National Review’s roving correspondent is one of the last people you’d expect to lead an Antifa march, but in the cover story for the December 31, 2018, issue of NR, “Whose Streets, Indeed?”, Kevin D. Williamson does just that. KDW wrote the cover story from Portland, Ore., where clashes — often violent ones — between left- and right-wing protesters are commonplace, and where the civil authorities, led by a feckless mayor, have allowed the mob to take control of public spaces. The story doubles as an on-the-ground report from an “Abolish ICE PDX” march and a history of extrajudicial violence from 20th-century Europe to now:

At the most public of public spaces in Portland, Pioneer Courthouse Square — “Portland’s living room,” they call it — the goons encounter a little bit of counterprotest, not from sad incel Proud Boys or the Klan or simply from other pissant neo-fascists wearing slightly different-color shirts — but from a young black man who intuits, not inaccurately, that this is mainly a bunch of rich-white-kid play-acting by little runts who make pretty good thugs when confronted with people in wheelchairs or little old ladies — more on that in a second — but who are basically chickensh** poseurs who are Down for the Cause only to the extent that it doesn’t stand between them and a soy latte and an MFA. . . .
It probably is worth noting that these black-bloc hooligans do not always call themselves “Antifa.” The Portland march was organized by Abolish ICE PDX. Sometimes they call themselves “Smash Racism” or something else. But they are the same people, and their goal is the same: They are fascists, albeit fascists whose idol is the proletariat rather than the nation.

Read the new NR cover story now.