1) My wise colleague @ShidelerK just wrote this piece about Antifa: 'the radical left's enforcement arm.' Hats off to him and to the brilliant people at @theammind who published it. americanmind.org/essays/the-rea…
2) Mainstream conspiracy theorists say Antifa doesn't really exist; they "argue Antifa is an amorphous blob of discontents, not a functioning organization, and certainly not one which could be designated and targeted for concentrated counterterrorism enforcement."
3) "Antifa—real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion—was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist 'anti-fascist defense' units were associated with the KPD much earlier."
4) My comment: In other words, Antifa helped Hitler by providing the Communist extremism that gave the Nazis the popularity and the pretext to bring order to Germany and establish the Third Reich.
5) The original Antifa's purpose was to help Stalin's Communist Party of Germany to "combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic." (In fighting the Nazis, Antifa paradoxically enabled Hitler.)
6) "Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism.... an anti-authoritarian [sic] anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade."
7) "Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the 'black block,' where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed."
8) This movement would find a home in the US among elements of the Weather Underground terrorists and other extremist groups, some tied to Fidel Castro and Communist Vietnam, @ShidelerK writes. So Antifa is rooted in foreign and domestic terrorist networks.
9) Inspired by Malcolm X and what were called "black nationalists" in the US, what would become the Antifa movement used the virtually-dead Ku Klux Klan as a foil to accuse Ronald Reagan of racism and white supremacy, and promote property theft as revolutionary virtues.
10) It then embraced the Soviet- & Cuban-backed Communist movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, domestic cop-killer extremists, and equated police with the KKK and American institutions with the Nazis, @ShidelerK writes. (New York City Mayor @BilldeBlasio comes from here also.)
11) Mainstreamed with progs in the media, like the NYT 1619 Project, Antifa's extremism became populist. Antifa grew with no public leader as an "affinity" movement of people who shared its members' hostility to American institutions.
12) "These methods are no less organized for being non-hierarchical and help Antifa avoid police and law enforcement investigations, as well as preserve the above-ground support structures from facing criminal consequences for the acts they enable," @ShidelerK notes.
13) "Antifa is in many ways an improved iteration of prior militant leftist guerilla organizations....Weather Underground wrote high-profile manifestos & their members became household names [but were] forced into hiding by aggressive, but largely traditional, law enforcement..."
14) Older extremists failed also for misreading society's readiness for their agenda, "banked everything on militant action and gave up mass organizing. Antifa, with its anarchist outer structure and plausible deniability, allows the radical Left to have their cake & eat it too."
