In Defense of Antifa
With far-right violence on the rise, it’s time to stop vilifying the activists who work to counter it
Recent terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas have drawn renewed attention to the scourge of violence carried out by far-right extremists, which has spiked in recent years and shows no sign of slowing down.
According to a November 2018 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the number of far-right terrorist attacks in the U.S. more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2017. Another recent report published by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found that every extremist murder in the U.S. in 2018 was linked to right-wing extremism.
Those statistics coincide with separate analyses showing increases in the number of far-right extremist groups and incidents of both right-wing violence and hate crimes since Trump took office.
There is an urgent need to address this growing threat, but it’s a need the Trump administration appears unwilling to take seriously. In the wake of the New Zealand terror attack, Trump said he doesn’t think white nationalism is on the rise, and his administration continues to point to Islamic extremism and illegal immigration as the only threats in America. Meanwhile, federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security are redirecting resources to focus on threats other than far-right extremism, even disbanding entire units focused on domestic terrorism.
With an administration that shows no interest in engaging the fight against white supremacy and right-wing extremism, those who care about combating the threat should consider looking to the people who have been leading the fight since it started. You know them as Antifa.
Antifascism in America
Despite a presence in the U.S. for decades, and for much longer in Europe, the collective movement known as Antifa — shorthand for antifascist or antifascism — didn’t make it onto many Americans’ radars until 2017.
This is in part because the antifascist movement has grown in recent years, coinciding with the rise of Trump and the spread of far-right populism across the globe. Antifascists have also become more visible as white supremacists and other far-right extremists have increased their activity and started organizing more public events, prompting antifascists to meet them wherever they show up.
Still, most of what antifascists do is behind the scenes. They make headlines when they confront white supremacists in the street, but few hear about their quieter activities, including research, monitoring, and surveillance of far-right extremist groups, community organizing, and advocating for historically marginalized populations.
Antifascist activity is incredibly diverse, encompassing everything from journalism, developing educational materials, and writing protest songs, to infiltrating far-right extremist groups and subverting them from within. Antifascist collectives in the U.S. and abroad have been consistent allies of transgender individuals, sexual assault survivors, feminists, sex workers, incarcerated people, refugees and immigrants, low wage workers, and others. They also have a long history of organizing successful efforts to curb neo-Nazi recruitment and stop them from infiltrating spaces like the punk rock scene. More recently, they’ve taken on the scourge of online radicalization by getting far-right extremists kicked off platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
The paradox here is that when antifascists are most successful, few people hear about it, because they stopped something bad before it happened. This has led to skewed public perceptions, with many people viewing antifascists as little more than street fighters who show up to protests on the weekend. As a result, the public has overlooked and often vilified antifascists, even in the face of a metastasizing far-right extremist movement.
Members of the clergy credit antifascist activists with saving lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist violence resulted in the murder of an anti-racist protester named Heather Heyer and injuries to dozens more. Yet even after Charlottesville, politicians and pundits quickly shifted from condemning the white supremacists who murdered Heyer to condemning the tactics used by those on both sides, as if the activists who pushed back against violent neo-Nazis were just as dangerous and menacing as violent neo-Nazis.
The Anti-Antifa Crusade
Commenting on the violence in Charlottesville, right-wing British politician Nigel Farage described antifascists as no different than fascists. Trump infamously claimed there were “very fine people” on “both sides,” and denounced antifascists and the “alt-left” for the deadly violence in Charlottesville. After the El Paso attack, Trump offered perfunctory criticism of white supremacy, but muddied the message by denouncing “any group of hate… whether it’s white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy” — even though no other kind of supremacy was involved in the attack — and spreading the blame to mental illness and video games.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Trump administration looked into antifascist protesters as a growing domestic terror threat, even though left-wing activists have been responsible for just 2 percent of murders committed by political extremists in the United States over the past decade, while right-wing activists have been responsible for 74 percent. And violence inspired by left-wing political ideologies has dropped precipitously over the past two decades, while violence carried out by those inspired by right-wing political ideologies has increased.
In September 2017, Politico reported that the Department of Homeland Security was referring to antifascist demonstrators as “domestic terrorists” in internal documents, despite acknowledging that it had only “medium confidence” in its assessments of the affiliations among antifascist groups and their motivations. As recently as April 2019, newly released documents revealed that intelligence assessments produced for law enforcement ahead of Charlottesville characterized left-wing protesters as “terrorists” who were at least equally responsible for street violence as white supremacists.
