Unmasking Antifa: Inside America's Anarchy - Andy Ngo

Andy Ngo's book about Antifa was, in effect, promoted by the campaign to suppress it. He tells the host that six days of pressure to stop shops stocking the title was "partially successful": Portland's largest bookstore said at once that it would not put the book on its shelves — a shop that, as the host notes, devotes a week every year to censored and banned books.

Ngo's stated purpose is more modest than the fight around him: to set out, "in one place where people can understand", the ideology, the history and the organisational practice. He describes Antifa as "anarchists communists" who adopt the anti-fascist label while working to destabilise US jurisdictions, aiming at "a world without nation-states, without borders, without capitalism".

The definitional move is the hinge of the argument. In what Ngo calls a "re-making of words", the vocabulary of harm is reassigned: "violence is not actual violence. It's having the wrong idea". Holding the wrong politics becomes an attack on them, so a pre-emptive physical response becomes self-defence, and the fascist label, he says, is applied to anyone.