I have
testified about Antifa before Congress, run columns on the organization for over a decade, and wrote
a book discussing Antifa. I
did oppose declaring Antifa a terrorist organization due to free speech concerns, but I also know that it is very real.
By design, Antifa
avoids typical leadership hierarchies and organizational structures. Antifa was first created in the 1920s, associated with the Weimar-era German communist group Antifaschistische Aktion.
One such student came from my campus and proclaimed that
Antifa was winning after his arrest for property destruction.
When another radical was
arrested after taking an axe to a congressional office, he self-identified as a member of Antifa.
Before Kyle Benjamin Douglas Calvert, 26, implanted an IED device outside of Alabama Attorney General
Steve Marshall’s office in downtown Montgomery, he put up stickers reading “
support your local Antifa.”
Numerous Antifa members have been arrested, including some who claimed
to be journalists.
Many protesters belong to Antifa groups that have names like “Rose City Antifa” and offshoots like Love and Rage and Mexico’s Amor Y Rabia.
Antifa members have been elected to the French and European parliaments.
Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s “
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” called by some the “Antifa bible,” explains that the group is united in its opposition to free speech. “Most Americans in Antifa have been anarchists or antiauthoritarian communists,” he writes. “From that standpoint, ‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”
Law enforcement officials like former FBI Director
Christopher Wray have long debunked the deniers like Goldman. “
Antifa is a real thing,” said Wray.
Ironically, when many on the left are not denying its existence, they are rallying their members or actually
selling Antifa merchandise. Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair
Keith Ellison — now the Minnesota attorney general — proclaimed that Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. His own son, Minneapolis City Council member
Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer.
Some liberal activists admit to having coordinated violent protests with Antifa groups. For example, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Dwayne Dixon was a member of the radical gun club Redneck Revolt, a group recently referenced in flyers that read, “Hey, Fascist! Catch! The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.”
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