The violence and chaos that broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month during a rally for white supremacists and neo-Nazis propelled a lesser-known group into the mainstream political vernacular: antifa.
President Donald Trump used the word himself at a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday evening.
"They show up in the helmets and the black masks and they've got clubs — they've got everything," he said. "Antifa!"
Trump was most likely referring to antifa activists when he blamed "many sides" for the Charlottesville violence in his initial statement on the matter. At a press conference later that week, Trump criticized what he called the "alt-left" for "charging with clubs" at the rally.
Antifa activists were among the many counterprotesters who mobilized in response to the white nationalist rally in Virginia. But the network of activists has been making waves across the US long before violence erupted in Charlottesville.
In and around Portland, Oregon, antifa activists smashed windows and hurled smoke bombs during a series of riots following Trump's election. They also took to the campus of the University of California at Berkeley in February to rail against a scheduled speech by the conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
The activists, dressed in black and wearing bandanas to obscure their faces, smashed store windows, set fires, threw Molotov cocktails, and rioted during what was originally intended to a be a peaceful protest.
Here's what you need to know about the controversial activist movement:
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What is antifa?
Antifa, short for "anti-fascist," describes a decentralized, leaderless movement dedicated to combatting right-wing authoritarianism and white supremacy. It has existed for decades but gained prominence after the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, and it has been at the center of numerous violent clashes and protests in the ensuing months.
Its members include a mixture of anarchists, socialists, communists, and other far-left activists. It's unclear how many people count themselves as members, but local, autonomous chapters or cells exist in major cities across the US, in many cases accompanied by sizable online followings.
The movement's adherents reject the notion that white supremacy can be quashed by any government apparatus and believe it instead must be eradicated through direct action.
Sometimes that action consists of traditional community-organizing efforts like peacefully protesting or fundraising. In other cases, antifa activists have staged doxxing campaigns to expose suspected white supremacists to their employer or landlord and have sometimes used violence to clash with those they view as fascist.
Antifa activists believe that legislative efforts or action from law enforcement are not only insufficient in expunging racist or fascist viewpoints but perpetuate them.
These beliefs were put on full display during the Charlottesville, Virginia, rally, when counterprotesters complained that the police had neglected to protect them from violence. It was antifa, instead, that had physically defended vulnerable counterprotesters and prevented further bloodshed, they argue.
"The police didn't do anything in terms of protecting the people of the community, the clergy," Cornel West, a prominent academic and activist, told The Washington Post. "If it hadn't been for the anti-fascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches."
The origins of antifa
Antifa's origins are sometimes attributed to European movements in the 1930s against Nazis in Germany and Blackshirts in Italy, though a more direct and contemporary ancestor of the movement would be the far-left activists who opposed British neo-Nazis in the 1970s and 1980s during the height of the punk-rock subculture's popularity.
In the US and Canada, the Anti-Racist Action Network sprang up around the same time in the 1980s in a similarly loose and decentralized state that antifa exists in today.
America's oldest antifa group that still operates is Rose City Antifa, which formed in 2007 in Portland, Oregon, according to Mark Bray, a historian and Dartmouth College lecturer who has written a book titled "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook."
Bray wrote in The Washington Post that these early antifa adherents typically faced outright animosity from the mainstream left for their attention to what was then seen as fringe, racist groups instead of tackling "more large-scale, systemic injustices."
"Years before the alt-right even had a name, antifascists were spending thankless hours scouring seedy message boards and researching clandestine neo-Nazi gatherings," Bray wrote. "They were tracking those who planted the seeds of the death that we all witnessed in Charlottesville."
Antifa, in its members' own words
Antifa members don't hesitate to describe their movement as one that uses any means necessary to oppose fascism.
A manual for organizing local antifa groups published on It's Going Down, an antifa-supporting journal, advises prospective members to stay anonymous, track and document "white nationalist, Far Right, and fascist activity," and organize demonstrations to counter events held by white nationalists or members of the so-called alt-right.
The manual warns against accepting "people who just want to fight," adding that "physically confronting and defending against fascists is a necessary part of anti-fascist work, but is not the only or even necessarily the most important part."
"No, I did not behave peacefully when I saw a thousand Nazis occupy a sizable American city," one activist wrote in a letter published on It's Going Down. "I fought them with the most persuasive instruments at hand, the way both my grandfathers did. I was maced, punched, kicked, and beaten with sticks, but I gave as good as I got, and usually better. Donald Trump says that 'there was violence on both sides.' Of course there was."
The necessity of violence in the face of what they perceive as a growing fascist threat is a sentiment expressed by many antifa adherents, who emphasize that white nationalists often cannot be reasoned with or otherwise opposed.
"You need violence in order to protect nonviolence," Emily Rose Nauert, an antifa member best known for being punched in the face by a white nationalist during a clash at Berkeley in April, told The New York Times. "That's what's very obviously necessary right now. It's full-on war, basically."
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