What Is Antifa? – The New York Times

The movement has been widely criticized among the mainstream left and right. After the protests in Berkeley, Calif., in August 2017, Speaker Nancy Pelosi decried the violent actions of people calling themselves antifa and said they should be arrested.

Conservative publications and politicians routinely rail against supporters of antifa, who they say are seeking to shut down peaceful expression of conservative views. These critics point to moments during which purported antifa members have been accused of sucker-punching Trump supporters.

But overblown fears and false claims about antifa can be dangerous in and of themselves. In Oregon, for example, after a wave of misinformation about left-wing activists intentionally setting fires began to interfere with firefighters efforts to contain the blazes there, law enforcement officials begged people to STOP. SPREADING. RUMORS!

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University who studies fascism, said she was worried that antifas methods could feed into what she said were false equivalencies that seek to lump violence on the left with attacks by the right, such as the killing of a protester in Charlottesville by a man who had expressed white supremacist views.

Throwing a milkshake is not equivalent to killing someone, but because the people in power are allied with the right, any provocation, any dissent against right-wing violence, backfires, Professor Ben-Ghiat said in an interview last year.

Between 2010 and 2016, 53 percent of terrorist attacks in the United States were carried out by religious extremists 35 percent by right-wing extremists and 12 percent by left-wing or environmentalist extremists, according to a University of Maryland-led consortium that studies terrorism.

Militancy on the left can become a justification for those in power and allies on the right to crack down, Professor Ben-Ghiat said. In these situations, the left, or antifa, are historically placed in impossible situations.

Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.

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What Is Antifa? - The New York Times