Congressional Republicans joined the crusade against antifascists, introducing a bill called the “Unmasking Antifa Act of 2018,” which sought to imprison any activist who, while wearing a mask, “injures, oppresses, threatens, or intimidates” someone else exercising their First Amendment rights. Meanwhile, the state of California was reportedly considering classifying “Antifa” as a street gang, even though the term “Antifa” describes a collection of tactics and philosophies — a style of doing politics — not a formal group or organization.
Most recently, in July 2019, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) co-sponsored a resolution to brand Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The language of the bill uses the terms “Antifa” and “left-wing activists” interchangeably, suggesting the legislation has to do more with criminalizing dissent than fighting terrorism.
Just days after the bill was introduced, Trump tweeted his support for designating Antifa as a terrorist organization, writing: “Consideration is being given to declaring ANTIFA, the gutless Radical Left Wack Jobs who go around hitting (only non-fighters) people over the heads with baseball bats, a major Organization of Terror (along with MS-13 & others). Would make it easier for police to do their job!”
The president keeps trying to label Antifa a terrorist organization, most recently on August 17. As terrorism scholars explain, the label is objectively inaccurate — no matter what you think of antifascist politics — but Trump clearly thinks the accusation plays to his political advantage.
Liberals have also been sharply critical of antifascists, arguing that the confrontational tactics used by some activists are too extreme and risk scaring away moderates. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi condemned the “violent actions” of antifascist protesters in California in the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville. Meanwhile, left-leaning writers have penned article after article contending, among other things, that antifascists are fueling violence on the right. In one example, The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart argued that antifascists have become the “unlikeliest allies” of authoritarianism, and that Democrats should reject their tactics or risk being branded as too radical.
The Media, the Far Right, and “Free Speech”
At times, the mainstream media has essentially acted as a press office for the far right, echoing its rhetoric about “free speech” and repeating its claims that white supremacists only bring weapons to rallies to defend themselves against the “violent left.” Far-right extremists hide behind the banner of “free speech” because it’s an easy concept to weaponize and turn against their critics. After all, doesn’t everyone deserve the right to free speech?
This argument has been successful enough to gain credibility among a wide swath of liberals, along with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who contend that even the most noxious viewpoints have a place in the marketplace of ideas. The assumption here is that by facilitating a free exchange of ideas the reasonable side will ultimately prevail. But this assumption rests on the premise that all parties are reasonable and willing to engage in good-faith debate, and that speech is no more than words. However, when applied to white supremacists, this assumption fails on all counts.
Certainly, a free society must tolerate speech that is disagreeable, hurtful, or offensive. But this doesn’t mean we must tolerate speech that incites violence against people based upon their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Nor does it mean we must give the benefit of the doubt to white supremacists, who have shown time and time again that they don’t want to debate those who disagree with them — they want to inflict violence on them. There’s a body count to prove it.
White supremacists aren’t interested in reasonable dialogue and letting the marketplace of ideas sort things out. They’re interested in exploiting the democratic principles underlying that marketplace and using them to promote hate and violence.
Therefore, as Karl Popper put it in his famous Paradox of Tolerance, “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
If we wish to preserve our free society, there comes a point at which we must stop extending tolerance to those who wish to destroy it — and that’s exactly what far-right extremists hope to do by weaponizing free speech and wielding it as a sword against their opponents.
White supremacists have held so-called “free speech” rallies, using that label as cover for recruitment events. They hope to cast themselves as victims and garner more mainstream support and sympathy. By traveling to liberal cities and college campuses where they know they’ll encounter pushback, far-right extremists can then portray their violence as a necessary defense against “intolerant leftists” trying to shut down free speech. This, in turn, provides mainstream Republicans and right-wing figures with a reason — or, in some cases, an excuse — to support their cause, or at least to avoid condemning it.
The False Equivalence of “Both Sides”
Even when acting in good faith, those who condemn antifascists for shutting down the speech of white supremacists have inadvertently helped legitimize far-right extremism while also erasing critical distinctions between antifascists and far-right activists.
In August 2017, just two weeks after Charlottesville, Washington Post columnist and former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen called antifascists the “moral equivalent of neo-Nazis” and asked why more Democrats haven’t publicly denounced them.
