Front Burner - What exactly is Antifa?
Episode Date: October 8, 2025The term ‘Antifa’ derives from the German word for Antifascist — and the constellation of resistance movements largely created as a response to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Today, Antifa d...escribes a decentralized anti-fascist movement with local groups and unaffiliated activists all over the world. Many became aware of Antifascist organizing following Antifa’s intervention at the white supremacist ‘Unite The Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. For the last decade, Antifa has come to symbolize progressive protest and movement building – engaging in doxxing,, property destruction, and street-level physical confrontations. In late September of this year, U.S. President Donald Trump officially designated Antifa a domestic terror organization. Mark Bray is an academic, scholar of European history and radicalism, and the author of several books including ‘ANTIFA — the anti fascist handbook.’ He joins the show to discuss the rise of antifascist movements from the 1930s to today, and why Trump’s terror designation recalls authoritarian crackdowns through history, both in the U.S., Canada and abroad. We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts
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You may have heard of Antifa before, though you may not know exactly what it is. Maybe you
heard about them when they confronted white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017.
On the streets of Charlottesville, today the hate boiling over white supremacists and countered protesters fighting with fists and clubs.
Or for their protests in Portland back in 2020.
The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters, and anarchists.
The violence and vandalism is being led by Antifa.
The Trump administration has recently sanctioned the deployment of federal forces into the city of Portland for the second.
time in five years, because, as Trump says, it is, quote, under siege from attack by
Antifa and other domestic terrorists. This is following a decision late last month to
officially designate Antifa a domestic terror organization. The word Antifa derives from the
German word for antifascist and finds its roots in the resistant movements to Mussolini
and Hitler in the 1930s. Today, Antifa is a decentralized anti-fascist movement. Today, Antifa is a decentralized
anti-fascist movement with local groups and unaffiliated activists all over the world.
The move to now designate Antifa as a terror organization comes with all kinds of implications,
and critics say that it recalls authoritarian crackdowns through history, both in the U.S. and
Canada and abroad.
Joining us today is Mark Bray, an academic and author of several books, including Antifa,
the Anti-Fascist Handbook.
He's a scholar of European history and radicalism, and he has spent years studying,
and tracking the rise of anti-fascist movements from the 1930s to today.
Mark, hi, thank you so much for coming on to Front Burner.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Antifa is generally decentralized movement and kind of amorphous.
At least it seems that way from the outside.
How would you describe the movement or?
group to people that may not be familiar with it. Yeah, that's right. There's an assumption on the part
of a lot of right-wingers that any kind of political entity has to be this kind of hierarchical,
homogenous organization with leaderships and the headquarters and so forth. I couldn't be farther
from the troops in this case. Antifa is a kind of politics. It's a kind of movement. It's sort of
something that you do, and maybe you call yourself that or you don't. In that sense, I kind of
compare it to, for example, feminism.
There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group.
There are Antifa groups, but Antifa itself is not a group.
And just to kind of address something that you mentioned in the introduction,
which is a great introduction, there are plenty of radicals from plenty of different
traditions that engage in different forms of direct action and unconventional political
forms of resistance.
Most of them are not part of Antifa groups, and most of the Black Lives Matter protests
and so forth, where people from other traditions, other kinds of political backgrounds.
part of the problem now is Trump is trying to lump everyone who maybe will have a protest in the streets
or will do anything outside of the liberal playbook of voting as the evil antifa. And it's not, it's not accurate.
Politics, both conservative and liberal, tend to operate within a framework of elections, debate, and faith and institutions, right?
The idea that fascism can be defeated democratically. But anti-fascist logic, rejects,
that, arguing those very systems often enable fascism's rise, right? Mussolini and Hitler,
after all, came to power through democracy. So within that logic, how effective to anti-fascists
believe governments or institutions really can be in fighting fascism? Who can be relied on?
