Louisville Antifa: Inside Two Of The City’s Most Militant Activist Groups

 The post on Facebook said that the Honorable Sacred Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would be meeting at Jaycee Park in Madison, Indiana on Aug. 31 for a “kookout” from 1 to 3 p.m., the group’s second gathering along the small town’s riverfront in two years. “Come support,” read the announcement, which included a phone number and email address, inviting the public to contact the HSK to become a member.

Sure enough, on the day of the event, about 18 people milled about in the wooden shelter house on the slice of city-owned green space, most wearing dark colors, a few with bandannas obscuring their faces.

A local counter-protester walked up to them, holding a “Racism is Ignorant” sign and jeering. But, the 18 people were not with the KKK. They belonged to the antifa movement, antifa being short for anti-fascism.

Once the counterprotester realized her mistake, she tentatively joined the anti-fascists, sitting down with her sign in her lap, waiting with them to see if the KKK would show up.

Holly Zoller, a member of Louisville Anti-Racist Action, or Louisville ARA, stood next to one of the shelter’s posts, scanning the roadway.

Louisville ARA was one of three anti-fascist groups that gathered at the shelter. One of them, March 4th Alliance from Louisville, hung a banner saying “Pinko Commie Birthday Party” and decorated the wooden picnic tables with handmade placards fashioned from pilfered “We Buy Houses”signs.

“We got here early and took the pavilion, which is the goal,” Zoller said. Thirty minutes after the KKK had planned to arrive, the stunt seemed to have worked.

But then, at 1:39 p.m., a small parade of cars and trucks drove slowly past the shelter house, one with a distinctive KKK flag hanging from its window. They drove out of sight before looping back around, heading for another shelter house next to where antifa had set up.

That’s when antifa switched to another one of its common tactics and ran toward the second shelter.

A confrontation was about to begin.

Antifa: Decentralized, Controversial 

The number of anti-fascists in Louisville is unclear, but they can be seen acting as individuals and in groups to confront far-right and hate groups directly, in person and online.

In April 2017, Louisville’s anti-fascists drove several alleged neo-Nazis from The Irish Rover restaurant in Louisville who had gathered there to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.

In August of the same year, Louisville anti-fascists traveled to Charlottesville to counter far-right protesters who planned to rally around a Confederate statue that the city said it would remove.

In 2018, Louisville antifa members doxxed (publicly revealed the personal information of) people in far-right groups who pepper sprayed Democratic Socialists of America members as they dined at The Silver Dollar restaurant on Frankfort Avenue.

LEO spoke to three Louisville anti-fascists who belong to two of the city’s anti-fascist groups: Louisville ARA and March 4th Alliance.

“We don’t believe in letting Nazis have the streets or letting fascism openly organize or recruit,” said Sean Liter, a member of ARA. “Because the more people they recruit, obviously, the bigger they get and the more dangerous they get.”

Louisville anti-fascists’ tactics and beliefs mirror those of antifa groups across the country and the world.

Anti-fascist groups have been around for over 100 years, first forming in the late 1800s in response to anti-Semitic and nationalist groups in Europe. The movement gained new relevance in the United States in 2016 as its adherents rose to confront far-right groups that were emboldened by President Donald Trump’s campaign and election. Both the Louisville ARA, in its most recent incarnation, and M4A began post Trump. Nationally, anti-fascists have protested far-right appearances at colleges (Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California Berkeley), shut down white nationalist rallies in Portland, Oregon, and battled the alt-right, tiki torch wielders in Charlottesville, Virginia.

For some people, the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally was their introduction to the masked, antifa movement, prompting questions about who the activists are, their strategies and what they want, even how to pronounce their name. (Some say an-TEE-fuh, while others say AN-tee-fah).

Antifa is not one homogeneous group, according to “Antifa: The Anti-fascist Handbook” by Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and an anti-fascist sympathizer.

Instead, antifa is a collection of individuals and organizations, often from different, leftist political persuasions (anarchists, communists, socialists and others). Antifa literally means “against fascism”, which many liberal groups are. But antifa, as most people know it, is militant anti-fascism, said Bray. Its goal is to use every possible strategy, no matter how unpopular with the mainstream, to stop groups of white supremacists and others on the far-right from organizing or spreading their rhetoric. The unacceptable alternative to not standing up, anti-fascists say, is eventual violence against minorities.

“The question is, how bad does it have to get, how much of a threat does the far right have to pose before it becomes legitimate,” said Bray, “and the anti-fascist answer is you treat every embryonic far-right group as if it could become something genocidal.”

To be sure, physical confrontation is one of antifa’s strategies, but it’s not the only one. Using interviews with 61 anti-fascists for his book, Bray cataloged the movement’s strategies, which include infiltrating far-right groups, doxxing members’ identities, “singing” over fascist speeches and, as antifa did in Madison, “occupying the sites of fascist meetings before they could set up.”

Antifa’s more extreme strategies receive criticism from the left, right and center.

After Charlottesville, Trump downplayed the confrontation between alt-right groups and anti-fascists who fought there by saying there were “very fine people on both sides.” In July of last year, U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy introduced a resolution to label antifa a domestic terrorist group. The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, says that antifa’s violent tendencies sometimes fuel a “self-defeating cycle of attacks, counter-attacks and blame,” playing into a white supremacist narrative that they are the victims.

But, the head of Louisville’s FBI field office, Special Agent in Charge James “Robert” Brown, defined antifa as more of an anti-government, anti-authoritarian movement at a roundtable discussion with Louisville media outlets about domestic terrorism in September. Antifa is different, he said, than Racially Motivated Violent Extremism (RMVE) groups such as the KKK or the Attomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group.

“RMVEs are by far more dangerous and more lethal,” Brown said.

An ADL research fellow told Snopes.com in 2017 that out of 372 extremist killings carried out in the U.S. in the past decade, 74% were the fault of right-wing extremists, compared to 2% committed by those on the left. In 2018, all extremist killings in the U.S. had links to right-wing extremism, but, in 2019, there were instances of violence and property damage perpetrated by leftists. . ."

https://www.leoweekly.com/2020/02/louisville-antifa-inside-two-cities-militant-activist-groups/