Inside Antifa

Inside Antifa I grew up admiring “the crusading syndicated labor columnist” Victor Riesel, as the New York Times called him in its 1995 obituary. In a scene with overtones of On the Waterfront, Riesel had been blinded in an assault just after leaving Lindy’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan at 3:00 a.m. on April 5, 1956. “An hour earlier,” the Times recalled, Riesel “had finished a radio broadcast in which he assailed the leadership of a Long Island local of the International Union of Operating Engineers.” The F.B.I. subsequently “arrested eight men and said the blinding was the work of garment district terrorists determined to silence Mr. Riesel.”