Today, Explained - Antifa?

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

President Trump wants to blame the unrest on antifa. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explains why he can’t. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Oof, long day today. Let me sit down and relax and watch some television. When the president said that he was designating Antifa as a terrorist organization, the question... With looters ransacking businesses and torching cars and buildings, President Trump has vowed to take action and designate Antifa as a terrorist organization. What I do know is that Antifa fits the very definition of domestic terrorism. Hmm. I wonder if this all is just an Antifa plot. No, Sean, absolutely not. No.

Whoa, who is that? Who is that? Whose voice is that? It is your friend, Zach Beecham, a Vox senior correspondent and host of the Worldly podcast. You know all of this, which is why you're hallucinating me in your head so I can explain it to you. Zach, I haven't seen you since we used to work in the office together, but I can just channel you in my head?

That's correct. The memory of the before times is so strong, so imprinted in your brain, that when you're confused about something, I come back to help explain to you why you're confused and you don't really understand it. Then I show back up and bam, explanations. Perfect.

This is like when they give you a blazer after you host five episodes of Saturday Night Live. You sound kind of weird, though. Can we just, like, have you sound normal? It's your brain. I can just join you on the couch if you want. Nice. Let me mute the TV for a second here. Good morning. Antifa business. The president is right now blaming Antifa for the vandalism and for turning the peaceful protests against police brutality less peaceful. Like it's all on Antifa in his eyes. Is that right? That is correct. It's possible they've done some of it. It's plausible that they've done some of it, but there's no hard evidence to suggest that that's actually what's

happening. What even is Antifa again? Like, do they have a website or a newsletter that I can read? No, they don't. And understanding what Antifa is requires going back to the 1930s. Whoa. Because that's where the idea came from. So the very first iteration of what we now call Antifa was a German organization called Anti-Fascist Action. I'm pronouncing it in an English accent because I'm going to butcher the German, or at least your mental projection would, Sean.

Yeah. Your German is not very good. Nein. This is just a testament to your mental limitations. Oh. was designed to be a street-level counterpart to the Nazi organizations that were dominating street brawls at the time in late Weimar Germany. And they became an inspiration afterwards to a variety of different other groups who wanted to oppose the rise of fascism and far-right movements in the West. The basic idea was that if you had been able to

more aggressively confront the Nazis on the street and to use force to prevent them from showing up in public, maybe they wouldn't have been able to rise as powerfully and prominently in German politics in the 1930s as they did. Where else? So you saw this a lot in the particular growth of it, starting in Europe and in the United Kingdom in the 70s and 80s. So Germany and then the UK, I'd say, would be the key places where this started. And it started and centered around the punk movement. The punk movement? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the punk music movement.

Like anarchy in the UK? Exactly like that. Exactly like the Sex Pistols. Because I want to be anarchy. Now don't look. Antifa is designed essentially, as one scholar I read put it, as a kind of anarchist alternative to the police to get out the fascists, right? So you're at a punk show and you need to get rid of neo-Nazis. You don't want them there. You think they endanger the people who are participating. You think they're spreading bad ideas in your left-wing spaces. And you don't want to call the cops because you hate the cops.

And so what do you do? You have these group of individuals who are willing to beat up the neo-Nazis or forcibly throw them out. So the kind of direct action that Antifa is willing to use, and they have a variety of different tactics that they do. They're not just about fighting people, but that is a key part of their ideology, what they call preemptive self-defense. You need to beat up the Nazis before they can get in a position where they have enough power and enough adherence to beat you up. Preemptive self-defense, is that just like, could that just be, you know, aggression? You know, the question of whether that's justifiable in the terms that you're asking, it's actually quite complicated, right? Because a lot of times when they would fight and engage in brawls with these people, they weren't actually being violent, that is to say the far-right movement. They were just there trying to be at the punk show or trying to talk to people about their ideas.

