Defense of antifa action

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Antifa is incredibly justified against the United States at this time.
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I recently wrote a mini-essay on this topic.
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In my experience, about 99% of the criticism of antifa has been agitprop. There are zero murders associated with antifa in the 25 years. It's not a topic of national significance, based off the data.
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I fundamentally disagree that looting can be an act of terrorism. Further, do you have any evidence the lootings by individuals after the George Floyd killing -- as opposed to the legalized looting other entities did through our Congress and the CARES Act -- were related to
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antifa groups?
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"Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature." - FBI definition of domestic terrorism
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My understanding of the looting you described is that it was carried out, spontaneously, by individuals working as individuals, not as part of any group based off any ideology, attempting to advance no group goals.
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Further, you should know that "terrorism" and an "English word" is extremely overloaded and often abused. There are dozens of working definitions and it's historically abused to punish dissidents for the current state. Designating antifa as a terrorist organization appears to be
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very consistent with that historical act of state tyranny -- the original definition of terrorism was state violence against dissidents -- as there are no deaths associated with antifa in the United States since at least 1994. Crimes less serious than murder are appropriately
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investigated by the criminal justice system -- assuming that it's not a corrupt process -- and does not require federal intervention. The proposed federal intervention, as far as I can tell, is because the US federal government has strong fascist orientation and recognizes antifa
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as a source of dissident activity.
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I wouldn't describe such non-state sanctioned violence as terrorism in the case of violence against the Nazis. I don't think state-sanctioning is relevant, except as a proxy variable. What matters is if the violence is justified, given the full context, for example, what offenses
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did the entity commit, for how long, what's the status of courts in the vicinity, are they part of a group with substantial economic/military/political resources? Ideally, we'd want to mediate as much as possible of the above through courts, and so I like the Nuremberg Trials
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*in late 1945*, but I would utterly reject the idea of requiring the Nuremberg Trials between 1934ish-1945 May 8, as the context indicates no courts of an established state are capable of holding Nazis to account for their crimes, and so individuals are authorized to do the best
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job they can. If any individual or group, in this phase, gets it sufficiently wrong, I'd also put them into a Nuremberg-like trial would a just state is reformed.
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Obviously, once individuals are dispensing life/death justice, probably a lot of mistakes will get made. The lament for this is due to the collapse of a just state, and not on those individuals being 'terrorists'. Clearly, the United States has extremely severe violations from
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ideal justice, and so some antifa activity is justified in this time period. For example:
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement
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For people who are interested in actually improving the justice of the states they belong to, rather than go after groups they disagree with or that annoy them, they have to take into account there are limited police resources. Worrying about antifa -- which has not a single
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murder associated with it in 25 years -- is simply not going to be an important priority for law enforcement or justice in the United States at this time. All politically motivated murders last year were by right-wing groups. So, if you're serious about the breakdown of the state
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and what paramilitary or dissident groups are doing in that context, the data indicates you'd focused almost exclusively on right-wing groups. Lastly, the top-level 'left' organizations in the United States, e.g. the Democratic Party, are not collaborating with these left-wing
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dissident groups, but the top-level right organization in the United States, the GOP, *is* actively collaborating with these far more dangerous right-wing groups. Finally, per that FBI report above, fascists are actively highly integrated into the policing of much of the United
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States -- which is why antifa is ascendant. This is *precisely* the right time for antifa to do antifa things. If you say you're for this in general, but not in this case, I think you're almost certainly fooling yourself. It's extremely easy to support extra-judicial violence
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against the Nazis in our lifetime, but much harder to see how much it currently applies in the United States (and other states where international white supremacy is powerful).
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On Tyranny , Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), Yale Prof. Timothy Snyder writes:  "When the pro-leader paramilitary and the  official police and military intermingle, the end has come."
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I'll give you my opinion: You would have been against antifa efforts against the Nazi government in 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939. Then, you'd say, well, now that the Nazi party is so powerful and deadly, I guess we should do a war against them, and, while
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we're at it, I guess non-state violence from individuals in the affected regions is also allowed. Correct me if my assessment is wrong. The non-lethal violence employed by American antifa, so far, is *exactly* what you want to see per an escalation of force doctrine. If you wait
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until 1939, yeah, now you have to use rifles and bombs to do violence against Nazis. If you start earlier, you can use less severe violence, is the idea. What's uncomfortable for many people, I think, and one of your 'dangerous' facts, is that such violence is probably authorized
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much, much, much earlier than we were taught by our cultural norms that work well when society is reasonably stable and reasonably just. This 'dangerous' fact can easily erode much of the modern nation-state concept -- dependent on its attempted legal monopoly of violence notion
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if you allow your society to become unjust.
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That was one of my mini-essays.
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BiosLogos: I just argued that antifa is extremely justified in the United States at this time.
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I can't think of any basis upon which antifa would be "ridiculous", as it's responding to the intense threat of fascism -- one of the great scourges in our species' entire history. Of course, the application of any particular ideology can be done unskillfully in a particular case
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For an application of antifa to be "ridiculous", I guess it would need to be invoked against a target that is not in anyway associated with fascism or its broader support, or against a target which is actually working against fascism. That would be "ridiculous", in my view.
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https://twitter.com/selectedwisdom/status/1267180275307548673
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"If I asked the class to name an Al-Qaeda Isis or white supremacist Attack, they could rapidly name off many of each type, the so-called antifa attack was usually some guys with bats broke windows at a business." - Clint Watts
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"I’d also struggle to explain to them that if they believed they had an Anti - fascist problem that might be a strong indicator they also have a “fascist” problem (White supremacists) since one movement would be in response to the other." - Clint Watts