing to see here should be asked a simple question. If Antifa has no structure, no coordination and no organization, who exactly was paying the hosting bill?
- Article Source:
The Post Millennial
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