Well, that's, that question is the key to understanding the historical genesis of militant
anti-fascism. So after World War II in Europe, debates emerged among the left. How do we
stop another Nazi party or another fascist party from coming to power? And the predominant position
among socialist and communist political parties in Europe was you simply make it illegal. You use
the state to make it illegal for the far right to reclaim its political presence. You get the
tradition of militant anti-fascism in its most kind of clarified sense moving into the latter
part of the 20th century when a lot of these far-right and Nazi and fascist groups start regrouping
And they simply change the symbols they use.
They don't use the spostick anymore.
They use like a Celtic cross or other symbols.
They change the name of their party.
They try to gradually become a little more family friendly,
although, of course, there is also the neo-Nazi skinhead phenomenon.
And militant antifascism emerges by saying, no, we can't simply count on the state.
We can't count on the police.
We can't count on the courts.
And we can't count on the supposed free market of ideas of rational discourse on
its own to stop the far right.
We don't depend on the cops or the courts to do the work of opposing white supremacy.
That means that when fascists come to our city to attack people, we are going to put our bodies
between fascists and the people they want to attack.
That doesn't mean that they don't advocate for making political arguments, but we can see
historically that you can't just hope that reasonable people will find the appeals of
fascism unappealing because quite a few people supported the history.
historical fascist regimes, and we're seeing in the United States today that quite a few people,
although polls show not a majority, but quite a few people support what Trump is doing. And so
the genesis of the anti-fascist argument is that you stop them from below, stop them in communities,
using a wide variety of strategies and tactics, but that you don't assume that fascism is going to fail.
instead do actually assume that unless we do something, it may succeed. And unfortunately, I feel like
that's happening in the U.S. right now. Can you take me through some of those strategies and tactics?
Sure. Sure. Right. So the anti-fascists I interviewed, and I interviewed for my book,
Antifa published in 2017, I interviewed more than 60 anti-fascists from 17 different countries,
including the U.S. and Canada. And the way that they explained their kind of strategic outlook was
it's often much more effective and safer to try and stop, for example, a Nazi event by contacting
the venue owner, encouraging them to cancel the event, organizing a public demonstration to stop it,
or some of the historical examples of fascists trying to sell their newspapers and showing up
and creating such a large protest that their voice is kind of drowned out,
de-platforming them by, for example, if there's an event scheduled in a park,
The anti-fastists show up two hours earlier with thousands of people and make it so they can't have their event.
Claims of dissent on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
Around 1,500 students assembled to protest the visit of Milo Yanopoulos,
the far-right editor of the conservative news outlet Breitbart.
The demonstration descended into violence as masked individuals smashed windows and clashed with police,
forcing the cancellation of Yanopoulos' speech to the student body.
Also in the U.S. in recent years, doxing has been a successful strategy, but the thing with doxing
is that it's really only successful to the degree that society at large rejects the politics of
the person being doxed. And so in that sense, I've heard from some anti-fascists that they don't
feel like it's as successful in the U.S. today because the kind of far-right politics
have become so predominant. Homeland Security says ICE agents, including in Portland,
are getting docks. Secretary Kristi Noem says two groups in Portland have been publishing names,
pictures, and addresses of ICE officers on the web. Others have allegedly been posting flyers
in the officer's neighborhoods. Now pledged to prosecute those who docks federal agents.
That's a wide range of tactics, but they also argue, given the historical legacy of fascism
being an inherently violent, not just empirically, but in its essence, glamorizing and
promoting violence, politics, and given the legacy of the Holocaust and authoritarian regimes,
and more recent examples of whenever there's a far right event, the likelihood of an attack
on a marginalized community increases that physical confrontation ought to be one of the
tools in the toolbox, but according to those I interviewed, really, the kind of last resort
when those other efforts fail.
Portland has become, I think, kind of shorthand for Antifa and a lot of the political
imagination, a kind of testing ground for what both the right and left project onto
anti-fascism. But this is also a city with a long history of white supremacist organizing.
That's right. Anarchist resistance, deep tensions between activists and law enforcement, right?
Yes. And now Trump has ordered the National Guard into Portland, painting it as a symbol of disorder.
Portland is burning to the ground. It's a insurrectionist all over the place. It's Antifa. And yet the
politicians who are petrified. Look, the politicians are afraid for their lives. That's the only reason that
they say like this, nothing happening.
