Antifa in Focus

When I call Gregory McKelvey and Kathryn Stevens, they’re in the midst of an alternately quiet and cacophonous Saturday afternoon typical to young parents. The Portland, Oregon–based pair, interracial and in their late 20s, plan to be married next year. Thankful one of their two babies is asleep, Stevens breast-feeds the other during our interview. Neither parent comes across as a domestic terrorist.

But McKelvey and Stevens are involved with antifa—a decentralized network of leftists representing various belief systems and tactics, united only in their opposition to nationalists and white supremacists—and as such they inhabit the same category as the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. Or they would, if senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy had succeeded last summer in designating the movement a domestic terrorist group. (Regarding the senators’ efforts, President Trump tweeted, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.’ ”)

McKelvey tells me that despite frequent threats to his family, showing up for antifa actions is something he and Stevens feel they must do. “I think it helps people to see a successful family defending antifascists, because those people often can’t defend themselves.”

Stevens adds, “When it was just Greg and me, it was easier to say, ‘Threaten us all you want. I’m not scared of you.’ But now, with two babies, it’s not okay at all. I haven’t hurt anybody, and I have no intention of hurting anyone, so why would you threaten my family? It’s solely because of our political beliefs.”

Perhaps the problem lies in pinpointing what those beliefs are, how the movement acts on them and whom the movement consists of in the first place.

That confusion has often led to fear and anger, exacerbated by antifascists’ use of anonymity as a defense against arrest and doxxing—though doxxing is also one of antifa’s tactics. Notwithstanding recent efforts to raise this shroud of secrecy, including non-anonymous interviews with outlets such as Rolling Stone (and this one), anonymity has allowed a group of loosely connected activists to be demonized by members of the far right and, increasingly, centrists and moderate Democrats. As we stagger toward the 2020 election, antifa finds itself at a crossroads: Can it succeed, or even survive, without taking up the very tools its opponents have wielded to such ruthless effect?

I’ve studied Portland’s antifa community since it came to prominence in the wake of the 2016 election, and I’ve reported on several protests and actions in that time. I can’t claim total impartiality, in large part because many of my friends and neighbors are involved in the movement, but I can say I’ve observed antifa’s victories and dysfunctions at close range. It’s the movement’s unique position in American culture—how it works, how it’s perceived and the gaping blind spot between the two—that I’ve set out to explore.

For this story I interviewed a dozen or so antifa activists, who gave me new insights into the range of their methods, from electoral campaigns to, yes, street confrontations. Although monitoring far-right groups online is a crucial part of the movement’s work, I’m more interested in its public-facing efforts—the attempts to puncture the antifa stereotype, reveal the sprawling community beneath and loudly voice the message uniting them all: Hate requires active and direct confrontation.

But learning more about antifa requires a treacherous journey through its internal and external challenges. And you can’t get a more potent demonstration of those challenges than a string of events, briefly violent and wholly absurd, that unfolded last summer.

On May 1, 2019, writer, Twitter personality and occasional Fox News commentator Andy Ngo was videotaped by an undercover antifascist who had embedded with the far-right organization Patriot Prayer. (A Portland grand jury later used the video to indict several Patriot Prayer members.) In it, Ngo appears to smile while others make plans to attack a Portland cidery known to be an antifa hangout. According to reports, the ensuing incident left a woman with a broken vertebra after a man hit her with a baton. Ngo would then dox the injured woman as she lay in the hospital; she reportedly awoke to a cavalcade of death threats.

For this, plus previous instances of what some consider Islamophobia and misinformation on his social accounts, Ngo became fair game in the minds of some antifascists. (In an op-ed, he pushed back against the allegations of Islamophobia.) On June 29, at a Portland rally organized by Patriot Prayer, he was punched and kicked by antifascists in black clothes and masks, who then stole the stunned writer’s GoPro. Overnight, Ngo morphed from a fringe figure to a national sympathy case who received nearly $195,000 from a GoFundMe organized by conservative commentator Michelle Malkin.

If only that were the end of the story.

The rally landed at the end of Pride Month, and the antifa group PopMob (short for Popular Mobilization) had organized a massive dance party for queer people and their allies to oppose the Proud Boys and other organizations that had joined in with Patriot Prayer. In a move reminiscent of recent antifascist actions in the U.K., PopMob decided to bring vegan coconut milkshakes. Antifa activists hit Ngo with multiple shakes, and Portland police, acting on a tip, tweeted, “Police have received information that some of the milkshakes thrown today during the demonstration contained quick-drying cement.” This tweet, which at press time is still on the department’s official Twitter page and has more than 13,000 retweets and 25,000 likes, has yet to be substantiated by a single piece of evidence.

“We definitely weren’t advocating throwing them at people,” says Effie Baum, a fourth-year graduate student and member of PopMob, “but we weren’t naive enough to think it might not happen.” Baum, who uses they/them pronouns, laughs tiredly at the suggestion that the shakes contained any sort of hardening agent. They point out, as many have, that PopMob would have been risking the murder of hundreds of people had they laced the drinks. This did not stop Fox News from reporting that “the so-called ‘milkshakes’ reportedly contained quick-drying cement, pepper spray and raw eggs.” The attention resulted in Baum receiving hundreds of violent threats from around the country.

