Reuters writes glowing profile of Antifa member charged with multiple violent crimes

In an exclusive, glowing and prolonged profile, Reuters is selling an Antifa extremist who requires violence and has ongoing costs for violent crimes.

The expose revealed Wednesday by the multinational media conglomerate is titled “American Antifa: A woman’s journey from Girl Scout to anarchist street warrior.” In the “special report” by Reuters Investigates, the institution information outlet touts 37-year-old Nicole Barbara Armbruster, a violent suspect in a number of ongoing prison circumstances. “Antifascism is more than just punching Nazis in the face,” Reuters quotes Armbruster for the article’s promotional tweet on Twitter, including within the story: “Nonetheless, she believes violence can serve a purpose.”

Reuters paperwork the Girl Scouts leader-turned-Antifa radical’s journey from being a school honors scholar to a avenue combatant, noting that Armbruster’s radicalization “offers rare insight into this far-left movement and its motivations.”

Armbruster, as soon as a day camp coordinator for the Girl Scouts youth group for six years, got here from a well-to-do suburban household and was radicalized after attending St. Lawrence University, a non-public liberal arts school in rural New York.

There, on the establishment a half hour from the Canadian border, Armbruster engaged as an activist whereas a world research main. Professor Kenneth Gould, a sociologist now at CUNY Brooklyn, was on the college and remembers Armbruster as a “far-left progressive” scholar whose honors thesis targeted on the “organizational structures” of protests towards the Free Trade Agreement.

At current day, Armbruster lives a nomadic way of life with one other Antifa activist, working from a camper she tows from campground to campground.

Over the years, Armbruster has labored as a kids’s camp director, nonprofit fundraiser, and swim coach. A former Girl Scout herself from kindergarten via highschool, the present political anarchist against hierarchies and authorities can nonetheless recite the “God and Country” creed.

She now has an extended arrest document throughout the states of Arizona, Virginia, Minnesota, and Florida in addition to the nation’s capital, relationship again to 2003 for costs of illegal meeting, failure to disperse, violating the Riot Act, and assaulting “far-right” figures and a police officer. She faces simply three pending circumstances after a majority of Armbruster’s prior costs had been dismissed by judges or prosecutors.

Armbruster agreed to talk with Reuters after conferring with household and legal professional and was keen to debate something besides the prison costs in Washington.

One case stems from Dec. 12 when police charged Armbruster with assault for spraying bear repellent throughout brawls with the Proud Boys group close to the White House. In one other case from June 26, 2020, police charged Armbruster with assaulting Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec, creator of The Antifa: Stories from Inside the Black Bloc. Armbruster donned a helmet, goggles, black garments, and a backpack and was half of the encompassing swarm of Antifa adherents who tried to push Posobiec backwards down the steps, police report. DC police arrest varieties have checkmarked the “violent tendencies” classification for Armbruster. She has pleaded not responsible within the ongoing assault case.

Two days prior, Armbruster was arrested in DC and charged with housebreaking for forcibly gaining entry to St. Regis Hotel round 2:00 am and stealing property.

Over months of interviews, she and a number of other colleagues spoke publicly about Antifa, which some of the far-left group’s followers have been hostile towards journalists by beating, harassing, and doxing reporters and videographers alike who try to doc the violent motion’s prison actions.

Armbruster’s first arrest was for illegal meeting in 2003 at a free commerce protest in Miami; the cost was dropped. She was busted in 2005 for illegal entry involving a protest at a faculty in Washington; the misdemeanor case was dismissed in a sentencing settlement. Then in 2008, she was arrested in Minnesota for illegal meeting throughout the Republican National Convention. Prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor case, courtroom data present.

Later in 2012, she was charged with assaulting a police officer after a World Bank and IMF protest. Although the cost was dismissed, a federal decide later mentioned Armbruster had tried to de-arrest a comrade by pulling a pal free by the arm from two arresting law enforcement officials. Armbruster then sued the police for extreme drive within the incident; the case was additionally dismissed.

