Here’s the real reason so many on the right are terrified of Antifa

With his tweet suggesting that Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old man who was violently shoved to the ground by Buffalo police during a protest last week, may have been an antifa super-ninja, Trump’s ooga-booga about anti-fascist activists descended into farce. And he isn’t alone. Locals on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state terrorized a multiracial family of four who were just out for a nice camping trip because they decided they were antifa activists. The Verge reports that “mythical buses full of bloodthirsty antifa protesters are causing panic in rural counties throughout the country,” leading small towns to board up shop windows and shut down their main streets. And this week, the Turkish regime under Recep Erdoğan blamed the Kurdistan Workers Party for training antifa units to commit acts of violence in the United States.

The reality, as you may know if you’re not a Fox News fan, is that while there are some local organized antifa groups, antifa is a philosophy, and a loose network of activists, rather than an organization. In its current iteration in the US, the movement arose from the punk scene, and some antifa activists engage in street fights with the Proud Boys and similar far-right groups. There has long been a debate on the left about the utility of those tactics (which I’ve written about).

But one thing that many mainstream commenters don’t acknowledge is that most antifa activism has nothing to do with physical confrontation. As Caroline Orr wrote at Medium, “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.” Continue reading.