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.

Interestingly many black protesters have attacked Antifa members for perpetuating violence, including one group who dragged a man dressed in Black Bloc attire to police.

There are people who are using the current events as an excuse to sow division and chaos, and Antifa groups are absolutely included.

> A fascist is one who uses violence for political means.

Interesting definition. Could it be said Abraham Lincoln used violence (in war) for political means?

Isn't all war "the continuation of politics by other means"?

I presume what was meant here was that 20th C fascist movements got big by the strategic use of street violence, in a way that the relatively liberal societies they worked within weren't equipped to counter.

Obviously not the first movement to use street violence, but (in my understanding) the scale and discipline with which it was deployed was a new and distinctive feature.

Fascism is used in a civil sense. Military violence during war is in a different category.

That definition of “fascist“ includes everyone except anarchists.

" A fascist is one who uses violence for political means."

What? No, that's the definition of terrorism.

Fascism is an extreme nationalistic ideology pioneered in Italy by Mussolini and adopted by Nazi Germany.

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.