Antifa’s violent far-left hooks

Antifa, the shadowy, violence-prone far-left radical group President Trump said he will designate as a terrorist organization, is best known for its clashes with police and conservative groups.

The Trump administration has blamed Antifa — short for anti-fascist — for stirring up attacks on police and businesses during the protests that have spread nationwide in response to the death of George Floyd.

Mark Bray, a Dartmouth College professor who wrote about the Antifa movement in his 2017 book, “The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” said the majority of the members “wholeheartedly support militant self-defense against the police and the targeted destruction of police and capitalist property.”

And while the group’s overall numbers remain vague, the members run the gamut from Marxists, Leninists, social democrats to anarchists.

They organize and do fundraising on a mix of social media sites before assembling from far and wide for protests.

Usually wearing black clothes with their faces obscured by masks, Antifa members do not shy away from violence and believe destroying property is righteous political expression.

“There is a place for violence. Is that the world that we want to live in? No. Is it the world we want to inhabit? No. Is it the world we want to create? No. But will we push back? Yes,” Scott Crow, a former Antifa organizer, told The Atlanta Voice.

Crow said they accept the violence because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist.”

In 2017, Antifa staged violent protests at the University of California at Berkeley over the appearance of conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, and clashed with white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.