White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter

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191 pointsaspenmayer225 comments

Blaming the boogy man of White Nationalists, Russia, or outside outside agitators is a way to shift blame by politicians and an easy scapegoat. Amusingly the governor of Minnesota, and a big city MN mayor blamed vandalism & lootingrioters as being the work of people who were all from out of state, thereby parroting Trump's same line (or he theirs).

They (not Trump of course) had to walk it back when it turned out not to be true.

Is there some outside groups posing as others, possibly, but to blame a majority of problems on them is just BS.

Unfortunately, you seem to be right. The Governor of Minnesota admitted precisely that, stating simply that he didn’t want to believe that his own people could act that way.

Scapegoating allows politicians to avoid angering their own constituents, and it also makes it rhetorically easier for politicians to avoid taking the demands seriously.

And a significant fraction (1/6 to 1/3) of arrests have been from out of state. So, the original claims had an element of truth.

But I disagree with you that it’s just “BS”, which would imply a level of cynicism which may exists, but for which you provided no evidence.

I wonder what's the mechanism of coordination among various parties for them to converge at the right time and place for a protest?

Riots are a classic coordination problem [1]. Peaceful protests, of course, can use official means of communication. The hard part is how to coordinate violence and looting, which would otherwise preempted by law enforcement. The linked essay is a fascinating read on the topic.

[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disor...

Whatever means of mass communication is at hand? Facebook? Twitter? Whatsapp?

I remember during the 2010 London riots it was alleged that the organisation was happening over Blackberry Messenger, and the government was outraged that RIM refused to turn over decrypted messages to them.

And a few months later they did research on it and it turned out to be driven mostly by television coverage.

I live in Minneapolis less than a mile from the fifth precinct. There are in fact metric F-Tons of out of state cars in the neighborhood since late last week. Tons of violence tourists driving around gawking, and several cars with NO plates trawling around to boot. The thugaroos we've seen "patrolling", and who neighbors have had "friendly" chats with have been rural white guys feigning concern (White-knighting, one might even say) that we dont have enough guns to protect ourselves. The burning has been targeted at certain businesses that nobody local has beef with (Ie the post office- that racist institution, the gas station that everyone buys their gas from- even if you hate gas companies and hate standing in line, you recognize when you're hurting your neighbors).

Sure, the police haven't arrested many of these out of staters, non-community members, but they are most certainly here. They had to walk back their comments because they can't just say "but we're there in the community and we see it".

Would you also say that rioters can be blamed for some of the damage, or only politicians? I'm pretty sure I've seen videos of people looting stores and beating up others.

I hated that tactic in my own country, where some of my fellow rioters last year blamed covert police agents for the damage and provoking violence, and I hope you hate that tactic from your own side as well.

By calling it a tactic, you make it sound like it's a lie. But these things are in fact happening. There certainly is a lot of noise - false positives, false negatives - but false flagging is occurring.

It is a lie, to be involved and advocate violence on demonstrations - but later to claim any actual violence was done by provocateurs. And it also is a tactic, even though mostly not a conscious one.

At least, this is my experience with large parts of the german (radical) left movement. It is allmost surreal, when you follow the left wing online news ticker about the demonstration and everything that happens. Police and fascist violence there and there and again there! And when you also follow neutral mediums or the other side, or are even there to see for yourself. Because then you can see quite some leftist/antifa violence or threats of violence, as well.

The agressors are allwas the others, the police and fascists, never they themself. And sure, police and fascists do use aggressive violence. And in numbers probably a lot more. But not only them. So it is a tactic. It is propaganda. I have seen all three sides (antifa, police and fascist) use it. And was quite some of that violence in fact done by covert police? Possible. But usually with the applause of the crowd.

(And the german right-wing movement is of course even worse at being hypocrites, because no one there is officially a rassist or a nazi and they get angry, if you point out rassist or nazi-ideologie arguments they made)

So true. It's just an attempt to control the storyline. PR 101. And when their political opposition has a peaceful protest or gathering with a few rogue individuals (or actual fraudulent hired "actors" in some cases) then they label the entire group bad.

Now, I don't think the bulk of the looters are bad people. But to change the narrative to be anything other than a REALLY TERRIBLE PR move by young people being opportunistic is absurd. For the truck driver who was beaten, the MSM were calling the violent protestors brave.

It comes down to this - are you helping the cause or hurting the cause? Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause and they're making every excuse under the sun. To think that humans, by and large, will look past it (for right or wrong) is out of touch with reality.

And if you criticize the means in any way, you get attacked even if you support the same change. In my opinion, to suggest that young black people are so pliable and incapable of thinking that some posts by a rogue group would turn them into robotic looters is racist in itself.

Young people semi organized and did some dumb stuff and justified it because of rightful injustice. Are they bad? No. Was it wise? Of course not. That's what happened.

Outside of that - I've been involved in a coroner's inquest before as my jury duty and it was very interesting. You basically are tasked with deciding whether a death was homicide, suicide or natural causes. I've heard about these civilian oversight boards as the answer but they have challenges with "local political manipulation" and require "steep budgets for investigators" [1]

So from my coroner's inquest experience, I was thinking - you already have civilians. It's efficient. If an officer is involved and the coroner's inquest participants rule it to be a homicide - boom, you could mandate an automatic trial!

This seems like it would be easier to roll out, more efficient, and provide pure accountability to any officer involved shooting. They'd know they would be legally required to go to trial if the coroner's inquest ruled a homicide.

Certainly, some evidence could still be tampered with by the powers that be, but that would elude the civilian oversight boards too in those cases. And with body cams, social media and business and civilian cameras, it's gotten much harder for them to hide evidence. So if you have an easy path to a trial originating from jury peers after coroner input, then you have a ton more accountability.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/is-civilian-overs...

On the other hand, Seattle has seen many, many citizens arriving after the riots with brooms and dustpans, cleaner and rags. They're cleaning up the damage and the graffiti. They're good people. I wish they'd get a lot more media coverage. Makes me proud of Seattle.

"Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause"

The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.

I grabbed this quote from your reply specifically because it seems to make the claim that people who belive in social justice are delusional, heavily-biased, and are entirely or at least largely in support of looting. I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.

"Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)

In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places. This tweet has one, but there are many in the responses to that tweet as well: https://twitter.com/gryking/status/1267101707596632066

> I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.