But the premise of Thiessen’s complaint is based on a false equivalence, albeit a common one. Antifascism is not, and never has been, the leftist version of far-right extremism. Property destruction is not on par with mass murder, spontaneous individual actions are not comparable with systemic violence, and street action is not the same as white supremacist terrorism. And perhaps most critically, the antifascist movement is not integrated into the Democratic establishment, nor does it represent the Democratic brand. Democrats don’t need to loudly denounce antifascists because antifascists have never been widely embraced by the Democratic Party.
The same can’t be said for the extreme right, which has found a home in the Republican Party and a leader in the current Republican president. White supremacists who marched in Charlottesville have mingled with GOP Senate candidates and held elected office as Republicans, while the leaders of violent far-right street gangs have been invited to speak at mainstream GOP institutions, rubbed elbows with Republican members of Congress, and made regular appearances on Fox News. And lest we forget, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) invited a known Holocaust denier to the State of the Union last year.
Masks, Black Bloc, Misinformation, and Ignorance
Because most Americans were unfamiliar with antifascism until recently, public perceptions primarily come from media portrayals, which are shaped by the tendency to oversimplify complex subjects and turn every issue into a “both sides” argument, even if it means ignoring significant moral, political, and institutional differences between the two “sides.”
Indeed, much of the criticism of antifascists arises from a combination of misinformation, disinformation, and, to be blunt, ignorance. For instance, people often complain about antifascists wearing masks, saying that no one needs to hide their face unless they’re doing something wrong; something criminal. But the masks are largely a defensive tactic, used by antifascists to shield their identity from violent extremists who routinely doxx and harass activists and others.
A common misconception is that all antifascists wear masks, that all antifascists dress in black during demonstrations, or that the black-clad protesters participating in a black bloc are the same thing as antifascists. In media reports, the term “black bloc” is often used to describe a group of people or a movement, but it’s actually a tactic, or set of tactics, that has been used by different groups and movements throughout modern history. It originated in Europe during the 1900s, and has since been used by activists in the U.S., including in demonstrations against Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. Antifascists commonly use the tactic, but not all antifascists take part in black bloc formations, and the two terms are neither interchangeable nor synonymous.
By wearing black masks and black clothing, activists participating in a black bloc protect their identities and create a sense of unity among the individual protesters. While the media tends to focus on acts of property destruction and civil unrest by masked activists — which often warrants criticism — the more common purpose of a black bloc is to protect activists from being separated from their allies and singled out by police or, in many instances, violent far-right extremists. Wearing near-identical black clothing and masks creates a sense of collective anonymity that makes it harder to identify a single individual, protecting activists from threats and harassment.
While images of masked protesters lighting trash cans on fire or hurling smoke bombs often make the news, images of activists using their bodies as human shields to protect protesters from violent white supremacists in places like Berkeley and Charlottesville don’t usually make headlines. In Oregon, the so-called “Snack bloc” provides food and water to antifascist activists, but that doesn’t lend itself to a sensationalized headline, so you’re unlikely to hear about it from the mainstream media.
Fake Antifa Violence
The notion that antifascists are violent and destructive stems in part from a concerted effort by far-right activists and right-wing media to demonize them. For example, in September 2017, after antifascists faced off with right-wing extremists in Berkeley, California, Trump supporters used social media to push a skewed narrative to distract from the actions of far-right agitators and blame them on antifascists. By amplifying the false narrative through the strategic use of hashtags, keywords, alarmist language, and repetitive content, these users managed to push a disinformation campaign from the fringes into the mainstream media, with the assistance of unwitting reporters who uncritically accepted a right-wing smear campaign as the true version of events.
Other disinformation campaigns targeting antifascists have exploited violent tragedies in an attempt to connect antifascism to violence. After the November 2017 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, far-right activists flooded social media with a false narrative connecting the gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, to antifascism.
A similar disinformation operation took hold in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, in May 2018, when far-right social media users created fake Facebook profiles using the gunman’s name and photo alongside antifascist symbols.
Fake social media accounts impersonating antifascists are a common tactic used to falsely portray the movement as ultra-violent. In September 2017, a fraudulent “Colorado Springs Antifa” Facebook page posted pictures glorifying violence, while fake fliers and letters bearing the name “Colorado Springs Antifa” called for capitalists to be killed and demanded that veterans be banned from a local college campus. On Twitter, there is an entire network of fake antifascist accounts that exists solely to cause confusion and spread disinformation about the antifascist movement. In multiple instances, posts from fake antifascist accounts have made their way into news stories and onto the pages of mainstream newspapers, including The New York Times.
