What Is Antifa? The Truth Behind the Tweets
Donald Trump clearly hates antifa. But what actually is antifa and why does it matter?
If you've watched Fox News recently, you have almost certainly heard the term "antifa" uttered with an air of sinister mystery and more than a hint of contempt, but what actually is it?
Antifa, pronounced "AN-tee-fuh," is short for antifascists. Antifa is not really an organization, as they have no leader, no hierarchy, and no regular meetings or gatherings. It is instead a left-wing political ideology that aims to eradicate fascism and white nationalism through the use of both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than policy reform. Essentially, they are a group characterized entirely by opposition to one thing: fascism.
Webster's Dictionary defines fascism as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts a nation and often a race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition." Most American's agree that fascism is a bad thing. It's regularly associated with bigotry and authoritarian dictators like Hitler. So why are we mad about anti-fascists? To understand that, we have to look at their history.
The History of antifa
The history of anti-fascism begins around the same time as the history of fascism. In 1932 Germany, a group called "Antifaschistische Aktion" formed in opposition to the rising Nazi party. It was a militant anti-fascist organization in the Weimar Republic started by members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and it only existed from 1932 to 1933. Antifaschistische Aktion used their militant approach to develop a self-defense network for communities targeted by the Nazis. The group engaged in a series of direct actions meant to challenge the Nazis, including street brawls, but they were forcibly dissolved after Hitler's rise to power.
Around the same time, the British Union of Fascists (BUF), a Nazi-like political party, was gaining political power in the UK. But when the BUF attempted to lead a march through London in 1936, thousands of Jews and left-wing activists attacked the fascists and their police escorts, raining homemade bombs and rocks down on the parade. The BUF forces retreated and the anti-fascists celebrated victory in "the Battle of Cable Street." The event is still cited by antifa activists today.
The modern antifa movement finds its roots in London's Anti-Fascist Action (AFA). Founded in the UK in 1985 by a wide range of anti-racist and anti-fascist organizations, the AFA was a militant anti-fascist group. It was active in fighting far-right organizations, particularly the National Front and British National Party. They were particularly active in the punk scene, where they would often violently throw neo-Nazis out of punk shows.
A similar organization called Anti-Racist Action (ARA), also connected to the punk music scene, formed in America in the 80's. In the late 1980s and 1990s, ARA activists toured with popular punk rock bands in order to prevent white supremacists from recruiting at their shows. They would remove any neo-Nazi materials and forcibly remove anyone espousing neo-Nazi philosophies.
What does antifa look like today?
Photo by: Nayani Teixeira / Unsplash
Antifa is not an organization; it's an ideology, and as such, it is highly decentralized and localized. There are some specific local organizations, like Portland's Rose City Antifa, which was founded in 2007, but there's no national umbrella leadership or hierarchy. There is no uniform course of action for antifa, but they do tend to operate on one principle: Stopping fascism by any means necessary.
In The Antifascist Handbook, antifa historian Mark Bray writes, "The job of the anti-fascist is to make [fascists] too afraid to act publicly and to act as volunteer targets for their hate and attacks which might keep them from thinking about burning down the mosque in their neighborhood."
In order to intimidate "fascists," antifa uses a variety of tactics. Online, they use a technique called doxxing. They identify white supremacists and fascists and expose them online in an attempt to get them fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments. Antifa also uses no-platforming or deplatforming, which involves denying fascists the opportunity to speak out in public by obstructing their events.
The tactic that makes most people nervous about antifa is their use of violence. Antifa generally seeks out fascists and racists and disrupts any and all rallies through violent confrontations. Antifa has been known to use sticks, fists, and projectiles, though they are almost never associated with guns.
In general, Antifa appear as counter-protesters, not protesters themselves. They look to events in history like the Battle of Cable Street, and claim that fascism can only be stopped by using violence. You can recognize antifa at a protest either from their logo—a red flag over a black flag—or sometimes from their use of black bloc strategy. The black bloc is where people dress in black and cover their faces in order to thwart surveillance and create a sense of equality among participants. Sometimes antifa members using this method try to operate as a "security force" for protesters.
Since Trump was elected in 2016, anti-fascist counter-protesters have become much more mainstream. Thousands of people protested at Donald Trump's inauguration, including some self-proclaimed anti-fascists. Memorably, after the inauguration, white-supremacist Richard Spencer was punched in the face by a black-clad protestor—and after the incident went viral on social media, Richard Spencer blamed it on antifa.
