The only difference between them and the alt-right, is they seem less likely to kill people and more likley to damage property. They are essentially what they claim to be fighting.
Um, a theocratic state does the exact same thing. You support re-criminalizing homosexuality and other things on religious grounds and would impose such a society on everyone, regardless of their own beliefs.
It should be apparent, but evidently is not to antifa members and leaders, that the United States, despite Donald Trump being president, is not in a comparable situation to that of Weimar Germany on the eve of Hitler’s ascension to power, or to Nazi Germany after the passage of the Enabling Act, which in 1933 gave Hitler the power to pass laws without the participation of the Reichstag. After this, Hitler and the Nazi Party assumed total control and established a one-party state without any political liberties.
Antifa members should read historians of Nazi Germany, like Laurie Marhoefer of the University of Washington, who writes that anti-fascist street fighters who greeted a Nazi rally with violence thought that they had won by disrupting a rally and fighting its speakers back in 1927. They sent a message that “Fascism was not welcome.” But instead, “events like the rally in Wedding [a Berlin district] helped the Nazis build a dictatorship.” The Reds got media attention, but it led to escalating street violence, all of which helped the Nazis, who painted themselves “as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left.”
Leftist violence in the 1930s in Germany led many to support the Nazis in the hope they would put an end to the continuing street brawls and violence. Today, the antifa left may even help to get Donald Trump reelected in 2020.
Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.
These morons are going to make legal, peaceful protests that much more difficult. Local authorities are going to deny permits required and the antifa will label anyone they want to counter-protest as facsist/nazis.
In the past, such rallies were for making contact with new potential followers. Do they have the same function today in the age of the internet email list?
During the civil-rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X openly clashed over methods. Dr. King espoused nonviolence. Malcolm X pushed a more militant approach. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, groups such as the Black Panthers and Weather Underground condoned violence against authorities to further goals such as ending the Vietnam War.
Arthur Eckstein, a University of Maryland professor who was an activist at that time and wrote a recent book on the Weather Underground, said left-wing groups today are grappling with the same question: How much violence, if any, is acceptable?
Antifa protesters are even more loosely organized than the far-right-wing groups they clash with, but they are united in their willingness to use physical force. And while some groups identify themselves by that name, the term also is used more broadly to describe the tactics used by a range of groups—some of whom may reject the antifa label.
Most people associated with the movement appear to be young men, but women and older activists also take part. Many are involved in other causes, such as socialism or anarchism. The term also can denote opposition to capitalism.
Some come in groups. Others are lone protesters.
Their protests attract people such as Morgan Bennett, a 26-year-old from Tucson at the gathering outside Mr. Trump’s Phoenix rally. Mr. Bennett, who said he “works with kids” for a living, joined a group of others dressed, like him, in all black, most with covered faces. Asked if the group was antifa, he said: “Everyone should be antifascist.”
Mr. Bennett called a commitment to nonviolence “a little naive,” saying he came unarmed but prepared to use his hands. “We have to defend ourselves.”
Tactics of people calling themselves antifa have ranged from shouting down those they deem bigots to more-aggressive measures. Police linked them to damaging property and throwing Molotov cocktails in February demonstrations that led University of California, Berkeley, to cancel an appearance of a speaker who was a Breitbart News Network writer at the time.
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These tactics echo those that emerged more than a decade ago among radicals on the political far-left who committed violence at major demonstrations against world leaders, such as at the 1999 World Trade Organization’s meetings in Seattle. Black-garbed protesters clashed there with police and hurled bricks through bank windows.
Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer and now director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said multiple studies show that in the past 15 years, extremists with far-right ideologies, including white supremacists, neo-Nazis and antigovernment extremists, have committed more violence—including homicides—“by a long shot” than have extreme leftists.
But, he added, the resurgence of these competing extremes is increasingly dangerous and is leading to an escalating number of violent confrontations between the two sides.
Protesters calling themselves antifa often say they are acting defensively and are protecting demonstrators. Many point to antifa’s efforts to keep people in Charlottesville safe.
Yet at more-recent protests, such as in Boston and Berkeley, they also initiated confrontations, leading to bipartisan complaints that antifa is imposing mob rule and denying others their rights to assemble—even though antifa protesters have made up only a small proportion of the crowds.
