At this point, it’s a well-worn playbook. In the event of any act of coordinated resistance against the right in this country, the Trump regime cries “antifa!”—whether it’s unrest after George Floyd’s killing in 2020 or the anti-ICE organizing on the streets of Minneapolis in 2026.
But who is antifa, really? Is antifa—as Trump and his minions seek to portray them—a centralized network of violent extremists? No. The real answer, as with most things, is much more complicated.
We’ve enlisted author Christopher Mathias, an expert in far-right extremism, to help sort this out. His new book, To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right, dives deep into the world of antifa, even following members who went undercover in fascist organizations to destroy them from within.
But what happens when fascist and white supremacist movements become so mainstreamed that they exist now at the top levels of our government? What can organized resistance to ICE on the streets of Minneapolis teach us about how antifa’s successful tactics can be replicated and scaled up around the country?
—Team Big Picture
Q: Your new book, “To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right,” follows antifa infiltrators who actually became trusted members of white supremacist fascist groups to root them out from within. Let’s start with what antifa actually is. The term is fraught and is often thrown loosely around, particularly by the right, so can you just lay out how you would define it?
Christopher Mathias: So, although “antifa” is just a shortening of the word “anti-fascist” — a label I think (and hope!) all of your readers would use to identify themselves — antifa actually refers to something pretty specific. It refers to a militant style, or tradition, of politics practiced by an underground, decentralist network of leftist radicals determined to defeat the far right “by any means necessary.” This network is made up largely of anarchists, socialists, and communists, and traces its lineage, in part, to groups in the 1980s and ‘90s like Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP), which were formed to kick neo-Nazis out of the punk scene.
Those groups developed some basic strategies and “points of unity” that were eventually used to kick an entire generation of fascists off the streets of America — not just from the punk scene. These groups believed in a few basic tenets of activism. First, is this idea of “we go where they go,” this idea that fascists needed to be followed and monitored and ultimately confronted in the streets, sometimes violently. Second, is the idea that fascists should have “no platform” to speak or organize. In practice, this means getting their rally permits revoked, or pressuring businesses and hotels not to host fascists. In its more modern iteration, this “no platform” strategy has meant getting fascists kicked off social media for violating terms of service. Third, and maybe the most important or distinctive tenet, is the belief that neither law enforcement nor the state can be trusted in the fight against fascists. This is based on the belief that those institutions are inherently white supremacist and will often collaborate with fascists.
Groups like Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) kind of fell to the wayside a bit in the early aughts. Then, in like 2015, when there was this explosion of new secretive white supremacist groups organizing online and in the streets, often calling themselves the “alt-right,” a modern iteration of “antifa” blossomed to fight back. It’s an organic, grassroots phenomenon, and its practitioners adopt the “antifa” or “anti-fascist” label to identify their struggles against all types of bigotry, not just racism and xenophobia, but Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia. By the end of 2017, everyone in America knew the word “antifa” because of these viral videos of Nazis getting punched in the streets. (Merriam-Webster added the word to the dictionary. Oxford Dictionaries shortlisted “antifa” for word of the year.) And although it’s true that antifa was punching Nazis, the bulk of the work they were doing was non-violent and, as my book argues, something altogether more remarkable.
Q: You document many instances in which antifa’s tactics—which include not just infiltrating these groups, but also publicly naming and shaming and even doxing members—have been very successful. Can you highlight some examples for our readers?
CM: In many ways my book is about doxing — but not in the way most people know the word. People typically associate “doxing” with the act of posting someone’s private info — like a phone number or address online — as a means of inviting harassment. It’s something the far right does a lot and it can be awful.
When I talk about “doxing” though, I mean it in the anti-fascist sense of the term, which refers to the practice of identifying or exposing a previously pseudonymous neo-Nazi or white supremacist — of which there were so, so many this last decade. Doxing in this sense, the way I describe it in the book, is the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a Klansman, revealing the very human face beneath. Antifa doxed thousands of Americans this way over the last decade.
Antifa did this not only because its activists saw it as an urgent form of community self-defense — it’s important after all to know if one of your neighbors is a Nazi, because that neighbor is liable to commit violence — but because they saw it as a way of creating a social cost for being a fascist. It leveraged existing societal taboos against explicit white supremacy and fascism to make sure that Americans fucking around with fascism found out. I created a spreadsheet of about one thousand doxes antifa published since about 2015. Through remarkable open-source intelligence gathering and research and espionage, antifa publicly identified or unmasked neo-Nazi soldiers and pastors and politicians and professors and teachers who had been hiding their bigotries behind pseudonyms, avatars or usernames online. A lot of those people were fired as a result of those doxes.
The tactic basically says to young white men, for example, that “yeah, you can join that Nazi group, but we will let your family and friends and employer know what you are a part of.” It’s a way of dissuading large swaths of people from joining organized fascism. It also makes it impossible for these groups to operate in the shadows. One of the stories I tell in the book is about Identity Evropa, this white supremacist group whose members were largely college-educated white dudes who wore suits and ties, and who were ingratiating themselves with the Republican Party. A spy went undercover into Identity Evropa, and got a hold of hundreds of thousands of the group’s internal messages — messages that this network of anti-fascist researchers then used to piece together clues that would eventually unmask a staggering one hundred members of the group. Within like a year and a half, Identity Evropa was forced to disband.
Q: You talk about the 2017 Unite the Right rally as formative for many in antifa, and formative for you in documenting the movement. Can you talk a bit about how that event was a turning point, and how we got from there in 2017 to a point in 2026 when fascists are literally running our government?
