The Antifa

Journalist Jack Posobiec has spent years reporting on Antifa at close range, and he says he has the scars to show for it. His reporting includes infiltrating the group's 2016 meetings, where members planned their attack on Donald Trump's inauguration, and going undercover in Seattle's CHAZ in 2020.

In The Antifa, Posobiec sets out what he calls the secret history of this radical anarchist movement and weaves in his own encounters with some of its most committed and violent members. Few Americans knew Antifa existed until recently. Posobiec argues that it belongs to a tradition of violent revolutionary movements stretching back more than a hundred years.

He contends that, like its predecessors, including the Weathermen of the 1960s, Antifa is driven by one overriding aim: to overthrow the existing political order and capitalism itself and put a communist state in their place. In his account, the movement saw an opening in 2020 and took it. He says it was never reined in and was even encouraged in its violence by sympathetic city and state governments. Posobiec concludes that Antifa is now a greater threat than ever and is better placed to reach its goal than any of its radical forebears.