There definitely are people making such arguments. The assertion is that property is the root cause of injustice so presumably destroying it is just. See for example https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1267402206220869632

What puzzles me is that some people supporting this argument are highly paid software engineers. How do they reconcile this with the fact that it is precisely the concept of private property (and yes, violent enforcement of it) that allows them to sit in front of the computer all day building some cool stuff and not worry that some violent thug will break into their house and take away their laptop?

You can be the beneficiary of a system and still understand that there are specific positive externalities of that system's partial failure.

For example, a corrupt politician can understand why an anti-bribery campaign is beneficial for his country.

I think it's fair to say that destruction of private property turns the situation into an economic problem, which in turn is a political pressure point. Rich people have more influence over police departments and attorneys general than do poor people. But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."

(That justice may come in the form of charges against specific police officers, or perhaps as a campaign of institutional reforms within the police apparatus.)

When you loot a store in your area, you aren't hurting "rich people", because they aren't a unified blob. You're just hurting a few people, like this guy and his wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uqOM94RJVc Eventually they will bounce back and restart somewhere else, where they are more welcome. But your area will have fewer businesses and jobs for a long time, because you've showed everyone the return on investment.

Edit: it seems exactly this happened after the Ferguson riots https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ferguson-anniversary-fina...

Baltimore has NOT recovered from it's 2015 riots.

Why should the looters care? How do the looters benefit from having stores in their area that they are too poor to buy from? The taxes from these stores are less and less helping them with social programs etc and go more towards funding police departments that brutalize them.

> The taxes from these stores are less and less helping them with social programs etc and go more towards funding police departments that brutalize them.

That sounds like an assumption whose truth is heavily dependent on being in a specific locality.

> How do the looters benefit from having stores in their area that they are too poor to buy from?

Again, an assumption that is highly dependent on geography and specific looting. You're also assuming that the looters are necessarily poor -- forgetting about, for example, organized crime.

>But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."

Consider for a moment what the optimal strategy would be to handle this vandalism and looting from the perspective of "Rich people." A) Capitulate to the demands of people using terror / destruction of property as leverage B) Utilize the vast resources available to you to end the source of the problem

I think your heart is in the right place in a very Robin Hood-esque kind of way but you're not grappling with reality if you think "give us justice and the looting will end" is going to play out favorably for the looters

I'm not Robin Hood, but I appreciate that you are looking for a friendly and non-pejorative way to engage someone with whom you disagree.

Those vast resources that you mention (police and military) are at the very core of the conflict. Their use of force has only exacerbated the problem, because people spread videos of unjustifiable abuses (three cops brutalizing one prostrate individual in LA, a cop hitting protestors with his vehicle in NYC, a brigade of cops shooting law-abiding people on their own porch in Minneapolis, etc) that in turn draw more protestors to the fore.

Your A/B scenario is precisely the problem -- you equate the soothing of public anger with "capitulation" rather than "justice," and you make violence an imperative by arguing that the only strong approach is the brutal one.

Not to mention that you express a view that police brutality can "end the source of the problem." What is the source of the problem, if not police brutality itself? Were Americans violating curfews to demonstrate in the streets of major cities immediately prior to the murder of George Floyd?

> You can be the beneficiary of a system and still understand that there are specific positive externalities of that system's partial failure. For example, a corrupt politician can understand why an anti-bribery campaign is beneficial for his country.

True, but presumably these software engineers that I was talking about think about the ability to do their work as something worthy and morally good, not simply as a benefit that they get from a corrupt system. On the other hand, corrupt politicians don't think of bribes as something desirable to have in a system: they either cynically exploit their position for strictly personal gain or think of themselves as victims of the system who are forced to take bribes.

> I think it's fair to say that destruction of private property turns the situation into an economic problem, which in turn is a political pressure point. Rich people have more influence over police departments and attorneys general than do poor people. But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."

This can be a valid strategy. I am reminded of someone who successfully executed this strategy: ANC and Nelson Mandela. But they were very clear in their demands and always stressed that they were reluctantly engaging in violence only because they had exhausted all peaceful methods. In contrast it seems that many who support recent riots are not very interested in actual solutions to the problem and only want to stick it to the Man in some way.

It's also important to distinguish between the protests vs elements using the protests (and pandemic) as a cover for crime. In NYC it least, it seems that the protests & those looting are two separate groups.

To your point about a few bad cops, the "bad apples" theory is just a way for institutional leaders to throw blame away from their own leadership, by isolating the blame to a few low-level individuals. We have to get away from the "bad apples" theory and start thinking about "bad barrels" that spoil the apples within.

We know how a riot can be a bad barrel that leads the people involved to do bad things. But a riot is not a day-to-day occurrence with its own persistent culture.

On the other hand, a police department does have a persistent culture, and we don't exactly understand how or why some police departments engender more brutality than others.

"The Lucifer Effect" is a very interesting book on the institutional dynamics that lead otherwise normal people to do horrific things. It is written by Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Experiment fame. He is a proponent of the "bad barrel" theory.

> We have to get away from the "bad apples" theory and start thinking about "bad barrels" that spoil the apples within.

The phrase that "bad apples" is taken from is "A few bad apples spoil the bunch". It's one of many phrases that has entered the common consciousness in partial form with the exact opposite meaning of its original intention.

I'm borrowing Dr. Zimbardo's terminology, and I believe it is accurate in that he says we cannot attribute spoilage of the bunch to a few bad apples.

His counterpoint is that a bad barrel can spoil a bunch of perfect apples. Good people can commit evil actions when they are put into bad social structures.

The spoilage in the "bad barrel" model comes from the containing structure, not from within its contents.

If you have a good barrel, you can keep bad apples more or less fresh. And if you have a bad barrel, even the best apples will spoil.

More literally: our focus should be on the command structures, accountability practices, disciplinary bodies, legal liability, and training programs within police departments -- rather than blaming systemic problems on a handful of white supremacists, careless brutes, or sociopaths.

> I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause

I've also never seen anyone make the argument that excessive use of force by US police officers is helpful.

That gives us two extremes that we can eliminate from the discussions. There are no people who think illegal force used by the police is good, nor is there people who think looting is helping the cause of stopping the police from using illegal amount of force. Two strawmen done and dusted.

> "Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops."

