This video's quite a long one because theres a lot to get through and it's all interconnected. It's in five parts, plus the conclusion,
so to make it easier to navigate I've put timestamps to each section in the description. That way you can come and go and you can take breaks if you need to, although obviously I do advise watching the whole thing, particularly if you're gonna be leaving a comment. My goal
here is, in good faith, to explain rather than to proselytise: I see a lot of bad philosophy and a lot of misconceptions surrounding Antifa so hopefully by the time this video's done you'll be able to understand some different worldviews. So, without further ado... Part 1 - Meet the Antifascists The first thing to internalise is that Antifa
is not a group of people. You can't join it or be a member of it. There is no official
uniform: not everybody who masks up at a protest is necessarily antifascist and not
all antifascists wear masks. There is no single website, or official leadership structure; there is no one official Twitter page although some people do sometimes create fake ones. In fact some people in Russia
create fake ones, ne tak li, gospodin Putin? Antifascism is a practical ethical and political
theory. It's less a thing you are and more a thing that you can do if you want to, and what you do is oppose fascism by any means necessary. Most people, one would hope, are against fascism at least
a little bit but it's that going above and beyond, it's that "any means necessary"
and actually taking action to stop fascists that takes you into
Antifa territory. "Any means necessary" sometimes includes
violence, as you probably know, and we'll talk about violence in detail later. But more
often antifascist action is other stuff. To email a hotel or a conference centre and tell
them that white supremacists are going to be using it as a meeting place to get them
kicked out is an antifascist action. To identify people at a white supremacist rally and email
their employers to get them fired is an antifascist action. To turn up at a rally and be part
of a nonviolent counter-demonstration to drown them out is an antifascist action. Or tearing
down their posters, cleaning up their graffiti, taking down their websites, asking shops not
to sell their books and materials. Sending a mole into far-right groups in London and
America on a year-long secret mission to film them and note who's talking to who is an
antifascist project that the group Hope not Hate have just completed - the story of
that project is fascinating reading. Many antifascists conduct other political
activities as well, defending working class communities from evictions and police violence,
setting up shelters when government cuts have forced them to close... all of which not
only helps people but also restricts fascists' ability to draw on community frustrations
for recruiting. These are more common steps that don't involve
the more attention-grabbing direct physical confrontation but nevertheless raise the social
cost of fascism and hopefully deter people from doing fascist things. I'm providing them here strictly as examples, not necessarily as proscriptions, though side note: if you are going to tear
down fascist posters do use your keys because sometimes they like to hide razor blades behind them. Liberals tend not to take serious antifascist
action because fascism is super effective against liberalism for reasons that I've
explained before here. So amongst antifascist actors you will tend, not always but tend,
to find people who are a little bit further Left than Liberal and maybe who even have criticisms of Liberalism as a political philosophy. That might include Communists and Anarchists, as the symbol with the Red and Black flags indicates, or it might include people who haven't really picked a political label and who are just there in response to some specific issue in their local community. And that bit's quite important: since there is no overarching Antifa structure antifascists tend to organise locally and flexibly in response to specific local issues. So for instance, maybe the EDL are organising a far-right rally in a particular borough of London and antifascist actors from that borough might get together to try and and organise a counter-demonstration in response to that specific local issue. Antifascism has a long and proud history.
Ever since fascism first crystallised in the early 20th Century there have been people
organising across the Left to fight it, in Italy and Germany to begin, with groups like
Arditi del Popolo and Antifaschistische Aktion. In those days some antifascists did form groups
with official structures. And then later when fascist groups like the British Union of Fascists and the American "Friends of New Germany" cropped up, citizens started taking action
in response. Something very worth bearing in mind is that not only are there a lot of honest misconceptions about Antifa out there, there are some downright lies going around as well. So for instance, after the Las Vegas mass shooting of October 2017 various right wing
pundits lied that Mr. Paddock, the murderer, had "Antifa literature" in his room, whatever that means; following the Texas mass shooting of November 2017 people again lied that the murderer Mr. Kelley was a "member" of Antifa... just be on your guard for stuff -that might include tenuous speculations or fake screenshots - that is designed to give you a false impression. We'll talk more about propaganda later on. Usually it's easy to spot this stuff: anything that talks about someone being a "member" of Antifa: that's a bit of a red flag, because you can't be a member of it, but in the interests of
getting an accurate impression, not necessarily a politically inclined impression but just an accurate one, do be conscientious. Since the goal of antifascist action is to
stop people from building fascism, one criticism or at least one constantly relevant question
is does it work? Because antifascist action tends to be local and specific that's a question
that rightly comes up whenever antifascists decide what tactics to use and what issues
to respond to. It can't really be answered in the general form, "Does it work?" kindof
like "Does protest work?" can't really be answered in the abstract because it depends on what happens and how it's used and also what we consider to be a workable outcome. Kindof like the question, "Does music make movies more effective?" Well, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't but it depends on what kind of music, and the context, and how it's used and what you consider the word "effective" to mean there. One question that antifascists ask themselves a lot more nowadays is how to effectively combat the new form of fascism today which is trying to
find mainstream appeal by toning down the Hitler salutes and the overt racism, and using online spaces as well as the streets to grow their movement. The old-school tactics of street confrontation might be effective but not quite sufficient in the face of this new form of fascism. We'll talk more about that later on. Because antifascist action is local and specific,
another criticism of it comes from, among others, journalist Lee Fang, who says that
there are potentially bigger threats to progressive politics than your local skinhead Nazi. Big companies like G4s, Serco, BAE Systems, they have a lot more power than your local Nazi and
they profit from the kind of authoritarian, militarist, racist violence that fascism feeds on so mightn't it be better to direct energies protesting and organising against them? Mightn't it be better to just ignore the relatively small local Neo-Nazi chapter? And certainly that's a line that you could take. Although antifascists might respond by saying we can in fact fight both small scale fascism and larger scale fascistic politics, and also the influence of small scale fascist organising on the media, and through the media on politics shouldn't be ignored - for instance see Charlottesville, which, although relatively small scale, echoed right round the world. Hitler started out with 45 guys, Mussolini
started out with just 100 - so the antifascist stance is that it's probably better to nip these things in the bud because in the right soil they can grow like that. Speaking
of which, in order to fully understand antifascists we also need to understand... PART 2 - Fascism A common question that comes up when we're
talking about taking direct action against fascism is, "How do we decide who's a
fascist?" And there are two ways of asking this question; one is very very helpful and clever, and the other one isn't so much. The not very helpful way of asking this question is, "How do we *decide* who's a fascist?" with the implied answer being that we can't, and
therefore antifascist action is moot and off the table. This reason that isn't very helpful is that it stops anybody really learning anything: it's kind of the end of the conversation, and it also allows fascists to carry on. People who ask this version of the question usually want some
abstracted, foolproof answer, or some formula for definitely identifying a fascist, which obviously stacks the deck against a theory that is
local, specific, and flexible in application. The clever way of asking the question is, "How do we decide who's a fascist?" and use that as a jumping off point to learn more about fascism and how to spot it. And that's the way we're gonna ask the question. The word 'fascist' is often used to just
mean authoritarian or aggressive, but that's not the most helpful way of using it because it allows people to draw a false equivalence between the authoritarianism of say, Lenin, with the
authoritarianism of Hitler. Although both were authoritarian they went about it in very
different ways for very different reasons, and only one can accurately be called a fascist. Since fascism has been around for about 100
years now it's had a few different versions. It's an essentially conservative ideology,
all about preserving some mythologised version of the way things used to be, or restoring
past glory to make a glorious future. In general fascism is characterised by being
less fond democracy of and more fond of dictatorship; very pro-military and pro-police; pro the State, particularly in ways that encourage narrow views of nationalism and patriotism, often in xenophobic ways or ways that tie nationalism to race; pro toxic masculinity, according to which straight
cis men should be dominant over and violent towards people of other genders; pro capitalism, and hand-in-hand with that very anti-communist; and, particularly relevantly for today's fascism, virulently racist against people of colour, and very Anti-Semitic. Those last two go hand-in-hand, as we'll be seeing later. The historian Robert Paxton gives a good overview.
