On October 6, some Antifa sock puppet addressed the Portland city council.  Somewhere near the beginning of his insipid rant, he claims, “I represent a mass of humanity, we’re tired, hungry, poor, and huddling.”  My initial response to this claim was a weird combination of indifference and shock.  Indifference at its vapidity, and shock at the possibility that this guy actually believes this about himself.  Be that as it may, I'll try to unpack it. 

Are you “tired” because you spent the night awake playing Call of Duty?  Are you “hungry” because mom hasn’t yet made her weekly run to Whole Foods?  Are you “poor” because you have no concept of what that word means, and that the poorest 20% of U.S. households (of which I doubt you're a part) still consume more than the overall average in Canada and Sweden?  Are you “huddling” because the police crammed too many of you in the back of the transport van?

Here is a brief cross-section of the “tired, hungry, poor, and huddling” foot soldiery of the radical Left:

Clara Kraebber, who attends the prestigious Rice University, was arrested for felony rioting in New York City.  Police found dozens of handwritten notes of hers outlining “revolutionary strategy” inspired by Josef Stalin.  Kraebber’s mother is an architect and her father a professor, and they own a $1.8 million apartment on the Upper East Side.  They also own a mansion in Connecticut.

Frank Fuhrmeister, who studied fine arts and photography at Florida State College, was arrested for felony rioting in New York.  He lives in Stuyvesant Heights and is a freelance art director who does work for corporations (assumedly fascist) such as Pepsi and Samsung.  His Instagram account specifies that his pronouns are “he” and “him,” the clarification for which I am legitimately grateful.

Elliot Rucka of Portland was arrested for felony rioting in New York City.  His parents are accomplished comic book writers who have worked for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, ABC, and Netflix. 

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, both attorneys, were arrested for firebombing a police car.  Mattis attended the private St. Andrews Boarding school before attending Princeton University and then the New York University School of Law.  He then worked as an associate for Pryor Cashman LLC, for whom associates earn over six figures.  Rahman graduated from Fordham University and worked as a human rights lawyer in Greece (and protested in Israel against Israel) before returning to New York.  Rational people understand that committing arson to further a political end is the very definition of terrorism, yet NPR calls them “idealistic attorneys hoping to change the world.” 

Loewy Malkovich, a software engineer who grew up in southern France and then Cambridge, Massachusetts, was arrested while rioting in Portland.  His father is the actor John Malkovich, whose income no doubt left little Loewy the very Dickensian image of “tired, hungry, poor, and huddling”.

Linwood Kaine, who attended the elite private Carleton College in Minnesota and majored in cinema and media studies, was arrested for rioting and resisting police in Minneapolis.  Young Linwood’s father is Senator Tim Kaine, who told Morning Joe that the Left needs to “fight in the streets” against the Trump administration.  This rotten apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

These people aren’t fighting The Man.  These people are The Man.  They are the sneering, elitist, hypocritical, tyrannical Man.  Or, more accurately, The Man Child.  They are, in the words of Bruce Willis, “just a bunch of dumb kids playin’ revolutionaries” and who, in the words of Bruce Bawer, like to “play Robin Hood with other people’s properties.”

Here are mugshots of from those “mostly peaceful” riots in Portland.  Besides a suspicious lack of diversity (other than the cotton-candy-machine-exploded hairstyles), one can’t help notice the absence of any form of economic impoverishment amongst the comrades.  But if their arrests signaled their dedication to the overthrow of an unjust “system,” they should start by examining their own cases.  Multnomah District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who described our justice system as having been built on “white supremacist culture,” nonetheless perpetuated that culture by dropping charges against hundreds of mostly white rioters in Portland.

Where does Antifa thrive?  In rich, segregated, progressive cities.  The average household income in the United States is $68400 per household.  The average household income in Antifa-friendly cities all exceed this number: $73097 in Portland, $73231 in Minneapolis, $78612 in Seattle, $95843 in Washington D.C., $96677 in San Francisco, and $123710 in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Where does Antifa arrive stillborn?  In the provincial backwaters of flyover America, where our fellow citizens actually are “tired, hungry, poor, and huddling.”  The average household income is $54322 in Arkansas, $53520 in West Virginia, $53021 in New Mexico, $51760 in Louisiana, and $44092 in Mississippi.  The lowest income areas in the United States are rural white communities and Indian reservations. 

The phenomenon of the upper-crust elites attempting to orchestrate revolution on behalf of the downtrodden is nothing new (and neither are the bloody results).  The French and Russian Revolutions were spearheaded by the rich and powerful who, all rhetorical subterfuge aside, were mostly upset that there were people richer and more powerful than they.  Both Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot were educated and radicalized in Paris before returning to their homelands to “liberate” the proletariat.  Fidel Castro was the son of a wealthy farmer and a law student, and his deputy Che Guevara was a medical student.  Or, to paraphrase NPR, they were idealistic students hoping to change the world. 

This pattern crosses ideological lines.  Osama bin Laden was the son of a billionaire construction magnate.  His deputies Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef were a surgeon and an agricultural engineer, respectively, and 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was an engineering student at Hamburg University in Germany.  ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi earned his PhD from the University of Baghdad. Or, to paraphrase NPR, they were idealistic doctrinaires hoping to change the world.

Many of their fighters are not impoverished locals, but outsiders who flew in from rich Western cities to earn their street cred, and then, when things got a little too dicey for first-world comfort, hightailed it back to the same bedroom they’ve slept in since kindergarten.  Sound familiar?

So it seems that whatever excuses the Antifa thugs tell themselves to justify their animalistic behavior, poverty cannot be one of them.  Books will be written as to their underlying motivations – arrogance, narcissism, envy, nihilism, projection, boredom, sociopathy, etc.  But honest self-reflection won’t be one of them, because such a virtue would lead them to acknowledge that there are more black people in the Ku Klux Klan than there are “tired, hungry, poor, and huddling” in Antifa. 

Images: Multnomah County Sheriff's Office