The Left’s Accusation That The Right Is Fascist Is Simply Psychological Projection

Antifa wants to pretend they're fighting a fascist dictatorship, but what they don't realize is that limited government is the best safeguard of all.

Friedrich Nietzsche cautioned those who fight monsters to take care lest they become monsters themselves. He should have also warned those pretending to fight monsters, whose imagined enemies are really projections of their own evils.

Consider Antifa, those self-styled anti-fascists who recently made headlines for harassing the family of Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The paucity of actual Nazis in this country would seem to make Antifa superfluous, but they have a talent for detecting fascists everywhere. Having determined that practically everything and everyone (themselves excepted) is fascist, they spend their free time going about in black shirts smashing things and looking for political opponents to threaten and beat up.

Antifa Is Performative Recreation

Kevin Williamson of National Review evaluates them with pity and disdain: “These play-acting buffoons aren’t the moral equivalent of the French Resistance—they are mincing would-be thugs looking for something that will make them feel better about themselves. Apparently, terrorizing Tucker Carlson’s wife scratches an itch that weed and Netflix don’t.”

Antifa is politics as performative recreation—cosplay and LARPing livened by harassment, vandalism, and moderate violence. The tactics Williamson observed in Portland, “marching through the streets chanting the usual obscenities…blocking traffic, engaging in the casual lawlessness now associated with this city,” are not those of hardened revolutionaries and resistance fighters, but of perpetual adolescents staving off ennui.

They are not much of a threat. The police could quickly clear them out if the feckless city leadership gave them permission, and if the GOP really were fascists then the black-mask LARPers would have been long dead. Portland still harbors many well-armed Republicans, some of whom possess enough firepower to singlehandedly gun down all of Antifa. The danger of Antifa is not that they will do much damage themselves, but that they will normalize political violence for those who would be good at it.

Real political violence is a dreadful thing, and those who yearn for it are ignorant, depraved, or both. The bitterness of civil conflict and war is driven not only by cruelty, ideological fervor, and vengeance, but also by fear. People will do terrible things to avoid being ruled by those who hate them. If (God forbid) it came to us, the fools pretending at it would be among the first to hide, lest they be among the first to die. The Clash sang about the “freedom fighters” of the Spanish Civil War, but they were (at best) patsies fighting on behalf of communist murderers who were as vile as the fascists.


Many of the idealists became monsters themselves. Why some people want to playact at that is mostly a psychological question, although the answers are not obscure—people crave significance, purpose, and accomplishment, and pretending to be an anti-fascist resistance fighter offers a better simulacrum than...Read More HERE