I concede that this first bit is insufferable. I have been an activist since I was old enough to be politically conscious. I helped organize gay rights rallies when I was 16, participated in the admittedly vague anti-corporatism of the late 90s, then dove headfirst into antiwar activism when the bombs started to fall on Kabul and Jalalabad. I spent five dispiriting years devoting myself to anti-Iraq activism more or less as a vocation. Now I do housing work here in the city. I’ve been in more groups and committees and “circles” than I care to remember. I’ve had the glamorous banner-unfurling moments and many more of the tedious “who’s going to rent the porta potties” moments. I’ve done the tabling and waded through the interminable listserv posts. I’ve been in group after group that was wracked with toxic left shit but still got it together to put on great events. I’ve waved signs, chanted the chants, occupied buildings, lied down in the street, made speeches, handed out leaflets, and sang the songs. Did any of it matter? No idea. But I did it all the same and I wouldn’t change a thing.
I don't think Antifa are harmless. They destroy property and hurt innocent people. Here in Reno last year, we had one of those mostly peaceful protests where the city hall was overrun and vandalized (with a lot more damage that was caused by the (heh heh) "insurrectionists" of 6 January). We don't have a lot of black people here in Reno, but one of them, a journalist, was beaten up during the mostly peaceful protest by a couple of white people who drove 350 miles from a neighboring state apparently just to assault a black guy. This weird man-bites-dog story oddly didn't go very far in the national news, but was reported in our local fishwrap:
Looks a little like the Weimar Republic, no? That sure ended well.
These morons might not represent any sort of coherent political ideology, but they hurt people, destroy property and deliberately escalate all political (and even cultural) discussion and protest into violence. Insisting they aren't smart or subtle enough to represent an important political movement doesn't mean anything because I'm pretty sure few SA members were capable of arguing epistemology over their lagers, but they were effective nonetheless. I think it would be prudent to wait a few years and see how they color political discussion in this country before declaring them "mostly harmless."
Thanks for this necessary critique. Your history is a little off (ironically, it's bit too suffused with contemporary social justice politics.) Antifascists prowled the streets not simply (and not mainly) to protect immigrants and gay people from harassment. The first antifa in the U.S. consisted primarily of Italian immigrant leftists (anarchists, socialists, communists) who saw the danger that Mussolini and his brutal regime posed to democracy in Italy and around the world way before most anyone else in the U.S. or anywhere else outside of Italy did. Italian fascisti in the U.S. were not likely to harass immigrants UNLESS the immigrants were Italians who were openly anti-fascist. Mussolini worked hard to court Italian immigrants by appealing to their hurt pride from being shit on by WASPy Americans and other immigrants (mostly Irish), and he succeeded to a great degree. Those he couldn't convert to the cause he tried to intimidate in a variety of ways, including threats against family members back in Italy. Street fights between fascisti and antifascisti in the US were proxy wars, of a kind, in which antifascisti exacted revenge for the often fatal violence visited upon their comrades in Italy. Also, antifascisti refused to allow Mussolini to claim Italians in the US as his own. Until Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, Italian antifascisti were seen by most in the US as thugs. This perception was fueled by stereoptypes of Italians as stupid and prone to violence and by anti-communism. The thinking was, "If Mussolini hates communists (and socialists, and anarchists), he can't be all bad." But antifascisti also published newspapers, and created organizations (like the Anti-fascist Alliance of North America) to counter the influence of the fascisti among the immigrant community and to encourage people outside of leftist Italian immigrant circles to see the antidemocratic nature of fascism. Some American antifascists (in the 1920s there weren't many) made analogies between Mussolini's Blackshirts and the racism and anti-radicalism of the KKK and the American Legion. Hitler's rise to power confirmed the antifascisti's position that fascism would spread. 1930s antifascists, many of them members of the CPUSA, defended the rights of immigrants and actively fought against deportation of leftists on the grounds that they would be sent back to countries in which there was an active campaign against the left and thus their lives would be in danger. And of course, some antifascists went to Spain to fight the fascist General Franco. Unfortunately, many among antifa today have retained the tactics of their antecedents but not their political and organizational acumen, or, in the cases of the Spanish Civil War volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, their bravery. Sorry if this post is pedantic, but I am writing a book that contains a lot of stuff on anti-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and I feel a loyalty to the original antifa.
