“ANTIFA TERRORISTS!”: An Orange County Photo Portfolio

I am a photographer not a writer and the best photographs tell their story without any words. I need to communicate what I see. While a good writer can communicate with words, I am a bad writer and don’t enjoy writing, so I communicate with pictures. If I could write well I might not have become a photographer, which is something I love. I feel that I was lucky to make a living at it for more than 50 years, first as a freelancer around the world and then working for the Long Beach Press-Telegram as a photojournalist for 28 years. I am now retired and am still taking photographs and doing photojournalism all the time, but now I do it for free.

The president and his sycophants have been saying that the people that I agree with are “ANTIFA TERRORISTS.” I don’t see these people as terrorists. They are good Americans who love our country and don’t want it turned into a dictatorship. When I attended the No Kings Day gathering on October 18 at Centennial Park in Santa Ana I didn’t see any terrorists, only a cross section of the kind of Americans with whom I grew up.

When I was editing my photographs of the day I kept thinking about what the president said, calling us “ANTIFA TERRORISTS.”

Leo Hetzel is a lifelong photojournalist, surfer, and retired Modjeska Canyon volunteer firefighter.