101 in in-group and out-group human behavior research. The in-group is always made out of individuals and a few bad apples can never represent the group that a persons self belong to. The out-group however is in contrast a homogenic group. The purpose of having a clearly defined group to define as "them" is to avoid having to spend the energy to individualizing every member. It is a type of lazy thinking. Both the police and the protesters has bad people in them and good people, you only need to look at the individual level.

> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost

If we expect every post on social media to include boiler plate signaling then it kind of losses meaning. Everyone already agree that illegal use of force by the police is bad and should be prosecuted. We have democratic created laws that says so and no movement to remove them. The problem lies at the pseudo kinship relations that a band-of-brothers style police force has when it is tasked to enforce those laws against the in-group.

> Both the police and the protesters has bad people in them and good people, you only need to look at the individual level.

A crucial difference is that the police is an actual entity/organization, and one that is entirely responsible for its members. The whole problem is that this organization is not properly keeping their 'bad apples' in check, and even actively shielding them from consequence.

On top of that, this organization is immensely powerful, has ridiculous weaponry (and some degree of training), and is legally allowed to do a lot of violent things that most other 'groups' or individuals are not.

I think it's absolutely fair to consider the police as a group (while acknowledging that it has 'good' members), and make more individual distinction concerning the protesters.

I also think it's not a coincidence that Trump and various others are pitching the "it's Antifa destroying our cities" or for that matter even the whole idea that Antifa is a properly organized entity. So much easier to justify the use of force against the whole lot of protesters!

It perfectly possible to address the issue of an organization without treating its members as homogenic group. There is however a greater risk here that by treating them as non-individuals, the only group they are allowed to be part of is the pseudo family that the police force develops. If we want to deescalate violence and hostility, treating people as individuals is a crucial step.

Telling organizations to keeping their 'bad apples' in check is an up hill battle, as within a in-group you don't see bad apples as representing the group. They are seen as individuals that did a bad choice, took a wrong turn, and as any individual they are given chances to change and do better. With pseudo kinship this get amplified, as its a fundamental aspect of most cultures that you treat kinship different than "others". Issues get handled and address within the family.

In order to break such patter you need to get cops more integrated into the society that they serve, increase pay in order to increase the status of the job within the rest of the community, decrease the inherent risks so that individuals has to rely less on a "family" to protect then, and increase the training period.

Nothing of that will help of course when governments start to use the military against protestors. Here in Sweden we have had several different parliaments trying to make clever hacks in order to prevent future parliaments from making such decision. At a time they even gave the power as an exclusive right under the king with the general idea beying that since the king does not participate politics and no future parliament would dare to take something from the king once given. Others have written laws forbidding parliament for taking such decisions. Currently it has been 89 years, and the event that caused such heavy opposition against military use against protestors, Ådalshändelserna, is still referenced in modern day politics. No matter what you don't send military against protestors.

> but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops

I am pretty sure that they do, at least in my mind as well as in the minds of my friends. Especially due to the amount of incidents. You can criticize one side without supporting the other.

> there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places

And there are a quite few where they haven't. This movement consists of different people with different beliefs after all.

Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)

I have literally, a few months ago, responded to comments on this site where people claimed all police were bad because of the bad actions of some.

Tribalism is a real thing, and it results in dehumanization of the other "side", and opportunistic labelling.

In 2019, 259 black people were killed by police. In the same year, 189 Hispanic people were killed by police. 406 white people were killed as well. 17 Asians. Obviously, blacks are overrepresented.

Data here: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

When was the last time you saw a national news media report on a non-black person being unjustly killed by police? It happens, and the cops get let off, routinely. Daniel Shaver is a particularly egregious example, and the lack of national media coverage helps ensure that the cops aren't held accountable. The cop who murdered him was acquitted, and temporarily rehired to let him collect a 2400 a month pension.

The national media wants this framed as PURELY a racial issue, when the reality is that it's a mix of race, police militarization, and lack of police accountability due to cozy relationship with prosecutors.

This racial framing is unnecessarily tribal, and undermines the effectiveness of achieving a meaningful goal that helps reduce this behavior by police.

The racial framing is also relevant to the black lived reality, which is why black people get more involved in protests. It isn’t a far off, hypothetical issue. It disproportionately affects them still to this day, despite all their protests and efforts. That has to take a toll.

> In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places.

Watching livestreams from demonstrations in my city I saw a lot of this. Local people, mostly guys, were marching and sticking around until the later evening hours to stream live. They were basically patrolling and keeping an eye out for anyone who threw stuff, got out fireworks, or started a fight.

I saw them grab one kid who threw a bottle into a line of cops and chase him down as he ran away. Then when some others began yelling to "kick his ass!" the same guys held anyone back from starting a fight. It was community de-escalation and struck a stark contrast with the gassing and rubber bullets I've seen.

Any time you get a whole bunch of people crammed in together with emotions running high, there's a chance someone will decide to break stuff or punch someone. Seeing the crowd self-policing like this gave me the tiniest bit of hope.

> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers

This is precisely my point. The looting and destruction creates a major secondary storyline that has taken over. And that you're delusional if you think it isn't hurting the cause.

> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.

For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed.*

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...

* For every 10,000 white people arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed. (ducks ... and runs away)

I know commenting about moderation is against the HN guidelines but I'll do it anyway:

It's incredibly sad a comment that adds actual data to a conversation is being downmodded.

If you haven't noticed, the recent cases in the news involve suspected check forgery, jogging down a street, and sitting in one's own home, not arrests for violent crime. Save your talking points for when they're actually relevant.

> suspected check forgery,

This guy had, according to the coroner's report, recently used meth, had fentanyl in his system and the police stated he resisted arrest. He also has a police report from 2007 where he pointed a gun at a pregnant lady's belly to restrain her while his partner ransacked her apartment for jewelry and drugs. Sounds peaceful to you?

https://www.theblaze.com/news/george-floyd-fentanyl-methamph... https://files.catbox.moe/f4ylk1.jpeg

(and BTW it was a forged $20 bill, not check forgery)

> jogging down a street

You use this as an example of police brutality in which the police weren't even involved. And then you immediately follow with "Save your talking points for when they're actually relevant"? Will you?

> sitting in one's own home

Breonna Taylor, a black woman, who's boyfriend shot first at the police when the executed a no-knock warrant. Does this sound racially motivated to you? If they were white, would the officers not shoot back?

Maybe you should stop skimming headlines of MSM and start actually trying to uncover the whole story before you help perpetuate a race war with lazy, anecdotal and misleading examples masquerading as actual talking points.