He says fascism is, "A form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation
with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy
and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in
uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and
pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal
cleansing and external expansion." The "collaboration with traditional elites" bit is important
there: in my country there's a popular image of fascists as uneducated or working class
skinheads, but that's increasingly outdated. As we'll be seeing later, many of today's
fascists are educated, wealthy, and polished. Some of these features might be emphasised more than others. For instance, contemporary Euro-American fascism leans hard on the white supremacy angle. There were 20th Century Chinese and Japanese versions of fascism that obviously didn't subscribe to that bit. Not everybody who has one
or two of these features is necessarily fascist, and fascists know that if they can find ways in which they can appear to not fit all of them all the time they might be able to fool you
like, "We can't be fascist, we've got a black person or a gay person in our movement!" Kindof like the old, "I can't be racist coz I have a black friend" move, or "I can't be sexist because I have a wife and a daughter!" move. But in general: these are the hallmarks to look out for. It's important to note that fascism
s not a wholly different kind of government from the one you might know and it did not
end in 1945. For instance, most of these features I described would also, in milder forms, describe a certain
American Presidency. That's right... the Reagan administration, which actually was so okay with fascism that it supported fascist governments with money and weapons, for instance in Guatemala. Something else worth bearing in mind is that
this form of government based on racist violence and exploitation - that's a story that a lot of
indigenous people and black people have heard before, which is why you might also see some people describe EuroAmerican fascism as colonialism brought
home. For reasons I\ve explained here, fascism
grows quite effectively within liberalism and that can be a gradual process. Fascism
is not an all-or-nothing deal. Like many of the most interesting things in life it's
a sliding scale, not a binary. Hence the problem we started with, right? How do we identify fascists and distinguish them from ordinary conservatives and even from just slightly more right-wing liberals? Another issue compounding this is that people used to openly
identify as fascists or Nazis but the words rightly have so much negativity attached to
them nowadays that hardly anybody does, and so fascists will say that they are not fascist
just as racists will say they are not racist and bullies will say they are not bullies.
If we confine our antifascist activities only to those who openly identify as fascist we'll
miss the most dangerous ones, as we'll be seeing later on. But if you know the features of fascism, and
- particularly in Europe and North America - if you understand white supremacist ideas
both for what they are and what they pretend to be, you be more easily able to spot fascist ideas when people are spreading them. I'll teach you more about white supremacy later on. But even if we know the hallmarks of fascism,
you might well say that the contents of someoneοΏ½s heart are hard to know. Whether someone really
believes in a political cause or is just going with the flow, or especially on the Internet if they are just a, quote, "ironic" fascist ...not always easy to tell. So maybe an even cleverer way of framing the
question is less, "Who is a fascist?" and more "Who is doing a fascism?" Who,
in the local community, is building fascism or spreading fascist ideas in a particular place at a particular
time that we can organise against? If we know the hallmarks of fascism it's a lot easier
to tell when someone is building it, whether they really intend to or not. For antifascists, it's less about whether they're a good person or what they have in their hearts; and more about the political effect their actions are having. That said, it's still possible to make mistakes. If you're gonna be out there taking antifascist action, particularly at a protest where it
can be disorienting and there's a lot of things going on, it's possible that people might get the
brunt of something that wasn't really meant for them. In fact that mole I mentioned earlier,
who infiltrated fascist groups in London and America? He got pepper sprayed by an antifascist
protestor whilst pretending to be a fascist, which is... Thankfully, he's completely fine. Antifascists know of course that mistakes
are possible, which is why decisions about tactics are made locally and flexibly: if you go to a protest, not necessarily an antifascist one but just about any protest, you will often find people who are among the protestors but trying to de-escalate things. Antifascists know about this problem; they do think about it, which is why such a large part of antifascist activity is gathering intelligence. It's also very worth noting that although it's true antifascists could
hit the wrong target, that is something that is also true of, and comes true far more often and destructively for, the army and the police. That doesn't mean we can't play the innocent bystanders card but if are gonna play it we should play it consistently. So, now that you know the features of fascism you'll be able to see through a very common mistake. People sometimes draw a false equivalence between antifascist actors and fascists, weirdly. You might have seen people, including the President of the United States, saying that "both sides are the same" or that if you resist
fascists you're the real fascist. There's that fake quote from Churchill saying, "The
fascists of the future will call themselves antifascists" - he never actually said
that and even if he did it wouldn't matter because it would still be wrong in this case.