“We are prepared to put our bodies on the line in the event of police or fascist or racist violence,” Armbruster instructed Reuters. “And it’s really, like, a duty to humanity to do that, right?” Antifa’s self-style mission is to “disrupt fascist and far-right organizing” akin to deplatforming political opponents on social media. Armbruster’s travelling companion 70-year-old fellow Antifa activist Jesse Schultz mentioned that he and Armbruster “deplatform with our hands and feet, maybe a piece of wood or something. You know, that means punching or kicking.”

Armbruster and Schultz had been amongst over 200 black-clad rioters arrested on Jan. 20, 2017, the day Trump was inaugurated, also referred to as “J20.” Schultz was prepared to make use of a bicycle as a weapon towards Bikers for Trump motorcyclists headed down an alley earlier than police responded to the scene to coral the black bloc. Without discretion, legislation enforcement kettled the lots of of activists marching down thirteenth St. NW, sweeping the unruly crowd right into a cordoned-off space.

Months later, the majority of circumstances had been dismissed, after 21 suspects agreed to take pleas. Armbruster’s case was dismissed in March 2019. Schultz is lead plaintiff in a class motion federal civil lawsuit towards the District of Columbia authorities alleging false arrest. Schultz’s lawyer and metropolis attorneys have filed courtroom papers saying they’re planning to accept $995,000 cut up amongst plaintiffs.

The grievance was filed towards Metropolitan Police Department officers for failing to tell apart rioters from peaceable members throughout the mass arrest. The false arrest plaintiffs requested the courtroom to declare the conduct illegal and to expunge the false arrests from the data of the category members, searching for compensatory and punitive damages and alleging that the “overwhelming majority” of the demonstrators had been “peaceful and law-abiding.” The go well with argued that the First Amendment rights of the suspects had been violated when the people had been taken into custody with out possible trigger based mostly on “actual or perceived ‘anarchist’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ ideology” or “association with such individuals.”

On Dec. 12, a jam-packed presence of Trump supporters gathered in Washington because the outgoing Republican president flew over the group within the Marine One helicopter. Armbruster was arrested when, in response to police, she sprayed somebody with pepper fuel in an unprovoked assault and carried seven packages of industrial grade fireworks alongside with two canisters of lighter fluid. Armbruster was charged with assault, pleaded not responsible, and spent two nights in jail.

Last yr, Armbruster purchased a patch of land in Arizona. She and Schultz have a trailer and an RV rigged with photo voltaic panels. The two are trying to retrofit a 25-year-old Las Vegas get together bus, the place a stripper pole was faraway from the center, into a big RV so buddies can journey with the pair. The automobile’s bus seats have been dismantled and unfold out throughout the barren desert.

“You can tell everyone you found the Antifa bus,” mentioned Schultz with a smile. Reuters provides, “referring to an urban myth that Antifa agitators arrive in cities by the busload,” to mythicize the motion that dispatches out-of-town comrades from throughout metropolis traces to deliberate direct motion occasions the place riot gear is allotted.

Reuters claims within the article that underneath the Trump administration, Antifa served as “a whipping boy for the president and his supporters” and was painted by the Proud Boys that oppose the far-left drive as “a dark and dangerous enemy.”

During the previous Trump presidency, the forty fifth commander-in-chief moved to designate Antifa as a home terrorist group, “though there is no system for such designations,” Reuters rebuts. The outlet goes on to parrot President Joe Biden’s speaking factors on Antifa whereas going through Trump on the 2020 presidential debate stage.

“In reality, Antifa is not a well-structured organization, but rather a loosely organized, secretive movement of like-minded far-left activists. There are no leaders, no hierarchy and no formal membership,” Reuters additional downplays Antifa’s skill to mobilize and terrorize native communities. Reuters emphasizes that the the activists set up in small casual models of three to eight people who belief and defend one another throughout protests known as “affinity groups.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s loss of life final May, cities had been gripped by violent civil unrest involving leftists extremists who clashed with police exterior downtown enterprise and in residential neighborhoods. Riot-torn Portland was rocked by greater than 100 day of consecutive illegal assemblies organized by Antifa. Reuters alleges that “[l]ittle evidence has emerged, though, to support Trump’s sweeping claim of a central Antifa role in triggering disturbances around the US.”

“Antifa has become, like, the boogeyman,” Armbruster says, bolstering the Reuters-crafted narrative trying to delegitimize Antifa’s menace to America.

Andy Ngo contributed to the reporting of this story.