So basically, none of these cases have anything to do with arrests for violent crimes, like I said.

I did not, however, say any of the other things you are attributing to me.

>Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors

This is deeply hypocritical name-calling, and undermines your writing by implying that you, yourself, might be heavily biased.

Sorry, I call it like I see it and if you think looting is helping the cause (the part you omitted) then I stand by it. I was talking about young people who would say their actions are helping and I was also talking about their supporters who rationalize it as ok and helping.

Using adjectives to describe the headspace of people who are committing crimes or supporting those that do that aren't even related to the injustices at hand, destroying businesses and other people's places of work, etc, is not name-calling.

This particular case becomes very interesting since it made its viral round in conservative circles on social networks. People waking up their kids in the middle of the night to get them ready, while loading guns because of the manipulation of this Twitter account. That then ended up posing a real threat since a lot of conservative people was up in arms with loaded guns, and any sort of innocent scenario could have had a deadly outcome

But the article itself is factual.

Yeah all those white supremacists in Portland. Definitely not Antifa: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Z6Jvy1Rf0

There are in fact a disproportionate number of white supremacists in Portland; Oregon itself was founded as a whites-only state, and it was illegal for black people to live there until 1926. The state's constitution on admission to the Union carried a black-exclusion clause.

Portland itself outlawed black residents in the 1840s and that law stood for many decades. It's only very recently that Portland has developed the reputation for having a liberal populace; as recently as the 1990s it was essentially the white supremacy capital of the west coast.

Looks like rioters to me. There's certainly not enough evidence in that video to prove any sort of group/political affiliation.

The problem is antifa has become the new boogy man for the GOP, and they've been pushing this narrative extremely hard. It's apparent they've identified their enemy, but this approach has me worried that "First they came for the antifa..." might not be far off.

I see a lot of mischaracterization of what is a category, not a group. From what I can tell antifa is anti-fascism, and somewhat characterized by people willing to take direct action.

If you’ve watched the ubiquitous video footage of protests where the left and right confront each other over the past 4 years, antifa is a clear group and aggressor. I have a friend in the “chapter” here, what loose categories have chapters? They treat it as a group/organization. They seem to be more organized than the Proud Boys, which plenty of people on the left deem a white supremacy organization.

It’s funny to me that now they are a target, people are trying to play down their involvement in the political landscape the past few years.

I’ve watched them shut down speech, aggressively block events from happening, attack people in MAGA hats, there is so much hate pouring out of them that they are more fascist than anti-fascist.

And yet, viewing that same myriad of videos, I see the exact opposite: That more hatred, threats of violence, and actual violence comes from the alt-right / white nationalists / MAGA provocateurs (depending on the video), and antifa simply returns that antagonism. Of course there are examples both ways, but speaking in terms of averages here, it doesn't even seem like a close call. Antifa's reaction's aren't always right, but neither is belting a guy who spits on you in a bar, yet I can't blame the puncher, and the bias is obvious if somebody gets up on a pulpit and claims moral superiority over the despicable violent puncher who viciously attacked the poor innocent spitter. I wish everybody could be Ghandi in the face of the ever-growing tidal wave of hatred, mockery, and gleeful threats of violence, but it's unrealistic to lay the blame primarily at the target's feet when they fail to rise to that level.

I totally agree. I think the far right and far left groups that act in this manner are both despicable. These groups are each possessed by an ideology and their primitive nature makes them try to force their will on one another. I personally wish we can someday go back to diversity of thought without worrying about getting your head bashed in.

For the GOP? Even Trevor Noah called them Vegan ISIS.

Trevor Noah frequently makes fun of the side he finds reasonable way more than the side he disagrees with. He hosts a comedy show.

"Antifa" is not just "anti-fascism". It is short for "Antifaschistische Aktion" and is an umbrella term for loosely related groups of extremist Anarchists/Communists who share the same symbolism, rethoric and tactics.

This is the definition of the word, no matter how much lefists try to whitewash the term and shift the overton window.

Those are some quick downvotes although I literally wrote the definition of "Antifa" that you can find on Wikipedia. Some people really don't like the truth.

Maybe because you are cherry-picking one definition, as-if what matters is what the term used to mean 75 years ago?

Wikipedia points to many resources about Antifa movements, starting from here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa

And you only care to pick one narrow definition.

> what matters is what the term used to mean 75 years ago?

You got it backwards.

The only definition from that page that is not related to some extremist marxist/anarchist movement is this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism

And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.

Today, "Antifa" is synonymous with "Antifaschistische Aktion".

> The only definition from that page that is not related to some extremist marxist/anarchist movement is this article

Why is it important for you to filter some definitions out?

> And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.

There are historical reasons that explain why Antifa caught up as a name, what logo activists use, etc. The abbreviation did not change, it still stands for "anti-fascim actions" today, or "Antifaschistische Aktion" in German.

But you are saying Antifa is synonymous, ie. equal to "Antifaschistische Aktion", not for what the words mean, but in a literal way, to restrict the definition. No matter how the name came to life, the spirit behind it is broader that the name; nowadays it is a perfectly fine shortcut for anti-fascism.

I mean, dictionaries tend to agree on this one:

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/antifa

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Antifa

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antifa

The dictionary !=== truth. At best it's truthy. Wikipedia probably even less so when it comes to political stuff.

I know a number of people in various countries who participate in Antifa action and who, while definitely left of center, are by no means anarchists or communists, and not even close to Marxists-Leninists or whatever other hard-left groups there are.

Some of their direct action includes running up behind people and striking them with a bike lock across the back of their head for the crime of voting the "wrong" way.

You're just doing the same thing again, using a vague "they" to extrapolate from cherry picked examples onto an amorphous mass, without even bothering to dress up the dissonance between that and "bike lock", singular.

> an amorphous mass

No mass is 100% identical though, so "you can't use some individual actions to project on the group they chose to be part of and that chooses to accept them" really just makes the concept of groups useless.

"No, that specific action wasn't covered by our shared intent, so obviously we will accept responsibility for it" is something I believe pretty much everybody will agree on after the action has happened and has resulted in negative feedback. Had it produced applause and achieved the goal of the group, they would have celebrated it.

> "you can't use some individual actions to project on the group they chose to be part of and that chooses to accept them"

You certainly can't cherry pick them (one instance of violence versus billions of instances of peacefulness, for example), apart from "group that chooses to accept them" not applying here.