Just tell me more about this city and how it has become synonymous with Antifa in this way.
Well, I mean, I think a big part of it is that the oldest currently existing group in the U.S.
to use the term Antifa to describe themselves is Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.
They've been one of the better organized, more successful Antifa groups,
and also relatively speaking a bit open to on certain occasions to speaking with the media.
and that's given them a bit more of a higher profile than some other groups.
You're here in sweatshirts and masks.
Why do you wear masks?
Why do you cover your faces?
Primarily it's for our own safety.
The far right and the state have a history of targeting anti-fascists.
Certainly, Portland and Oregon as a whole has a long history of white supremacist politics and violence from that.
This is a city where emotions are particularly.
raw. Two men were killed on the city's metro system, coming to the aid of two women, one in a
hijab who were being verbally assaulted. The alleged killer is a far-right supporter.
It also has, at least in recent years, a legacy of being a very radical city with a relatively,
and I emphasize relatively robust anarchist movement. I say relatively, because, I mean, still,
in American terms, it's tidy. And so we've seen some major protests. We've seen protests there against
ice. We've seen Black Lives Matter protests. I think part of what Trump is trying to do, though,
is conflate those anti-ice protests and those Black Lives Matter protests with Antifa without there
being evidence that that's the case, again, because there's a political incentive to homogenize all
of this. So coming back to Portland, Trump has talked about Portland being a city under siege,
as a war zone radicals burning the city down. That does.
just isn't happening. And I've seen some journalists speculate online that it's possible that
some of his aides are basically showing him AI videos of the supposed auntie for burning down
the city. And I don't know of any evidence to that effect, but I wouldn't be shocked if there
were some grain of truth to that. And I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please don't
come in. We don't need you. I said, well, unless they're playing false tapes, this looked like
World War II. Your place is burning down. The other big moment that I think a lot of people
will think about when they hear the word Antifa is the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville
in 2017. This is where we saw anti-fascist counter protesters descend on the campus of the
University of Virginia and meet hundreds of white supremacists head on. Today, the hate boiling over
white supremacists and countered protesters fighting with fists and clubs. Confederate flags on full
display the governor declaring a state of emergency and that confrontation led to street level
clashes and violence and eventually culminated in the murder of a woman, Heather Heyer, who was killed
by one of the white supremacists present. The American activist Cornell West, as well as other
peaceful protesters present that day, credited the presence of Antifa with having saved their
lives that they would have likely been injured or worse, if not for their intervention.
Can you talk to me a little bit more about Antifa's presence at the Charlottesville?
unite the right rally and what you saw in that right so i mean that was an interesting moment in
american politics for a variety of reasons part of what was that there was an effort evident in the
title of the rally which was unite the right to create an independent political space for the far
right even outside of trump and trumpism and establish a kind of militant street presence for the far right
After hundreds of white supremacists, some giving Nazi salutes held a torch-lit rally yesterday at the University of Virginia
to protest against a decision to remove the statue of a Confederate Civil War general.
The fact is to show people like an overwhelming force that we support keeping these statues, that we're against their removal.
I mean, they're literally pulling up all our culture from the roots.
They're not pulling up anybody else's culture.
In response to that, various different Antifa groups or like-minded activists,
showed up to counter-protest them, and, you know, we've all seen the images of the confrontations
that occurred, including the tragic murder of Heather Heyer. Part of the argument made by militant
anti-fascist historically is you don't let the far right normalize themselves in society
either through their discourse or through their organizing or through their public presence,
that if there is this large gathering that is basically promoting the great replacement theory,
which for listeners who are unfamiliar with it is basically this explicitly Nazi conspiracy theory
that had existed on the farthest reaches of Nazi internet world for several decades
that is now being promoted directly by Donald Trump,
which says that Jews are orchestrating a conspiracy to destroy the white race
by promoting immigration and interracial marriage,
that the people that were marching there in Charlottesville were chanting Jews will not replace us,
which is a direct reference to that conspiracy theory
and trying to really demonize anyone
that was not a straight white person.
