From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
Senator Ted Cruz proposes Antifa be treated as a domestic terrorist organization.
What grips me about this is that there are numerous loose groups that protest fascism and racism (not a single, centralized organization) but there is a good probability that language that simply calls this activity “left wing activists” or “affiliated with Antifa” will be used to target any “fellow traveler”. (One might recall that HUAC looked into civil rights groups, but kept their paws off the Klan.)
I don’t like the implications of it–and with McConnell crying about McCarthyism, I guess I’m just saying it seems to me to be a case of one side accusing the other of the very thing they’d like to do. And I guess I could just be misreading red meat for a red scare. Except there’s also this denunciation of socialism proposed by Sen. Steve Daines. For some reason, he associates socialism with lack of freedom as opposed to being an alternative to unregulated free market capitalism, but again, this is a denunciation specifically of “the left”.
So is this a denunciation of being a leftist, and to what extent? Being a card-carrying Communist Democratic Party member? Promoting social welfare programs? The problem for me with this is the undefined nature of it–how left is too left for our pontificating patriot? And where does the leftist’s/antifascist’s freedom of speech or association get interfered with, while “we” are concerning ourselves so greatly with the cause of liberty?