And so depending on how you understand the nature of these far-right movements, you could say, well, they're just beating up people who are talking. That seems ridiculous. That's obviously just a way of getting out aggression and feeling good about it because you're beating up people that you don't like. The other way to spin it is the more neo-Nazis there are and the more openly they can act, the more unsafe our space has become for minorities, for Jews, for LGBT individuals.

And if we want to make this a safe and open, inclusive space for all different kinds of people, the people who want to hurt vulnerable groups, they got to go. And we got to do whatever we can to get them out. So how does this go from a sort of anti-Nazi thing in the 1930s to a punk thing in the UK in the 80s to what we see the president constantly bashing now in 2020? Starting around the late 2000s, 2010s, Americans started to embrace the Antifa label as just an abbreviation for anti-fascist action or anti-fascist. And it became this kind of diffuse movement that you saw in different places around the country. There's no central organization. There is one network that

kind of tries to connect them to each other, but there's no command and control structure. It's just a bunch of people who understand themselves to be part of this movement. We see ourselves as engaging in self-defense from groups who want to do our community harm, whose ideology is the ideology of genocide and mass murder. It's unclear how many there are. There are hubs in certain places like Portland where they're more popular, but on the whole, just a bunch of people who describe themselves as Antifa and were initially affiliated or involved in the punk scene, but it sort of grew beyond that.

And then you get the rise of the alt-right and Donald Trump in 2015. And that's the key factor in transforming the way we understand Antifa socially from a totally French movement to something that people actually know about who aren't involved in these sort of subcultural spaces. So this is during the Trump campaign? Yeah, because you started to see an active alt-right presence publicly of people like Richard Spencer, the famous quote-unquote

dapper white supremacist who got these semi-friendly appearances in mainstream media and got to go on television and stuff like that. To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer, and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward. And we recognize the central lie of American race relations. We don't exploit other groups. We don't gain anything from their presence. They need us and not the other way around. You see that, and if you're Antifa, right, again, remember that their whole idea is that you needed to stop the Nazis with force first before they could build up legitimate sources of power and become part of the political system. So they see that and they're like,

oh my God, we got to do something about this. And they start organizing and turning out to contest public spaces where people like Richard Spencer are showing up. And then when Trump wins the election, so many people are scared, hurt, angry, confused, and concerned about a descent of the United States into outright fascism. You start seeing an increase in individual interest in the Antifa movement. And that all comes to a head in Trump's inauguration when an unidentified Antifa member punches Richard Spencer, the white supremacist, in the face. It's Pepe's Become Kind of Assembled. I remember that. Was that that video that you always see? It's been slowed down and everything?

Yeah, and put over music to a lot of different... Totally. Pepe's Become Kind of different... Totally. It's become kind of assembled. And you saw mainstream figures being like, this is kind of awesome. Like, maybe you should punch the Nazis. And that kind of mainstream legitimacy and recognition took Antifa from something that just was totally in the fringes to something that more and more people knew about.

But the thing I wonder about is, like, is that just a guy punching a Nazi because Nazis aren't that popular? Or was it a guy who feels that he is a member of a organized group called Antifa punching a Nazi? Man, we're getting into tricky definitional territory here. But like basically the way that we should think about this is that it's kind of both. There are a lot of people who can understand and see themselves as being Antifa, who are operating in any individual space, but. If you are somebody who's involved in your local Antifa, for example, Rose City Antifa in Portland, then you're operating within a kind of institutional structure, but you're not going around punching Richard Spencer on orders from somebody else. It's not like there's an Antifa commander sitting in a bunker being like, we've identified Richard Spencer.

We have a go order. We have a go order. It's not like that. It's just random people being on the street trying to act in a way that they think is consistent with their values. Which brings us back to this idea that it's hard to define Antifa, right?