A few months later in August 2017, Antifa counter-protesters showed up at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and violently clashed with alt-right protesters. During the rally a neo-Nazi plowed into a crowd of counter protester, injuring dozens and killing one woman, Heather Heyer.
In March 2018, Richard Spencer canceled the remaining stops on his college speaking tour, releasing a tearful video in which he declared that "antifa is winning."
Coverage of antifa has gone up significantly during the recent racial justice protests. This summer, between May 24th and August 22nd, ACLED recorded more than 10,600 protests in all 50 states and Washington, DC. Most of the protests were about police brutality, and around 10,130 of them were peaceful. However the media has spent a lot of time on the approximately 570 protests that involved some form of violence. Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed the violence at protests on antifa, which has given the movement significant media attention.
Trump and his supporters have designated antifa as public enemy #1. He has mentioned antifa in 41 tweets and has credited antifa with all of the violence and looting of the Black Lives Matter protests, and even accused the 75-year-old man who was pushed over on camera by the police in Buffalo of being an "antifa provocateur."
Trump also declared via Twitter that he would designate antifa as a terrorist organization, despite the fact that he legally cannot declare any domestic group as a terrorist organization. Overall, he has given antifa a lot of attention without presenting any actual evidence of antifa involvement.
Are antifa responsible for protest violence?
Photo by: Nicole Baster / Unsplash
Any group that believes that the ends justify the means should be viewed as a threat. That being said, so far there is no evidence that the violence at the racial justice protests is caused by antifa or even that it has been coordinated at all. Thousands have been arrested at the protests, but most are for misdemeanor charges such as breaking curfew. The few more serious offenses, including murder and throwing molotov cocktails at police vehicles, have resulted in federal charges. According to the Washington Post, there are roughly 80 federal charges stemming from the protests, but thus far there are no mentions of antifa in any of the court documents. However, the far-right "boogaloo" movement is tied to 4 of the offenders.
Seth Jones, an expert on terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes, "My conversations with law enforcement and intelligence officials in multiple US cities suggest that [though] antifa played a minor role in violence, the vast majority of looting appeared to come from local opportunists with no affiliation and no political objectives. Most were common criminals."
A May 31 memo from the FBI's Washington field office reported "no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence" in DC protests. The Associated Press analyzed court records, employment histories, social media posts and other sources of information concerning the 217 people arrested May 29-31 in Minneapolis and DC, and found that almost all were local residents, and very few had any connection to any extremist organizations.
Even the Department of Homeland Security admits that most of the violence seems to be caused by local "violent opportunists" rather than extremists, despite the fact that a recent whistleblower claimed that DHS officials were directed to play up the threat presented by antifa to match the president's rhetoric.
Antifa has existed in some form in the United States since the 1980s, and they have never posed much of a domestic terror threat. In fact, the only known death caused by an antifa supporter happened a week ago, by a man who stated on Instagram that he was "100% antifa" but was not actually affiliated with any antifa group.
According to the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Right-wing terrorist (Boogaloo, Sovereign Citizens, white supremacists, incels, etc.) attacks caused 335 deaths, while left-wing (extreme environmentalists, animal rights extremists, anti-capitalists, anarchists, etc.) attacks caused 22 deaths. Most importantly, antifa caused no known deaths.
Why Trump's antifa rhetoric should scare you.
Antifa is not responsible for the level of violence Trump claims, but it is a real extremist ideology that does use violence as a tactic. This fact has led Trump and his supporters to use it as a catch-all term for leftists in order to scare people on the right.
This is concerning for a number of reasons, and is somewhat—dare I say it—fascist. A defining feature of fascism is forcible suppression of the opposition and Trump is trying to use antifa to do exactly that.
Antifa doesn't have official membership, which gives Trump and his supporters a lot of leeway to dictate who is in "antifa" and who it isn't. If antifa includes anyone who is against fascism, it would likely include most Americans.
Trump's misapplication of the label "antifa" to include all left-leaning activists rather than limiting it to those who proactively seek physical confrontations has resulted in dangerous generalizations. He continues to paint a picture of this summer's protesters as a monolithic leftist group who desire nothing more than chaos.
In reality, racial justice protesters are very diverse. According to Pew Research, 59% are over 30, 42% live in the suburbs, and 17% lean Republican. The protesters are people from every walk of life who genuinely feel that police brutality and racial injustice are serious problems.