And so the anti-fascist argument,
their strategic outlook is we just don't let that
become normalized, that we show up and oppose it.
And that's what happened.
One of the really interesting components
of Trump's Antifa terror designation,
if we can move to that now,
is just how vague and broad the language is.
It talks not just about Antifa,
but, quote, Antifa aligned actors.
President wrote on social media last night
that he is, quote,
designating Antifa a sick, dangerous,
radical left disaster as a major terrorist organization.
He also says he will investigate those who fund the group.
Critics have warned that because Antiva has no central structure,
There's a danger here that these orders will be used by law enforcement agencies to crack down on a broad spectrum of left-wing activism and frame it as a national security problem.
Were you surprised by Trump's terror designation?
What do you think the implications of all of this are?
Well, initially I was not too surprised because it was not the first time that he or other Republicans had called for, quote-unquote, Antifa to be designated as a terrorist organization.
Trump famously made the same kind of appeal during 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests
when he argued that the entirety of what was perhaps the most important popular social upheaval
the U.S. had seen in decades was the exclusive product of these handful of really small
anti-for groups, which was, of course, ludicrous.
We support the right of peaceful protesters, and we hear their pleas, but what we are now seeing
on the streets of our cities has nothing to do with justice or with peace.
The memory of George Floyd is being dishonored by rioters, looters, and anarchists.
The violence and vandalism is being led by Antifa and other radical left-wing groups.
So he called for it back then but didn't follow it up.
So initially this time when he said that I thought maybe it'd be more of the same,
but then he issued the executive order, which despite having a lot of like strong sounding
language has no legal mechanism. There is no way to designate domestic entities in the U.S.
to be terrorist organizations only foreign entities. But although it doesn't have legal weight,
I think it would be short-sighted to think that it doesn't matter. Because as you suggest,
it's certainly an effort to try and demonize the left, demonize those who protest or resist the
administration in any way. And it was actually not in the initial executive order, but in
a kind of memo from the Department of Homeland Security four days later that they introduced the
phrase Antifa aligned. And so a term that was clearly chosen because it is vague and broad,
because it is poorly misunderstood, was rhetorically expanded very quickly to not only cover
Antifa or those similar but Antifa aligned, which of course they're trying to stretch very
broadly because they're not just trying to target radicals. They're also trying to target
liberal nonprofit organizations and NGOs. They're claiming that George Soros, who of course
has been accused of being behind everything for years, arguing that George Soros is somehow
financing these groups. But Soros is the name that I hear. I hear a lot of different names.
I hear names of some pretty rich people that are radical left people. If they are funding
these things, they're going to have some problems because they're agitators and they're
These are anarchists, which is ridiculous.
And for what it's worth, is another manifestation of that great replacement theory notion,
which is a modern version of the older anti-Semitic trope of Jews trying to destroy society
by having big money behind everything, right, which has always been ridiculous.
So, you know, that's the framework in which it's happening.
And it seems crystal clear to me that the end game here is to make it so that
resistance is equated with terrorism.
Many on the right now frame Antifa as the real fascists, right?
I'm sure you've heard this, the true threat to freedom and liberty.
And what do you make of that?
So since I published my book in 2017, there's been an effort to push back to say that
because anti-fascists sometimes will de-platform a fascist speaker,
because they will sometimes defend themselves with their body.
that they are the real fascists.
Lamentably, I think that this has somewhat been enabled by liberal discourse, which equates,
which sort of promotes the horseshoe theory, right, that the quote-unquote extremes meet
that anyone who's outside of the center of gravity politically, whether they're anarchists or
ISIS or whatever, is ultimately a version of the same thing, which is really not borne out
by any kind of historical or political scholarship.
fascists and antifascists disagree about almost everything.
Fascists are ultra-nationalists.
Anti-fascists are internationalists.
Fascists are misogynists.
Anti-fascists are feminists.
You could run down the list.
They disagree about almost anything.
The only like sliver of overlap is that they are both not the center of the political spectrum.