And you can also find memes saying that anybody who wears a mask in public is bad, which I
like to call the J. Jonah Jameson approach to political critique. Also, here's a completely unrelated picture of some riot police. Now that you know what fascism is you'll be able to see through this false equivalence. Since Antifascist actors tend to be pro-peaceful
foreign policy, pro-community, pro-workers rights, feminist, and anti-racist, they are obviously not ideologically the same as fascists, who you'll remember are all
about state violence, capitalism, nationalism, and being racist. You'll also see people, for instance Dinesh
D'Souza, say that the Nazis were left wing because "National Socialism" has socialism
in the name. In fact this was a deliberate ruse - genuine socialism, where the workers
control the economy, was big in 1920s Germany and represented the main rival political force
to the Nazis. So they co-opted socialist rhetoric to appear more left-wing and tie their brand, if you like, to something that was already popular. In fact when the Nazis came to power they
banned trade unions and privatised large sections of the economy, so the opposite of socialism.
Nazi propaganda sent the message that Marxism is a secret plot by Jews to control the world,
and at several points in Mein Kampf Hitler unambiguously condemns socialism. Another crucial difference is that whereas
a socialist would analyse society in terms of class, the Nazis analysed it in terms of
race, or people, or "volk." All of which is why the Nazis killed so many
socialists: you know that famous poem by Martin NiemΓΆller that starts, "First they
came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I wasn't a socialist"? Well
the reason it says that is because they did. Another sneaky trick that fascists are using
at the moment is saying that fascism definitely isn't racist because Mussolini's fascism
supposedly wasn't and they support this by selectively quoting Mussolini. This is
a lie that's been peddled since at least the 1980s, designed to try and make fascism
palatable again by crowbarring Mussolini and Hitler apart. We'll be talking about propaganda
shortly. In fact as early as the 1920s Italian fascists were repeating white supremacist
ideas. As well as producing Anti-Semitic propaganda, laws restricting the freedom of Jews, and
building concentration camps. In the early 20th Century socialism was a
major political force; not just in Germany but in a lot of other places as well. Particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1917 a lot of people and political parties had hope that capitalism, and all of the nasty working conditions and unfairness and war and disease and the poverty that had come with industrialisation, might collapse, like any day now. And a lot of 20th Century Leftists, including Marxists, saw early fascism and
said, "Oh, it's just the rich capitalists using more aggressive measures to try and oppress the working class and stop us from building socialism." And to an extent they were correct - a lot of early 20th Century liberals and rich people and liberals supported fascism precisely because it was so anti-socialist and anti-communist. But what those early 20th Century Marxists didn't quite anticipate was just how big the racial element of fascism would become. Fascists weren't just working with rich capitalists to keep the working class in their place,
they were dividing the working class along racial and national lines and making them
fight each other instead of fighting the rich. Which is why to this very day socialists and
fascists really do not get on. And speaking of fighting, when it comes to
antifascist action there's one thing that everyone wants to talk about and I said we'd discuss it so let's move on to... PART 3 - Violence Another kind of false equivalence is to say
that antifascists and fascists are just as bad because both use violence. We've already
seen that antifascist action is not violent all of the time and is targeted at those who are openly building fascism; contrastingly we'll see in Section 5 how contemporary fascism is truly genocidal in its ambitions so the first reason this is a false equivalence is just because the scale of the violence on the table here is not the same. But still, some people maintain, that violence has no place in politics and they criticise antifascism because it doesn't rule out
using violence as a political tactic. And this idea is false in a very interesting way because
violence actually occupies every place in politics. Politics is the distribution of
power, and power is enforced using violence. For instance, the army and the police force are both forms of controlled violence in the service of liberalism. Every border implies the violence
necessary to maintain it; capitalism requires the threat of eviction and preventable poverty
in order to motivate you to keep going to work. I mean, it's called the police force,
not the police everybody-sit-down-and-talk-about- it. Politics is all about violence. Every political ideology legitimises violence against somebody, that's what politics is. We often call things violent because they
stand out to us not from a background of peace, but from a background of things we might call violent if we really thought about it but we ignore because they appear normal to us. A great small example of this was drawn to my recent attention by LA Times Writer Adam Johnson, who points out that this Fox News Headline says "violence breaks out after police kill a student,"
not "violence breaks out when police kill a student." You see the difference there? The initial police killing is not there portrayed as violent even though somebody was shot dead by people who carry guns in the service of the government. Because the police killing
somebody is seen as normal. Be very clear about this though: just because
all political ideologies legitimise violence somewhere doesn't mean that they're all
the same or equally good choices, and therefore it is also doesn't follow from this that all violence done in the name of antifascism is good. What it means is - to say that a particular form of
political engagement is bad because it features violence isn't quite enough, because they all do. If antifascism and fascism are equivalent because they both feature violence, then every political positions is equivalent because they all feature violence. What separates them is who the violence is being done against and why it's being done. Some people will acknowledge that all politics
features some kind of violence but still criticise antifascists because they think that the state
should maintain a monopoly on that violence. So although the police and the army are agents
of political violence, they work for the state and, ideally, the state works for the people
so their use of violence represents at least some kind of democracy. Kindof like the philosopher
Thomas Hobbes, who said that government should work by the people placing all power in the
hands of an absolute ruler who in return promises to maintain "peace" and "order." And that's a route you could go down, although
antifascist actors might have some questions. They might ask you whether modern government
really do represent enough of a democratic ideal of accountability for that argument
to fly. For instance, they might point out that "peace" and "order" are somewhat
relative terms and increasingly "order," which remember is enforced with violence,
is an order that benefits the rich at the expense of everybody else. They might, if
they're anarchists especially, flat out deny that the state should have a monopoly
on violence. They might also point out that this Hobbes arrangement where all violence
is within the state is one that greatly benefits fascists and allows them room to grow. But let's return to that false equivalence
between the Far Left and the Far Right. The idea we're examining is the idea that both are
the same because they both use violence, and we've seen already that the scale of the violence doesn't match, and that to that a particular form of political engagement is violent is almost tautologous because they all do. When it comes to understanding political violence, a concept that might help you is the Friend/Enemy Distinction,
which comes from philosopher and Nazi in fact, Carl Schmitt. Don't say that I never cite any
right-wing thinkers on the show. Schmitt said that your political enemies are
the people that you might get along with and one or two of them you might even like, but when push comes to shove you will...not even necessarily kill them, but just let them die. You'll be okay with them being removed. Every political ideology uses violence somewhere; everybody has some political enemies, but another big difference between the Left and the Right is that they use the Friend/Enemy
distinction in very different ways. There's a famous antifascist play called