As long as antifa is a shadowy, amorphous group, it will continue to be used as a punching bag for the right. The lack of information about antifa has already given rise to various conspiracy theories regarding it. Some claim it is being funded by George Soros, who is somehow also a Nazi. Some even claim that Soros is sending out buses marked "Soros riot Dance Squad" full of antifa members intending to start riots.
Others falsely claim that the Democratic party is funding antifa and hiring paid agitators. These claims are quite obviously false, yet they spread like wildfire. One of the most concerning disinformation campaigns about antifa in recent memory was the twitter account @antifa_us, which encouraged violence at protests. The account was removed by twitter after it turned out to actually be operated by Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group.
By playing up the scale of the antifa threat, Trump has made antifa seem just as bad, if not worse, than other extremist groups. However, the statistics show us that this is simply not the case.
The anti-defamation league warns that "it is important to reject attempts to claim equivalence between the antifa and the white supremacist groups they oppose." They add that, "Right-wing extremists have been one of the largest and most consistent sources of domestic terror incidents in the United States for many years; they have murdered hundreds of people in this country over the last ten years alone. To date, there have not been any known antifa-related murders."
Antifa is extreme, and we should all condemn their use of violence—however rare it may be. But perhaps their cause is a worthy one. After all, it does seem awfully fascist to declare anti-fascists terrorists.
Cult Leader, Mass Murderer, Alt-Right Hero, Folk Singer: Charles Manson and His Failed Music Career
On the 50th anniversary of the Manson Murders, a look back in time at the sonic inspirations and frustrated desire for glory that inspired Manson's killing spree.
Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is preparing to take modern-day Hollywood by storm.
The film's release is timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the infamous Manson Family murders, when Charles Manson and his coterie of villains gruesomely took the lives of Sharon Tate and eight others.
Manson's legacy has persisted for half a decade, and Tarantino's movie reestablishes another gruesome truth: Hollywood can't get enough of its supervillains, especially when their mythologies involve young women, movie stars, and ambition that crashed and burned and left bloodlust in its wake.
All this recognition raises the question: When is it acceptable to revisit the legacy—and, in this case, the music—of a serial killer?
Hollywood Hallucinations
Before he became a cult leader, Manson actually wanted to be a folk musician.
From 1966-67, Manson recorded his compositions onto a mixtape called Lie: The Love and Terror Cult. Because Manson is a white supremacist and serial killer, we don't actually encourage you to waste the time or energy to listen to his album. Instead, according to other sources, the album's fourteen songs belie a troubled spirit with a (possibly subconscious) awareness of his own true nature—particularly on "People Say I'm No Good" and "Garbage Dump." Apparently, his music is also laden with counterculture tropes, from a hatred of cops to a bevy of lines about birds.
However, Manson's guiding mantras were in no way aligned with the starry-eyed, peace-and-love ethos of the average counter-culture hippie. Manson was motivated by racist ideas that led him towards the belief that an ensuing, super-apocalyptic race war was on its way, meant to annihilate both blacks and whites, thereby creating space for Manson and his (maybe "disturbed") 'Family' to take over the world.
Though his music never broke into the mainstream on its own, Manson did make some promising industry connections before initiating his final rampage. In 1968, two of Manson's female followers—Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey—were hitchhiking when they were picked up by the Beach Boys' drummer, Dennis Wilson. Once he learned about this, Manson leapt on the connection, eventually ingratiating himself into the Beach Boys' social circle. He and some of his Family moved into the Beach Boys' mansion that summer, where they dropped acid and participated in group sex.
Soon enough, it seemed like Manson might've made a powerful connection with the Beach Boys, as Dennis Wilson eventually took Manson to a studio to record. However, everything came crashing down when Manson pulled a knife on Wilson's producers after a disagreement, and from there, things spiraled out of control.
That fall, the Beach Boys recorded a poppier version of Manson's original song, the forebodingly named "Cease to Exist," renamed "Never Learn Not to Love," with Brian Wilson credited as the sole songwriter. Afterwards, Manson presented Dennis Wilson with a single bullet, and said, "It's important to keep your children safe." This was the final straw; Wilson beat him up and sent him home.