Yeah. I mean, they're like the quote-unquote distinctive Antifa look that you sometimes see is more generally a look associated with black bloc anarchist demonstrators who are different. You know, the sort of all-black dress, the face masks. And that's a very particular kind of anarchist demonstration tactic that's not necessarily employed by Antifa. So you can get into this very technical, definitional thing where you've got people dressed in all black, a bandana over their face, breaking windows at a Starbucks or whatever, and people are like, that's Antifa. And well, yeah, it could be Antifa, but it also could be somebody who is not part of

an Antifa organization, doesn't see them as such, but is engaged in a similar kind of protest and demonstration that might mark them as sharing a similar ideology, even if they are not technically or in terms of self-identification an Antifa person. It's quite complicated. I really want to entangle this a little bit more, but I need to make a quick pit stop. I know you're in my subconscious, but can you hang out here on the couch and I'll be right back? No, I'm going to go with you. It's because I'm part of your brain. I know it's going to be awkward, but you're just going to have to push past it. This is going to be fun. Okay, great. Let's go. We'll be right back. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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This is the time we look to our leader. We want this to stop. Zach, Zach, are you still there? Yep, I am. I'm here now that your brain has been turned back on. Ready to answer your questions about all the Fox News you've been watching. President Trump has vowed to take action and designate Antifa as a terrorist organization. So they said on the news that the president's going to designate Antifa a terrorist organization. So they said on the news that the president's gonna designate Antifa a terrorist organization. Is that a thing he can do? No, that's stupid. Like you can't do that.

The reason why is the president has the power to designate foreign terrorist organizations as terrorist groups. That's what he is legally and statutorily empowered to do. Antifa is not a foreign terrorist organization. Even though it started in Germany in the 1930s? Well, because it's not an organization like that. It's not like there's an Antifa compound in Berlin where they're sending out orders to America. It's entirely a bunch of people here who aren't even operating under a direct order or command and control structure, which is the other problem with it. When it's al-Qaeda or ISIS, you can be like, well, yeah, there's an organization here that we can declare a terrorist organization.

But when it comes to Antifa, there's no structure that one could sanction like that. It doesn't even make sense to speak of them as being any sort of unified organization called Antifa. There are just different Antifa branches and individuals who see themselves as participating in it. So it's not foreign in the way that it operates because it's entirely decentralized and domestic. When the FBI has investigated domestic terrorism cases and organizations, they tend to apply an organized crime model. So if you're going into a white nationalist group. Like the KKK? Yeah, like the KKK, or a more violent one.

Let's say like the base in Atomwaffen, which are two new and recent extremely murderous white nationalist groups. When the FBI looks at groups like this, they approach them like they're approaching the mafia because there isn't exactly a legal framework for purely domestic terrorist groups. And the legal tools that one might need to deal with this kind of thing are encapsulated in the powers available for dealing with organized crime. It's the same thing, right? You've got an organized group of people who are conspiring to commit a pattern or series of violent and dangerous actions inside the U.S. And so even if ideologically they're different, structurally you don't need different legal powers to address them. So there's no kind of domestic terrorist designation for that reason. So you're saying, just to be clear here, that the president can't even designate this group a terrorist organization. Like, that's not even within the realm of his power.

I mean, he can do whatever he wants. He can tweet, Antifa is a terrorist organization, or knowing Troth, it would be Antifa terrorist organization, 10 exclamation points. But he can't do anything beyond that. There's no formal legal structure that would allow him to be like, now Antifa are terrorists and the police should arrest them. So why is he going after Antifa? Well, that's because for the past few years, Antifa has become a kind of right-wing boogeyman. It started with that Richard Spencer thing that we were talking about early on at Trump's inauguration, punching a very famous white nationalist. But it really escalated after Charlottesville.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly violence and chaos. The images just coming in, a car plowing into a crowd of demonstrators, victims thrown in the air, one woman dead, others critically wounded. So during the Charlottesville protests, white nationalist rally, violence, etc., there was a pretty significant Antifa protest because this is, of course, the type of event that they would go to based on the way they understand themselves. And there, they had a very right-wing journalist, Andy Ngo in Portland, who was known to hate Antifa, to try to provoke them and so on, went to a rally, and he got beat up. I just got beat up by the crowd. No police at all. Seemingly by Antifa people. In the middle of the street, and they stole my GoPro,