"On the Frontier" by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, a play that I once had the pleasure of being in actually, in which a wealthy arms manufacturer called Valerian makes weapons for a fascist dictator. At the climax of the play the fascist dictator is overthrown by his own people who also kill Valerian himself. But just before that there's a crucial scene in which Valerian's friend comes to him and says, "It's all over, the revolution has happened, you need to run away with me now and abandon all your wealth and power and flee to another country with me." And Valerian says, "No." He chooses to stay, and moreover, he chooses to give his money and weapons not to the people trying to overthrow the fascist dictator but to the fascists. And it's choice that distinguishes Valerian from the victims of the fascist government he supports. I'm not suggesting we should start executing industrialists; I'm illustrating that if you're a fascist, and antifascists come for you, you
have a choice. You can give it up. You can apologise, renounce what you said, say, "I'm sorry, I'm gonna retire and read a load of books and understand why I was wrong." Alternatively you could just
go on with the rest of your life and stop turning up to fascist rallies. And Antifascists probably
aren't gonna buy you a pint and be your best friend but they'll move on. And the historical evidence supports this: when fascists in a particular city stop getting together and organising antifascists go back to their lives as well. In fact some antifascists engage with fascists and provide services to try and get them out of the movement so they get on move on with their lives. But if you're a person of colour, if you're
trans, or a person with a disability, or gay, or Jewish, or whatever and fascists come for you there is nothing you can do that will make them happy except stop existing. I'm gonna demonstrate that in a little bit more detail in Section 5, and the historical evidence supports it as well: every concession given to the fascists of the 20th Century only emboldened them. That's the key ideological difference between the Far Left and the Far Right. Antifascists organise themselves against
those who are building fascism, not just those who have fascist sympathies
or fascist thoughts in the privacy of their own heads but those who are choosing to be out in public building a fascist government, and if you're doing that that is a thing you can non-violently
stop doing. If you're a political enemy of Antifa you can become a friend. If you're a political enemy of fascism though either they lose or you die. Again, it does not follow from that that all
violence done in the name of antifascism, or done by the Left, is okay. What it is to
say is that those who draw an equivalence between the Left and Right using violence
are missing a much richer and more interesting layer of philosophy. Another false equivalence you might see is
when people associate antifascist action with terrorism: people will try to form this association in your mind by talking about "Left Wing terror" or "the Vegan ISIS," or by spreading the kind of lies that we looked at in Section 1, and it relies on a not very helpful understanding of antifascism and a not very helpful understand of terrorism too. The dictionary definition of terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence or intimidation,
especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." This definition is a little bit inadequate, and reason it's inadequate is because some Western military interventions and even policing actually fit that definition, for instance the Iraq War, and yet they are not commonly called
terrorism so the concept as it is being used in the political world by real people, never mind what it says on paper, must be a little bit more detailed and more refined than that. According to terrorism scholar Louise Richardson, terrorists want 3 things - revenge, renown, and a response - that's a specific
political response, like the withdrawal of troops from whatever area they're occupying. Antifascist actors tend not to seek renown; in fact they're notoriously media-shy. They do want specific political responses, though like wanting fascists in that particular city to go home, but because they are and flexible in their application of the theory they tend to be less about revenge, in the way that
for instance some captured ISIS fighters have identified the Iraq War as a source of humiliation
which motivated them to violence against America, or for instance Elliot Rodger who described
his killing spree as "retribution" against women because they wouldn't sleep with him. Those are just two examples of revenge in terrorism, I'm not trying to draw any other kind of equivalence between them. Another key feature of terrorism is that its
targets are fungible, which means interchangeable. The victims of a terrorist bombing, or again, Rodger's victims, stand for a group even if they are not personally doing the bad thing that members of that group supposedly do: they may not personally have invaded Iraq, they may not personally have rejected the man - the point is the targets of terrorism are more symbolic than specific and to the person committing
the act what each individual is actually doing politically doesn't really matter.
Contrast that with, say, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, where the target was specifically chosen because of his political actions. Terrifying, no doubt, but not terrorism. Because antifascist action tends to be local
and specific, and specifically targets those who are doing a certain thing, namely building
fascism, its targets are not really fungible and therefore comparing it to terrorism it
doesn't really help us understand the mind-sets of either antifascists or terrorists, for
that matter. What it does do is allow fascists to call for the state to use existing anti-terrorism
measures to crack down on those who oppose them. Having discussed political violence in the
abstract, we're now ready to talk about it as a tactic. As prologue, we should note that the line
between violent tactics and nonviolent tactics is often quite blurry, particularly where
public protest is involved, because a protest can be loud and intimidating and tense even without violence and tense, and because, as we identified earlier, "violent" is a somewhat politically relative term. The
supposed dichotomy between peaceful, good protestors and violent, bad protestors is
used to justify excessively punishing those painted as bad. For instance, at time of writing
around 200 people, including a handful of journalists, who were present at a protest
for the inauguration of President Donald Trump on January 20th of 2017, are facing felony
charges ranging from rioting to conspiracy to riot. Without wishing to comment politically,
two things are worth noting about these proceedings for our philosophical purposes: firstly, the
evidence that the Trump regime is bringing against many of those charged is merely that
they were present on the day and wearing black. Ordinarily this wouldn't be sufficient evidence for criminal activity, since those are both perfectly legal things to do, but an attempt is being
made to use the "bad protestor" label to lower the bar of evidence required for
conviction in the minds of those handling the cases. We might think that someone commits
a crime and is then therefore a criminal, but it can work the other way around: convince
people that someone is a criminal by nature or by their association with something they
already think is bad, and they will be more likely to believe that a crime has therefore
been committed. Another example of this comes from scholar Lisa Marie Cacho, who demonstrated
that after Hurricane Katrina black people retrieving supplies from abandoned shops was
described in the media as "looting" but white people doing the exact same thing was
described as "scavenging." In that case, black skin was a mark of criminality and from that it was then assumed that a crime must have been committed. The second thing worth noting about the January
20th cases is that the batons, chemical gas, stun grenades, and kettling that the police
used on the day have not been painted as unduly violent, which demonstrates that the bar of
evidence for showing that people working for the government are bad and violent is considerably
higher than the bar required to demonstrate the same thing about those who disagree with
the government. Again, we call things violent because they stand out not from a background
of peace, but from what we think is normal. Some people with acknowledge that all politics involves violence somewhere but will still say that using nonviolent tactics is more effective for achieving the desired goal. And undoubtedly, sometimes it is, which is why the vast majority of antifascist action, although confrontational, doesn't get directly physically violent. Antifascists regularly consider whether nonviolent tactics could be used instead: you don't wanna only use violence because there are some problems that violence can't solve. They also regularly consider the way that using violence as a tactic can play into the kind of machismo and toxic masculinity that certain political movements can sometimes get caught up in, which can shut down the contributions of antifascists of other genders. However there is a long history of confrontational, violent, and illegal tactics succeeding in achieving their political goals for instance the American Revolution,
the Irish War for Independence, the Haitan Slave Revolt, the Jamaican Slave Revolt... Hell, to look at the modern age, Stonewall, the catalyst for LGBT Rights in the USA, was a literal brick-throwing riot.