They're both illiberal movements who do not have faith in the liberal play
book for politics to address what they consider to be the problems in society. That's the
extent of it. And so to equate to political movements or tendencies simply because they
sometimes happen to do the same things, such as, for example, interrupting a speaker that they
oppose, is to assess an action without any point of reference towards why the action is being
done, who it's being done to, what the politics are behind it and the context it's happening.
And believe me, as a history professor, I can see that that is not a way to analyze anything.
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I want to put a critique around free speech to you, which I'm sure you've heard, right,
that if antifascists believe or some anti-fascists believe, I know it's not a monopoly,
that you need to shut down the right of the fascists
to speak to be heard.
That is, of course, an opposition
to the concept of free speech,
an important liberal value.
And so, you know,
how might someone in the movement,
if you could just tell me more
about how someone in the movement
might respond to the critique,
that once you start restricting free speech,
you enter a slippery slope.
Well, there have been several different shades
of opinion that I've encountered
in interviewing anti-fascist about this.
One is to point out that
the protection of free speech applies to the Constitution.
Anti-fascists are not the government. They're not appealing to the government to change
speech laws. They actually oppose that. And so it doesn't apply. But what I point out in the
book is that actually speech is limited in so many different ways already in ways that most
of us would sympathize with around pornography, around copyright laws. There are innumerable
ways in which the rights that we have as individuals are mitigated by our role in society. That
already exists. And it's also true that historically we can see what fascism results in. So the other
argument that anti-fascist put forward is that you have to understand how political movements grow,
right? So fascism doesn't simply go from zero to 100 right away. It has to establish itself as a kind
of family-friendly community-based part of the political discourse. So if you look at it,
you know, Italy or Germany, what were initially very small groups, grew by selling newspapers
in the case of Nazi Germany, right, issuing radio broadcasts, expanding their party. It has to
establish itself in society, in the discourse, in the public sphere. And so if you want to stop that
from happening, you need to employ a variety of different means to stop that. And so, you know,
thinking about it, for example, from the point of view of a university where I work, sure, I
encourage all of my students to express their views, however they see fit, doesn't matter what
their politics are. But if that crosses the line into dehumanizing a classmate, into saying
conspiracy theories about how Jews are trying to destroy the white race or making these erroneous
pseudo-scientific arguments about, like, for example, the intelligence of black people, those are
arguments that meaningfully threatened the actual substance of free speech. And so to shut down
someone or an organization rather that's basically trying to incite violence against marginalized
groups ultimately they argue that's really in the interest of a meaningful robust sense of free
speech not just kind of a narrow liberal mechanistic interpretation of what it is so that that's
where they come from yeah just on your point on how it can spread how fascism can spread so quickly
I was interested to read in in your book that in 1919 Mussolini's initial fascist nucleus was
only 100 men, and two years later, it was 250,000, or when Hitler attended his first meeting
of the German Workers Party before he turned it into the Nazi Party, it had just 54 members.
Could we do violence now? So this is another critique that I am sure you have heard. You'll often
hear conservative influencers talk about being targeted by Antifa, being menaced by them in some ways.
But a more broad critique is that when you meet this in the street, when you justify violence that
is escalatory, that violence begets more violence, that it normalizes violence. How might
an anti-fascist respond to that? So let's look at the history, right? In the 20s and 30s,
the leadership of the main left-wing parties in Italy and Germany were calling for no violence.
They were calling for pursuing their politics through the ballot box. They were arguing for union
activity. And famously, they did not take the threat of fascism in Italy or Nazism in Germany
seriously until it was well too late, and those regimes had consolidated themselves in power.
So I think that when we look at World War II, when we look at resistance and concentration camps,
I think most of us can agree that the use of violence in those circumstances was legitimate.
What the anti-fascists argue, based on the interviews I've done with them, is when does the threat
become grave enough for society to fight back? Reasonable people will disagree about that,
But the argument, especially after World War II, that anti-fascists have made historically,
is you don't let far-right groups grow enough so that they could potentially become those threats, right?
So you treat every group of 54 people as if they could be the nucleus of a new Nazi regime.
That does not mean that the most effective way to oppose them is necessarily violence.
