That’s pretty vague, can you be more specific? What issue do you have in mind? What is an example of someone claiming that “speech merits a violent response”?
One opinion piece says that Antifa is too violent. Another argues that threats of violence can be harmful.
I don’t see any example of someone saying that “speech merits a violent response”, which is what I was requesting.
If you don't know anything about the survey, read the survey. I intentionally linked the results because I didn't want to present a biased synthesis as fact.
Antifa holds that opinion, and believes violence is justified in return.
From the Atlantic piece previously linked:
> the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.”
> An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”
> Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.
> A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos. After the university canceled the speech out of what it called “concern for public safety,” white nationalists announced a “March on Berkeley” in support of “free speech.” At that rally, a 41-year-old man named Kyle Chapman, who was wearing a baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, and a mask, smashed an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Suddenly, Trump supporters had a viral video of their own. A far-right crowdfunding site soon raised more than $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense. (In January, the same site had offered a substantial reward for the identity of the antifascist who had punched Spencer.) A politicized fight culture is emerging, fueled by cheerleaders on both sides. As James Anderson, an editor at It’s Going Down, told Vice, “This shit is fun.”
Did you read all of those pieces in the eight minutes between my comment and yours? Your arguments suggest you don't. You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
I did not.
> You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
If your goal was to answer my question (ignoring the fact that you misread my question in the first place), then a more effective approach would have been to write an answer. That answer could have included quotes from your material. It is customary to include links to the raw material backing up your quotes, as a footnote.
Instead you just dumped links with no explanation or context. After a few minutes of skimming your material, a coherent point failed to magically appear.
So no, sorry, I’m not going to invest an hour of my time doing research on your own material to produce an answer you couldn’t be bothered to articulate yourself.
Silencing an opposing political opinion through violence is a definition of fascism.
Correct we call that terrorism when it is to further your own political, religious, social, racial, or environmental views.
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
How correct they are about what they’re fighting is a separate question. As you have demonstrated, there are many different definitions of fascism. The Berlin Wall was described as the “anti-fascism protection wall” by the DDR. And, of course, “my opponent is literally Hitler” is widely dismissed as a melodramatic overstatement.
However, if we presuppose that they are correct about who they are targeting — sadly plausible, given how many genocides followed the one in WW2 — then to say that Antifa as a movement is itself “fascist” is like saying that the Allied powers in WW2 were “fascist” for violently opposing the “political opinion” of Herr Adolf H. and Signore Benito M.