Not to mention the American Civil Rights movement to which the Black Panthers made their
contribution. All of these a great deal more violent, you might notice, than contemporary antifascist action. And obviously all of them a great deal less violent than fascism. Here we have to restate the "Does It Work?"
question that we examined in Part 2, and again the answer it that it can depend. The historical record shows that direct confrontation can be very successful in shutting down fascists, but
it can have its drawbacks too. Some people worry that using violence against fascists
will make liberals sympathise with them, and in certain contexts that can be right: optics
is very important, as Contrapoints has pointed out before. Again though that's something that antifascism, because it's a local and specific and flexible theory, will consider on a case-by-case basis. It's also important to bear in mind that liberals will tend to sympathise with fascists anyway for reaosns that I've explained before here. The spectacle of antifascist violence can sometimes bring attention to fascists and recruitment, it's true. The antifascist response to that is that although it might bring some recruitment, if you can't hold a meeting or you can't pass out flyers because you keep getting shut down then attention is all well and good but you won't be able to capitalise on it. In addition, the first time a fascist gets punched it gets
a lot of attention. Second time bit less attention, third time, even less. We also need to be
careful not to oversimplify the reasons why people join fascist movements: if being a victim of violence
was all it took for somebody to sympathise with your political cause then a lot of other political movements would find their ranks filling up faster than fascism's are. Some people say that calling fascists "fascist" rather than letting them hide behind a euphemism might push them to embrace fascism. This is an empirical claim and we can look to the historical evidence: feminists have been called "Feminazis" for years and women have been subjected to centuries of violence but there
hasn't been a mass conversion to fascism on the part of the female population. This argument seems also to imply that what's bad about fascism is the aesthetics of it, rather than the effects it has. The antifascist way of looking at it would be to say that it doesn't really matter whether fascists wear a uniforms or even openly identify as fascists, what matters is the effect of their political ideas. Another objection though is to be a pacifist,
and say that whilst nonviolent tactics might not be a effective in certain circumstances, they are nevertheless morally required. And that's a road you could go down. Antifascists might say in response to you that they expect you to condemn the violence of the state and the violence of fascism in similar terms. They might also point out, and we'll be explaining in a little bit more detail later on, that there is no peaceful form of fascism, and therefore direct action against it could be seen as self-defence, which again is something that you could deny is morally acceptable: people do deny that violent self-defence is okay. History can give us clues in this discussion: in my country, Britain, we have a specific word for not resisting
fascism, the word is 'appeasement.' Appeasement was Britain's official
policy towards Hitler before WWII, just give him what he wants and hope he's satisfied; today,
to call someone an appeaser is quite a strong political insult because - spoilers
for anybody watching this in the year 1939 - appeasement didn't work. It fact
it could never have worked: as we'll be seeing in Part 5, peaceful coexistence with fascism was never really an option. You might see people say that "hate" is
on both sides, and that "love" must win. I've talked about the words love and hate
in politics before here so I won't dwell on that but do be aware that hate Vs love
talk can be used to draw false equivalences too. Do also be aware that fascists love these
false equivalences and will hide behind them to try and gain your sympathy. Before we move on, I'll say this again explicitly for the
third time, for those determined to misunderstand me: none of this means that all Left Wing
violence is okay. What it means is the equivalence between the left and the right is a false
one that benefits fascism. Part 4 - Free Speech Some people say that fascism is despicable but fascists have a right to their opinion. What's interesting is that many antifascist actors would agree. Their goal is not to strike down the laws that guarantee free speech. So what's the source of the conflict here? Well let's dig a little deeper. As prologue, we should note that the free
speech issue and the violence issue can't really be separated. It might seem very neat, and enlightened, and compassionate to say, "I don't support fascist ideas but I'll defend their right to express them," but remember all political ideologies involve violence somewhere - what that can in practice translate to is police subjecting people to violence because they get called up to do the actual business of protecting that fascist speech. For instance, at the Battle of Cable Street
in 1936 the British Union of Fascists decided they wanted to march through the East End
of London, and about 20,000 people from the local community turned up to block the march.
