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Antifa (United States)
Wikipedia (en)
Antifa () is an anti-fascist and left-wing political movement in the United States comprising an array of autonomous groups that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both nonviolent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform. A highly decentralized movement, antifa political activists are anti-racists who engage in protest tactics, seeking to combat fascists and racists such as neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other far-right extremists. This may involve digital activism, harassment, physical violence and property damage against those whom they identify as belonging to the far-right.Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and anti-state views, subscribing to a range of left-wing ideologies such as anarchism, communism, Marxism, social democracy and socialism. Both the name antifa and the logo with two flags representing anarchism and communism are derived from the German Antifa movement. Antifa actions have received both criticism and praise. Conspiracy theories about antifa which tend to inaccurately portray antifa as a single organization with leaders and secret sources of funding have been spread by right-wing activists, media organisations and politicians, including Trump administration officials and the 2020 Trump campaign. There have been multiple efforts to discredit antifa groups via hoaxes on social media, many of them false flag attacks originating from alt-right and 4chan users posing as antifa backers on Twitter. Some hoaxes have been picked up and reported as fact by right-leaning media.During the George Floyd protests in May and June 2020, President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr blamed antifa for orchestrating the mass protests, but analysis of federal arrests did not find links to antifa. There have been repeated calls from Trump, Barr and others to designate antifa as a terrorist organization which Barr has characterized as "highly organized". However, academics, legal experts and scholars, among others, argue that antifa cannot be designated as it would be a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and there is no legal authority to designate a wholly domestic organization. A June 2020 study of 893 terrorism incidents in the United States since 1994 found no murder that was specifically attributed to anti-fascists or antifa while 329 deaths were attributed to right-wing perpetrators. Several analyses, reports and studies concluded that antifa is not a domestic or major terrorism risk and ranked far-right extremism and white supremacy as the top risk. In September 2020, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray stated that antifa is an "ideology, not an organization", resulting in sharp condemnation from Trump, alleging that the FBI is allowing "Antifa" to "get away with murder".
