This essay is a response to Amanda Marcotte’s “How the Proud Boys Invented Antifa, “ published in Salon.
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Foeword
Amanda Marcotte’s essay in Salon on October 22, 2025, argues that antifa is essentially a fiction conjured by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to justify political repression. While the piece contains some legitimate observations, it suffers from significant factual problems, logical inconsistencies, and a selective engagement with evidence, undermining its central thesis. A careful reader should push back on several of its core claims.
The Central Claim Is Demonstrably False
The essay’s opening assertion — that antifa “is not real” — is not a defensible position, and Marcotte herself partially concedes this within the same paragraph by acknowledging that antifa has “existed for a long time.” This is not a minor tension; it is a self-contradiction that hollows out the essay’s thesis from the very first lines.
Antifa is not a centralized organization with a membership roster, a treasury, and a chain of command. That much is accurate. But characterizing it as wholly imaginary ignores a substantial body of documented evidence. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have both formally assessed antifa as a real movement with real participants engaging in real violence. In congressional testimony, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray — appointed by Trump but not generally regarded as a partisan figure — described antifa as “a real thing” and “a movement” engaged in “violent, anarchist, criminal activity.” Academic researchers who study political violence, including those deeply skeptical of right-wing characterizations of antifa, do not describe it as a fiction. The academic literature treats it as a loosely networked ideological movement with identifiable participants, tactics, and organizational nodes. Journalists and researchers across the political spectrum have documented antifa’s activities extensively — from sympathetic accounts that celebrate its antifascist mission to critical investigations that catalog its methods and personnel.
Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, published in 2017, was written with direct access to movement participants and became something of an intellectual touchstone for the movement itself. If antifa does not exist, one must wonder why its self-identified members sat down for interviews, why its tactical manuals circulate in identifiable networks, and why federal law enforcement has spent considerable resources mapping those networks.
The claim that it “does not exist” is not a sober analytical correction to right-wing exaggeration. It is the mirror image of that exaggeration, simply pointing in the opposite direction.
Documented Violence - Minimized or Ignored
Marcotte’s essay characterizes antifa violence as largely manufactured, dismissing the idea that the movement uses “illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence.” But documented incidents are not difficult to find, and they occurred at a scale well beyond what can be explained as Proud Boys entrapment operations.
During the 2020 unrest following the death of George Floyd, federal authorities documented dozens of arsons, assaults, and coordinated attacks on federal buildings in Portland — the very city Marcotte uses as her central example — that continued nightly for months. A federal courthouse was repeatedly attacked with incendiary devices, commercial-grade fireworks, and improvised weapons. By September 2020, federal prosecutors had filed charges against more than a dozen individuals in Portland specifically for attacks on federal property. In Seattle, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ/CHOP) — established and defended by individuals identifying with the radical left, including antifa participants — saw multiple shootings, including two homicides.
None of these features is in Marcotte’s essay. She mentions the killing of Aaron Danielson by Michael Reinoehl — which she attributes to Reinoehl walking “right into the trap” set by the Proud Boys, a framing that is quite generous to a man who killed someone — but otherwise treats left-wing political violence as essentially a statistical footnote manufactured by the right. This is not analysis; it is typical progressive advocacy.
It is worth noting that Reinoehl himself, in a Vice interview conducted days before he was killed by the police, described the shooting not as self-defense but as a preemptive act, saying “I had no choice” because “I see a civil war right around the corner.” This is not the profile of a bystander who fell into a trap.
The Asymmetric Violence Argument Is Oversimplified
Marcotte invokes the argument that “there’s exponentially more right-wing violence than left-wing violence in the U.S.” as though it settles the question. This claim deserves scrutiny.
The statistics underlying this assertion typically come from databases such as the Global Terrorism Database or reports from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League. These datasets use methodological choices that meaningfully shape their conclusions — for example, categorizing mass shootings with unclear political motivation as right-wing events, or treating categories like “incel violence” as a subdivision of right-wing extremism. Researchers who study political violence have noted that measuring ideological asymmetry in violence is genuinely difficult and that the headline figures are often more politically useful than analytically precise.
More importantly, even granting the asymmetry argument for purposes of discussion, it does not follow that left-wing political violence is therefore negligible, or that antifa does not engage in it. The existence of greater overarching right-wing violence (as defined by the SPLC) does not make left-wing violence fictional (as defined by the SPLC). But then again, Biden made this same right-wing claim, casting it as a threat, right up there with the thorny thesis that carbon dioxide (a life-giving gas) is a looming threat. And of course, silent on left-wing violence. Nevertheless, we see the basic logical error.
The Nazi Analogy Works Against Marcotte’s Argument
Perhaps the most striking feature of the essay is its extended analogy comparing Trump and the Proud Boys to the Nazi brownshirts and eventually to the SS. Marcotte is entitled to make this argument, but she does not appear to notice that it importantly undermines her own thesis.
If the historical situation is genuinely analogous to Weimar Germany’s — where paramilitary fascists were consolidating power and preparing to establish concentration camps — then the question of whether organized antifascist resistance is appropriate becomes considerably more serious than the essay’s breezy conclusion (wear frog costumes, don’t take the bait) would suggest. You cannot simultaneously argue that the United States is on the verge of a Nazi-style takeover and that the correct response is a dopey dance party outside an ICE facility. The severity of the analogy demands either a more serious response or a less apocalyptic framing. Marcotte wants both the rhetorical power of the Nazi comparison and the strategic lightness of advising people to dress as unicorns.