Until he drowned off the coast of Marina del Rey in 1983, Dennis Wilson refused to talk about his relationship with the Manson Family. It is known that the Mansons wrecked the Wilson's car, blew $100,000 in cash, passed along STDs, and trashed his home. According to fellow Beach Boys member Mike Love, Wilson saw Manson shoot someone and throw him down a well. The psychological impact of a visit from the Manson family certainly did nothing to help with Dennis Wilson's battle with addiction, which would continue for the remainder of his life.
That was Charles Manson for you, though. He was a man whose fetid, twisted nature found a shell in the hectic abandon of the late 1960s counterculture movement, and whose ability to cast a spell over others enabled him to pull many innocent people into his twisted influence. As it turned out, the drug-addled, guru-worshiping, love-is-all-you-need ethos of the hippie age was the perfect guise under which to hide murderous impulses.
Interestingly, Manson's actions were partly inspired by some of the most famous music of the era. He claimed that the Beatles' White Album was the reason he committed all of his murders in the first place; specifically, he believed that several songs on the White Album foreshadowed a forthcoming race war. He believed that the song "Helter Skelter" referred to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and that "Revolution 9" and "Piggies" predicted the vanquishment of the white man.
Chillingly, during one of the Manson murders, one of the killers wrote "Helter Skelter" in blood on a door in Sharon Tate's house.
Posthumous Glory
Since Manson's conviction, his music has gained controversial levels of recognition. The Lemonheads covered Manson's "Home is What Makes You Happy" in 1988, and Guns N' Roses put their spin on "Look at Your Game Girl," released as a secret bonus track at the end of their covers album The Spaghetti Incident?
Most famously, the boundary-pushing goth rocker Marilyn Manson created his name by smashing together "Charles Manson" and "Marilyn Monroe" to form a moniker that combines two of the most glorified objects of Hollywood tragedy. Marilyn Manson even covered Charles'"Sick City," and Nine Inch Nails recorded their 1992 EP, Broken, at the house where Sharon Tate was murdered.
All this posthumous recognition raises the question of when, and if, it's appropriate to recognize and interpret the art of a serial killer and white supremacist. This is the more extreme angle to a very common question—can we separate the art from the artist?
While contemporary "cancel culture" can sometimes go too far, in Manson's case, there is no separating his work from who he was as a person. Every consideration of what art we morally should or should not listen to needs to happen on a case-by-case basis, wherein we weigh the extremity of the person's offenses with the time period and extenuating circumstances surrounding their actions; and Manson can never be extricated from who he was as a person or from the lives he stole.
Things get especially hairy when examining the tremendous amount of art and pop cultural products inspired by Manson's legacy. From Joan Didion to Marilyn Manson, Mad Men to the Ramones, Manson has been a constant muse for everyone from punk rockers to political commentators. Sometimes, these products can be genuinely thoughtful—for example, Emma Cline's The Girls explored the brainwashing inherent in 60s California mythology and the effect of patriarchal aggression on the adolescent female psyche; and other outlets like Psychic TV have used Manson's story to explore the connection between cults and fanbases.
Still, other interpretations have been less nuanced, to say the least. Buried within the countercultural forces that motivated Manson was a stunning super-individualism, a belief that he was totally enlightened and free, to the point of total liberation from any form of consequence. It was a patriarchal, white supremacist, pack-mentality-created hatred that is very much alive today. (There are obvious parallels between the central ideas that fueled Charles Manson and fuel the alt-right today, and Manson is a frequent object of idealization on alt-right forums). In a way, attention—be it positive or negative—is exactly what Charles Manson wanted. The fact that he transitioned from an aspiring musician to drug-addled guru to murderous cult leader reveals that his number one love was not music, nor adoration. It was power and attention of any kind.
Therefore, Manson's music and life deserves no glory and no idealization. The only positive consequences of exploring his story and legacy are a potentially deeper understanding of the forces that created someone like him, if only to locate and address those forces when they reappear.
Tellingly, after Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor recorded in Sharon Tate's old home, he happened to run into her sister.
According to Reznor, "She said,'Are you exploiting my sister's my sister's death by living in her house?' For the first time, the whole thing kind of slapped me in the face. I said: 'No, it's just sort of my own interest in American folklore. I'm in this place where a weird part of history occurred.' I guess it never really struck me before, but it did then. She lost her sister from a senseless, ignorant situation that I don't want to support. When she was talking to me, I realised for the first time: 'What if it was my sister?' I thought: 'Fuck Charlie Manson.' I don't want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit."
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