Stop and think about it: As supposed existential threats to America go, “antifa” and its “dark shadows” sure did seem to come out of nowhere, didn’t they? Three years ago, hardly any American could have even told you what the word meant, let alone pronounce it.
Well, it indeed came largely out of nowhere—or more precisely, from the fevered imaginations of the white nationalists and far-right conspiracy theorists who demonized what really is a leftist movement dedicated to opposing their ugly racial politics. Those happen to be the same politics engendered by Donald Trump, so in short order, mainstream right-wing media—dedicated to defending Trump in every regard—managed to manufacture a frightening vision of scary and mysterious radicals whose “dark shadows” completely obliterated the growth of violent white nationalism from public view. And it worked.
In reality, antifa traces its origins to the leftist groups who organized in Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s, particularly in Germany and Italy, to oppose fascists in those countries. Its modern iterations began organizing in the early part of the 21st century, with the first local antifascist group, Rose City Antifa, forming in Portland in 2007. The movement remains deliberately decentralized with no official leadership.
The essence of the movement (which in many ways grew out of the punk music scene) is the motto “We go where they go”—that is, they believe in confronting fascists in the public spaces where they appear and removing their materials. This is why doxxing is central to the antifascist mission, and is an aspect that goes little mentioned by its often hysterical critics on the right.
There is no national “antifa” organization—only small local cooperative groups, all of them officially leaderless—and no national “leaders,” despite anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists’ risibly false claims that George Soros is the man behind it all.
Most of all, its operating philosophy is not—contrary to the right’s characterization of the movement—focused on creating violence but rather more on preventing it if possible, particularly violence against vulnerable minorities frequently targeted by right-wing extremists and hate groups. At the same time, unlike other leftist groups, it does not eschew the use of violence to defend those minorities from violence—which is why and how so many of its members get caught up in street brawls and are regularly seen engaging in violent acts. And it justifies some violent acts as pre-emptive.
Most, but not all, of antifa’s violence is reactive—unlike that of the Proud Boys and other street brawling groups with whom they have been engaging, whose violence is almost entirely deliberate and provocative. Those groups’ entire reason for existence is to create violent scenes in liberal urban centers, all ostensibly in defense of “Western civilization.”
None of that, however, is apparent to media audiences who have been subjected over the past three years to a steady and now fast-growing stream of reports from such outlets as Fox News—as well as right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Ben Shapiro—falsely depicting antifa as a “Marxist” movement intent on destroying America, and poised to invade middle America to burn down their way of life.
Fox host Tucker Carlson’s June 2 rant crystallized the nightmare vision of a future under antifa that right-wing media has been selling to the public: “Violent young men with guns will be in charge. They will make the rules, including the rules in your neighborhood. They will do what they want. You will do what they say. No one will stop them.”
As existential threats to our national well-being go, the “antifa” bogeyman is actually a very recent addition to the American right’s long history of concocting dire enemies through the use of eliminationist rhetoric. Through all of 2016, for instance, Fox News only mentioned the movement once—in reporting on the violent melee that erupted in Sacramento, California, during a march organized by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party in June. Fox, of course, blamed the antifascists for the violence, despite multiple videos showing neo-Nazis starting the fights that broke out.
A communist inauguration plot
It really only first arrived on the right’s radar in January 2017, when a bundle of conspiracy theorists tried to claim that they were leading the charge for a communist attempt to prevent Trump from being sworn in as president, with Alex Jones of Infowars and “health ranger” Mike Adams leading the charge.
They were joined by a wide array of conspiracist right wingers. The website of the antigovernment group the Oath Keepers, as well as its Facebook page, shouted out apocalyptic warnings in the week leading up to the inauguration: “Communists Intend to Overthrow the United States Before Inauguration Day,” “10,000 Men With Guns To Prevent Coup on Inauguration Day,” “In Just 10 Days, the Radical Left Will Attempt to Overthrow the U.S. Government.”
At the Infowars conspiracy mill run by Jones, the theories were multifarious as well as frantic: “Anarchists Are Hoping To Turn Donald Trump’s Inauguration On January 20th Into One Of The Biggest Riots In U.S. History,” “Will The CIA Assassinate Trump?”, “Alex Jones' Emergency Message To President Donald Trump To Deter Martial Law.”
The hysteria was all inspired by a series of protests planned for Washington, D.C., that week by a small antifascist group called Refuse Fascism. The reality of those protests starkly contrasted with the dire threat suggested by the conspiracists: videos from those marches revealed that it is a small organization that managed to attract only a couple dozen protesters to march in Washington the weekend before the inauguration.
