They Look Sketchy as Shit

摘要

In a calmer spring-when facts weren't so slippery, social media so noxious, the country so ready to combust-what happened in Forks, Washington, on June 3 might have been a perfect plot for a farce. A giant white school bus known as Big Bertha puttered into a two-stoplight town far north on the Olympic Peninsula, in desperate need of a new battery, on the very day the town was on alert for a different bus, one full of violent antifa activists ready to riot. But this was not a calmer spring. A week had passed since a Black man named George Floyd died while a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. People who had been trapped at home during a tense pandemic spilled into the streets, first in Minneapolis and then in other cities and even tiny towns. They marched and carried signs and chanted that Black Lives Matter. A much smaller number looted liquor stores and burned police precincts. The president tweeted threats-"when the looting starts, the shooting starts"-and smeared all protesters, including millions of peaceful Americans, as the Radical Left, "thugs," or, most menacingly, antifa, an ideology ascribed to a diffuse group of antifascists who sometimes stoke chaos and aren't opposed to fighting the far right with violence. Twitter, Facebook, and Nextdoor crackled with claims that antifa was coming to suburbs and rural towns. They were coming on buses, on planes, wearing black, coming, always, from somewhere else.