> Had it produced applause and achieved the goal of the group, they would have celebrated it.

Had there been anye instances of violence by people calling themselves antifa, those seeking to defend the ongoing, systematic violence would have invented instances of violence of people they call antifa. See how that works, or rather, how it doesn't?

True, if it was billions to one, I'd probably agree with you. It's not though, not being peaceful is pretty much one of the core defining features of the black bloc. And let's not go down the road with claims of "all the other instances are Nazis or undercover cops trying to hurt the movement". I have serious doubts regarding the Nazis (I knew a few people in Antifa circles back in the day and you don't go unnoticed with your shit just because you wear a black sweat shirt, like every sub-culture they have lots of Shibboleths), and the undercover cops are mostly observers, not instigators (though I'm sure they will take part in riots if it helps their cover or their case).

> See how that works, or rather, how it doesn't?

My point is that disowning a member's actions when they aren't considered favorably post factum is what pretty much every group does. If Antifa/black bloc were actively promoting non-violence, that would be a different issue, but this rather sounds like the Daily Stormer saying "we don't condone violence wink wink" when another one of their goons snaps and shoots up a mosque.

> It's not though, not being peaceful is pretty much one of the core defining features of the black bloc.

If the black bloc was all of antifa, it would just be called antifa. Outside the black bloc, direct action covers a lot of things, from just organizing all sorts of things (not just protests), art and being loud, to vandalism and even violence.

Just take all the sorts of things that were done in human history while claiming it was for freedom, both bad and good. Does that make any person doing thing X in the name of freedom responsible for what a person doing Y in the name of freedom? You can call those people a "group" all day long, but that doesn't mean they're actually a group in the sense of voting on their values and actions.

Citation needed

I believe the parent comment is referencing the 2017 Berkeley incident where a professor ambushed multiple conservative and libertarian protesters from behind, hitting them in the back of the head with a bike lock.

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3...

3 years probation for whacking 7 people in the head--something that could very easily result in death. A person his age knew this without a doubt.

How he didn't get 7 counts of attempted murder is beyond me.

Presumably, as a professor of ethics are Berkeley, he was hitting people in the head with a bike lock in an ethical manner.

It's literally not an organization. There are lots of people that have anti-fascist stickers or flags or whatever in europe that explicitly exist to stand up for people when nazis/neo-nazis show up to protests, or to their squats, or to their homes... they exist to save peoples lives from right-wing violence.

It's pitiful that this is the best boogeyman the right can come up with in 2020 and it's extra pitiful that - like everything else they project - it's just them telling on themselves.

> It's literally not an organization.

And that's the problem.

This story is natural clickbait because you have literal fascists claiming to be anti-fascist, which is an obvious contradiction.

But if Antifa is just anybody who is against fascism then violent anti-fascists are Antifa. You can't say they're not when they actually are against fascism. And without any official leadership to disavow the advocation of violence, now your label is tainted by violent evildoers and you get to enter the grab-bag of boogymen for whenever somebody needs one.

its even more pitiful how many are cheerleading this shit on HN

I don't think you're allowed to point it out here, but there is a large audience here that is a massive part of the problem. rich, influential people with power (whether they use it or not) riding this generation's wave of prosperity with no knowledge of or interest in the people that are affected by their jobs and lifestyles.

smart enough to learn to code or to polish a pitch to a vc, but lacking any critical thinking skills or morality that would cause them to reflect on their position in society.

flocking to the right at the first hint of something that does reflect these truths.

supporting fascists because you're scared or uncomfortable is even worse than supporting fascists because you're a bigot imo

>smart enough to learn to code or to polish a pitch to a vc, but lacking any critical thinking skills or morality that would cause them to reflect on their position in society.

Sure, people that disagree with your viewpoints lack critical thinking and morality. Painting people who disagree with you as immoral idiots just sounds like you're not able to defend your beliefs.

Obligatory plug for Jonathon Haidt: https://righteousmind.com/

People start with moral intuitions first and work backwards to find reasons. Fallacies, ignorance, and sloppy thinking is quasi-deliberate, to satisfy a priori values of what is sacred and what is profane, who are the good people and who are the bad people.

Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics, which is one of the hallmarks of fascism.

Naming yourself "the good guys" doesn't mean anyone who opposes you is bad. It's like if someone said disliking 'Make America Great Again' means you don't want America to be great. Or opposing the Patriot Act makes you not a patriot.

You know this, everyone else reading this knows this, stop pretending we don't.

Using violence to achieve political goals is not in itself a "hallmark of fascism". From the Gordon Riots, to union riots, to militant suffragettes, history is littered with examples of political change that was expedited by violence.

In the UK, the British Union of Fascists organised a march in London in 1936 and were countered by ten times as many people organised by anarchist, communist, socialist and Jewish groups. The ensuing violence sent an extremely clear message that fascism is not welcome in the country.

My post:

>> Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics

Your reply:

> Using violence to achieve political goals is not in itself a "hallmark of fascism".

Agreed. But I didn't write that it was.

You live in the UK. How would you compare the IRA of the 1920s with the provos in the 1980s? Would you say they're the same group? They have the same name.

I'm a bit confused about your argument, then. Antifa aren't violent against just anyone that doesn't share their politics. It's not a single organisation with a uniform political ideology, so that wouldn't make sense. It's more like the practise of aggressive confrontation specifically against authoritarian, right-wing movements, especially those which have some level of support from the state and/or police.

> Antifa aren't violent against just anyone that doesn't share their politics.

In my experience (as a mainsteam left person) Antifa consider anyone not on the hard left to be either 'fascists' or 'bootlickers'. Everyone else I know who has had any contact with Antifa has had the same experience. Many Antifa people would say this is an accurate view of anyone who does not share hard left political views.

They don't tend to protest engage in violence against soft-left events like democrat rallies, unless I'm mistaken? The vast majority of the time it's against alt-right or white supremacist events.

Honestly, I'm not even sure that Antifa exists. I'd never heard anything about such a group being worthy of concern in America until the current president started trying to make white supremacists sound like regular folks. I view rhetoric about Antifa as propaganda from apologists for right-wing extremism. It's their way of saying "he started it!" Any time their culture war comes to blows.

no, they don't! what are you talking about? I have been to places where people have to defend themselves from neo nazis coming to beat them up for being gay. it is a label that indicates reactive protection from fascist violence, period

I think my post was pretty clear.