One prominent Oath Keepers blogger, using the pen name Navy Jack, wrote a blogpost in the days leading up to the event titled: “Communists Intend to Overthrow the United States before Inauguration Day.” “So let it begin,” responded a user named Rev. Dave. “I don’t like commies any more than I like NAZIs [sic]. If law enforcement can’t put them down, I’ll be more than willing to help out by putting a few down myself.”
“An actual planned coup attempt”
One of the Oath Keepers’ primary sources for their information about the planned disruptions of the inauguration came from “Health Ranger” Mike Adams, a longtime conspiracy theorist and onetime associated of Jones’ Infowars. (In 2013, just before the second inauguration of Barack Obama, Adams warned antigovernment “Patriots” that the president would soon be issuing a “mass of kill orders” for them.)
“What I am hearing is that there is an actual planned coup attempt,” Jones told his audience in a video that was promoted by the Oath Keepers. He then conflated the Refuse Fascism protests with the long-announced “Women’s March on Washington,” scheduled the day after the inauguration and expected to attract 200,000, saying that the “cover story” for the coup would be “the women’s march, the labor union march, whatever it is.”
On the day of the inauguration, Oath Keepers and their cohorts were visibly present, vowing “to protect peaceable American patriots who are now being threatened with assault and other acts of violence by radical leftist groups.” The rhetoric whipped up by the 2017 hysteria formed the template for the attacks on antifascist protesters being heard in 2020.
“We WILL be there,” a commenter named Marlene wrote on the Oath Keepers Facebook page. “And we will be prepared. We will not allow soros [sic] and the globalists start a civil war where we fight against each other. But we are prepared for a full scale revolution against tyranny on OUR own terms at a later time. Most of these anti-American fascists are not even Americans. They represent the dregs of humanity Obama [sic] has brought into our country just for this purpose—all illegal all foreign and all who hate us because they hate themselves.”
The antifa hysteria quickly subsided when no such coup attempt materialized in January 2017, and media coverage went mostly quiet, except at Infowars, where Jones began bringing up antifa as a “demonic” presence. He described the movement as “crazed, self-hating white people who are trying to start a race war in America.”
However, over the ensuing weeks, antifa was involved in a number of violent protests, notably in Berkeley, California; Olympia, Washington; and Portland, Oregon. At that point, Fox News created a video calling antifa an “alt-left group” in late June claiming that antifascists’ goal was “political intimidation and chaos through the threat of violence.”
Most coverage of antifa became muted in most right-wing media circles for the next couple of months—though the Daily Caller became a reliable source of stories demonizing antifa during this time. Headlines like “‘Anti-Fascism' Group Bears Striking Resemblance To Actual Terrorists,” “Revealed: The Antifa Plan To Get Liberals To Embrace Violence,” and “Here's Why George Soros Is Siding With Fascists,” became common there.
The antifa-demonization narrative then erupted widely in the wake of the horrifying events of August 11-12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the lethal “Unite the Right” march event.
Even though most of the violence at that event was provoked by the gathering of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates and “Patriot” militiamen who came to the city to brawl with leftists—and the victims of its lethal violence included antifascist Heather Heyer and 20 other people maimed when a neo-Nazi drove his car at high speed into a crowd of them—the coverage at Fox News and elsewhere focused almost exclusively on the violence involving antifascists. The channel and website actually carried no coverage of the riots mentioning the radical white nationalists who chanted, during their August 11 march, “Jews will not replace us” (though the chants were briefly mentioned in a Marc Thiessen piece headlined “Anti-Semitism rising on left”).
Apparently in reaction to the events in Charlottesville, Fox News then began beating a steady drumbeat declaring antifa to be the far more dire threat to the nation than violent white nationalists. It ran prominent stories on a clash between far-right provocateurs who attempted to organize protest rallies in the Bay Area the weekend of August 26-27, claiming that antifascists had “attacked peaceful protesters.” It ran news stories attacking a Dartmouth professor who had the temerity to defend antifascists.
The anti-antifascist backlash began hitting a fever pitch. An “open letter” at Fox to “the hatemongers” of “the violent extremist group Antifa” featured a bizarrely inverted version of the reality of what happened at “Unite the Right”:
In Charlottesville, you arrived on the scene with clubs and shields, prepared to commit violence. Instead, your sick plans were superseded by the monstrous behavior of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other right-wing extremists as lunatic as you are. But they don’t have much of the liberal media working as agit-prop wings for them every day, like you do.
