The Great Antifa Hoax

A series of violent clashes also took place in Portland, Oregon, during this period between alt-right groups and antifa with police usually intervening against the latter. Claims and counterclaims make it difficult to know who started what. The highest-profile clash involving antifa, however, took place on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally. Despite a massive police presence, a series of clashes ensued when the white supremacists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and members of various militias who had been chanting “Jews will not replace us” a day earlier were now met with a massive counterdemonstration that included anti-fascists who had prepared for a confrontation. During the chaos, James Fields Jr., a 20-year-old self-proclaimed admirer of Hitler, drove his car into the crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring nearly three dozen others. Famously, three days after the rally in which video clearly demonstrated where the aggression arose, Trump had trouble distinguishing between the guilty and innocent in the melee, insisting that there was “blame on both sides” for the violence, and that there were “some very fine” people among the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Soon afterward, Merriam-Webster added “antifa” to its dictionary, and The Oxford English Dictionary short-listed it for its “word of the year.”

Christopher Mathias, author of the recently published To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right, has gotten to know many members of antifa, having gained their trust over time by reporting on them sympathetically in HuffPost, where he worked for 14 years. He told me, “Antifa is a network of everyday people from different walks of life with perhaps a couple of demographics overrepresented.” These include trans and queer people, who Mathias believes see anti-fascist work “as kind of an urgent form of community self-defense,” together with “neurodivergent people,” who he said are “very good at this type of research, and who see the kind of recruiting the far right does as targeting neurodivergent spaces online,” and who see “anti-fascist work as also an urgent form of community self-defense.”

To be clear, self-identified antifa partisans are not “liberals” in any of the term’s connotations. They are unimpressed by foundational liberal commitments to ideals such as the right to free speech and free assembly. Anti-fascists will not defend to their deaths anyone’s right to say whatever they want however much they disagree with it. They prefer to disrupt fascist advances, Bray wrote in Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, in ways that range from “singing over fascist speeches, to occupying the sites of fascist meetings before they could set up to sowing discord in their groups via infiltration, to breaking any veil of anonymity, to physically disrupting their newspaper sales, demonstrations, and other activities.” Violence, when anti-fascists do resort to it, is without exception presented as a means of countering or preventing fascist violence. It does not include terrorist violence. There will be no antifa murdering of innocents as a means of advancing the cause in the manner of the old anarchist adage about “the propaganda of the deed.”