The goal of these disinformation operations is to confuse the media and the public by flooding the information space with so many falsehoods that the truth gets lost in a sea of competing narratives. While many of these efforts fail, some have been strikingly effective. In October and November 2017, far-right extremists and right-wing websites like InfoWars and Gateway Pundit pushed a hoax about antifascists planning a civil war. The hoax spread so widely that the Department of Homeland Security sent an inquiry about it to U.S. intelligence agencies.
Antifascists are particularly vulnerable to disinformation campaigns because their lack of organizational structure makes it easy for bad actors to paint the movement with a broad brush, and to use the actions of a few individuals to demonize and mischaracterize anyone who falls under the umbrella of antifascism.
Real Antifa Violence
Putting aside these intentional efforts to misrepresent the movement, there are instances when antifascists do engage in violence. Antifascist activists say violence is a last resort, used only when other methods — such as trying to stop white supremacists from organizing in the first place — have failed. Regardless of why or when it happens, the use of violence by antifascists is a highly controversial move that attracts criticism even from otherwise sympathetic allies, many of whom argue — with good reason — that violence fuels fascist leaders, who use incidents of violence to justify state crackdowns and power grabs.
But to many antifascists, the most pertinent question isn’t “Is violence ever acceptable?,” but rather “How bad must it get before defensive violence is acceptable?”
Even the most steadfast non-violent activists would likely agree that Jews who fought back against Nazis during the Holocaust were justified in doing so. In the face of an imminent and existential threat, the use of violence clearly falls under the category of self-defense, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone other than explicit anti-Semites who would argue that Jews were wrong to defend themselves.
But what if the victims of the Holocaust knew in advance what would happen to them, and had the ability to fight back before they were sent to concentration camps? Or before they were forced into ghettos? Or before the Nazis rose to power?
If you know a group is intent on carrying out acts of mass violence, how long are you supposed to wait to try to stop them?
Antifascists don’t ask if an organized white supremacist movement will result in violence, but when it will. The most effective way to stop this from happening, antifascists say, is to stop white supremacists before they can organize, instead of waiting for them to drive a car through a crowd of protesters, inspire terrorist attacks, or achieve their dream of igniting a race war and seizing political power.
In most instances, antifascists accomplish this quietly, using non-violent methods like pressuring venues not to host white supremacist gatherings. But when that fails, antifascists meet them on the streets, protecting peaceful counterprotesters and showing far-right thugs they cannot organize or attack with impunity.
This sometimes leads to street violence, and it’s reasonable to criticize individual instances as excessive. But if that’s your main focus when it comes to Antifa, consider the possibility that some violence is a regrettable but unavoidable part of preventing much greater violence by fascists.
Along similar lines, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail” described the problem of the “white moderate” ally who stated their support for anti-racist causes but didn’t want to face the sometimes-messy reality of what that support looks like in action:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.”
Antifa and the Police
Antifascists are also frequently criticized for their opposition to police and other law enforcement agencies, which is often mischaracterized as a form of anarchy. Writing about antifascist activity in Portland, Oregon, The Atlantic’s Beinart argued:
As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifascists don’t want the government to stop white supremacists from gathering. They want to do so themselves, rendering the government impotent.
But that’s far from the whole story. While it’s true that antifascists are generally hostile to police — sometimes quite vocally so — the antagonistic relationship stems in large part from deep mistrust. It’s not exactly unfounded. The police have repeatedly, throughout history, failed to take action to stop far-right extremists, so antifascists have learned not to rely on them for protection. Recent events seem to affirm that antifascists were right not to put their faith in law enforcement in the face of a growing white supremacist movement.
In February, the Willamette Week published text messages showing collaboration between white supremacist groups and police in Oregon, where far-right extremists have staged numerous marches and protests. In some of the exchanges, a police lieutenant even told members of a white supremacist group what to do to avoid arrest, and then tipped them off to the location of antifascist demonstrators, potentially putting lives in danger.
Antifascists did not, as Beinart claimed, render the government “impotent.” The police did that.
This was also the case in February 2018, when court documents reviewed by The Guardian revealed that California police investigating a violent white supremacist rally had “worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counterprotesters and sought the prosecution of activists with ‘anti-racist’ beliefs.” The records also showed police officers “expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity.”
This type of coordination between law enforcement and far-right extremists is not uncommon. In 2006, the FBI released a bulletin warning of “the threat of white nationalists and skinheads infiltrating police in order to disrupt investigations against fellow members and recruit other supremacists.” This came amid a series of scandals engulfing law enforcement agencies nationwide, including the revelation that members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had formed a neo-Nazi gang and were harassing local black and Latino communities. Other investigations found active ties to hate groups among law enforcement officers and agencies in Illinois, Ohio, and Texas.
