Something all great mysteries rely on is a red herring. In case you don’t know what that is, let’s define it: “Something, especially a clue, that is or is intended to be misleading or distracting.”
And nothing unites people like a common enemy.
Trump found both in Antifa.
Why?
Because it’s an anti-right wing organization. Perfect.
But there were a couple of other things that made it even better.
One, it’s a faceless movement that’s more of an ideology than an actual organization.
Two, it wasn’t very well known. Who was going to defend it? Anyone who identified with it really couldn’t. They certainly didn’t have deep pockets to pay for lawyers to fight Trump’s slanderous assaults. Trump could portray and demonize it at will so he did.
His supporters identify as right-wing. He already had their support, and he often likes to paint all Democrats as liberals, which right-wingers also oppose, but Trump needed something even more extreme. Something sort of vague and ominous-sounding that mirrored the far right in many ways, but that he could throw under the bus and blame when shit hit the fan.
Antifa.
It was both the perfect common enemy.
But it’s all a con. A red herring.
No one, not even the majority of Republicans, had really ever heard of Antifa until 2017 when Trump injected it into the right-wing media mainstream. Now that’s they’re favorite scapegoat for whenever something goes wrong when Trumpsters are involved.
It’s not them. It was Antifa.
It wasn’t them who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 because their President told them to do it. It was Antifa.
Ah, the fallacy of that argument. I’m gonna have fun in a separate post blowing their Antifa argument up.