This is undoubtedly the strongest and most compelling case one can make for supporting Antifa, the so-called anti-fascist action movement. Yet it still doesn’t hold up.
It’s difficult to disagree with Caroline Orr that right-wing extremism is a real and apparently growing problem, made worse by the fact that it’s partly emboldened by extreme nativist rhetoric coming from the White House. It’s a threat that needs to be countered. But is Antifa the movement to counter it?
Certainly, some of the antifascist activities that Orr mentions — such as monitoring and flagging YouTube videos that promote race hatred or Holocaust denial — are entirely laudable. But Antifa groups are hardly the only ones engaged in such work, and given Antifa’s record of defining “fascism” and “white supremacy” quite broadly, I’m not sure we should trust these activists with “deplatforming.”
As far as direct action in the streets: Yes, confronting far-right extremists when they hold public gatherings that are constitutionally protected but also intimidating and inflammatory (e.g., a Ku Klux Klan rally) is an excellent idea. However, some caveats are in order.
One: I think it’s essential for such action to be peaceful, i.e. take a principled stance against physical aggression. Street brawls between far-right and far-left extremists rarely end well. (See Germany in the 1930s.)
Two: it’s a really bad idea for that role to be taken over by militant groups that also espouse extremist ideologies. (I certainly don’t want to see people with Nazi banners or even Confederate flags marching in my neighborhood, but seeing people with hammer-and-sickle flags come out as the opposing force wouldn’t make me feel a whole lot better.)
Three: it’s also a really bad idea for that role to be assumed by groups that have a habit of equating the Republican Party with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Two years ago, as I noted in my Arc Digital article, an annual parade held as part of Portland’s Rose Festival was canceled because Antifa threatened to disrupt it if Multnomah County Republicans — who were accused of harboring “Nazis” — were not barred from participating. This is bad both because some Americans are being denied their constitutional right to peacefully assemble and because the result, almost inevitably, is an escalation of extremism. The rise of Patriot Prayer and other far-right groups in Portland was spurred in part by the Rose Parade debacle, which suggested a need for conservative self-defense.
Unfortunately, in her article, Orr herself repeatedly conflates right-wing groups with Nazis and white supremacists. Thus, her argument that Antifa have good reasons to distrust the police rests partly on the claim that a recent Willamette Week report showed “collaboration between white supremacist groups and police in Oregon.” The linked article discusses friendly text messages between a Portland police lieutenant, Jeff Niiya, and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson (both of whom are Japanese-American).
One can have a very negative view of Patriot Prayer and of Gibson, a provocateur who clearly loves getting into punch-ups with Antifa; but it’s a fact that even the Southern Poverty Law Center, often criticized of late for being too free with terms like “hate group” and “white supremacist,” doesn’t apply either label to Patriot Prayer. (The Proud Boys are classed by the SPLC as a “general hate” group, but not as white supremacists.) While white nationalists have sometimes attended Patriot Prayer rallies, Gibson has denounced them, insisted they were not welcome, and specifically barred white supremacist guru Richard Spencer and Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo from his events.
One can certainly argue that Gibson’s moderate persona is a PR-driven mask. But first of all, accuracy matters. Secondly, while Orr is certainly correct to say that “white supremacists aren’t interested in reasonable dialogue and letting the marketplace of ideas sort things out,” it’s far from clear that Joey Gibson belongs in the “beyond reasonable dialogue” category. Patriot Prayer has been implicated in violence as far as brawling with Antifa and arguably instigating some of those clashes; but they are not tied to right-wing terrorism. (Jeremy Christian, a mentally disturbed man who fatally stabbed two people and wounded a third on a Portland light-rail train in May 2017 when they tried to stop him from harassing two Muslim teenage girls, had showed up at a Patriot Prayer “free speech” rally a month earlier; however, he had met with a strongly negative reaction from others when he threw Nazi salutes and shouted racial slurs. Gibson says he had Christian ejected from the rally and has video to prove it, while the Willamette Week mentions attempts to kick him out.)
