This Is Antifa

So here we are. Who are we?

We are not a brand.

We are not a trend.

We are not a momentary spike in the algorithm.

We are the living resistance to fascism: strategic, visible, and unapologetically present.

This is not a claim to central authority, but rather a refusal to be erased or exploited any further. While we understand fully the arguments in support of the leaderless movement ethos, we assert that we must reject it when it becomes an excuse for silence, invisibility, or strategic paralysis.

While we absolutely welcome members of local and regional antifascist groups, we are not them.

Fundamentally, we are everyone else. Everyone who is antifascist, which is everyone with a sense of decency and compassion and community – everyone with a human heart and soul.

We claim a seat at the table because our name is already there: dragged through the mud, invoked in bad faith, weaponized to justify repression, while the exploiters and abusers rotate impotent, illegitimate, and dishonest talking heads to portray us.

No more. If they’re going to talk about us, we’re going to speak for ourselves.

We have someone qualified and entirely outside the influence of other commercial or political influences to be the microphone through which we speak, who has stepped forward to do so. Anyone else claiming to speak for Antifa is speaking for themselves and hiding behind Antifa to do it, and their intentions may not have anything to do with antifascism.

We build infrastructure, not ego. Memes, livestreams, essays, snapshots…these are tactical nodes in a living archive. We document what happens, when it happens, so the propaganda loop can’t rewrite it later. We resist the inducements to let ourselves be dragged down to the level of imitating the behavior of the fascists for lack of any other immediately apparent way to repel them.

We operate from ethics. The survival and propagation of the species is our prime directive. You’ll forgive us the introduction of some language and framing that is now considered somewhat archaic, but still speaks a fundamental truth – possibly the fundamental truth – of humanity in this quote from noted speculative fiction pioneer Robert Heinlein:

“All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can – and must – be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a ‘perfect society’ on any foundation other than ‘Women and children first!’ is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal.”

To pre-empt distractions created by archaic language, we should note here first and foremost that by “racial survival” Heinlein means – and it would have been unquestionably clear that he meant this, in its contemporary context – the human “race,” not some silly ethnic supremacy trip.

Second, we should say out loud that while Heinlein was framing his observation in a fiction story in which the invocation of “women and children” is used as a romantic-literary device, the observation itself isn’t about “women and children” but “keeping humanity alive and progressing.” If that isn’t the first priority, the prime directive above all else, then everything else is meaningless anyway because we won’t survive long if we’re not trying to.

Finally, we affirm without further qualification as self-evident truth that the way to uphold that prime directive is to build a world in which every single human being has every single possible opportunity to become their favorite and most actualized potentiality of themselves. The fulfillment and protection of the fundamental right to be who you are so long as you are not hurting anyone else has proven repeatedly throughout history to be the most effective means of ensuring “women and children first.”

Who we are is that vast majority of human beings who aren’t fascists and don’t want to be, who want to simply live, let live, and pursue self-actualization.

Now you know who we are. Next up: Why are we here?