It’s no surprise that the Ngo incident played well with the Fox audience, but CNN’s Jake Tapper took it upon himself to retweet a video of Ngo post-punch with the caption “Antifa regularly attacks journalists; it’s reprehensible.” (The “attacks” he posted included an egg being tossed, a camera cord being cut and University of Virginia students yelling at a journalist.) Tapper’s colleague John Berman invited Ngo on his show. Neither anchor brought up Ngo’s history of posting false or misleading statements on his Twitter account.

“Going out in the streets is only about 10 percent of what we do.”

So—an attempt at peaceful protest was compromised by a moment of violence at the hands of ostensible allies; that violence was pounced on by the opposition and swiftly turned into a narrative that was amplified by law enforcement and major media outlets.

The antifascists involved didn’t have the media apparatus in place to combat the disinformation (though Baum tried), and a major opportunity to correct the record—to proclaim that antifa is not a pack of extremist hooligans—was lost in a fog of tweets and sound bites.

The antifascist activists I interviewed for this piece are eager to change the perception of the movement and spoke with me knowing they would receive torrents of threats for doing so. The vast majority of antifascist work consists, they tell me, not of black masks, street clashes and weaponized milkshakes but of behind-the-scenes organizing and countless hours spent observing far-right communication channels.

People who do antifascist work are not, by and large, participants in the so-called black bloc, whose masks and sometimes aggressive presence at rallies are a magnet for media attention. Antifascists are doctors, parents and baristas. They’re your neighbors. There are so many grandmothers involved in antifascist actions in Portland alone that they have their own organization, complete with monthly meetings and a Facebook page. At the Occupy ICE PDX protests last June, directly in front of federal agents dressed in riot gear and holding rifles sat a row of grannies. One of them was knitting.

“The people who are open about their involvement need to change their rhetoric, because right now we’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

So why has antifascism become demonized by the right and shunned by the left? Much of the answer lies in the movement’s anonymity and disdain for figureheads. Groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys, along with their admirers in the media and Washington, D.C., have cultivated a stable of big personalities and a knack for messaging that has served them well under President Trump, allowing them to shape their own narrative and that of antifascism. In the social-media age, when information (and misinformation) travels the world in the blink of an eye, the messaging effort is often as important as the message itself. It’s not enough to be on the right side of history; you have to be on the right side of those reading and writing that history. While the far right has flourished, antifascists have painted themselves into a lonely corner by shunning the press and the centrist public.

Lucky for them, the press isn’t the only tool at their disposal.

“I feel a responsibility to change the public discourse around antifascism, absolutely,” says Sarah Iannarone, a 2020 candidate for mayor of Portland. (Her campaign is helmed by McKelvey.) Iannarone is a mother who has spent her professional life trying to make urban spaces greener and more livable, often traveling the world to discuss policy. She’s aware that her open support of antifascism will mark her for threats and violence—and possibly cost her political capital—but she feels duty-bound to the cause.

“Our society’s lack of awareness and understanding of the issue is extremely disappointing to me,” she says. “Because this problem exists within the system, it’s important we use radical tactics—though I definitely think electoral politics matter, and that’s why I’m running.”

Iannarone’s belief that antifascism should engage with mainstream politics is shared by many of the activists I interviewed; it’s one of the reasons they spoke openly with me. These attitudes represent a shift in tactics within a movement that has traditionally been suspicious of the electoral process. Along with a nascent openness to the press, this approach could go a long way toward correcting the rampant misinformation against them.

PopMob’s Baum represents a more counterintuitive strain of the “radical tactics” Iannarone mentioned. Over the past year, PopMob and its allies have sought to combat both the far right’s endeavors and antifa’s messaging problems through resistance theatrics, using marching bands to drown out loudspeakers and recently launching the “Banana Bloc,” wherein roughly 40 activists dressed in banana suits and armed with brass instruments led a parade of about 100 people to protest a Proud Boys rally.

Baum points to community building and organizing as Pop-Mob’s central aim. In March 2019, after a series of attacks befell Portland’s LGBTQ community, PopMob rapidly put together an event attended by about 600 people, featuring self-defense and community-awareness lessons. The organizers handed out more than 1,000 whistles, flashlights and self-defense key chains.

“I volunteered because I wanted to change attitudes,” Baum says. “Going out in the streets is only about 10 percent of what we do.”

Jacob Bureros, an activist whose participation in rallies and press ops subjects him to constant death threats, points to rarely covered community-minded work—such as the aid provided to Portland’s most vulnerable residents during a brutal ice storm in January 2017. Activists delivered blankets and hot meals to the city’s homeless and offered transportation to shelters. After a rash of violent attacks against the homeless in 2018, antifascists set up patrols of the various homeless camps around town.

