David Boze: When will Antifa notice they are the real fascists?

There was another riot in Portland this past weekend — Patriot Prayer and Antifa decided to duke it out. They used bear spray, bare fists, and batons to thrash each other outside of Kelly’s Olympian, a bar on Southwest Washington Street. This was not, “take off the glove and slap the guy with it.” It was quite a skirmish.

I have one big problem with the Antifa group. They’ve got the whole black mask thing going, they carry the batons or some other weapon of choice, and they inflate their own importance, as if they’re on the right side of history. They make themselves out to be these great heroes standing up to fascism — while looking remarkably fascist.

“I’m opposed to fascism, so I’m going to go beat up someone for using their First Amendment right to free speech.” Are you aware of how that sounds? At some point, you might want to take a look in the mirror.

RELATED: Portland police allowed Antifa mob to take over the streets

There’s a great skit from the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb that perfectly illustrates this. They’re dressed up as Nazi SS officers in the Battle of Stalingrad and one of them notices that their uniform caps have skulls on them. They realize that the Americans have stars and stripes, the British have lions, the Russians have hammers and sickles — and the Nazis have skulls. And the one SS officer asks, “Are we the baddies?” They suddenly realize that they’re the bad guys. The Antifa crowd strikes me as this a bit.

There has been a very popular video going around of Portland Antifa blocking traffic and telling people which way to go, while the Portland police look helpless — in all likelihood, that’s due to the politicians telling them to back off and avoid confrontation. So the Antifa activists block people and at one point even smack a guy’s car.

I thought the crowd of masked hoodlums got off easy. Antifa is running around telling drivers they will kick their you-know-whats. In Washington state, it’s illegal to make these sort of threats to people. You can’t just threaten physical violence or death to someone; it’s illegal. But as far as I know, no one got arrested for this in Portland.

I’m not sure I’d be willing to take the right turn if strange people in weird masks are telling me to take the right turn because I’m not sure what they’re trying to get me to do. Are they trying to get me in a place where they can ambush me? Police had better ask themselves if that’s the kind of behavior they want to tolerate and that’s what they want to keep.

Has anyone actually learned anything from these protests? It reminds me of the City of Seattle folks who go out to protest in a part of the community that voted, what, 93 percent against Trump? The next time you see a group downtown protesting Trump, ask yourself — why are you protesting someone who agreed with you already? They mess up traffic, they put a stop to people’s shopping plans, and the reality is, all they did was talk to people who agreed with them at the ballot box. So it was a big fat nothing.