A Steve Kurtz piece similarly attacking the movement claimed: “Antifa gets to decide who the fascists are, and don’t look now, but it’s you.” And what appeared to be a straight news piece described how a petition presented to the White House urged the Trump administration to label antifa a “terror group,” then added: “Antifa has earned this title due to its violent actions in multiple cities and their influence in the killings of multiple police officers throughout the United States.” (No police killings of any kind by members of Antifa have been recorded to date.)
A similar opinion piece by Ned Ryun likewise insisted that “Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization” and demanded that Democrats denounce the movement. Meanwhile, Carlson devoted a segment of his nightly Fox show to discussing whether antifa should be barred from gathering on American college campuses.
Red State publisher Erik Erickson then penned the apotheosis of this smear campaign by using it as an excuse to give tacit approval to the gathering storm of far-right extremists: “Why should anyone condemn white nationalists if the left won't condemn Antifa?” he wrote. “The truth is that if the left does not do a better job of vocally condemning Antifa, there really will be less people on the right willing to condemn the white nationalists.”
Rush Limbaugh weighed in along similar lines immediately after the Charlottesville events. He claimed Republicans who denounced the white nationalists afterward were being weak by “conferring moral authority on militant leftist protesters,” and within a couple of weeks had shifted the narrative on its head, claiming that “the Democrats’ media and their Antifa pitbulls are the real threat to America.”
“I’ll tell you what this shows,” Limbaugh said. “It shows the power of the fake news media to create a crisis out of literally nothing because there is no threat to America from white supremacists. The number of white supremacists, in relation to voters, wouldn’t fill a bathtub.”
Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro paid a visit to the Berkeley campus in September, was met by protesters, but nonetheless gave a speech in which he denounced antifa in crude terms, telling protesters “you can all go to hell, you stupid, pathetic, lying jackasses,” and that believing antifa attacks on him means “you have to have your head so far up your ass you can actually see your colon firsthand.” Limbaugh invited him onto his show to talk about it.
The conspiracist far right then seized what had now become a mainstream narrative about antifa and blew it into an otherworldly narrative about a gigantic plot to remove Trump from the presidency in a coup—which was then carried credulously by mainstream right-wing media, notably Fox. In November they resuscitated their earlier hysterical scenario claiming that “antifa” and associated Satanists were planning to spark a violent civil war, with Trump’s overthrow being the ultimate purpose.
However, this time, the antifa panic spread to a broader audience, including Fox News, which carried a report claiming that the movement was plotting to topple the “Trump regime”: “Will the so-called ‘Antifa apocalypse’ come with a bang or a whimper?” a Fox story asked in its lede.
One widely viewed YouTube video claimed: “They will start off by attacking police officers, first responders, anybody that’s in uniform,” he said. “And after they have disrupted that enough in the nation, and us first responders are literally going everywhere, trying to resolve things, they will then go after the citizens and the people and the government and all of that. So if you’re white, you’re a Trump supporter, you’re a Nazi then, to them. And it will be open game on you.”
“Make sure you got enough ammo, make sure your guns are ready,” another YouTuber advised in a popular clip. “You have to understand these are vicious, vicious people. Your life means nothing to them. In fact, if you’re a white man, you don’t deserve to live.”
The right-wing blog Gateway Pundit even published a post claiming that “antifa” radicals were planning to “behead white parents and small business owners”—citing a post that in fact mocked gullible fools on the right who believed such nonsense. As it turned out, these even included officials at the Department of Homeland Security who bought into the hoax and handled it as if the threat were a real one.
In reality, the “civil war” turned out to be just a handful of small anti-Trump rallies. But the myth of the looming threat of the Evil Antifa Horde had been given a permanent spot on the right-wing narrative shelf.
The Fox News “antifa” record
Fox News’ coverage of antifa as a threat to American political life went through cycles, and its ebb and flow there as a story reflect its usefulness as a propaganda tool for attacking liberals and defending Trump, as well as the general interest in finding a leftist scapegoat in the national discourse. Fox initially pushed the story hardest as part of a pushback against concern about the rise of white nationalism that arose after Charlottesville—but none of that compares to the open floodgates accompanying the nationwide protests over police brutality.
In 2016, Fox had carried one story anti-antifa piece; but after mid-August 2017, it rushed out 18 pieces, all attacking the movement, all in the month of September. The network then ran 10 antifa hit pieces between October and December.
The story was comparatively deemphasized at Fox for 2018, with some 21 pieces in total—the majority of those appearing in August, around the time of the anniversary of the Unite the Right events. And for 2019, the story seemed almost to vanish, with only six pieces running between January and late June.