And then there’s Margaret “Peggy” Zebroski, a 69-year-old retired physician’s assistant and grandmother. In February 2017, Zebroski participated in a protest against the killing of Quanice Hayes, a 17-year-old African American who was fatally shot by a white Portland cop with an AR-15 after Hayes had allegedly used a toy airsoft gun in a robbery. At the protest, a Portland police officer—in full riot gear, despite there being only about 50 protesters—pinned Zebroski’s head to the pavement with his knee, breaking her nose.

“Well, I have to tell you that for me, in the context of things, this was a pretty trivial event,” Zebroski tells me. “I’ve been doing demonstrations since I was a teenager. I’ve been clubbed in the head in San Francisco during Vietnam protests. It’s the police harming the elderly, and that’s upsetting—I get that. But we were protesting Quanice Hayes being killed. He died; I only had my nose broken.”

Even in the face of such ardent civil disobedience, the question of physical confrontation remains. If antifascism really favors vigilance and community building over fists, why do some of its adherents give the far right what it wants by meeting its violence with more violence? Because for better or worse, sometimes it works out in the left’s favor.

David (not his real name) is a family man in his mid-30s and a member of Rose City Antifa, one of America’s oldest antifascist groups. He cites Richard Spencer, the white nationalist whose fame peaked after he was punched in the face with cameras running. Spencer’s assertion that the black bloc has made his allies afraid to show up to events suggests that violently confronting the far right can be an effective tactic. “If they can’t find a protester in black bloc to fight,” David explains, “they’re going to go beat up an African American teen at a mall who is not involved in a protest whatsoever. They’re going to attack somebody just walking down the street.”

But the threat of violence goes beyond civilians on the far edges of the political spectrum. And for Bureros, a man of Filipino descent and a young father of two, the real danger doesn’t come from the bigots in the streets.

“For all the threats I get, I’m still more afraid of the police state and what it can do,” he says. “When you have police who can do whatever they want to you with impunity, that’s a lot scarier.”

An editorial in a 2017 issue of Pax Centurion, the official publication of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, informed readers that, when dealing with antifascists, “the only way to defeat these savages is to fight fire with fire.” The piece went on to equate antifascism with Nazism.

“The problem, of course, is with that blanket statement,” says Norm Stamper, Seattle’s police chief during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, which helped give rise to Occupy Wall Street and much of the modern protest movement. (Stamper has repeatedly voiced his regrets at the heavy-handedness with which his department responded to the massive protest.) “It’s just plain wrong, and it’s dangerous and ridiculous to think that way.

“Law enforcement has a responsibility to protect everyone at a protest—or a counterprotest—no matter what they’re saying or what they believe,” he adds. “It’s extremely difficult at times, but that’s the job we signed up for.”

Of the domestic-terrorist designation and its ties to policing, he says, “There is a fascist thread working its way through the body politic, and its head cheerleader is Donald Trump. His diehard followers would absolutely use such a designation to force law enforcement to help further their political cause, which is antithetical to what law enforcement is ostensibly all about.”

Of course, quasi-fascism and Pax Centurion don’t begin to speak for all law enforcement, and the rare instances of antifa affiliates hurling various projectiles their way are further steps away from antifa’s core message. (The antifa slogan “All cops are bastards”—or ACAB—while not equivalent to Pax Centurion’s claims, isn’t helping either.) Activists say their anger arises with good reason and that they’re often left to fend for themselves when attacked. In Portland, instances of overzealous policing include shooting nonlethal rounds into crowds of peaceful protesters, resulting in devastating head injuries; charging groups of black bloc antifascists, regular citizens and journalists alike (myself included); striking civilians with batons while driving them toward downtown traffic; and disproportionately arresting leftist protesters.

Which brings us back to black bloc—a small and often messy faction but an integral one. In January 2019, Patriot Prayer attempted to storm a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at Portland’s Industrial Workers of the World union office. Portland DSA co-chair Olivia Katbi Smith wasn’t there that night, but she’s been present for many similar Patriot Prayer-led incursions.

“It’s incredibly frustrating when they do things like try to invade our meetings,” Katbi Smith says. Reflecting on black bloc’s greater significance, she adds, “People still wonder why we need the black bloc out there. That’s exactly why. They put their bodies on the line for us.”

When I ask McKelvey about the future of the movement, he replies without hesitation.

“Antifascism sure as hell has a PR problem,” he says.

He goes on, and his words suggest an outline of how the movement might finally find a voice to meet that of the roaring far right: “These elements that Trump has inspired to come out of the woodwork aren’t going anywhere regardless of what happens next year, so antifascists aren’t either. We need to make it okay for people to say they support antifascism, including people in all levels of government. We’re going to need people in the streets forever, but the people who are open about their involvement need to change their rhetoric, because right now we’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

Even if antifa coheres into a force strong enough to shift American culture away from the fears and hatred that continue to work their way into the mainstream, I can’t help but think about the effect all that visibility could have on McKelvey and Stevens’s family.

“Even with the kids?” I ask.

“Our kids,” says Stevens, “are one of the reasons we’re out there.”