I think the most cynical thing since 2016 is how anti-fascism got fuses with anti-trump, which got fused with carrying water for the Democrats. It was very useful for the Dems to portray Trump as a literal fascist instead of a very vulgar version of a garden variety Republican, much less admit that the Democrats share or at least don't genuinely oppose many of his policies. This crude misreading of the historical moment, grandiosity, and continued embrace of this narrative about fascism (which very conveniently and self servingly benefits mainstream liberalism) has infected almost every single aspect of the 2021 left. I'd like to say it was just Antifa (although they may be the worst), but it's much worse than that.
This is and always was the reason they get blowjobs from the NYTimes and academics on Twitter.
“they lack satisfying opportunities for violence in their lives, and protests create conditions where it’s easier to find targets and easier to evade arrest”
I think this explains a lot of the worst behavior on the left (from actual violence to cruel internet bullying). Some people are cynical assholes seeking an outlet, while others convince themselves that punching a conservative at a demonstration, or telling some alleged “Karen” she’s a worthless piece of shit on Twitter, are actually noble behaviors advancing the cause of social justice.
It’s especially easy to justify when the woke world constantly claims that disagreement = “violence” against marginalized people. Then whole groups of people (conservatives, white people, men, etc) become legitimate targets based on their identities and opinions. So you can be an aggressive, asshole bully, and as long as the optics are in order (your target has more “privilege” than you) people on the left will rally around you.
I would also point out that Portland is not inevitable. The riots there continue on and on and on because the local government is completely dysfunctional. Contrast the situation there with a place like Denver, which is also run by Democrats but took a totally different tack in dealing with riots: namely aggressive law enforcement coupled with both civil and criminal penalties.
In my experience, the main thing these people do is
1) give the cops a reason to start beating protestors
2) go to working-class neighbourhoods and break shit or cover it in graffiti.
And I'm not talking about the last few months, I mean going back decades. Anyone who's ever been on the Left has experienced this. That wonderful feeling when a protest is going OK until some middle-class kids dressed up as Batman start throwing bottles. But of course most internet leftists were apolitical until about five minutes ago and don't need to learn anything about history.
If your actions are indistinguishable from those of a police provocateur, you're working for the police no matter what you tell yourself.
“They almost never do anything but stand around in their ridiculous Matrix cosplay and try to look tough, which is hard to accomplish for a movement made up of slam poets and people who have nowhere to put the energy they used to put into Division II field hockey. ”
Freddie, I’m sending you a bill for an oxygen tank because this sentence caused me to laugh so hard I stopped breathing.
NGL I enjoyed the aesthetics of antifa over the past few years.
There was something hallucinatory and weird about a Left that included both deranged McCarthyite Russia-collusion paranoia (Maddow) and Weimar reenactments staged for social media by sociopathic theater kids.
If you squint your eyes you can see the violence of these pseudo-events as nihilistic performance art meant to illustrate how stunted politics are in our social media simulacrum.
Anyways, there's nothing there. Antifa is meaningful and of interest only at an intellectual remove: Tipping over a van for the disabled? Wonderful praxis! But in the light of day, without a filter, it's just pathetic, desperate, derangement.
"A country that has seen a near-total takeover of its institutions by fringe left social justice politics is not a country that is slipping into fascism"
Social justice politics is developing into its own form of totalitarianism. Wokies, for lack of a better name, are not content to just have their own discourse. They require that you participate. You have to use their language, hunt their witches and then stand around the fire. Failure to participate, or even any faint skepticism about the ongoings is enough to rouse suspicion. This wouldn't be of concern if you could opt out, but as it appears this shit is going to continue forcing its way into the real world. HR *will* force you into a DEI seminar, and your coworkers *will* dissaprove if you aren't ecstatic about it.
"...in elite universities where there’s total unanimity of opinion .."
True, and against the standard line that academics are all competing with each other via ideas and perspectives. Or the other line that academics all agree because they are smarter than us, and have a better hold on what's right. Someone needs to write a thorough analysis of this phenomenon. How is it that intense competitors will align, without formal agreement, in their interests to maintain power and exclude large numbers of people, while maintaining the façade of competition?
It makes me sad because I really believed in science and academia. It was so disappointing when I was there.
The costumes, the posturing: I think of pro wrestling every time I hear about these guys. And of course in pro wrestling you need an opponent. Nobody would pay to see Hulk Hogan climb into the ring by himself. Trump as usual had it half right. It's not a question of very fine people on both sides of the issue, it's that both sides have an ample supply of morons.
"...perpetual adolescents in paintball outfits wandering around looking for someone with wrists skinnier than theirs to fight."