On a related subject, Orr argues that Lt. Niiya’s friendly interactions with Gibson confirm that Antifa activists are right to distrust the police. But the article she links notes that it’s not unusual for police in Portland to talk to all groups that intend to demonstrate — and that Lt. Niiya also had extensive conversations with an Antifa activist, June Davies (a.k.a. “Gia” and “Tan”). But Davies, who claimed that the purpose of these conversations was to protect fellow protesters from getting hurt or arrested, was ejected and ostracized by the movement once the conversations became known.
Orr’s other evidence of frequent “coordination” between law enforcement and white supremacists consists of stories that go back 20 years or more (with one exception) and generally fall far short of coordination: a series of racist graffiti incidents at a Cleveland police station in 1999; a 1991 case involving an alleged white supremacist gang in a Los Angeles police precinct; a Chicago police torture scandal uncovered in 1990–1991 in which the chief culprit was rumored to have ties to the Ku Klux Klan; and a 2016 incident in which two police deputies in Texas were summarily fired from the force after they were revealed to be Klan members. Deplorable though this history may be, it seems a stretch to say that it justifies a presumptively hostile attitude toward police in San Francisco, Seattle, or Portland in 2019.
But most important, Orr elides incidents of Antifa violence that cannot, in any shape or form, be justified as defense against far-right extremists. That includes an incident in Portland a year ago in which Paul Welch, a Bernie Sanders supporter who came to a rally to protest against the far right, was viciously assaulted by black-clad, masked Antifa activists who didn’t like the fact that he was carrying an American flag. They tried to wrench the flag away from Welch, calling it a “fascist symbol.” When Welch refused to give it up, he was beaten on the legs and the head with a club and left bleeding on the ground; he suffered a concussion and needed staples for the gash in his head.
In another incident last year, two Marines visiting Philadelphia for a Marine Corps ball were beaten by Antifa activists who thought they were there for a Proud Boys rally. The alleged assailants included prominent Washington, D.C. Antifa activist Joseph Alcoff. Ironically, the victims were Hispanic and were insulted with ethnic slurs during the assault.
There are also all the times Antifa activists harassed and assaulted journalists, even ones who are not named Andy Ngo.
Finally, Orr does not mention the July 13 incident in Seattle in which Willem Van Spronsen, a 69-year-old musician and Antifa activist, was fatally shot while trying to attack an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center with incendiary devices and to set fire to a commercial-size propane tank. (Whatever one thinks of the ICE, if Van Spronsen had been successful he would likely have killed not only ICE agents but numerous migrants inside the facility.) The fact Van Spronsen is being lionized as a hero and a martyr by many Antifa activists suggests that the rise of terrorism on the far left is not an impossible scenario.
The bottom line: Endorsing a group that claims the right to initiate violence is likely to lead to escalation.
Orr’s mention of the range of causes and groups Antifa champions — migrants, sexual assault survivors, transgender people, feminist, etc. — ironically raises additional concerns, given the movement’s coercive tactics and hostility to “harmful” speech. Will Antifa’s “allyship” with feminism or transgender rights translate into shutting down or disrupting events that are perceived as anti-feminist or anti-trans — or even attacking speakers, the way Charles Murray and the professor escorting him were attacked at Middlebury College in Vermont in 2017? (Antifa activists’ targets of disruption have already included a Portland State University panel discussing whether innate sex differences may partly account for gender disparities in the tech field.) Will support for sexual assault survivors translate into vigilantism against accused perpetrators who the activists believe got away with it? (Already, in one troubling incident in 2018, a group calling itself the Revolutionary Student Front launched a harassment campaign against University of Austin-Texas professor Richard Morrisett because of his 2016 guilty plea to an assault on his then-girlfriend. The activists, who defaced buildings with threatening graffiti, openly declared their intent to make “abusers … afraid to show their faces around campus.” Two month later, Morrisett was found dead at his home; the later revelation that he committed suicide was applauded by an Antifa-affiliated website.)
Do we need to counter extremism and hate groups? Absolutely. On this, I fully agree with Orr. Nor do I dispute that sometimes, activists who identify as antifascist do good work, such as thwarting the use of farmers’ markets for white supremacist propaganda by the peaceful means of raising awareness of the problem.
But anti-extremism, anti-hate activism should not be left to extremist groups on the other side.
