Destroying their infrastructure and logistics is probably, truthfully, far more vital than chasing down individual protesters and arresting people by the hundreds that fall into a group consisting of thousands; the arrests aren't doing much, but erasing their ability to sustain themselves long-term is fucking brilliant.
With that in mind, what they should have done immediately was cut all cellphone signals to the city. All of them, the entire night. No cellphone service means no streaming back to Antifa's leadership, no communicating and organizing with each other, et cetera. Force the ISPs in the area offline, too.
Remember how twitter Antifags were bitching about how internet is a human right? Antifa relies on having cellphone service 24x7 during riots.
Of course the FBI is in there. The FBI always is.
Antifa is a radical leftist Neo-Marxist terrorist movement, in the style of Trotskyist "Forever Revolution" movements of the past. Some of the related movements, like By Any Means Necessary, literally are descended from the Trotskyists in America. (BAMN is descended from the "
Revolutionary Workers League.") Fun fact, both ANTIFA and BAMN have direct ties to NAMBLA -- the North American Man Boy Love Association. Aka, the US Pedophile lobby. If you look deep enough into any Marxist groups, you'll find pedophiles somewhere.
I half expect BAMN to be the real group Trump targets, while calling them Antifa for marketing. BAMN is fucked up. BAMN has a history of convincing underaged kids to run away and move in with other BAMN members, who then cut them off from all outside contact and basically raise them like a cult. The Bike Lock Bandit was a BAMN guy; the mayor of Berkeley is a member, too. Just in case you were wondering why "Antifa" was allowed to riot 3 separate times without any response.
There's enough Alphabet soup staffers, especially higher up, that are old enough to know full well that you don't let a goddamned Trotskyist terrorist cell fester in your country unless you want to see said country collapse in a few generations.
Every Antifa cell has a FBI agent in it. At least the bigger ones. Antifa uses the Affinity Group model, which is why they call smugly (and now, nervously) explain that "antifa doesn't have groups and isn't an organization." No, it's more like a hivemind of bugmen. They all agree with each other and there's overlap between groups, and some of said overlap are the actual shitheads, which keeps tabs on the little affinity groups and can activate these terrorist cells when needed. This is the "bussing in protestors" thing.
This is especially true since Antifa, well, did this.
If you take the batteries out of your cellphones AFTER you meet up at your terrorist shindig, then the FBI knows exactly who attended said meetings. If you bring your burner phone home and let it come close to your real phone, your burner phone will not save you.
The FBI knows exactly who the Antifa cells are. They probably have a network map of them. They're probably creating cases as we speak against the bigger targets, the ones that never attend a riot or even a meeting, but direct the others, or the "Antifa Medic" types that you can see during the Black Bloc that have a discreet colored armband so the other Antifa goons know who to obey. People like Shanta Driver or Yvette Felarca, for example.
There was a righty twitter account, Thomas Wictor or... something? Forget his name, but man, Right Wing Watch was smug as shit when they finally false flagged him off Twitter. Used to talk a lot about this, point out shit like how people Antifa were attacking were actually wearing body armor under their clothes, or were giving hand signals to other people, or how some Antifa members were getting the police to allow them to perform first aid on people, which means they were EMTs "in real life." That sort of thing.
The FBI has Antifa pegged. The problem is, the Radical Left has probably infiltrated the FBI pretty hard, too. Remember, the FBI and CIA both were implicated in a coup attempt against the President of the United States.
