Please know, we don’t bring any of this up to defend antifa, or to suggest that groups and individuals associated with antifa are never violent or destructive.  They most certainly can be.

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On August 29, 2020, a self-identified antifa supporter shot and killed Aaron Danielson, a pro-Trump protester in Portland (the shooter was later killed by federal agents). Almost one year later, far-right groups and far-left groups — including antifascist demonstrators — violently clashed in Portland, and there were plenty of violent flare-ups in between.  Just hours after Joe Biden was sworn in as president, far-left demonstrators — including some who identified themselves as aligned with antifa — vandalized the Oregon Democratic Party headquarters in Portland, as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, several businesses, and a federal courthouse in Seattle.

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There is this thing called the Theory of Constraints.  Essentially, the Theory of Constraints says that we should identity the factors (i.e., constraints) that keep us from achieving a certain goal, then systematically remove or improve those constraints until they are no longer limiting our end result.  As we work to remove or improve constraints, it’s important to keep in mind that if we identify the wrong constraint and work on it instead of the actual constraint, we will likely make the entire problem worse.

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Let’s say Jack owns a car dealership.  Jack sells a lot of cars, but — it’s really weird — he never has enough money to pay his bills at the end of the month.  He must not be selling enough cars, he thinks! 

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So, Jack orders twice the number of cars from his wholesale car suppliers than he usually does and announces a contest among his salespeople to motivate them to sell every one of them. Jack’s salespeople do great!  They sell every car on the lot.

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However, in the weeks following the contest, Jack had far less money in the bank than he did in the months before.  

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What Jack failed to realize is that he had identified the wrong constraint. The problem was never that Jack was selling too few cars.  The problem was that Jack owed his wholesale car suppliers money for the cars he bought from them weeks before he actually sold the cars on his own lot.  In other words, the terms of his Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable were not aligned correctly, and that was the constraint.

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Since Jack’s constraint was a cash flow issue, it was made far worse when he ordered even more cars from his suppliers, because now he owed them even more money upfront.

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To alleviate Jack’s real constraint, the best move would be to contact his car suppliers and other creditors and match their payment terms to a time closer to when he actually sold the cars.  This would allow him time to collect money from the cars he sells, then pay his bills, then pocket the difference (i.e., the profit).

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​You may be wondering why in the heck we took that little detour, but the Theory of Constraints concept is really instructive for most policy issues.  It’s especially important in this discussion, because we’re not talking about cars, we’re talking about life and death.

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We cannot allow anyone to highjack the domestic terrorism conversation or allow them to misidentify antifa as our constraint.  If we do, the insurrection on January 6th will be just the beginning of our troubles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not the first time a constraint has been misidentified to protect far-right extremist groups. For years, the federal government and other law enforcement agencies did not give the rising threat of these groups the attention it demanded, keeping the focus instead on Islamic extremists.  For example, in a 2017 interview, then White House Deputy Assistant to President Trump Sebastian Gorka, said there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot (in the United States) that was unconnected from ISIS or al-Qaeda.”

 

When, in response, someone cited the Oklahoma City bombing — where Timothy McVeigh, a White man, killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, a horrific crime that remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history — Gorka responded, “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the White man.  It’s the White supremacists.  That’s the problem.’  No, it isn’t.”  (Gorka has long-standing ties to the alt-right, by the way)

 

His wife Katharine then chimed in and said that the United States should just close “radical mosques” and bar Al Jazeera from broadcasting in the United States to solve the problem of domestic terrorism.

 

In truth, analysis sponsored by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University reveals that:

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Antifa is the perfect scapegoat for White supremacist groups and their champions, because the entire storyline feeds directly into the narrative that already plays loudly in their heads: antifa people, who are “probably Black,” are crazies from the radical left who defend the wicked Black Lives Matter zealots. They are scary terrorists who are devoted to the Democratic Party and fight for their Socialist agenda, and are funded by people like the evil George Soros, blah blah blah…

 

But it’s just not true.  According to a database administered by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, from 1994 to August 2020 — when that self-identified antifa supporter shot and killed a pro-Trump protester in Portland — far right and White supremacist groups were found to be responsible for at least 329 murders. In that same timeframe, antifa and other anti-fascists groups were not found to be responsible for any.  Not one.  Zero.