Conversely, those who believe the Nazi analogy is overwrought will find the essay’s entire argumentative structure collapses. If the situation is not genuinely comparable to Weimar, then the treatment of antifa resistance as morally equivalent to fighting the Nazi brownshirts in the 1930s is partisan special pleading.
The Treatment of Jack Posobiec Is a Straw Man
The essay holds up Posobiec’s comment — that antifa “goes back to Weimar Republic Germany” — as proof that MAGA supporters think “the people who tried to stop the rise of the Nazis were the bad guys.” But this is not what Posobiec said. He noted, accurately, that the antifascist movement in Germany in the early 1930s was affiliated with the Communist Party, and that some of its street violence contributed to the political instability the Nazis exploited. This is standard historical fact, not a conspiracy theory. Whether one finds that historical parallel illuminating or misleading in the American context is a legitimate debate. Marcotte collapses the argument into an absurd caricature rather than engaging with it.
For an unblemished overview of Posobiec, the SPLC does a splendid job - click here.
The Conclusion Contradicts the Premise
The essay ends with this line: “Antifa is an illusion, but like many such fantasies, it has power.”
This is a significant concession. An illusion with genuine political power, documented historical continuity across multiple countries, an identifiable tactical repertoire, academic literature devoted to its study, and real-world participants who identify as members is not well described as an illusion. It is a movement. Describing it as an illusion is a rhetorical choice made to delegitimize political opponents, not an honest analytical conclusion.
Justice Must Be Equal
An executive order designating antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” raises genuine civil liberties concerns, and those concerns are worth taking seriously on their own terms — not because antifa is fictional, but precisely because it is not. Please stay tuned, this is not to defend the anarchist group called antifa.
When the government arrogates to itself the power to designate loosely affiliated ideological movements as terrorist organizations by executive fiat, it creates machinery that does not stay pointed in one direction for long. The Biden administration provided a cautionary example of this tendency when, in 2023, a since-retracted FBI memo from the Richmond, Virginia, field office flagged “radical traditional Catholics” as potential domestic terror threats, citing their interest in the Latin Mass as a potential marker of extremist sympathy.1 The memo was withdrawn after public outcry, but the episode illustrated with uncomfortable clarity how elastic the category of “domestic threat” becomes once institutional inhibitions against targeting ideological communities begin to erode. If the left finds executive terror designations alarming when aimed at antifa, it should have found them equally alarming when aimed at Catholics kneeling in a pew.
The principle at stake is not partisan. It is constitutional. Individuals who commit arson, assault federal officers, or destroy property should be charged, tried, and sentenced under the laws that govern those specific acts — the same laws that apply to a Proud Boy who beats a counter-protester or anyone else who crosses from political expression into criminal conduct. The answer to political violence is not a classification of approved and disapproved movements maintained by whoever holds executive power at a given moment. It is an equal application of a law that is indifferent to the ideological jersey the defendant was wearing when he threw the punch.
This commitment to equal justice is not a comfortable one, because it requires consistency even when consistency is politically costly. Consider the treatment of January 6 defendants — many of whom faced prolonged pretrial detention, solitary confinement, and sentences that critics across the ideological spectrum, including civil libertarians with no sympathy for the insurrection itself, characterized as disproportionate to the underlying conduct. That machinery of prosecutorial zeal was cheered by many on the left who now rightly worry about the government’s appetite for targeting its political opponents. The test of a genuine principle, however, is whether you apply it when it cuts against your own side. If the events of January 6 had been a progressive uprising — if it had been left-wing activists who stormed the Capitol, faced years in pretrial detention, and were prosecuted under charging theories that stretched the boundaries of existing statutes — I would say exactly what I am saying now: the law must be applied evenhandedly, the punishment must fit the proven crime, and no defendant deserves to be made an example of simply because the government finds his politics contemptible. I would have written this essay on their behalf. The principle does not change based on the flag the defendant was carrying.
Justice, in other words, must be objective. The moment it begins sorting defendants by the politics of their movement rather than the facts of their conduct, it ceases to be justice and becomes something considerably more dangerous. Marcotte’s essay, for all its flaws, is animated by a real fear of that danger. The tragedy is that in denying antifa’s existence rather than demanding it be treated like everyone else under the law, she inadvertently weakens the very civil liberties argument she is trying to make. 📕
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Of course, the government would never ever dare to do this to a Mu____m group.
Wow, what a sentence: "This is not a minor tension; it is a self-contradiction that hollows out the essay’s thesis from the very first lines." I enjoy well written essays. It is ironic when the term fascism is thrown around without knowledge it was birthed by Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile. The latter would be what is deemed a Neo-Hegelian, thus linked to socialism. The linkage of violence to what is perceived as 'alt-right' but not 'alt-left,' as in Leninism or Maoism, makes no logical sense, but it does so on a shallow level. The Nazi's had such great uniforms and pageantry. Perhaps had Mao had a better tailor, we would know more about the violence stemming from communism.
Good catch and logical breakdown of a completely ridiculous argument Frederick.