But antifascists argue that basically you treat them as such and you try to nip the threat in the bud before it grows.
grows. So in that sense, this politics is a kind of a preventative anti-fascism. And so an
interesting part of the conversation is certainly in the U.S., I think the situation has moved
beyond that because the kind of politics that they espouse has ended up in the White House.
But this is the post-war theory, right? The post-war theory is you oppose them before they grow big
and you make it impossible logistically for them to normalize themselves in society and
spread their message. We know, we'll never know, right? There was no reason for the left in Germany
or Italy to treat fascism and Nazism as as much of a threat as we now know it was. They didn't
know at the time. But you can't help but wonder if in 1922 the German left knew what
fascism would become, they would have treated it much differently. Maybe with success,
maybe not, but we'll never know.
On America today, I mean, if we just look at what we're seeing in the streets, where we see people on a pathway to citizenship, citizens, non-citizens are being snatched off the street by masked agents of the state.
American cities are being invaded and occupied by federal forces.
The president is categorically using the courts to target his political and personal adversaries.
The president has also talked about the use of lethal force on peaceful,
demonstrators. You know, I think he's talked about shooting them, right? Shooting them in the legs
before. And now Antifa has been designated a terror movement. And what do they see, again,
I know it's not a monolithic group, but what do they see of their role in this moment, you think?
What is the anti-fascist prescription for this moment? Well, I can't speak for any individual
or group specifically, but from the point of view of a history professor of anti-fascism, I think it's a very
interesting and possibly somewhat unprecedented moment.
So before we were talking about the post-war militant anti-fascist strategy being one that
aims to target small and medium-sized far-right groups to try and prevent the potential
spread of their ideas into society and into the halls of power.
That was in my book in 2017, I spoke of the anti-fascist movement at that time as this
kind of preventative anti-fascist movement. Now, I think insofar as the efforts by the far
right to establish their own independent street presence were shut down in 2017, 2018, and
2019, Antifa served that purpose well. But essentially, it seems like a lot of what the far right
did was they folded themselves into MAGA and into Trumpism. And so here we are with Trump
in the White House more explicitly fascist than he was even last time.
And so at this point, the kind of preventative anti-fascism that Antifa groups focus on, we're a bit beyond that point, which doesn't mean that those groups cannot or will not serve an important purpose, either in terms of continuing their monitoring of far-right groups or providing a kind of role in protests or even promoting their kind of strategic outlook around the need to counter protest and so forth.
So we're not in this kind of preventative anti-fascism stage.
We're also not, and we have a historical blueprint for how to do that,
we're also not in the stage that we have the other historical blueprint for,
in terms of anti-fascism, which is warfare, right?
We know what happened with the Spanish Civil War.
We know what happened with World War II.
I hope more than anything that we don't end up in an analogous situation again.
And so I think we need to write a new playbook that has to involve as many people as possible,
resisting in whatever way they see fit,
but building a kind of mass popular anti-fascist movement
to stop this march towards fascism.
Mark, just finally before we go,
I think relevant to this conversation,
is the fact that you are currently the subject
of a doxing campaign,
and it has forced you to teach your classes online
out of fear for your safety.
You've been targeted, I believe,
by members of Turning Point USA,
the late Charlie Kirk's political organization, as well as Fox News and other conservative influencers
that are accusing you of being a financier of Antifa, which, of course, you deny. How have you been
dealing with that? What has it been like for you to be the target of that kind of effort?
Well, when my book came out in 2017, I was harassed and received quite a few threats back then
as well. So unfortunately, it's not entirely new territory. Nevertheless, it is very disturbing.
it has caused me to be concerned for my physical safety and that of my family.
But I'm heartened by the fact that it is currently sparking a kind of national and to some extent
international a conversation about academic freedom and resistance to an increasingly authoritarian regime.
And so to the degree to which that that can kind of spark that conversation and encourage people to action,
then I hope that that's the result that this will have.
Okay, Mark Bray, thank you very much for this.
Appreciate it.
All right, that is all for today.
I'm J.B. Plessall, and thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.
Go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.