Per the article
“The curriculum is structured in part kind of like a university curriculum, except it lasts for months on end. And they complete different units.
So this curriculum is pretty significant because it was not just used for Rose City Antifa, which is a cell in Portland. But Rose City Antifa is part of this network called the Torch Network. And they’re connected to other cells across the United States, who are organized along similar lines.
It really lays to rest, I hope, in this claim that Antifa are not organized in any meaningful way, that it’s just an ideology of being against fascism.
They have been able to use that as a façade and a way to trick the public into not viewing them as a threat, and viewing them as allies in the fight against the far right, whatever.”
“So part of the origin story of Antifa looks at who are the original Antifa, capital “A.” So the original and first Antifa were a paramilitary group of the German Communist Party, in four years of the Weimar Republic.
And that’s important because, in that historical context, the Antifa today don’t necessarily have a direct lineage to the original group. They kind of just appropriated the name and the symbols and the messaging.
But the original Antifa were communists. The people that they called fascists weren’t just the actual fascists, in terms of national socialists, their opposition was primarily to the Social Democrats, which was the party that was in the governing party of the Weimar Republic. And they saw it at every turn to delegitimize the state. Their members were connected to previous communist uprisings.
Their goal, from the beginning, was always to delegitimize liberal democracy. And the Antifa today still continue that legacy and goal. If you step back, even after World War II, what became East Germany, the communist state of East Germany, they actually institutionalized the so-called anti-fascist ideology into the state ideology.”
The Berlin Wall, as we are familiar with what it’s called, to the East Germans, the official title was the “Anti-Fascist Defense Barrier.”
“So this whole label of being against anti-fascism has always been a trick. It sounds noble and great because, I mean, America was involved in a war fighting actual fascists. And so people who are ignorant about Antifa, maybe sympathize with the name, but they use that to pull liberals and the mainstream left into becoming allies or, in my view, useful idiots.”
“Antifa’s main enemy is the United States itself. You can look at their own literature. They viewed the United States as a fascist, imperialistic state, [that] doesn’t just need to be destroyed, but the American philosophy itself needs to be destroyed because America has influenced and exported liberal democracy to a lot of the world in the 20th century.
So that is their principal enemy. So the actions that they were partaking in during the Trump administration are the same in the Biden administration.
Even in November, when it was announced that Joe Biden had become president-elect, the response in the Antifa, in Portland, in Seattle, where they’re most active, [was] to take to the streets to riot.
On the 4th of November, the day after the election, the National Guard was actually activated for the first time by the Oregon governor because the Antifa were … smashing up businesses, one by one, in downtown.
They even destroyed a church, which I think that should have been more widely covered in the media because the destruction of the house of worship, that’s significant, I think.
And they continued that since, but the media had just moved on from Portland. The headlines aren’t so interesting when you can’t blame Trump, when you can’t blame secret police under Trump. So, much of the country wasn’t even aware that the riots were continuing on Inauguration Day in Portland.
The Antifa had announced way ahead of time that they were planning a direct action and, of course, they gathered a group of several hundred, and they marched to the headquarters of the Democrat Party in Portland and destroyed it. And this is the second time that they had severely damaged a building connected to the Democrat Party.”
Per the article
“But there are also journalists who are actual fellow travelers and members of Antifa groups as well. And I write about that in the book.
One of the people who provided some of the radicalization training to Rose City Antifa was a man named Shane Burley. And he has written opinion pieces for NBC, The Independent, and some other mainstream places. And he’s never been forthcoming about his involvement in training Antifa and extremist ideology. So, there’s also academics who are involved.”