for “please don’t kill us.” But as we smacked into a wall of surly, black-clad antifa, feeling as though we’d just crashed an ISIS sleepover, it was clear that peace wasn’t on the menu. Pouring over a barrier, crashing into us like a tsunami (I was so worried about antifa crushing my tape recorder, I forgot to reach for the Mace stashed in my sock), antifa rushed past me to give the stick to the patriots. Literally. Pete caught a two-by-four right in his stars’n’stripes-swaddled head. He went down, temporarily blacking out. Tiny, kitted up in goggles and football shoulder pads, dragged Joey backwards in retreat. And Joey had his hat stolen, got smacked in the head, gouged in his side, and had a flagpole brought down on his dome so hard it left a knot that had Tiny later calling him “The Unicorn.” They were hit with enough bear spray to clear out Yosemite. The only reason they were probably not beaten to death was that they managed to crash through a line of do-nothing Alameda County police officers, who finally did something when they arrested Joey and Tiny. (“To save them,” one of the cops suggested, though he seemed perplexed when I asked how about arresting the people who nearly killed two men right in front of him. Just a thought.) After nonchalantly watching another beatdown or two, the cops finally dispersed some of the crowd with smoke grenades.
But the joke seemed to be that Pelosi, antifa, and company have now fallen so far down the identity politics hole, they can no longer even successfully identify white people to rage against. In their paranoid cosmology, even people of color are white supremacists. Instead of handing out black bandanas and light weaponry, antifa might be better served handing out 23andMe genetic testing kits. This shoot-first, ask-questions-never approach didn’t pan out on the ground. Joey, Tiny, and a stars’n’stripes do-rag- wearing political rapper named Pete V, made their free-speech stand at Berkeley’s impromptu and ironically-named “Rally Against Hate,” not far from the park’s Peace Wall. As they did so, they threw their hands in the air, flashing peace signs, the universal symbol
A long-haired political activist named Bobby ran for cover alongside me, smiling and filming all the while. (The modern quandary at antifa rallies: if you hit someone
They were hit with enough bear spray to clear out Yosemite.
80 | October 2017
Made with FlippingBook Online document