As riots and looting consumed Philadelphia this week after a fatal police shooting, a radical left-wing group, the “Philly Socialists,” began monitoring police scanners and relaying information to help protesters evade arrest. At one point, the Philly Socialists tweeted out a clue as to their street allegiances:  “Do humanity a favor and learn what antifa stands for.”

The scene in Philadelphia was similar to scores of violent protests around the country since May, which have often featured a common and shadowy element – black-masked men and women who seemed as intent on breaking windows and confronting the police as chanting social justice slogans.

The one thing most people can agree on is these people have a name – “antifa,” short for anti-fascists. But larger questions – who are they? where did they come from? what do they want? – have been lost in the battle of partisan politics.

American Antifa (Routl... Vysotsky, Stanislav Best Price: $41.42 Buy New $34.03 (as of 03:24 UTC - Details) President Trump has denounced antifa as an organized terror group, like the Ku Klux Klan. At the first presidential debate, Joe Biden disagreed, paraphrasing Trump’s own FBI director, Christopher Wray, as saying that “unlike white supremacists, antifa is an idea, not an organization, not a militia.”

While Wray did testify to that effect before a House panel in September, he also said antifa was a real threat and that the FBI had undertaken “any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists.” A U.S. attorney with the Justice Department told Congress in August the FBI had opened more than 300 domestic terrorism investigations related to the ongoing riots.

Antifa is, in fact, hard to pin down. It has no known leaders, no address, not even a Twitter account. A number of specific groups involved in street violence embrace the antifa label. Those groups, in turn, are highly secretive and loosely organized.  Stanislav Vysotsky, a former antifa activist and author of “American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism” (2020), concedes that “for most people antifa is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wearing a black mask.”

This elusiveness, which appears to be by design, makes it difficult to define or even identify members of a movement that nevertheless has had an outsized impact on American society.

Yet, the black mask slips. Scholarly research and daily journalism shed light on antifa’s ideology and its long history in the United States. Its mixture of left-wing politics and anarchist nihilism can be traced back more than 100 years. Its modern incarnation, centered in the Pacific Northwest, features 1960s radicals, including former members of the Weather Underground, anti-racist skateboard punks who emerged in the 1980s, and younger radicals. Their racial and ethnic makeup is uncertain, but significant numbers are white. Arrest records and other publicly available information suggest many of those identifying as antifa are itinerant or marginally employed.

Scholars agree with Vysotsky that “antifascism is simultaneously a complex and simple political phenomenon.” It is simple in that it is an oppositional movement – it is defined by its resistance to “fascism.” Unlike leftists, its adherents are not seeking to gain the levers of power to build a utopia. They are skeptical of state power, hence their frequent clashes with the police, and are more intent on confronting those they see as enemies.

But antifascism is also complex because fascism itself “is often an extremely murky concept,” writes Mark Bray, a history lecturer at Rutgers, self-described political organizer and author of “The Antifa Handbook.” To clarify what fascism is, antifa sympathizers try to connect the American movement to a series of obscure 20^th century left-wing groups that resisted the likes of Hitler, Mussolini and General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.The leftist slogan of that war, “No pasarán” (“They shall not pass”), is often invoked by American adherents. In general, antifa partisans show no embarrassment from associations with leftist totalitarians. Bray notes that an antifa-sympathizing self-defense group called the “Maoist Red Guards” is still active in Austin. Antifa: The Anti-Fasci... Bray, Mark Best Price: $22.44 Buy New $11.19 (as of 03:24 UTC - Details)

At the same time, antifa activists are intensely hostile to American historical traditions. In Portland, rioters recently smashed windows of the Oregon Historical Society, stealing and damaging a quilt made by black women to celebrate America’s bicentennial. That same night, rioters tore down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt that had stood in Portland for more than a century.

While American antifa adherents explicitly reject the First Amendment and other classically liberal ideas about free speech and assembly, they see as their spiritual ancestors 19^th century slavery abolitionists and others who fought slavery and later racism. Bray writes that John Brown, the white man who tried to spark a slave revolt by attacking a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va., in 1859, is a particular hero.

More recently, antifa in America have drawn power from punk-rock subcultures and post-1960s left-wing extremism. After white supremacists recruited disaffected youths as “skinheads” and racist “Oi” bands began to appear, counter-movements formed in response. In particular,  a group of punk rockers known as the Minnesota Baldies in 1987 formed the Anti-Racist Action Network (ARA) to engage in “direct action” confrontations using spray paint, crowbars, and bricks against racists in the punk scene. Word of the group and its exploits, which sometimes involved violent skirmishes with racists, spread via underground punk publications known as “zines” and the organization spread across the country.

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