“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
— John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (via philosophybits)
Several hundred anti-fascist activists gathered in Lownsdale Square, a small park in downtown Portland, Oregon, on February 8 to oppose a Ku Klux Klan rally organized by Steven Shane Howard, a former imperial wizard of the North Mississippi White Knights. But after local anti-fascist groups mobilized to counterprotest, Howard contacted the Portland Police Bureau to cancel his event. When the KKK didn’t show up, we held a victory party instead.
Unfortunately, while we anti-fascists in Portland danced to a brass band dressed in banana costumes (the beloved Banana Bloc), more than a hundred members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the National Mall in Washington, DC, wearing white masks and chanting “Reclaim America!” and “Life, liberty, victory!”
In the aftermath, #AntifaTerrorists trended on Twitter. The hashtag tends to emerge when the right has an optics problem and needs to spin the narrative. An optics problem like, for example, white nationalists marching through the nation’s capital.
For all of the right-wing hand-wringing over people dressed in black wielding silly string and oranges, nearly all the domestic terrorists in the United States emerge from the extreme right. A 2019 report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism showed that all 50 of the extremist killings in the United States in 2018 had links to right-wing extremists. Since 2001, the extreme right has killed 109 people. Over that same time period, anti-fascists are responsible for zero deaths.
