ACLU / ANTIFA Live Rent Free Inside Tiny Rightist Brains

[Matt]

Column: What is antifa? Mostly a right-wing myth
Staff Writer
The Columbus Dispatch
Joseph Hayden, Columnist

As I'm sitting in a doctor's waiting room in Memphis, Tennessee, 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? I'm a news junkie, and I barely have a clue.

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,
labeling 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
of federal arrests of protesters by National Public Radio and The New York
Times don't actually show anyone with these connections.

Trump and Fox News are tireless promoters of such scare tactics. On
Monday, when the president was interviewed by Fox host Laura Ingraham, he
suggested that Democratic nominee Joe Biden's campaign was being run by a
secret cabal of "people you've 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, it's broadcast the word 520 times, versus just
24 for CBS, 37 for ABC and 66 for MSNBC. In one July 2019 episode of Laura
Ingraham's program alone, she or her guests said the word 59 times.

As the presidential election in November draws near, it's 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 couldn't 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 most of the country, antifa is mostly wind. And its hot-air blowers are
the kind of demagogues that history knows all too well.

Joseph Hayden, a professor of journalism at the University of Memphis, is
writing a book on the recent history of fake news in America. This column
was produced for the Progressive Media Project and distributed by Tribune
News Service.