Lacy MacAuley

Antifa is a left-wing anti-fascist and anti-racist political movement in the United States.

It consists of a highly decentralized array of autonomous groups that use nonviolent direct action, incivility, and violence to achieve their aims.

Antifa political activism includes non-violent methods like involving poster and Flyer campaigns, mutual aid, speeches, protest marches, and community organizing.

Some who identify as antifa also use tactics involving digital activism, doxing, harassment, physical violence, and property damage.

Members of antifa aim to combat far-right extremists, including neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Antifa targets:

Individuals involved in the movement subscribe to a range of left-wing ideologies, and tend to hold anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-state views.

A majority of individuals involved are anarchists, communists, and socialists who describe themselves as revolutionaries, and have little allegiance to liberal democracy, Ideology (academic sources):

Ideology (news sources):

The German word Antifa itself first appeared in 1930 and the long form antifaschistisch was borrowed from the original Italian anti-Fascisti ("anti-fascists").

The English word antifa is a loanword from the German Antifa, where it is a shortened form of the word antifaschistisch ("anti-fascist") and a nickname of Antifaschistische Aktion (1932–1933), a short-lived group which inspired the wider antifa movement in Germany.

The American antifa movement grew after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016.

Antifa activists' actions have since received support and criticism from various organizations and pundits.

Some on the political left and some civil rights organizations criticize antifa's willingness to adopt violent tactics, which they describe as counterproductive and dangerous, arguing that these tactics embolden the political right and their allies.

Criticism:

There have been numerous efforts to discredit antifa by various right-wing groups and individuals.

Some have been done via hoaxes on social media, many of them false flag operations originating from alt-right and 4chan users posing as antifa backers on Twitter; some hoaxes have been picked up and portrayed as fact by right-leaning media and politicians.

There were repeated calls by Donald Trump and William Barr to designate antifa as a terrorist organization.

Academics, legal experts, and others have argued such an action would exceed the authority of the presidency and violate the First Amendment.

Several analyses, reports, and studies have concluded that antifa is not a major domestic terrorism risk.

Oxford Dictionaries placed antifa on its shortlist for word of the year in 2017 and stated the word "emerged from relative obscurity to become an established part of the English lexicon over the course of 2017."

The pronunciation of the word in English is not settled as it may be stressed on either the first or the second syllable.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) the term antifa "is often misapplied to include all counter-protesters".

During the Trump administration, the term antifa became "a conservative catch-all" term as Donald Trump, administration officials, Trump base supporters, and right-wing commentators applied the label to all sorts of left-leaning or liberal protest actions.

Conservative writers such as L. Brent Bozell III labeled Black Lives Matter as "antifa".

Politico reported that "the term [antifa] is a potent one for conservatives" because "[i]t's the violent distillation of everything they fear could come to pass in an all-out culture war. And it's a quick way to brand part of the opposition."

Alexander Reid Ross, who teaches at Portland State University, argues that the popularization of the term antifa was a reaction to the popularization of the term alt-right, "to the point where [antifa] simply describes people who are anti-fascist or people who are against racism and are willing to protest against it."

Antifa is not a unified organization but rather a movement without a hierarchical leadership structure, comprising multiple autonomous groups and individuals.

The movement is loosely affiliated and has no chain of command, with antifa groups instead sharing "resources and information about far-right activity across regional and national borders through loosely knit networks and informal relationships of trust and solidarity."

According to Mark Bray, "members hide their political activities from law enforcement and the far right" and "concerns about infiltration and high expectations of commitment keep the sizes of groups rather small."

Bray adds that "[i]t's important to understand that antifa politics, and antifa's methods, are designed to stop white supremacists, fascists, and neo-Nazis as easily as possible."

According to research by both Bray and scholar Stanislav Vysotsky, antifa methods are mostly nonviolent; analysis by the Anti-Defamation League has reached the same conclusion.

According to Bray, "they function in some ways like private investigators; they track neo-Nazi organizing across multiple social-media platforms."

In regard to doxing, Bray says that it is about "telling people that they have a Nazi living down the street, or telling employers that they're employing white supremacists", adding that "after Charlottesville, a lot of the repercussions that these khaki-wearing, tiki-torch white supremacists faced were their employers firing them and their families repudiating what they do."

Activists typically organize protests via social media and through websites.

Some activists have built peer-to-peer networks, or use encrypted-texting services like Signal.

Chauncey Devega of Salon described antifa as an organizing strategy, not a group of people.

According to a member of a New York City antifa group, their group's identification research on whether an individual or group is "fascist, Alt Right, White Nationalist, etc."

is "based on which groups they are a part of and endorse."

While noting that "Nazis, fascists, white nationalists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes" are specific overlapping categories, the main focus is "on groups and individuals which endorse, or work directly in alliance with, white supremacists and white separatists. We try to be very clear and precise with how we use these terms."