'AntiFa Civil War' On November 4 Was Really Just A Few Protests Against Trump
BY MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN ON 11/4/17 AT 6:21 PM
The afternoon of November 4 arrived in midtown Manhattan like any other Saturday. Families breezed in and out of shops and restaurants along Fifth Avenue. Couples chatted on benches in Central Park, enjoying the crisp autumn air. You could easily be forgiven for not knowing that a protest billed Friday by Fox News as the “Antifa Apocalypse” was gathering on the south side of Times Square.
The so-called November 4 protests, which took place in cities across the country today, hosted by a nascent protest group called Refuse Fascism, will likely be remembered more for what they did not look like, than what they did. Far-right conspiracies had morphed the event into a fantasy world of unrealistic expectations. Antifa was going to start a civil war. Antifa-bred supersoldiers were going to behead white people in town squares across the country. These stories were pushed hard by far-right outlets like Alex Jones’ Info Wars and Gateway Pundit, feeding an engine of clickbait to build a mind-blowing but utterly meaningless news story almost entirely out of thin air.
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In Times Square, by 2:30 PM, a half-an-hour after the New York City event was supposed to begin, a little more than 300 people showed up, according to NYPD officers tasked with securing it. Many of the signs Refuse Fascism had prepared sat stacked against a metal railing. Organizers handed out leaflets about the Revolutionary Communist Party, an older, radical group with ties to Refuse Fascism. Over a thousand people had previously committed to going to the November 4 protests on Facebook, and roughly five thousand had pledged interest, but when all was said and done, burgeoning leftist groups like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), protest mainstays like Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the masked anarchists that had captured the imagination of people on the far right failed to attend.
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Roughly five Trump supporters showed up to counter the demonstration. In the words of Christopher Lehmann, a 56-year-old Trump supporter who made the trip from Belmar, New Jersey to counter the event, “I thought there would be more of them. I thought there would be more of us too.” Lehmann, who brought an American flag and wore a jacket with “Trump” written across the back in big letters, said that “someone had to come to support the president.” The stated goal of the protest was, according to Refuse Fascism, to create a sustained movement on the streets to remove Trump’s administration from office.
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http://www.newsweek.com/antifa-civil-war-november-4-really-just-few-protests-against-trump-702150
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