This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
There is still so much confusion about what antifa is and isn’t. Listen to President Donald Trump, and you’d think antifa is a “domestic terrorist organization.” Listen to many liberal pundits and you’d think antifa doesn’t really exist at all; that it is just an “idea,” a simple shortening of the word “anti-fascist” — a label most Americans would use to self-identify.
But the truth about antifa is something far more interesting. Antifa is real, and refers to an underground network of anarchists, socialists and communists dedicated to destroying the far right “by any means necessary.” Although its activists sometimes punch neo-Nazis, its violence is rare, and equating antifa with “domestic terrorists” is absurd. The bulk of the work antifa does is nonviolent but nevertheless extraordinary. Over the last decade, antifa deployed spies to go undercover into the new generation of white supremacist groups organizing in the Trump era. These spies gathered intelligence that would eventually unmask thousands of pseudonymous neo-Nazis, revealing them to be your local police officer, your local high school teacher, your college professor, your pastor, and your local elected official.