However, the network began bashing antifa again seriously after the June 30 assault on Portland pseudo-journalist/provocateur Andy Ngo—regaling the public with 10 pieces attacking antifa over the short space of the next seven days. For the remainder of the year, the antifa hit pieces became a more persistent drumbeat, with 34 such stories running through early November (and then going quiet entirely for the next two months).
Indeed, antifa largely disappeared from Fox’s news radar again for the first six months of 2020—but after the May 28 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman sparked nationwide protests against police brutality, the story came roaring back with a vengeance. Antifa, right-wing pundits have unanimously proclaimed, is the entity almost solely responsible for violence during the protests.
These claims became common in the first week of the protests. Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue June 2 raised the spectral bogeyman of antifa, warning that they were coming soon to your neighborhood, where “violent young men with guns will be in charge. They will make the rules, including the rules in your neighborhood. They will do what they want. You will do what they say. No one will stop them. You will not want to live here when that happens.”
Between May 31 and June 6, Fox News ran a total of 40 hit pieces blaming antifa for the protest violence. Since June 8 until now, it has run another 57 such pieces.
Shootings unleash the demons
However, last week’s fatal shootings at volatile protests—in Kenosha on August 25, when a teenage militiaman gunned down three protesters, two of them fatally; and in Portland on August 30, when an antifascist shot and killed a right-wing protester who had apparently maced him—brought the narrative to screeching levels of hysteria. The Oath Keepers demanded that Trump declare a “national insurrection”—a “Marxist takeover” at the hands of antifa—and send out “the militia,” by which he means not just the National Guard, but ad-hoc vigilante outfits like theirs.
Unsurprisingly, the narrative at Fox heavily featured a defense of the Kenosha shooter (“Fundraising initiatives for Kyle Rittenhouse, accused Kenosha shooter, surface online”) along with suggestions that his antifascist victims fully deserved their fates. It quoted the head of a pro-gun-rights group: “Kyle was doing his best to protect business owners from losing their entire livelihoods when criminal actors instigated violence against him. … Unfortunately for them, Kyle was armed with an AR-15 and their rocks, skateboards, and handguns stood no chance against his well-placed shots."
Meanwhile, its feature story from the Portland shooting (“Apparent Antifa member in Portland overheard saying she's 'not sad that a f---ing fascist died tonight,' after Patriot Prayer backer killed”) both sympathized with the victim and demonized Black Lives Matter, who it blamed for the shootings, claiming the shooter was a counterprotester “associated with” the movement.
The culmination of this narrative so far may be the Department of Homeland Security’s acting chief, Chad Wolf, announcing on Fox with Tucker Carlson that the Department of Justice plans in “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, [and] the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.” Wolf’s plan came on the heels of a viral video showing protesters heckling Sen. Rand Paul as he left the Republican National Convention in Washington, D.C., after which Paul demanded a similar investigation.
Its apotheosis, however, may be Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham this week, in which he claimed that “people that are in the dark shadows” are “controlling the streets” of Democratic cities. And when Ingraham warned him that he sounded like he was promoting a conspiracy theory, he doubled down with a pitch-perfect rendition of the “evil Antifa thug” caricature central to the narrative attacking the movement.
“We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that,” he claimed.
The radical conspiracist far right largely invented this narrative—which is almost entirely fictitious, even though antifa is very much a real thing. However, it is not an existential threat to America—rather, because it is (like right-wing movements) comprised of actual ordinary Americans too, it reflects some of the best of America and its democratic traditions and free-thought foundations. Depending on your politics, some of its worldview (especially regarding violence).
So it’s actually impressive to stand back and assize the massive obliviousness of right-wing bad-faith actors of all stripes who to a person complain incessantly about left-wing “cancel culture” become laser-beam focused on utterly canceling participants in a political movement they hate, including any of their free-speech or association rights.
We know from firsthand experience that, prior to last week’s tragedies, nearly all of the violence associated with antifa over the past three years was the product of right-wing street theater whose entire purpose was to create a bogeyman narrative about the “violent left” for mass consumption. We know that far-right con men have been gulling rural and suburban communities with hoax “antifa bus” threats that get the armed-and-angry crowds there all riled up and ready for action. We know that Republicans—whose party is itself being consumed from within by the QAnon authoritarian cult—have shown no compunction about gaslighting the public about antifa by blaming it for killings in fact credited to far-right extremists.
There may be any number of things not to like about antifa. (I have my own reasons to not be wild about them, even while maintaining respect for much of what they have accomplished.) But the right’s ongoing eliminationist narrative—and what may soon metastasize into an exterminationist project—about the movement, along with the underlying and increasingly likely threat of violence, is adding up to one of the greatest threats to American liberties in the nation’s history.
