The difference in my view is that Antifa and its supporters are totally separate from Democratic Party networks, the issue with “defund” is it was backed by a bunch of Dem-aligned groups and progressive foundations who should make smarter decisions in the future. https://twitter.com/lara_putnam/status/1380271423575449601

The reason the argument on the particular defund point remains so testy and bitter is that it’s not some thing that happened randomly, the progressive nonprofit world really threw in behind raising its salience per @danielmarans’ points here.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-defund-the-police-attacks-democrats-election-2020_n_5fb68698c5b695be83008c57

So there’s an abstract social science question “how import was this in the grand scheme of things?” but also a narrower question about strategy and funding — “was this a smart decision given the nominal aims of these groups and their funders?”

My view is that grantmaking institutions have created some highly unrepresentative ethnic niche activist groups that in turn misled a wider progressive community into believing this was a more authentic demand and priority than it really was. https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang 

So on the one hand I wouldn’t want to overstate the causal impact of these funding decisions. But on the other hand sometimes people who make funding decisions listen to me, so I think it’s a reasonably important thing to have arguments about. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1380838284885123074