Nancy Rommelman at Reason had an article about the antifa riots in Portland where she witnessed them trying to form up a "shield wall" to resist the police. When the cops, who are actual jocks, went in they tore through the formation using nothing but their bare hands to rip away their shields and shove people out of the way. As the Antifa crew limped away Rommelman couldn't help but notice how many of them were clumsy, or fat, or short. It makes me wonder if the real motive here is politics or deep seated personal issues.
1. Just letting you know that I'm stealing this framing: "You don't actually think that [X]. . . and this conversation would be a less tedious if you stopped pretending that you did."
I've been looking for precisely this riposte in so many different conversations about completely unrelated things.
2. This is the kind of analysis that I subscribed for. You're on the Left. I'm on the Right. Nobody cares if I'm ambivalent about antifa, especially as a historical phenomenon. But finding someone on the Left who can credibly describe this ambivalence from that perspective is really valuable.
3. A question though. Part of your critique here is that these days, a lot of antifa seems to be made up of "people who will go on to be dentists and lawyers flock to burning neighborhoods to playact revolutionary." I'm wondering whether that's true anymore. It may have been a decade or two ago, but I'm not convinced it is these days. I think a lot of the frustration here--not entirely unrelated to the frustration that gave us Trump!--is a lot of people who think they were supposed to go on to be dentists and lawyers, people who in decades past might well have done so. . . just aren't. There are a few high profile cases of actual lawyers getting caught up in this (see, e.g., those two lawyers in NYC that caught federal charges last year), but the "masked children raging at nothing in Portland" seem, to my admittedly uninformed perspective, to consist largely of people who will never have that kind of "success". There's nothing like thwarted expectations to cultivate resentment. Thoughts?
FWIW Freddie, I don't find that first paragraph insufferable at all. I see it as a necessary reminder that real activists do real on-the-ground work as opposed to just yell on Twitter, try to get people fired, and police their friends for wrongthink.
Not just a spot on evaluation of antifa and its recent history, but one of the few critiques of left protest culture from the inside that is candid and relevant. I’ve been active off and one in anti-intervention and social justice issues since the late 80s, and I’ve noticed that the crop of progressive activists tend to be very tight lipped and self-conscious in talking about this kind of stuff. Hopefully Freddy’s influence can let in some air, and light. Needless to say, I’ve had reservations about antifa for years — at protests I’ve observed they seem to be there primarily to find rightwingers they can gang up on and yell at. Was in a DSA reading group once where we read classic fascist texts. Was struck that any discussion of combating present day revolved around doxing and street militia activity. The lesson I took from the reading was that we had to do everything possible to make fascists didn’t any more recruits by offering regular people an alternative to fascism, by doubling down on organizing around housing, jobs, education.
I don't think Antifa are harmless. They destroy property and hurt innocent people. Here in Reno last year, we had one of those mostly peaceful protests where the city hall was overrun and vandalized (with a lot more damage that was caused by the (heh heh) "insurrectionists" of 6 January). We don't have a lot of black people here in Reno, but one of them, a journalist, was beaten up during the mostly peaceful protest by a couple of white people who drove 350 miles from a neighboring state apparently just to assault a black guy. This weird man-bites-dog story oddly didn't go very far in the national news, but was reported in our local fishwrap:
https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2020/06/15/journalist-attacked-black-lives-matter-protest-reno-city-hall/3149426001/
Meanwhile, in coastal cities there is fighting in the streets, instigated almost every time by people calling themselves Antifa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxSKVP__-ww
Looks a little like the Weimar Republic, no? That sure ended well.
These morons might not represent any sort of coherent political ideology, but they hurt people, destroy property and deliberately escalate all political (and even cultural) discussion and protest into violence. Insisting they aren't smart or subtle enough to represent an important political movement doesn't mean anything because I'm pretty sure few SA members were capable of arguing epistemology over their lagers, but they were effective nonetheless. I think it would be prudent to wait a few years and see how they color political discussion in this country before declaring them "mostly harmless."
