We are issuing this statement in response to the shooting of a civilian by federal agents in Brighton Park, Chicago. The facts remain murky, but the stakes are not.
We must never forget the fundamental truth: Antifa as portrayed by the Trump administration and fascist regimes throughout recent history simply does not exist.
First and foremost: Antifa does not engage in armed conflict.
Antifascists do not bring weapons to protests. Antifascists do not initiate violence. Antifascists do not endorse destruction as strategy. That is not who antifascists are, and it is not how we fight.
With that said, current reports are ambiguous at best. DHS claims that protesters boxed in ICE vehicles and opened fire. We do not validate those claims. We take this opportunity to say again: politics through the initiation of violence is the tactic of fascists, not anti-fascists.
Antifascists believe in resistance to and accountability for abuses of power. But resistance is not chaos. It is not bloodlust. It is not the reckless endangerment of our communities.
This is not a drill.
The regime is escalating. The threshold for lethal force is dropping. The agents are masked, armored, and increasingly unaccountable. If you show up to a protest with rage and no plan, you are not resisting; you are gambling with your life and the lives of others.
We mourn the shooting in Chicago. We reject the federal narrative. We condemn the scapegoating of Antifa. And we remind you: a significant contingent of the government has turned on its people, and it will not flinch when the crosshairs land on you.
This is not a game. As comical as some of the newly-recruited “soldiers” of ICE may seem, their weapons, and their intentions, are lethal. Laughing at them is an effective form of disempowering them, but do it from out of range.
Stay lucid. Stay principled. Stay alive. Stay antifascist.
— Antifa
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