The fact that nazis exist doesn't invalidate it. Again you probably know this so I'm not going to bother replying further.

Equivocation between literal facicts and people who want to fight literal facists doesn't make a lot of sense.

So no, I really, truly have no clue what you're getting at. Like as far as I can tell you're saying "being willing to punch a Nazi makes you a Nazi". Which, like, no.

Demonising your enemies as racists or fascists, ie nazis and employing mob tactics to "no platform" them or otherwise shut them up as in "no free speech for racists", strike me as exactly the sort of tactics the real fascists employed in the 1930s. So in that sense, yes, Antifa groups/coalitions/collectives/networks frequently behave like fascists. Which is no surprise really if you subscribe to the horseshoe model of the political spectrum.

My post:

>> Naming yourself "the good guys" doesn't mean anyone who opposes you is bad. It's like if someone said disliking 'Make America Great Again' means you don't want America to be great. Or opposing the Patriot Act makes you not a patriot.

Your reply:

> Like as far as I can tell you're saying "being willing to punch a Nazi makes you a Nazi".

Yes, I'm still confused by the equivocation between facists and antifacsists, and your dodging that question doesn't help.

Please elaborate. Please don't just re-quote yourself. You know, follow the guidelines and engage in good faith. I did, it why I asked a genuine clarifying question which you seemed to ignore.

> Which, like, no.

No, you did not address GP in good faith. And GP did address your question by quoting himself: the problem is not "fighting against the bad guys", the problem is whom you consider the bad guys. Anti-fascists calling themselves such in no way means that everyone they oppose is actually a fascist.

> No, you did not address GP in good faith.

I did. Please don't presume to know my thoughts.

> Anti-fascists calling themselves such in no way means that everyone they oppose is actually a fascist.

This doesn't address my comment, nor is it what GP said. Id suggest you reread their comment. And mine.

I'll break it down:

> Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics

This is overbroad. Many people don't share antifa politics. I don't. They don't threaten me with violence. Something is missing here.

> which is one of the hallmarks of fascism

So this is only sensical in an overbroad generalization of antifa to mean "violent left wing people who are violent towards anyone not suitably left wing", which isn't antifa under any reasonable definition, and is an entirely circular argument.

So yes, please: explain.

They've already tried to paint BLM as a violent organization, so no new low surprises me.

Well, technically the Bureau of Land Management does use threats of violence to enforce it's decisions, but it's a bit unfair to single them out next to much worse offenders like the ATF or CIA.

Who do you attribute the assassinations of police officers to? I guess you could argue that they weren't "organized", but it seems about as organized as right-wing terrorism like the shooting in Charleston (a.k.a. the fascism the anti-fascism is counteracting).

I don't consider Christianity a violent organization despite the crusades and the inquisition, nor do I consider Islam a violent organization, or most other religions.

I consider an organization on their tenets, under which Black Lives Matter is completely fine.

KKK for example isn't.

Right-wing terrorism has no redeeming kernel of decency, nor does it have a productive movement behind the (few?) bad actors.

> I consider an organization on their tenets

No, you don't, or you would consider a religion that endorses literally infinite amounts of torture for anyone who disagrees with them to be violent. There's also its attitudes toward homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22), slavery (Exodus 21:7), murdering people for working on saturdays (or maybe sundays?) (Exodus 35:2), and touching pig remains (Leviticus 11:7), among others.

I wholeheartedly condemn a large portion of the evangelical movement, and any religious fanatic, but I also believe that there's a case to be made for more charitable translations and interpretations, and I know several Christians who believe not in the things you listed, but follow the less brimstoney new testament.

But to some extent I do agree with you, otherwise I would still be a Christian which I'm not, for the fact that any belief that subjugates moral philosophy and reasoning to interpreting holy text will always have blind spots.

Either way, I apologize if it distracted from the point I was trying to make, that all organizations, good or bad will have bad actors, but what's important is identifying which organization can be fruitful and which is inherently bad.

Maybe we will disagree on a few there.

Er, just to clairify, Islam is also horrible, but I have less in the way of citations for them because I don't interact with them as much and I don't speak Arabic. If you want to look up said citations yourself, I think the search keywords your want would be "sharia law", although "muhammed pedophile" would probably also help.

You’re quoting the Old Testament. The “lesser laws” of which were superseded by the “higher law” instituted by Jesus.

"Slaves, obey your earthly masters" (Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22) (the easiest one to grep for, since I remember the exact phrasing). Doesn't sound very superseded to me, and Christians continued supporting that right up until the South lost the Civil War (and a fair bit past that in other places) and slavery became politically impractical to defend. So it wasn't a case of a misquotation (by two different sources? really?) being corrected; it was a case of explicitly heretical values being forced on the church at (rather close to literal) gunpoint.

As someone more eloquent than me put it: Christianity had it's chance to rule the world; we call it the Dark Ages for good reason.

Read up on what the Quakers did that whole time.

The experience with -ism words like socialism, communism, capitalism, libertarianism, etc, is that it is very hard to rally a group together that agrees on an actual definition of what they mean.

So when you say 'From what I can tell antifa is anti-fascism' - what does that mean? America doesn't have any serious fascist groups - from what I can tell the ruling powers are decidedly corporatist and the first alternative philosophy seems to be light/moderate socialism. Second is maybe libertarianism.

So who/what do you think the anti-fascists are opposing, and what would they espouse if they ever decide there are no fascists for them to define themselves against?

> America doesn't have any serious fascist groups - from what I can tell the ruling powers are decidedly corporatist and the first alternative philosophy seems to be light/moderate socialism.

Corporatism was inseparable from fascism in Italy and Germany. The exploitation of the profit motive is one of the primary reasons that so many people overlooked the atrocities.

Fascism is the reason so many companies like IBM, Hugo Boss, L'Oreal, Koch Industries, Audi, Porsche, Adidas, BMW, and countless other extant corporations have dark histories from supporting the German extermination camps to utilizing their slave labor to build their products.

> Corporatism was inseparable from fascism in Italy and Germany

Corporatism was also inseparable from the political systems in the UK and the US though, wasn't it?

The reply said "corporatism and fascism" can both exist, not "corporatism implies fascism".