The Berkeley rally showed the dilemma the antifa movement presents the left. The “No to Marxism in America” event was planned for Sunday, Aug. 27. Groups planning to protest organized counter-rallies.
In the weeks leading to it, some organizers—including the National Lawyers Guild, a protest group called Showing Up for Racial Justice, or SURJ, and representatives of groups identifying themselves as antifa—gathered to discuss tactics, said Dan Siegel, a member of the National Lawyers Guild and longtime leftist organizer.
Jeff Conant, a spokesman for SURJ’s Bay Area chapter, said organizers decided against condemning any actions, including “physical confrontations,” by demonstrators on the left. “We feel it serves the interests of white supremacists to divide progressive movements,” he said.
Organizers took to internet message boards to ask protesters not to initiate any violence.
The right-wing event’s organizer called it off two nights before it was to happen. Some sympathizers showed up anyway, and protesters went ahead with their counter-rally.
John Cookenboo, a 28-year-old warehouse worker, and Vincent Yochelson, a 23-year-old line cook, came to the Berkeley protest from neighboring Oakland with body armor, helmets and shields they had bought on eBay. They said they had hoped they wouldn’t need the gear.
“I’m not going to let my friends get beat over the head or pepper sprayed,” said Mr. Yochelson. “I’m going to do what I can to protect them.”
Though the young men both identified as antifa, they said they weren’t part of any organized group. This loose structure makes protests such as the one in Berkeley hard to control. The protesters are all dressed alike, but no one is in charge. Much of the coordination, Mr. Cookenboo said, is done by word-of-mouth and on closed internet message boards using pseudonyms.
“I try not to openly incite violence,” Mr. Cookenboo said. “I don’t feel like, at the end of the day, that accomplishes too much.”
Nonetheless, there was violence. One young man pepper sprayed a group of masked protesters who appeared to be antifa and was quickly set upon and beaten by at least five people dressed in black, one of them using a shield fashioned from a plastic trash can. When the young man was on the ground, another black-clad activist kicked him.
Protesters in dark get-ups set off smoke bombs, toppled police barricades and smashed the cameras of some journalists and bystanders. “You do it again, I’ll break your phone,” a man in a Spider-Man mask told a Wall Street Journal reporter who was taking photographs.
City officials said 13 people were arrested and two hospitalized. After the event, organizers and some demonstrators said that those who behaved aggressively didn’t represent the majority and that things had gone well.
“It went wonderfully,” said Tur-ha Ak, a leader of Community Ready Corps, an organization devoted to fighting white supremacy, though he acknowledged “some situations here and there.” He said that he didn’t identify as antifa but that “they were there to protect the crowd, just like in Charlottesville.”
Mayor Arreguin of Berkeley disagreed: “We saw a large group of black-clad extremists who really turned a peaceful protest on its head.”
Some activists on the left, leery of mayhem, said they would no longer march with groups they call antifa. Samantha Pree-Stinson, a Green Party candidate for the Minneapolis City Council, said she finds the movement too unpredictable.
At a March antiracism rally in Minneapolis, she said, activists chanted “punch a Nazi in the face” and lighted on fire a scarecrow dressed as a white nationalist. “The people who end up taking the rap for it are black organizers,” said Ms. Pree-Stinson, 36, who described herself as a black Latina.
In Boston, masked counterprotesters distributed fliers titled “WHY ANTIFA?” The leaflets criticized the “liberal” approach of believing that elections, courts, the Constitution, a free press and other institutions would “prevent things from going too far.” They called for “uncompromising militancy” against fascists and said antifa “must force their hate out of public spaces by any means necessary.”
The approach worries Democratic political consultant and activism trainer Stefanie Coxe, 35, who joined more than 30,000 in Boston to counter a “free speech” rally. The initial lineup of attendees overlapped with headliners at the deadly Charlottesville rally. Organizers said the event had no links to white supremacy.
Boston’s police commissioner said the event was overwhelmingly peaceful. Ms. Coxe agreed but said she felt unsettled at times by aggressive, masked activists. Any time one of them spotted someone they considered a “fascist,” she said, they rushed to “get in people’s faces.”
“I had never felt unsafe because of my own side before,” said Ms. Coxe. “I really think we have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we helping to put down white supremacy, or are we helping to give them talking points?’ ”