Thanks for this necessary critique. Your history is a little off (ironically, it's bit too suffused with contemporary social justice politics.) Antifascists prowled the streets not simply (and not mainly) to protect immigrants and gay people from harassment. The first antifa in the U.S. consisted primarily of Italian immigrant leftists (anarchists, socialists, communists) who saw the danger that Mussolini and his brutal regime posed to democracy in Italy and around the world way before most anyone else in the U.S. or anywhere else outside of Italy did. Italian fascisti in the U.S. were not likely to harass immigrants UNLESS the immigrants were Italians who were openly anti-fascist. Mussolini worked hard to court Italian immigrants by appealing to their hurt pride from being shit on by WASPy Americans and other immigrants (mostly Irish), and he succeeded to a great degree. Those he couldn't convert to the cause he tried to intimidate in a variety of ways, including threats against family members back in Italy. Street fights between fascisti and antifascisti in the US were proxy wars, of a kind, in which antifascisti exacted revenge for the often fatal violence visited upon their comrades in Italy. Also, antifascisti refused to allow Mussolini to claim Italians in the US as his own. Until Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, Italian antifascisti were seen by most in the US as thugs. This perception was fueled by stereoptypes of Italians as stupid and prone to violence and by anti-communism. The thinking was, "If Mussolini hates communists (and socialists, and anarchists), he can't be all bad." But antifascisti also published newspapers, and created organizations (like the Anti-fascist Alliance of North America) to counter the influence of the fascisti among the immigrant community and to encourage people outside of leftist Italian immigrant circles to see the antidemocratic nature of fascism. Some American antifascists (in the 1920s there weren't many) made analogies between Mussolini's Blackshirts and the racism and anti-radicalism of the KKK and the American Legion. Hitler's rise to power confirmed the antifascisti's position that fascism would spread. 1930s antifascists, many of them members of the CPUSA, defended the rights of immigrants and actively fought against deportation of leftists on the grounds that they would be sent back to countries in which there was an active campaign against the left and thus their lives would be in danger. And of course, some antifascists went to Spain to fight the fascist General Franco. Unfortunately, many among antifa today have retained the tactics of their antecedents but not their political and organizational acumen, or, in the cases of the Spanish Civil War volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, their bravery. Sorry if this post is pedantic, but I am writing a book that contains a lot of stuff on anti-fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and I feel a loyalty to the original antifa.
I think the most cynical thing since 2016 is how anti-fascism got fuses with anti-trump, which got fused with carrying water for the Democrats. It was very useful for the Dems to portray Trump as a literal fascist instead of a very vulgar version of a garden variety Republican, much less admit that the Democrats share or at least don't genuinely oppose many of his policies. This crude misreading of the historical moment, grandiosity, and continued embrace of this narrative about fascism (which very conveniently and self servingly benefits mainstream liberalism) has infected almost every single aspect of the 2021 left. I'd like to say it was just Antifa (although they may be the worst), but it's much worse than that.
This is and always was the reason they get blowjobs from the NYTimes and academics on Twitter.
“they lack satisfying opportunities for violence in their lives, and protests create conditions where it’s easier to find targets and easier to evade arrest”
I think this explains a lot of the worst behavior on the left (from actual violence to cruel internet bullying). Some people are cynical assholes seeking an outlet, while others convince themselves that punching a conservative at a demonstration, or telling some alleged “Karen” she’s a worthless piece of shit on Twitter, are actually noble behaviors advancing the cause of social justice.
It’s especially easy to justify when the woke world constantly claims that disagreement = “violence” against marginalized people. Then whole groups of people (conservatives, white people, men, etc) become legitimate targets based on their identities and opinions. So you can be an aggressive, asshole bully, and as long as the optics are in order (your target has more “privilege” than you) people on the left will rally around you.
I would also point out that Portland is not inevitable. The riots there continue on and on and on because the local government is completely dysfunctional. Contrast the situation there with a place like Denver, which is also run by Democrats but took a totally different tack in dealing with riots: namely aggressive law enforcement coupled with both civil and criminal penalties.
In my experience, the main thing these people do is
1) give the cops a reason to start beating protestors
2) go to working-class neighbourhoods and break shit or cover it in graffiti.
And I'm not talking about the last few months, I mean going back decades. Anyone who's ever been on the Left has experienced this. That wonderful feeling when a protest is going OK until some middle-class kids dressed up as Batman start throwing bottles. But of course most internet leftists were apolitical until about five minutes ago and don't need to learn anything about history.
If your actions are indistinguishable from those of a police provocateur, you're working for the police no matter what you tell yourself.
“They almost never do anything but stand around in their ridiculous Matrix cosplay and try to look tough, which is hard to accomplish for a movement made up of slam poets and people who have nowhere to put the energy they used to put into Division II field hockey. ”
Freddie, I’m sending you a bill for an oxygen tank because this sentence caused me to laugh so hard I stopped breathing.
Grumpy Freddie and I'm here for it!
NGL I enjoyed the aesthetics of antifa over the past few years.
There was something hallucinatory and weird about a Left that included both deranged McCarthyite Russia-collusion paranoia (Maddow) and Weimar reenactments staged for social media by sociopathic theater kids.
If you squint your eyes you can see the violence of these pseudo-events as nihilistic performance art meant to illustrate how stunted politics are in our social media simulacrum.