They didn't want fascists in their community, they had already tried and failed ahead of
time to get the government to stop the march, the government refused, and because the march
was therefore technically legal the police protected the fascists and attacked the antifascist
protestors, who ended up having to fight not just fascists but their own police force as
well, the very people who were ostensibly meant to be defending their community against threats. Lest we think that sort of thing is confined to the past, in 2003 and 2004 Swedish antifascist actors were attacked by the police whilst trying to shut down a fascist rally; in 2012 Greek antifascists were attacked, arrested, and
then tortured by police for defending immigrant communities against the fascist political party Golden Dawn; in my country only last year the EDL, a far-right group, held a rally in Trafalgar Square and antifascist counterprotestors were threatened with arrest, and pinned to the ground, and dragged away, and in some cases arrested, whilst those who were publicly inciting racial hatred were allowed to continue. I offer these examples not to try and sway
you in any way but just to show you that when fascist free of speech is advanced on paper it is enforced in the streets by police violence, and so because some free speech drowns out other free speech it matters whose specific free speech we support. Let's dig into the philosophy though. The
first thing we're gonna need to note is that there is a difference between what somebody says and the act of saying it. An example I've used before, fans of my show will know
it, is the sentence, "I love you." Suppose a stalker sends this message every
10 minutes to their victim, and suppose also that it is true: the stalker really does love the victim. It would still be missing the point to defend the stalker either on the grounds that what they have said is true or that they have a right to say it. Because the problem here is not the content of what is said or the bare fact that it has been said, but the particular effect that
the act of saying it in that way have. So you can see, for instance, there's a
difference between saying something Anti-Semitic at home and organising a fascist rally through an area of London where a lot of Jewish people live. Although both are despicable
and the ideas expressed might be the same the effects that those two acts of speech have are very different. Having limitations on acts of political expression
is nothing new: the right to free speech guarantees that governments will not persecute you for
the content of your beliefs, but if I were to break into the House of Commons and make
my criticisms of the British government very loudly with a lot of swearing I would expect
to be shut down. Because although we are all entitled to our views, we are not, legally
or morally, entitled to always express them in whatever manner we like without consequence. And fascist speech often has very interesting consequences. Suppose I say the sentence "Today is Wednesday." And I say it all the time,
every day, even when it isn't Wednesday. And I even Today's Wednesday said Today's Wednesday
at times that seemed completely ina-Today's Wednesday-propriate. If you're very clever you might start to
suspect that I'm not really talking about the days of the week. Those are the words that I'm using but I'm actually doing something else with them, namely I'm taking the piss out of you whilst you try to explain to me the days of the week. Well a lot of fascist speech works in similar
ways. The myths at the core of fascism - the bad statistics, the made up history, the really
off-the-wall stuff we'll be getting to later on - it doesn't really matter to a committed
fascist how many times you sit down and debunk that stuff. They keep Today's Wednesday saying Today's Wednesday. That's because once it's not so much not about the content but the act of saying it. And that's how we spot propaganda. The job of propaganda isn't necessarily to convince anyone. Propaganda is a recruitment tool: it gathers and retains the people who understand the true message and who are willing to repeat it. It doesn't matter to a committed white nationalist how many times you sit down and debunk the ridiculous white nationalist conspiracy that the world is secretly being taken over by Jews: because when they say that they aren't really saying that it's true. What they're saying is they want to persecute Jewish people. And their audience are all running around trying to explain the days of week, saying, "Come on our talk show and explain your weird theory about the days of week! Bring this idea to the free market place of ideas that we may
debunk it!" - whilst some of their audience are sitting there going, "Oh, I get it. Today's Wednesday." The liberal love of free speech is a great thing but it assumes that everybody is coming to the table in good faith and is willing to play the game, which fascist obviously aren't. That's why it is worth countering fascist arguments in order to try and reach potential recruits before they can, but antifascists will try to deny fascists platforms. Because when we interview fascists or we debate fascists they're not really there for us; they're there for our audience. Whilst we're up there talking about the days of the week, there's a guy there's a guy at the back of the lecture handing out pamphlets about "the Wednesday question." Another function that giving platforms to
fascists serves is to make them appear normal, like this New York Times article from November
2017, which is a largely humanising profile of a Neo-Nazi from Ohio. The desired effect
from the Neo-Nazi point of view is that people reading the article who are close to Nazi
sympathisers but not all the way will feel more comfortable knowing that they can still
love cats, metal music, and pasta and be fascists, and, being more comfortable with their proximity
to fascism, will therefore be inclined to get a little bolder and more public with it.
Journalists may feel they're being neutral by writing pieces like this, but in fact the
decision to focus the article on a Neo Nazi's family life rather than on the fact that,
as will be demonstrated shortly, his political beliefs demand the genocide of millions of
people, is itself a political decision on the part of the author. Articles like this
make fascism out as little more than a quirky alternative to the mainstream, which is how
it sneaks under the radar of liberalism. And fascists realised this long before anyone
else did: Carl Schmitt, who you'll remember from the Friend/Enemy Distinction in Section 3, said in 1922 that liberal societies, with their love of free speech, would allow
the Nazis to freely undermine them from within. And turn liberalism's own virtues against it. All they had to do was pretend to value free speech and they could say, "Hey! What about our free speech? Why don't we get to come on the talk shows and stand up in Parliament and spread out propaganda-I mean, make our arguments?" And turn liberalism against itself they did. Schmitt himself joined the Nazi party,
who, it then became obvious, didn't value free speech quite so much as they'd pretended to. Despite what classical liberals like John Stewart Mill said about truth always defeating error and falsehood in open rational debate, the historical evidence sadly just doesn't support that idea when it comes to fascism. Still though, somebody might be saying that even though fascists don't value free speech and only pretend to when it suits them, Antifascists can't use that as a justification to shut them down because isn't that like saying that shooting
people is bad and therefore we should shoot anybody who shoots people? Aren't you the real fascist if you shut down fascists? Well this is just the same false equivalence that we examined earlier on but it's been restated in a different skin. Like before, this ignores the ideological differences between antifascism and fascism, and it ignores the content/act distinction.
It treats the tactic as separate from the politics behind the tactics, and that's just not how antifascists approach this issue. Remember, every political ideology is violent towards someone, shuts
someone down, but the devil is in who and why. In Antifa: the Antifascist Handbook Mark
Bray writes: "It's important to note that the vast
majority of people who oppose limiting free speech on political grounds are not free speech
absolutists. They all have their exceptions to the rule, whether obscenity, incitement
to violence, copyright infringement, press censorship during wartime, or restrictions
for the incarcerated. If we rephrase the terms of the debate by taking these exceptions into
account, we can see that many liberals support limiting the free speech of working-class
teens busted for drugs, but not limiting the speech of Nazis. Many are fine when the police
quash the free speech of the undocumented by hunting them down, while they amplify the
speech of the Klan by protecting them. They advocate curtailing ads for cigarettes but
not ads for white supremacy." One objection to antifascists' stance on
this might be that giving the government more power to shut down the free speech of some people arguably plays right into fascist's hands, and that's probably true. But it's not really what antifascists are after. Antifascist actors know from experience that liberal states and their police forces will usually defend fascist speech so there's not much use looking for help there. Because anarchists swim freely through the Antifa ocean empowering the state to tackle fascism is not usually what they're after. Rather the goal is usually to enable communities to take a more direct approach, which they do. Since it often appears in the news, it's
worth briefly touching on free speech in universities and academic freedom. Firstly, academic freedom
is not the same thing as freedom of speech. Academic freedom refers to researchers and
academics being free to investigate those topics that interest them and being able to
publish their findings publicly without the government removing points of view it doesn't like. This has not always been allowed, even recently: the George W. Bush regime, for instance,
attempted to prevent scientific evidence from being published that demonstrated, among many
other things, that humans are contributing to climate change. The Eisenhower regime subpoenaed
several academics, including schoolteachers, for Un-American Activities because of perceived
Left-Wing sympathies. Academic freedom has nothing in fact to do with people outside
of universities being guaranteed protected speaking engagements on campus. Neither free
speech nor academic freedom guarantees anybody a platform, or the freedom from consequences, criticism, or protest, which are themselves often forms of free speech. Speaking of governments' relationships to
free speech though, another thing that Bray illustrates is that antifascists are probably actually more in favour of free speech than a lot of people realise and even more than a lot of liberals are. We tend I think to assume that countries like the USA and UK allow everybody free speech at the moment and that antifascists are trying to chip away at that, but that's not quite true. Western
governments do restrict free speech for instance undocumented immigrants and prisoners have huge curtailments on their free speech, which antiauthoritarians, many of whom also swim freely through the Antifa ocean, would oppose. And of course we know that if you have a lot of money you can make your free speech go a lot further that somebody else's. Bray also writes: "The false assumption that the United States
maximises free speech rests on the unstated fact that this right only applies to non-incarcerated
citizens. Therefore, millions of people in the United States are deprived of elements
of this freedom. In contrast, antiauthoritarians seek to abolish prisons, states, and the very
notion of citizenship - thereby eliminating this black hole of rightlessness. They also
aim to construct a classless, post-capitalist society that would eradicate significant discrepancies
in our ability to make our speech meaningful... Many will argue that this is simply impossible.
