Don't know about that. My suspicion is the 'leaders' of Antifa are well known to the US government and there are reasons for not cracking down on them.
When I read Antifa literature - everything from the shit they spray on walls to the information they share on Telegram - I'm reminded of a writer who was active prior to the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
His name is Barrett Brown, and this is a piece from 2017 suggesting the US needs an alternate system of governance.
He had an entire series of articles about his experiences in prison after he was caught up in government attempts to expose Anonymous. This is one of them, it's interesting.
Most importantly, this is an interview he did with Truthout. He's hitting on most of the Antifa tones by this point.
It's quotes like this that get me, they're just a little too conspicuous and on the nose to be coincidence.
"We don’t have the rule of law. We just don’t. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth."
"It has become more and more difficult, as the years proceed, to maintain the fiction that the American republic is fundamentally sound. An associated myth—that the great majority of the American electorate are decent people who are entirely capable of overseeing the single most powerful apparatus in history—has also become less viable. The "establishment," as we may as well join in terming it, has likewise lost credibility, for reasons ranging from nonsensical to inarguable. The end result is a crisis of moral authority, and even of amoral authority; this is a society that cannot even produce a proper strongman. But it can certainly produce a disaster, for ourselves and for the world."
"But most of all, I realized that journalism will not be enough to save this country."
You don't read much from Barrett Brown these days. In another time, intellectuals like Brown would have been another Hunter S. Thompson or George Plimpton - a clever writer telling tales of extraordinary experiences that reveal something about America's soul. Societal forces would have groomed him to speak in defense of institutions and reaffirm the principles underlying this state.
Instead, he was persecuted. Brown ran a group called Project PM way back in the day, which could be described as a loose confederation of Democracy activists from all around the globe. This lead to involvement with Anonymous and eventually to conflicts with the FBI and DoD Contractors. If you don't know who Stratfor and HB Gary are, look them up - they're work can be described as having your own private CIA and companies use their services for all sorts of nefarious reasons.
I suspect Antifa leadership includes people like Brown, people from the Kennedy School at Harvard, organizers of the Bernie Sanders campaign from 2016, others who see America fundamentally flawed and wish to reshape it in a more just and equitable form. They're not hard to track down, it's not terribly hard to find people who have been singing this tune for a long while.
More importantly, there are DoD contractors - CGI, Clearforce, Dynology, etc - who do the same thing as Stratfor and HB Gary. They collect a lot of information about people online and use it in novel ways to achieve social change. If you're familiar with Cambridge Analytica, you know how they work. The only difference is where they get their information and who's running the show.
Would be trivial to hunt down the people running Antifa. They're Communists who maintain Infosec. Doesn't matter what they say through secure channels, the fact they use those channels puts them in the scope of surveillance. Those DoD contractors are going to look at someone like Brown and figure out when communications overlap over a broad population of users to track people down. They are the ones who find the specific atom in the needle in the haystack out of a couple million haystacks. Their data analysis capacity is immense, their ability to understand networks of people is beyond what places like China are capable of. And it's multicultural - their models have been trained in the Middle East, India, countries in the South Pacific, etc. If someone wants them found, they will be found.
So why hasn't there been a crackdown? That's the real question. Some of the people involved are probably people of influence, there's got to be questions about the extent of their operations, etc. My best guess is Antifa is a form of controlled opposition, there are forces who would benefit from the US economy collapsing and real wages coming down dramatically. Think about all the labor that has to be imported into the US every year and the amount of outsourcing that has to happen to make the economy continue to grow. It's probably not sustainable in the long run, there are reasons to think someone could be manipulating this group and social justice movements to achieve that end.
Would not be surprised to learn Jamie Diamond funds the organization along with a conglomerate of international kleptocrats. Long term, Wall Street would benefit tremendously from a reduction in US labor rates and moving investments overseas. It's impossible to go after the CEO of JP Morgan, he's one of the few people who can tell Trump what's off limits.
I know this sounds like a stupid hypothesis. I just know, if we wanted to crack down on the people running Antifa, it would have happened already. Very interested in why it hasn't.
