As Im sitting in a doctors waiting room in Memphis, a television set hanging from the ceiling plays a Fox News program whose host warns of antifa heading to a town near me.

But what exactly is antifa? Im a news junkie, and I barely have a clue.

These menacing insinuations mirror the way the term antifa is used in right-wing media not with precision or even sincerity, but as an incantation or curse. And they are obsessed with it.

The word stands for anti-fascist, and it appears to have originated in Germany in the 1930s and then resurfaced again in the 1970s. With the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, small organizations with that name have cropped up in a few American cities. But, for the most part, labelling protesters as members of antifa or, as Trump likes to say, professional anarchists is often either a red herring or a false flag operation used to frighten gullible citizens.

In early June, for example, a fake Twitter account pretending to be from antifa called for violence. It turned out to be a scam orchestrated by white nationalists.

Antifa, as a code word used to rile up fear and paranoia, has been lobbed especially at Black Lives Matter activists. Trump and Attorney General William Barr have repeatedly said that demonstrators leading the protests for racial justice are antifa, even though independent analyses by National Public Radio and the The New York Times of federal arrests of protesters dont actually show anyone with these connections.

Trump and Fox News are tireless promoters of such scare tactics. On August 31, when the President was interviewed by Fox host Laura Ingraham, he suggested that Democratic nominee Joe Bidens campaign was being run by a secret cabal of people youve never heard about, people that are in the dark shadows. These menacing insinuations mirror the way the term antifa is used in right-wing media not with precision or even sincerity, but as an incantation or curse. And they are obsessed with it.

Indeed, Fox News might as well change its name to the Antifa Network, because over the past few years, according to a Lexis-Nexis search conducted in early August, its broadcast the word 520 times, versus just 24 for CBS, 37 for ABC, and 66 for MSNBC. In one July 2019 episode of Laura Ingrahams program alone, she or her guests said the word 59 times.

As the presidential election in November draws near, its clear that conservatives are using the myth of antifa to pander to their base. But is it working?

To some extent, yes. According to a Rasmussen poll in June, almost half of respondents say antifa should be considered a terrorist organization, even though most of them probably couldnt tell you what it is, stands for, or wants.

Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of French literature who survived the Nazi regime, wrote in his book The Language of the Third Reich that a foreign word impresses all the more the less it is understood.

Perhaps that explains the strange buoyancy of antifa in right-wing media outlets. But whatever the reason may be for its popularity, the purpose is clear.

Political language, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

In much of the country, antifa is mostly wind. And its hot-air blowers are the kind of demagogues that history knows all too well.

This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

September 3, 2020

11:22 AM

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What Is Antifa? Mostly a Myth - Progressive.org