Even if that were true, however, what is at issue here are the values being espoused,
not their likelihood of being enacted. Pundits attack antifa for being anti-free speech.
Yet, even if you agree that shutting down fascist organising constitutes an infringement
upon the free speech of fascists, it is still patently obvious that anti-fascists advocate
for far more speech in society than liberals, both quantitatively and qualitatively." Today's antifascists want to shut down today's fascists. Whereas today's fascists... well let's take a look. Part 5 - There is No Peaceful White Nationalism Contemporary EuroAmerican fascism leans hard on white supremacy, so let's talk about that. One thing that modern fascists are
very good at is marketing, and that's because they know their audience. They know that if
antifascists shut them down liberals might be inclined to take their side and they increase
their chances of this happening if they can lie by marketing themselves as "peaceful." By now we've seen that words like "peaceful" and "violent" are somewhat politically looser than we might have initially supposed, but fascists
will do whatever they can to appear peaceful specifically in the eyes of liberals. White supremacists will rebrand themselves as "white nationalists" "white identitarians," "white civil rights activists," or "alternative ethno-nationalists" or "the Alt-Right." Finger quotes everywhere! They'll do sneaky things occasionally like
denounce the Nazis or denounce the KKK; they won't call it a white supremacist rally; they'll
call it a "Free Speech Rally" or a "March Against Communism." They don't call it
the Seattle White Nationalist Convention; they call it the "Northwest Forum." They'll
say things like, "We just want peaceful relocation of people of colour, not genocide!" or they'll say "Other races have an ethno-state, why can't white people?" or they'll say "Black people are proud to be black; aren't you proud to be white? Do you hate your own people?" Don't fall for it. It's a ruse. White nationalism as an idea can only be established through racist violence and ultimately through genocide, and I'm gonna prove that for you
it right now. We established earlier on that every political ideology legitimises violence against somebody, but the devil is in who and why? So let's pop the hood and see who is on contemporary
fascism's hit list and why. The why is easy. At the core of white supremacy - or whatever name they use to try and sell you on it today - is the myth of "White Genocide." White Genocide
is a conspiracy theory, which says that the immigration of people of colour and interracial relationships are leading to the extinction of white people. Furthermore, though they
often won't say this bit openly, this "genocide" is supposedly being orchestrated deliberately by the Jews. Or "globalists," which is often just a euphemism for Jews. It's a scenario that's no less ridiculous now than it was 120 years ago when it was invented by American racists and then it got picked up by the Nazis. White people are not going to go extinct anytime soon, demographic change
is not the same thing as genocide, and it should go without saying that it is not being orchestrated by Jews. And you might well wonder how anybody could ever believe that. Well they'll use all kinds of tactics to try and sell you on it. Sometimes they'll rebrand the White Genocide myth and call it something "like "The Great Replacement." They'll try and feed you all sorts of dodgy statistics about immigration rates, birth rates, crime rates, IQs, They'll talk about the "cultural incompatibility" of immigrants; they'll say they're not racist, they're
just "race realists." The idea that nationality is somehow tied to race is something that you can find traces often even quite mainstream discourse. A skinhead Nazi ranting about how Jews are take over the world and kill all the white people probably isn't
gonna persuade many; but a clean-cut Harvard graduate in a suit appears on the evening news and tells you that wealthy elites and globalists are bringing in all these immigrants whose culture just aren't compatible with our Western values, and six months down the line everyone's going "Whoa, where didall these Nazis come from?" One thing they love doing is assuming, without evidence, that current data trends will continue decades and even centuries into the future, that way they can say "Oh, look at all these immigrants coming here and having kids! If
this keeps up," (a very dodgy assumption even if the data they give you is real) "then you'll be a minority in your own country by 20whatever!" Note how that not only contains that very dodgy assumption, but also the structure of that sentence already draws a line between you and whoever the supposed new majority will be, which rules out the possibility that together you might form something better. YouTube's own Shaun does great work debunking the way white nationalists lie about statistics in order to try and sell you on this white genocide conspiracy theory, I thoroughly recommend his work. Recall what we said earlier on about propaganda and how it doesn't really matter that it's false? Remember, the goal is, if not to fool you, then at least get you to repeat the message without realising what it is. So they'll say that they want to prevent
"white genocide" and "peacefully" build a white ethnostate, that's the why of the violence.
So who's the who? Well here's the key to figuring that one out - Barack Obama is a black man despite the fact that he had one white parent and one black parent. Mixed-race children, nowadays, are not considered white, and that's gonna have some big implications. Interestingly, this wasn't always the case!
It used to be that if you had one white parent you were white. The boundaries of whiteness
have shifted a huge amount over the last few centuries and varied from place to place.