and they punched me several times in my face, in my head, I'm bleeding. Antifa hates being filmed. They don't want anyone to identify them. They want to operate anonymously. And so they see journalists who are filming them as a threat to their anonymity and ability to function in their regular lives. And this violence became really important ideologically for the American right because it allowed you to say not that there were many fine people on both sides, but rather there are many violent people on both sides. That it's not just the extreme right that's become violent and dangerous in the Trump era. It's also the extreme left. It allows you to paint a degree of equivalence between these two sides. And so you have right-wing major legislators and politicians condemning them. Ted Cruz today is calling for a federal investigation after protests turned violent in Portland, Oregon over the weekend.

And Ted Cruz at the time tried to introduce legislation that would count Antifa as a terrorist organization. Now you could do that legislatively. It's just there weren't enough votes to do it and it doesn't really make sense. But the point is that this is not a new Trump thing. It's something that has been a major focus of Fox News and of conservative legislators for a very long time in an effort to say that the growing militancy in the United States is not at all one-sided, but rather that there's a violent left that needs to be dealt with. It seems sort of dangerous to take this particular moment and say, oh, that's just a bunch of antifa? Not only dismissive, but potentially risky? Have we seen any manifestations of how dangerous it can be

to just pin this entire thing on something called antifa? I mean, you see it in the president's rhetoric to a degree, right? The way that he talks about the protests. He focuses primarily on the property damage and the violence that we've seen and uses it to paint Antifa as being responsible for what's happening in the United States right now. The violence and vandalism is being led by Antifa and other radical left-wing groups who are terrorizing the innocent, destroying jobs, hurting businesses, and burning down buildings. In reality, what's happening is that there are overwhelmingly peaceful protests that have violent members inside of them who do not define what's

happening, and that the violent dynamics are escalated by police who use disproportionate, often entirely unjustified, shows of force against protesters whose objectives they find threatening. So it allows you to paint this as a clash between two violent factions, the police who are defending law and order and Antifa who's trying to tear it apart, when what's actually happening is that there's a large group of people who are calling for justice primarily and an end to discrimination who have some agitators inside their ranks. And instead of being able to just deal with the agitators,

arrest somebody who throws a brick or something like that, the police are more justified in using broad brush tactics like firing rubber bullets indiscriminately or tear gassing in order to disperse crowds on grounds that the crowd itself is violent, the nature of it is violent. You can't draw a straight line between calling this an Antifa demonstration and a police crackdown, but you can see how the ideology, the connection, helps legitimize what the cops are doing, even when it's quite clearly unjustifiable. And beyond that, Zach, I mean, is this just like a straw man for the president and the right-wing

media to just avoid dealing with the actual issue at hand here, which is a whole lot of Americans clamoring for racial justice right now? Yeah, it's not even a straw man, right? It's more of a boogeyman, right? You gotta put up the big monster so you can defeat it and claim victory that you're defending the public from this. There was never any chance that President Donald Trump was going to say, okay, there are a bunch of Black people out here protesting for racial justice. I'm going to side with the protesters. That was just not what's going to happen. And white people, too.

It's like the United Colors of Angry America right now. I thought you were going to go with Angry Benetton or Fiery Benetton. I've never really known what the Benetton is. What's the Benetton? It's a clothing company. I know, but why Benetton? What is that? Is that

a place? Well, I guess since I'm your brain, I don't really know. This is where we fall short, as you were a brain. You need to tell a story in order to justify your behaviors, both to yourself and to the public. And the story that you're telling here is that there are violent rioters who need to be put down with force. And if you can say, well, this violence is primarily being driven by an organized group, well, that sounds a lot scarier. And it sounds like something that, after years of the war on terrorism, in American minds, justifies a more violent response. It's a more sellable and salient narrative. Zach, thank you for hanging out with me on my couch and helping me work through this.

I'm your captive, Sean. I can't really do anything else, but I'm happy to be here. Genie, you're free. Goodbye.