Law enforcement agencies also have a pattern of treating right-wing extremism less harshly than left-wing extremism. For example, in the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Justice identified so-called “ecoterrorists” — a group of left-wing activists who damaged property but never killed anyone — as the “No. 1 domestic terror concern.” By contrast, when a Department of Homeland Security report warned of right-wing extremist violence in 2009 — a warning the next 10 years proved prescient — Republican politicians and conservative groups took offense, and the government disbanded the unit that produced it.
In Charlottesville, local police were widely criticized for failing to do anything when swarms of violent white supremacists attacked peaceful, non-violent protesters, including local clergy members. As one anonymous clergy member described:
The police did nothing. I looked over at the police many times in the midst of the chaos only to find some laughing at certain points. I was not surprised, but I was still disillusioned by their lack of response.
Antifascists didn’t force law enforcement to stand by impotently. The police did that themselves.
While many police officers and departments perform their duties with integrity, enough have shown they will turn a blind eye to, or even assist white supremacists that antifascists’ skepticism is warranted.
Lessons from Antifascism
As we confront a growing threat of violence from the far-right, antifascism offers crucial lessons that we would be foolish to ignore, especially at this perilous moment.
One of those lessons is that direct action like deplatforming is effective. This is especially true when it comes to the digital environment, because so many extremists make a living by monetizing social media platforms like YouTube, while others rely on social media to recruit and radicalize young people.
When right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos got kicked off Twitter, it prompted other platforms to respond in kind, and before long, he was millions of dollars in debt and struggling to find a platform that would host him. After Facebook, YouTube, and Apple News banned far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website InfoWars, traffic to the site fell by half. A short time later, Twitter permanently banned Jones, resulting in even less exposure to his content.
While research on the long-term outcomes of deplatforming is limited, the existing data suggest it reduces the spread of extremist content. A 2017 study by researchers at Georgia Tech found that when Reddit banned its most hateful subreddits, hate speech declined elsewhere on the site, especially from the people who were active on the banned subreddits. And although new platforms have popped up to offer a safe haven for those banned from more mainstream social media sites, most of these alternative platforms have struggled to gain large numbers of users and, for the most part, are still confined to the fringes of the web.
On a similar note, antifascism has also taught us that white supremacy is inherently violent and dangerous even in small numbers, and that the best way to prevent white supremacist violence is to stop it early. That means recognizing that white supremacy is not a legitimate school of thought or ideology, and it’s not worthy of open debate. White supremacists should be shut down wherever they appear, at every opportunity, before they have the chance to turn their violent words into violent actions.
We know this works because we’ve seen it. For example, at a white supremacist rally in Boston, Massachusetts, last fall, far-right protesters were overwhelmed by masses of non-violent counterprotesters. After realizing they were likely to face similar resistance elsewhere, the white supremacists who organized the event canceled their entire series of “America First” rallies across the country.
A similar scene played out in Washington, D.C. on August 12, 2018, exactly one year after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. What was supposed to be a show of strength — a public demonstration in America’s capital to prove that the white supremacist movement hadn’t lost momentum — turned out to be a pathetic gathering of a couple dozen white supremacists who cowered behind the police assigned to protect them. The rally was a failure in part because prominent figures within the white supremacist movement — including Richard Spencer, Chris Cantwell (better known as the “Crying Nazi”), and Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer — told their followers not to attend because the risk of being doxxed by antifascists was too high to make it worth going.
And the ones who did show up were surrounded by counterprotesters from groups like Black Lives Matter, March for Racial Justice, New York Anti-Racist Action, Occupy Wall St., and Showing Up for Racial Justice, all of whom worked together with antifascists to make sure the white supremacists faced overwhelming resistance to their cause. According to Vox, “counterprotesters outnumbered white nationalists by the hundreds at the DC rally.”
It’s easy to see why far-right extremists have worked so hard to vilify antifascists, who represent the most consistent opponents of far-right extremism and the most steadfast allies of those targeted by far-right violence.
As we face a global resurgence of far-right violence and a governmental response that ranges from neutered to counterproductive, it’s time to start listening to those who’ve been in the fight the longest. At the very least, those who can’t get behind the antifascist movement should reconsider their decision to frequently denounce the activists who’ve stepped up when everyone else was standing on the sidelines.