CM: Yeah, so I covered Unite The Right as a journalist for HuffPost, and it was horrifying. One of those days that will never leave me. Pitched battles in the streets. The beating of Deandre Harris. The murder of Heather Heyer. And then, afterwards, the way in which Trump referred to the Nazis there that day — which was the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation — as “very fine people.” For me it was the beginning of this journey to investigate and unmask this new generation of fascists, which at the time branded itself the “alt-right.” Very quickly I learned antifa was doing this work very effectively.
Over the next ten years, I watched antifa systematically disrupt and destroy so many of the groups that were in Charlottesville. But yes, as your question notes, something bigger was happening. The vile ideas and slogans I heard the Nazis shout that day were going mainstream.
There’s this narrative that the alt-right kind of fell apart and was destroyed, in large part by antifa, and I think that’s true. Antifa did this urgent work of self-defense, kicking fascists off the streets, but antifa is a fundamentally small subculture or phenomenon. It was never going to be in any position to effectively destroy a mass fascist movement, which is what I would argue MAGA is. In this way, now I kind of think of the alt-right, and all the groups that were a part of it, as a vanguard or “shock troops” sacrificed to push the Overton Window open wider and wider so that the GOP could adopt the most explicitly fascist rhetoric and policies. Back in 2017, I could read terms like “great replacement” and “remigration” in the Identity Evropa chat messages stolen away by antifa spies. Now those terms are used by people in the White House.
Q: Donald Trump’s rise to power over the past decade, along with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022, has really given a permission structure to racists, bigots and fascists of all sorts to be open about their beliefs. So in this environment, can fascists still be shamed? Are those tactics still effective or are antifa groups changing things up to adapt to this new reality?
CM: Right, this is basically the narrative or animating question of my book. If anti-fascist doxing leverages existing societal taboos against explicit white supremacy or fascism to create a consequence for being a fascist, what happens when that taboo starts to disappear?
There are a lot of stories of anti-fascist doxes kind of seeing diminishing returns. I think of Libs of TikTok in particular. We all know that social media account by now, the one that basically operates as a kind of homing beacon for the right, showing which queer or trans person the far right should target with harassment. Now, while the person behind Libs of TikTok, Chaya Raichik, wasn’t exposed by antifa but rather in a piece in the Washington Post, what happened afterwards was really alarming. Raichick wasn’t shamed; she became a celebrity. A MAGA celebrity. The GOP embraced her. She became rich. Hell, she was even appointed as an adviser to the state Education Department’s library committee in Oklahoma.
Essentially, over the last few years, fascism went more and more mask-off. Fast forward to 2026, and the ones wearing masks aren’t necessarily neo-Nazis — although many of them still do — but rather armed agents of the state: ICE and CBP. The masked agents who are abducting our neighbors and sending them to concentration camps. I wrote recently for The Guardian about how antifa is repurposing its expertise to unmask this new secret police force. That is part of what antifa is doing now.
Q: We have seen an incredibly robust grassroots activist network in Minneapolis push back against ICE’s invasion there. The seeds of that were planted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Can you speak to antifa’s role in that, and how they are working to scale that up to other cities?
CM: It’s amazing what a recurring character Minneapolis has been in the fight against fascism over the last few decades. It’s where ARA formed to fight off Nazis in the punk scene; in 2020, it’s where a mass uprising started against police murdering Black people; and now it’s this mass uprising against ICE and CBP.
So, antifa certainly took part in the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, but its activists did not foment those uprisings, nor would they have had the capacity to. Trump and MAGA in 2020 tried to blame antifa for fomenting the uprisings, which was absurd. It was their way of trying to delegitimize the uprisings, saying that they were the work of leftist agent provocateurs or “outside agitators. It was a way of distracting and deflecting from the very real grievance at the heart of those demonstrations: for law enforcement to stop killing Black people. It was also a way of suggesting that the uprisings, which were led by Black people, couldn’t possibly be led by Black people. (James Baldwin described this kind of “outside agitator” trope this way: “It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated.”)
What we’re seeing now in Minneapolis is still a type of militant anti-fascism, I would argue, even if it doesn’t label itself “antifa” or use the symbols common to that subculture. The resistance against ICE in Minneapolis bears a striking resemblance to antifa’s fight against fascists in the streets in 2017-2019. Every day Americans in Minneapolis, those not steeped in anarchist or other leftist circles, are demonstrating the ethos of “we go where they go.” They are following and monitoring ICE agents. They are filming and surveilling. They are unmasking. They are pressuring hotels and businesses not to collaborate with ICE. They are creating a social cost for being part of ICE or working with ICE. They are putting their bodies on the line for their neighbors.
It’s the ethos of another anti-fascist slogan — “we protect us” — in action. A recognition that, as antifa has argued for a while, the state and law enforcement can’t be trusted in this fight. That we have to show up for our neighbors ourselves because no one else is coming to save us. What’s happening in Minneapolis is remarkable and heartening and I think a model or blueprint for other cities.
Q: For people who consider themselves anti-fascist, which we hope includes virtually everyone reading this post, how can we get beyond the caricature of “antifa” and actually get involved in the movement at a local level?
CM: I think every time you attempt to show up for your neighbors right now — providing mutual aid or a place to stay or legal support or by turning up at an anti-ICE rally or anything else — you’ll be ushered further and further into a world of people who have developed tactics to stop what’s happening right now. A world of people who have chosen a politics of solidarity over a politics of domination. I think the bigger that world grows, with you as a part of it, this current iteration of fascism doesn’t stand a chance.
I've requested the book be purchased by my three libraries in addition to my own copy, I hope it will help.
This article was enlightening and I thank you for it.