This is what it means. It is a reply to "America doesn't have any serious fascist groups - from what I can tell the ruling powers are decidedly corporatist" after all.

Fair enough; but am I going to get disagreement when I say the brand of corporatism that currently holds power is pretty obviously not fascism?

Quoting a few key sentences from Wikipedia:

Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky (national economic self-sufficiency) through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. [0]

America doesn't have a serious lobby that believes in those things. There isn't a lobby that is serious about autarchy, there isn't a lobby calling for complete mobilisation and there isn't a lobby calling for a one party state. Apart from maybe the anti-facists I don't know of a lobby promoting political violence. The war and imperialism stuff is possibly true, but that isn't a new thing in American politics - America has been at war my entire lifetime and mostly in the same set of middle eastern countries.

The only link between fascism and American politics is that Trump is popular in the Republican party and is happy to stand up and say that the globalism pendulum has swung too far. That is a tenuous link to fascist ideology.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

> America doesn't have a serious lobby that believes in those things.

I've gotta say, the NRA has been getting closer to fitting this.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals?cycle=2012&id=d00000...

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/us/nra-details-plan-for-a...

I'm sorry, I don't understand how either of those links shows that the NRA believes in the things mentioned above. Can you clarify?

The NRA is a serious lobby group that is being used to promote a single party. And it's moves toward schools being more heavily policed/militarized organization in the name of safety seem like a stepping stone towards fascism to me.

Their original goal, of a rights advocacy group has turned into a partisan dividing tactic.

Do you expect Planned Parenthood to promote the GOP, and do you consider them fascist for not doing so?

Supporting one party over another is not an act of fascism. They promote the GOP because the GOP supports their goals. Do you think it's reasonable to expect them to promote the other party while that party actively works against them?

They promote a stronger police presence in schools, but they also support the right of teachers to be armed and able to defend against attackers. In other words, they support teachers being able to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. Whether you agree with that or not, the 2nd Amendment is a decidedly libertarian idea. Fascism is authoritarian by nature. Promoting one of these is mutually exclusive with promoting the other.

Regarding police in schools, I don't see how that fits with Wikipedia's definition of fascism: a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society and of the economy. Perhaps we're operating on different definitions.

Planned parenthood isn't an organization created to defend a constitutional amendment. It relies an a particular Amendment to provide some of it's services, but it's not a fair comparison.

I also wouldn't think poorly of the NRA for just it's change in how it donates to candidates if they weren't performing illegal coordination and also promoting Republicans candidates even if their opponent was aligned with their 2nd Amendment stance.

Police presence in schools is just a step into a strong regimentation of society IMO. And the 2nd Amendment is far too vague to be considered libertarian. We could debate all day over what the intent was, or how it can be interpreted.

> Planned parenthood isn't an organization created to defend a constitutional amendment. It relies an a particular Amendment to provide some of it's services, but it's not a fair comparison.

Frankly I don't see why that's relevant. My point is that the amendment itself has become a partisan issue. The GOP and the NRA agree on their interpretation of the amendment, while the other party opposes them. Why would you expect two allies to support their mutual opposition instead of each other, and how does not doing so equate to fascism?

> performing illegal coordination

Political corruption != fascism, and it is certainly not unique to it.

> the 2nd Amendment is far too vague to be considered libertarian

I disagree, but I can see how some interpretations of it (that it's meant to arm militias which are agents of the state) could even be considered authoritarian. However, the NRA advocates for the interpretation that says people should have the means to overthrow their government if necessary. I'm having a hard time seeing how that aligns with fascism.

Have you read the President's twitter account lately?

Do you have something specific in mind?

Antifa as a bogyman fits with the golden quote from Umberto Eco.

"However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."

source http://interglacial.com/prose/Umberto_Eco_-_Eternal_Fascism....

Those "white nationalist" sure have quite a dark skin complexion on the looting videos i am seeing.

Just so you know, these were the people in pol meet-up.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSpx9rb...

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ7DOx5...

So you’re posting a pic of 4chan trolls from the He Will Not Divide US stint in 2016 to refute a statement that the looters this past week comprising of African Americans are not white supremacists?

I think you are misunderstanding. I am saying white supremacists can be other than white so judging based on the skin complexion of the person seems a bit silly like op did.

Something else I think you're indirectly hinting at is that revelations like the one in the original post - White Nationalists posing as Antifa - can be bent by bad actors as an excuse to claim that all anti-fascists are white nationalists, instead of being correctly observed as fascists trying to undermine anti-fascism. In effect, even after being exposed Evropa was successful.

looking at the videos over the past few days its pretty safe to safe it was for the most part not white supremists. the last day was questionable like those bricks in dallas but other than that. there were a lot of young black people doing stuff on their own.

In Denver it seems that the day time protestors are older and more diverse (latino-american, african-american, etc) and the night time protestors are younger and more white-american looking to start trouble, though things are changing rapidly. [0]

There are confirmed reports of agitators that have been stopped before violence occurred, thank God. [0]

Last evening, Denver's PD chief marched with protestors and mostly allowed them to walk and shout well past curfew. I've not yet seen looting reports (though that may change), and the injuries to protestors and PD seem to have been much less as of now. Compared to other nights, it was successful.

Each city is different. Lumping people together nationally is not helping anyone discover what is happening locally.

[0] https://twitter.com/KyleClark I suck at twitter, so I can't figure out how to link specific tweets here. But Kyle Clark is the head anchor for Denver's 9pm news broadcast. The tweets in his feed specify the facts much better than I can.

Note that while this particular account was fake, real Antifa groups were organizing to attack those areas, according to multiple police sources. [1]

Disinformation campaigns don't mean all such activity is by political shills.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/law-enfo...

Antifa is not a single organized group, it's anyone who is anti-fascist. So there is no 'real' antifa groups. The police don't have a very good track record releasing truthful information regarding these events, so why not chill out before drawing your own outrageous conclusions.

There are numerous quasi-organized Antifa groups. [1] They organize via Telegram and other (usually encrypted) modes of communication. In these groups, they regularly plan and encourage violent attacks on police and property.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/05/31/us/politics/ap-u...

I'm anti-fascist, but would never in a million years associate with antifa in any capacity. The two are distinct.

"anti-fascist" here should be in quotes. In the context of Antifa, "anti-fascist" is doublespeak.

> So there is no 'real' antifa groups.

How do we actually know this?