In fact it wasn't until around the turn of the 19th Century that the so-called "One
Drop Rule" came into effect. States like Tennessee and Virginia started saying that
if you had one drop of blood in you from a person of colour in your ancestry, you couldn't
be called white anymore. These new laws were in part designed to prevent former slaves
and their descendants from enjoying the full benefits of whiteness, and to keep them in
poverty by preventing them from marrying into white families - mixed marriages being at
that time largely illegal. They were also designed to keep immigrants out of the USA - courts and legislators literally invented whole racial categories just to establish
that would-be immigrants weren't white, since at that time you had to be if you wanted
to come into the country. A shift in the way whiteness is defined also
reflected the growing popularity of eugenics, the pseudoscientific myth that good social
things happen if you sterilise or exterminate people of colour and people with disabilities
in order to control whose genes enter society. With eugenics, whiteness became even narrower
- white nationalists including the Nazis began to define their "people" or volk
as excluding not just all people of colour, but people with disabilities, LGBT people,
Jews, and so on. Incidentally, although the Nazis are the most
infamous practitioners of eugenics and legalised racism, they were inspired by eugenicist,
racist laws that were passed and widely used in the USA for decades before the Nazis even
got close to power. So, whiteness wasn't always recessive but
laws that were designed to keep people of colour down after emancipation and the myth of eugenics mean that even after most of these laws have been struck from the books, we have inherited in the modern age this classification of whiteness as recessive. How does this help find who is on contemporary fascism's hit list? Well fascists say that one of the big causes of "white genocide" is the immigration of people of colour So let's say that we, hypothetically, stopped all immigration of people of colour to a particular country, say, the United States. Obviously that would be horrifically racist and immoral, but generously setting that aside it also
wouldn't actually work to achieve the goal the fascist wants. Because what about all the people of colour who already live there? Mixed race children in the modern age do not count as white, and so the proportion of mixed race people compared to white people
is still increasing. "White genocide" is still happening. Of course it isn't genocide, it's just demographics changing over centuries as a result of a how
we choose to construct whiteness, but according to the fascist that's somehow a Jewish plot. So what can they do? Well they have to pas laws against interracial relationships But I mean that ain't gonna work, people are still gonna fall in love, people are still gonnahave sex and produce mixed race babies so they gotta segregate the races, keep them separate, make sure nobody's having sex with anyone they're not supposed to. And remember, ideology is enforced with violence so the police have to start enforcing it: that means things like compulsory terminations for mixed raced pregnancies, forced sterilisation, punishments for people who are convicted of "racial pollution." But wait, there's more! People still find ways around segregation so it has to be enforced more strictly until it becomes ghettoization.
We've know from history that "separate but equal" doesn't happen. But people
sneak out of ghettos too, so they need to removed even further away and remanded to camps where they can be watched. Or deported: the Nazis had a vague idea to deport
all Jews, or people they considered Jews, to Madagascar in the hopes that they would
just die there or on the way but it turns out that deporting and persecuting millions of people makes you quite unpopular with other countries. The Nazis actually began with "voluntary,
peaceful" deportations, which weren't voluntary or peaceful because Jews were being either forced to flee by vigilante violence that the state allowed or stirred up, or were being deported, which is to say arrested, imprisoned, and subjected to violence directly by the
state. And what if they won't go, or can't go, to the internment camps or wherever it is the fascist plan to deport them to? It's a big job: remember we're talking about every single person of colour in the country. In fact more than that, because remember whiteness is defined as even narrower than that. They've gotta be rounded up, they're gonna try to come back or escape or return illegally. And in the end the only way to be 100% sure that "white genocide" can't happen - which it isn't
remember, it's a conspiracy theory that demographic change is somehow a plot by Jews - is with extermination. Real genocide. Because whiteness is defined one-drop recessive contemporary white supremacist fascism defines the very existence of people of colour as a threat. All of them. This is
not a slippery slope argument; this is the built-in conclusion of contemporary fascism. If left unchecked it leads inexorably to total racist violence and genocide, and the historical evidence is the final proof. In fact it must lead there, its own internal logic demands it. The who
is at least everyone who isn't white. ' That's why appeasement was doomed to fail. That's why there is no peaceful white nationalism. There is no peaceful white supremacy. There
are no peaceful Nazis: fascism is not simply an alternative political viewpoint one can
hold. It is in fact incompatible with the
existence of most human beings on Earth Which is why it meets with such resistance. To people who haven't followed the white nationalist rabbit and who haven't really investigated why contemporary fascists think that they do, antifascist action can appear to come out of nowhere and be disproportionate. But now, you can see through them and you know what's at stake. You may still disagree with antifascist action, or, in the spirit of being local and flexible you may agree sometimes, disagree others,
and reserve the right to change your mind. But at the very least you nowunderstand
the political philosophies that are in motion in your world today. Conclusions A lot of people I think have this idea that
politics is like a play. There's one lead actor, one stage, one script, a handful of other people playing smaller roles, one audience. But actually I think that politics is more like a whole theatre festival. There's all sorts of shows, loads of casts, loads of actors, loads of audiences, some of which overlap. Some of them are really big
and famous and some of them are tiny. Some of them aren't pitched at you, and some of
them are just weird and incomprehensible like that one guy at the Edinburgh Fringe every year who just stands on the street corner dressed as the Predator. And that's his whole show. Some of the shows in the theatre festival probably aren't very good, and there's a whole army of people whose job it is to write about the theatre festival
and tell you what to think, and a lot of what they produce isn't very good either. If you want to know whether a show you just
saw was good, you've gotta ask yourself, "What is it doing?" Not what the flyer
says, not what do the big official reviewers say about it, but by the content of the show and the
effects it has on its audience both intentional and unintentional, what is actually being done here? And in political terms what that means is you've gotta understand ideology and action. Theory and praxis. Hopefully,
having seen this video, you're on your way, or at the very least hopefully you realise now that the theatres of politics can accommodate very many different kinds of show. If you liked this video I have a tip jar at
PayPal.me/PhilosophyTube; think of it like me putting a hat round at the end of the lecture.
Patreon.com/PhilosophyTube is where you could make a regular donation to help me pay rent, afford food, and keep giving away free philosophy education.
If you don't watch the whole thing, these are probably the key points:
A couple of other things that I think bear mentioning:
Familiarize yourself with this because it's gonna be a whole fuckin thing soon what with the Ngo nonsense.
Imo this is the best you can get if you have one hour to learn about Antifa
Honestly, it's this video and his one about Steve Bannon that has me gotten me to start keeping tabs on local antifa events in my area. Don't play with matches!
"You only think that anti-fascists are as bad as fascists when your only problem with fascists is that they're rowdy"
Don't yell at me, and Philosophy tube is still GREAT of course, but I really do miss his older style of videos like this one. I find them infinitely more engaging
Looks like the bootlickers have found this sub.
The best video to watch while thoughtfully sipping your milkshake.
It's very important that people share this