Antifa

Let me make it perfectly clear; I in no way support or condone violence no matter what the ideology behind it is. That being said, I feel I should go into depth on what I think of the loosely organized group known as "Antifa". What do I think of them? I think that, while I'm sure many of them have the best intentions and that their hearts are in the right place, the ideology loosely shared among the organization doesn't justify some of their actions. I think that a big reason that they have been associated with violence is that there is a significant enough fringe of people in the movement that are just in it for opportunistic reasons which involve creating violence and chaos. While I agree wholeheartedly that fascism is fundamentally wrong and should be combatted anywhere it shows its ugly head, I believe that the spreading of knowledge, awareness, and enlightenment is the best means of keeping such toxic ideologies at bay. Fascism has no place in America or anywhere in the civilized world, plain and simple. Another thing worth mentioning is that "news" organizations like FOX News and other conservative outlets, have obviously gone well out of their way to cover the few instances where Antifa has gotten violent. After doing some research of my own, I've found that, while yes the organization has had incidences where people have caused chaos, these incidences are not indicative of the movement as a whole, no matter how much conservative outlets try to paint that as being the case. In my opinion, fascism is like an infection in the body of western civilization and groups such as Antifa see themselves somewhat like white blood cells fighting said infection. Another thing worth mentioning is that, after doing a little bit of research, you'll realize that Antifa isn't a completely uniform group. Rather, it is a patchwork of a variety of groups holding varying ideologies. In it, you have your standard left leaning individuals, but you also have various fringe groups such as socialists, anarchists, communists, etc. So it's very hard to paint them all with one brush, and attempting to do so would be deliberately misinformative and just down right ethically irresponsible. Again, while I don't agree with all of the methods that some of them employ, I one hundred percent agree with the notion that fascism has no place in our society and should be fought with knowledge wherever it rears its ugly head.