Or to put it differently, how much do we know about the interconnections of such groups? I'm sure that some are just kids who like the look & dress up with their buddies (no connections). Some seem pretty organised. How do we tell the extent from outside?

I would hope there is effort put into infiltrating and studying such things. But presumably any serious FBI or whatever effort isn't going to be keen to spell out how they know what they know. (IIRC this was part of what broke up the KKK, that and anti-mask laws. Which at its height was also a mix of fairly organised & not at all, although I don't claim the same mix.)

>How do we actually know this?

We don't which is why it's weird the current administration is trying to declare 'antifa' a terrorist group without presenting any real evidence. If they know something we don't this would probably be a good time to tell us.

> Some seem pretty organised.

Like who? In North America, I haven't seen any evidence of this. The example that's always posted, including in this thread, is a lone actor that hit a few people with a bike lock years ago.

According to the Government Accountability Office of the United States, 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths since September 12, 2001 were caused by right-wing extremist groups. That's not even including what they label as Islamist extremists and "incel" extremists which both could also easily be classified as right-wing extremism. In North America, violent left-wing extremism is barely a blip on the radar and yet we keep hearing "conservative" talking heads go on about Antifa. It seems like little more than a politically motivated distraction much like Obamagate.

I've got a lot of chat logs of people organizing who know they're Antifa. The handbooks and wisdom obviously tell members to obscure the organizational structure, to enable exactly what you're doing here with the definition, and it works when nobody cares, but not now.

Just because your criminal organization has chapters, doesn't mean people don't see the organization.

Antifa is, in practice, a collection of people whose most notable and consistent actions are preventing people that they perceive to be right-wing-radicals, i.e. non-left-wing-radicals, from speaking at universities and other events. Warren Farrell, Ben Shapiro, Janice Fiamengo and Jordan Peterson are not exactly radicals.

> it's anyone who is anti-fascist

Wrong.

> The Antifa movement in Germany is a political movement, composed of multiple far-left, autonomous, militant groups and individuals who describe themselves as anti-fascist. The use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the understanding of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(Germany)

> The English word antifa (or ANTIFA) is a loanword from German, taken as a shortened form of the word antifaschistisch ("anti-fascist") and the name of Antifaschistische Aktion which inspired the wider Antifa movement in Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)

Did you even read your own link? Not only does it mention that it's a specific movement that is "militant, predominantly left-wing", it outright states that

>Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist views and subscribe to a range of left-wing ideologies such as anarchism, communism, Marxism, social democracy and socialism

Why did you put a link to the Antifa_(Germany) article?

It would be fair to say that there are anti-fascist groups - many of them. It's just utterly non-factual to claim that "antifa" is an organized group, let alone some sort of terrorist organization. At best it's lots of small organizations with some common goals and iconography, and many of them have differing opinions and practices

Who claimed "antifa" is a singular organized group?

The KKK has multiple independent sects and semi-decentralized governance, but that doesn't mean "KKK" doesn't exist -- it refers to all of them collectively.

The president did

I'm sorry, but you're going to have to be specific. Saying "antifa" does not imply a singular group. The same way "KKK" does not imply a singular group.

If you'd checked the example you rely upon further down you'd have seen that in fact the individual Al-Qaeda groups are listed specifically in the State Department's listed of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Now obviously I don't have the authority to say why that is, but it seems reasonable to presume that they are listed as separate organizations because they are, in fact, separate organizations.

Not necessarily. You don't want vague language in official documents, so you have to be specific, because you'd just shift the problem if you said "Al-Qaeda", since you now need an official list of Al-Qaeda-Subgroups.

If it would allow nesting, I'm pretty sure somebody would've already accidentally put Al-Qaeda under Ansar al-Sunna and cause a recursion error, blowing up DC.

"The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization"

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/12671296442282475...

Terrorist organisations are not necessarily singular groups. Al-Qaeda for example.

Trump tweeted: "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization". This implies a singular group, a singular group which the consensus seems to be does not exist.

It does not imply a singular group. For example, Al-Qaeda is classified as a terrorist organization despite being made up of several structures and groups.

It implies a collective.

Dehumanization (of any group, by any other) preceeds crimes against humanity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehumanization

Also, if NBC calls something misinformation with "little evidence", then it would be unsatirical to reference some primary sources itself.

"according to a Twitter spokesperson". Which spokesperson and where was this said? I don't see anything on https://blog.twitter.com. Nor could I find any primary recent references to Twitter and white nationalists or Identity Evropa except the editorials themselves.

Well, AntiFa exists to engage in violence, by their own statements, so anyone "posing as" them to "call for violence" is just playing catch-up.

It is utterly ridiculous to try to blame either, far right or far left wing organizations for what is happening in the US right now. None of these groups have the power to cause that much damage. I’d be surprised if the number of antifa/black bloc people in these protest is more than a tiny fraction of people, like in any protest. Yet the discussion is shifted to these groups as an explanation for violence and this entire thread is full of people arguing about whether the Antifa is an organization. The antifa doesn’t even matter. What is happening to this discourse?

If there are 1000 people at a protest and 50 start brawling with the police, that changes the entire character of the day, no matter whether 50/1000 is a small number or not.

This is the point. There are many people at these protests. This is a heated, complex situation and at any large protest the people there are not homogeneous. The majority wants to peacefully protest, some loot, some want violence, the police is aggressive. Given that it is understood that every protest is a complicated social phenomenon, the narrative pushed by major news outlets in the US, and echoed in parts here, that somehow this is led and organised by Antifa, or the far right, is delusional. There are protests all over the US. In suburbs. How do you imagine this is working? The Antifa/Right has some chapters in every suburb of the US, just waiting to be unleashed upon the masses and this is the reason why protests turn violent? It's a gross oversimplification of the actual dynamics, it's a child's story that is easy to tell and easy to digest.

If there are 1000 cops and 50 start brawling with the protestors...

Inevitable I guess, given how this violence is likely to boost support for Trump and the right. It raises the possibility that some of the people supporting, defending or excusing looting and violence on HN are secretly right-wingers. Nah, probably not, but still...

antifa is a term that only serves fascists.

fascists do not call themselves that since the 40s.

calling the normal of not being fascists antifa is only enabling easier critic amd blaming of something that could not be criticized or blamed.

the term antifa only benefit fascists. who can now easily direct blame and critic to their critics, as shown in the article (which is not the first and hardly the last)

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