PROTESTS: “Last weekend, when a 27-year-old bike messenger showed up at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Va., he came ready for battle. He joined a human chain that stretched in front of Emancipation Park and linked his arms with others, blocking waves of white supremacists — some of them in full Nazi regalia — from entering.
‘As soon as they got close,’ said the young man, who declined to give his real name and goes by Frank Sabaté after the famous Spanish anarchist, ‘they started swinging clubs, fists, shields. I’m not embarrassed to say that we were not shy in defending ourselves.’
Sabaté is an adherent of a controversial force on the left known as antifa. The term, a contraction of the word ‘anti-fascist,’ describes the loose affiliation of radical activists who have surfaced in recent months at events around the country and have openly scuffled with white supremacists, right-wing extremists and, in some cases, ordinary supporters of President Trump. Energized in part by Mr. Trump’s election, they have sparred with their conservative opponents at political rallies and college campus speaking engagements, arguing that one crucial way to combat the far right is to confront its supporters on the streets.
Unlike most of the counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville and elsewhere, members of antifa have shown no qualms about using their fists, sticks or canisters of pepper spray to meet an array of right-wing antagonists whom they call a fascist threat to American democracy. As explained this week by a dozen adherents of the movement, the ascendant new right in the country requires a physical response.”
-Thomas Fuller, Alan Feuer, and Serge F. Kovaleski, “‘Antifa’ Grows as Left-Wing Faction Set to, Literally, Fight the Far Right,” The New York Times online, Aug. 17, 2017