Extreme Radical Makeover
A cop on the front lines tells how anarchists hijacked the Black Lives Matter movement by rebranding as Antifa
Once a lunatic fringe neo-Marxist revolutionary movement, anarchism has gained mainstream credibility by calling itself “Antifa” and allying with Black Lives Matter. While there is a broad spectrum of anarchist schools of thought—including pacifists—modern and historical anarcho-communists seek to end capitalism and all hierarchical forms of coercive government in favor of free associations such as labor committees. Anarchists commonly attack banks and other symbols of capitalism, but they consider capitalism’s protector, the police, their primary adversary. As a Seattle Police officer since 1994, my colleagues and I spent every May 1st (otherwise known as International Workers’ Day) as a recipient of their attacks with rocks and Molotov cocktails.
Outside of May Day, you would not have heard much about Anarchists besides their “direct action” in the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in 1999 and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016 resulted in increased racial tensions in the United States, the anarchists saw an opportunity and started calling themselves Antifa, which is a portmanteau of anti-fascist. After the George Floyd Riots of 2020, anarchism all but disappeared as Antifa militants used the cover of large Black Lives Matter demonstrations to attack police.
As a Seattle Police detective, I had a front-row seat as the newly emboldened anarchists created war-like conditions in Seattle in 2020. On May 30 the Anarchists stole rifles from and set on fire five police cars and initiated a massive riot in which many stores downtown were looted. Despite our best efforts, the riots continued and worsened, when on July 25 they went on an arson rampage across Capitol Hill, even setting a Starbucks in an apartment building ablaze. They shot commercial-grade fireworks at the police, injuring 59 officers. Over the course of seven months, Seattle officers had to respond to 46 riots requiring 324 arrests.
Antifa began in the 1930s consisting of groups that fought real fascism in Italy and Germany. The term Antifa only appeared in the modern US in 2007 with the creation of Rose City Antifa and then only as an example of Portland weirdness. The word “Antifa” did not become commonplace in news media until 2016 when there was concern about right-wing extremists being given succor by Trump’s divisive rhetoric. Modern-day anarchists gained an unearned cachet of moral superiority by declaring themselves Antifa. It is equivalent to Al Qaeda changing its name to the Peace Corps.
In 1901 an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz [pronounced Chill Goss] assassinated President McKinley, putting Vice President Teddy Roosevelt into office. This was but one incident in a campaign of terror the anarchists waged against government officials over 100 years ago. Anarchist ideology is so nonsensical that it has never gained any mainstream traction until they restyled themselves as Antifa. The mainstream media made the Antifa rebrand strategy a stunning success by repeating the lie that, “Antifa is not an organization, it is an idea and a movement.” The implication of this gaslighting is that it paints Antifa/anarchism as a group of citizens who are merely concerned about fascism and it ignores the underlying radical ideology. This is deeply insulting to my fellow officers who are being told that they were sent to the hospital with wounds caused by an entity that does not exist. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills to have to say this, but if the same group of people shows up every night in the same uniform (black bloc) under the same flag to fight the police, that is an organization! This campaign of obfuscation was so successful that even Joe Biden repeated the “Antifa is an idea not an organization” talking point during the September 29, 2020, presidential debate.
A metaphor for the transformation of anarchism to Antifa is the career of Mark Bray, a historian, and an Occupy Wall Street organizer. In 2013 Bray published Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street in which he celebrates the “revolutionary anarchist core of Occupy.” Antifa is only mentioned four times in passing in this book. Fast forward to 2017 and Bray published Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook. Although the word anarchy does not appear in the title of this book, the text mentions anarchy 118 times and makes it clear that Antifa is an evolution of anarchism. In fact, Bray calls anarchism “proto-anti fascism.” Even anarchism’s most ardent proponent is willing to erase the name of his ideology to buy some mainstream credibility by rebranding it as Antifa.
While anarchism may have tricked many Americans by giving itself a reputational cleanse of a new name, it is still the same dangerous and deranged ideology that seeks to undo 500 years of human progress. Without government, you cannot have civilization. Without civilization, there would be no economic, environmental, medical, or social progress. Imagine having your COVID-19 vaccine development lab raided by the neighboring anarchist warlord. As a progressive cop, I am sympathetic to the criminal justice reform mission of Black Lives Matter. Despite some of their solutions, such as defunding the police, being misguided, I still regard the BLM movement as well-intentioned civil rights activism. If BLM sincerely wants to make the world a better place, the movement should rid itself of the Antifa parasite by denouncing their violence and telling them to go cosplay revolutionary somewhere else.
@chris5977