Thursday, March 28, 2024

Nancy Pelosi Just Denounced Antifa. Will More Democrats Finally Join Her?

It’s not every day we take the opportunity to write sweet nothings about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi here at The National Pulse, but this week she definitely deserves some credit. Following more left-wing violence perpetrated by “antifa” — a group of radical, left-wing terrorists that believes all violence against political opponents is justified — Pelosi finally spoke up and said “enough.”

Via Fox News:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., condemned attacks by members of Antifa against conservative demonstrators over the weekend in Berkeley, Calif., calling the violence a “sad event.”

“Our democracy has no room for inciting violence or endangering the public, no matter the ideology of those who commit such acts,” Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday evening. “The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa [sic] in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.”

Thirteen people were arrested and five others were injured Sunday after more than 100 black-clad, hooded protesters with masks and weapons attacked and overwhelmed the peaceful demonstrators.

In the weeks since the Charlottesville debacle, a number of journalists and Democrats have been shamelessly defending antifa as an honorable organization of patriots fighting Nazis, despite the fact that antifa has spent much of this year repeatedly assaulting non-Nazis, including journalists and Trump supporters. This refusal by the Left to condemn political terrorism on the Left has only emboldened antifa and encouraged them to double down on their violent tactics.

The hypocrisy has been striking. When President Trump condemned violence “on many sides” in his first speech after Charlottesville, many on the Left and Right (perhaps rightly) criticized him for failing to address the Ku Klux Klan and neo-nazis by name. Yet those same individuals, inexplicably including many on the Right, have defended antifa because they agree with its cause — shutting down the free speech of anyone who dares to support President Donald Trump. While the media has almost exclusively portrayed antifa as an anti-fascist organization, the reality is that antifa is an anti-American organization that has demonstrated a willingness to attack anyone who displays the American flag.

Pelosi seems to realize this. The temptation to embrace terrorism because it seeks to do harm to one’s political opponents should be rejected strongly and without reservation. While most Democrats and progressives have refused to condemn their violent cousin, antifa, Pelosi rightly understands that political violence on all sides has no place in the United States of America.

Good for her. Let’s hope her party starts to follow suit.

Photo credit: US Department of Labor via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

More From The Pulse