Anyways, there's nothing there. Antifa is meaningful and of interest only at an intellectual remove: Tipping over a van for the disabled? Wonderful praxis! But in the light of day, without a filter, it's just pathetic, desperate, derangement.
"A country that has seen a near-total takeover of its institutions by fringe left social justice politics is not a country that is slipping into fascism"
Social justice politics is developing into its own form of totalitarianism. Wokies, for lack of a better name, are not content to just have their own discourse. They require that you participate. You have to use their language, hunt their witches and then stand around the fire. Failure to participate, or even any faint skepticism about the ongoings is enough to rouse suspicion. This wouldn't be of concern if you could opt out, but as it appears this shit is going to continue forcing its way into the real world. HR *will* force you into a DEI seminar, and your coworkers *will* dissaprove if you aren't ecstatic about it.
"...in elite universities where there’s total unanimity of opinion .."
True, and against the standard line that academics are all competing with each other via ideas and perspectives. Or the other line that academics all agree because they are smarter than us, and have a better hold on what's right. Someone needs to write a thorough analysis of this phenomenon. How is it that intense competitors will align, without formal agreement, in their interests to maintain power and exclude large numbers of people, while maintaining the façade of competition?
It makes me sad because I really believed in science and academia. It was so disappointing when I was there.
The costumes, the posturing: I think of pro wrestling every time I hear about these guys. And of course in pro wrestling you need an opponent. Nobody would pay to see Hulk Hogan climb into the ring by himself. Trump as usual had it half right. It's not a question of very fine people on both sides of the issue, it's that both sides have an ample supply of morons.
"...perpetual adolescents in paintball outfits wandering around looking for someone with wrists skinnier than theirs to fight."
Nancy Rommelman at Reason had an article about the antifa riots in Portland where she witnessed them trying to form up a "shield wall" to resist the police. When the cops, who are actual jocks, went in they tore through the formation using nothing but their bare hands to rip away their shields and shove people out of the way. As the Antifa crew limped away Rommelman couldn't help but notice how many of them were clumsy, or fat, or short. It makes me wonder if the real motive here is politics or deep seated personal issues.
1. Just letting you know that I'm stealing this framing: "You don't actually think that [X]. . . and this conversation would be a less tedious if you stopped pretending that you did."
I've been looking for precisely this riposte in so many different conversations about completely unrelated things.
2. This is the kind of analysis that I subscribed for. You're on the Left. I'm on the Right. Nobody cares if I'm ambivalent about antifa, especially as a historical phenomenon. But finding someone on the Left who can credibly describe this ambivalence from that perspective is really valuable.
3. A question though. Part of your critique here is that these days, a lot of antifa seems to be made up of "people who will go on to be dentists and lawyers flock to burning neighborhoods to playact revolutionary." I'm wondering whether that's true anymore. It may have been a decade or two ago, but I'm not convinced it is these days. I think a lot of the frustration here--not entirely unrelated to the frustration that gave us Trump!--is a lot of people who think they were supposed to go on to be dentists and lawyers, people who in decades past might well have done so. . . just aren't. There are a few high profile cases of actual lawyers getting caught up in this (see, e.g., those two lawyers in NYC that caught federal charges last year), but the "masked children raging at nothing in Portland" seem, to my admittedly uninformed perspective, to consist largely of people who will never have that kind of "success". There's nothing like thwarted expectations to cultivate resentment. Thoughts?
FWIW Freddie, I don't find that first paragraph insufferable at all. I see it as a necessary reminder that real activists do real on-the-ground work as opposed to just yell on Twitter, try to get people fired, and police their friends for wrongthink.
The penultimate paragraph here (leading with the "Buzzfuck.com" sentence) might be my new favorite thing ever written in English. Great read, Freddie.
Not just a spot on evaluation of antifa and its recent history, but one of the few critiques of left protest culture from the inside that is candid and relevant. I’ve been active off and one in anti-intervention and social justice issues since the late 80s, and I’ve noticed that the crop of progressive activists tend to be very tight lipped and self-conscious in talking about this kind of stuff. Hopefully Freddy’s influence can let in some air, and light. Needless to say, I’ve had reservations about antifa for years — at protests I’ve observed they seem to be there primarily to find rightwingers they can gang up on and yell at. Was in a DSA reading group once where we read classic fascist texts. Was struck that any discussion of combating present day revolved around doxing and street militia activity. The lesson I took from the reading was that we had to do everything possible to make fascists didn’t any more recruits by offering regular people an alternative to fascism, by doubling down on organizing around housing, jobs, education.