“Antifa is an idea, not an organization.” —Joe Biden at the first presidential debate

When is it OK to knock out a black man’s teeth and call him a n—er? When that man is Philip Anderson, one of the organizers of a permitted protest conducted last Saturday in San Francisco by conservative group Team Save America. The group was there to protest Twitter’s ongoing determination to censor any tweets about the New York Post’s exposé on Hunter Biden’s emails.

The event was to be staged at the city’s United Nations Plaza at 1 p.m. and then moved in front of Twitter’s headquarters a few blocks away. Before that could happen, hundreds of what the media are describing as “counterprotesters” or “critics” — rather than the thugs they truly are — stormed the scene and attacked Anderson and his group.

A video shows a man clad totally in black approaching Anderson from behind. Absent any provocation, the man punches Anderson twice, knocking out one of his front teeth and leaving another barely attached.

After the attack, a woman in the background can be heard taunting Anderson, yelling, “Cry about it. Cry,” while a largely white antifa mob can be heard shouting “n—er” multiple times. As Anderson tries to escape the attack, someone can be heard yelling, “Back up n—er.‘ Back up n—er,” while Anderson and the white man he was with move to safety behind a police barricade.

Despite being attacked, Anderson went to the rally. “You knocked a black man’s teeth out,” he told the crowd that booed and threw plastic water bottles and glass bottles at the speakers from behind a line of riot-clad police. “You knocked my teeth out. But you’re here saying black lives matter. That makes no sense.”

Anderson also reminded the crowd that the protest was all about protecting free speech, but the rally was cut short when police ultimately concluded they could no longer control the scene. They put Team Save America members in a van and extracted them from the area. While in the van, Anderson tweeted, “Antifa attacked me for no reason. These people are racist terrorists.”

Anderson was not the only victim of the violence. Additional reports stated that three officers were “slightly injured” after being hit by pepper spray and other caustic chemicals, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported that three demonstrators were also injured, including one man who needed hospitalization.

Number of arrests? Zero, despite the reality that more than 100 thugs surrounded approximately 10 peaceful protesters and “began throwing glass bottles, plastic bottles filled with unknown liquid, metal cans and eggs” at the rally participants and police officers, according to a statement Saturday evening by the San Francisco Police Department. “The rally became so violent in nature it was declared a public safety hazard and was shut down,” police added.

In other words, antifa’s suppression of free speech was successful.

One woman who stood with the mob illuminated its mindset. “It’s not our job to be peaceful,” she warned. “You don’t get justice, you take justice.”

Another “counterprotester” also offered some insight into the mindset of these wannabe revolutionaries. “Two of them [Team Save America members] were black men, which is always really confusing to see someone who’s been brainwashed into that,” she stated. “I was hoping [the Proud Boys] would … stand toe-to-toe with us and, like, get spit in their face, you know?”

The Proud Boys? As columnist Rick Moran explains, “The Proud Boys were nowhere to be seen. These were members of a small, conservative activist group known as Team Save America. They weren’t even there to rally for Trump. They were there to protest Twitter stifling conservative speech.”

For anarchists, such details are irrelevant. What is relevant is the “confusion” (read: bigotry) that has them assuming any black men who aren’t aligned with the radical Left have been “brainwashed.” Perhaps they’re “inspired” by Joe Biden, who offered a similar take during an interview last May when he stated, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, who testified in the Senate on antifa and the growing anti-free speech movement in America, succinctly described what took place last Saturday. “A conservative group named Team Save America organized the event and were met by a violent crowd intent on preventing them from speaking,” he writes. “Media reported that the counter protesters carried BLM and Antifa signs. In a now familiar pattern, the counter protesters stopped those with opposing views from being heard.”

He also issued a warning saying the nation needs to “take Antifa seriously as a virulent anti-free speech organization.”

Regardless, the groups has its apologists. Rutgers professor Mark Bray, who authored Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, asserting President Trump’s attacks on antifa were aimed at “delegitimizing militant protest and deflecting attention away from the white supremacy and police brutality that the protests oppose.”

Protests? “I believe it’s true that most, if not all, members do wholeheartedly support militant self-defense against the police and the targeted destruction of police and capitalist property,” he adds.

Militant self-defense is violence, and the targeted destruction of police and capitalist property is criminal behavior. Yet in his book, Bray doubles down, decrying media portrayals of anftia as “bloodthirsty,” even as he admits its followers “conduct research on the far right online, in person, and sometimes through infiltrations; they dox them, push central milieux to disown them, pressure bosses to fire them,” while “some of them punch Nazis in the face and don’t apologize for it.”

Thus, for Bray and other like-minded individuals, overt racism and mindless violence is perfectly excusable, as long as it is being perpetrated under the banner of “social justice” and inflicted upon the “right” kind of people, be they conservative black Americans, police officers, and anyone the Left labels as “Nazis.”

Genuine Nazis (Germany’s National Socialist Workers Party) successfully exterminated more than 10 million people — by first legitimizing hatred of “the other” in the eyes of the German people.

The American Left? Far too many of these self-professed champions of tolerance have moved seamlessly from declaring certain Americans “deplorable” and “irredeemable” to demonizing the entire nation as “systemically racist” and every white American as “implicitly biased” and “privileged.” And now former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has proposed creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to “erase Trump’s lies” and “name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice” enabled his administration.

The Orwellian arrogance is breathtaking. But it becomes really easy to see how those so convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority can justify virtually anything — even punching a black man in the face, calling him a n—er, and crushing a free speech rally. Retribution against “the other” demands nothing less.

Those are “ideas” too, Mr. Biden. Ones that historically led to inquisitions, show trials, the guillotine — and the gas chambers.