How the world has fought back against the violent far-right and started winning

Over the course of the current decade, every passing year seemed to indicate a far right movement which was growing in numbers, cultural reach, political influence, and in its preparedness for violence.

But 2018 was the year in which a broad, people-powered movement – or more accurately a movement of movements – showed how effectively they could fight back.

Across the English-speaking world politicians sat on their hands or offered “both sides” narratives of far right violence. Law enforcement either dragged their feet or turned their weapons on the right’s opposition.

But activists routed around these blockages and found ways to shut down the far right – whether or not they identified as antifascists.

Over 2018 activists used and refined a range of tactics to respond to far right individuals and groups trying to build their presence online, on campuses, in the halls of power, and in the streets.

While some chose to physically oppose fascist street marches, overall the wide scope of the activist response showed that it is impossible to reduce antifascism to the single tactic of “black bloc” counterprotest. Entirely nonviolent activism has also played a role in dismantling the far right.

One important method was what we might term “counter surveillance” – a bottom-up effort to use digital tools and online networks to publicize the activities of the far right, and to hold to account those authorities whose response has ranged between inadequate to outright collusion.

By “doxxing” people who participated in online organizing or offline street action, antifascists aimed to defuse the danger that believers in violent ideologies present, and to extract a social or economic cost for participation in far right movements.

Mark Bray, a historian and the author of Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, described doxxing as the technique from which “some of the greatest success perhaps in recent anti-fascist organizing have come from”.

This year, antifascists have used photographs of street events like Unite the Right in Charlottesville, revelations from compromised chat servers, and the kinds of extensive trails that all of us leave online in order to connect far right violence with the real names of the people who perpetrate it.

Doxxing campaigns – aimed at Proud Boys, neonazis, and individuals who attended events like Charlottesville – have fed into reporting on these movements, and even, eventually, into prosecutions.

The fate of the Southern Californian group RAM is instructive here. The group’s activities and identities were first highlighted by a Californian antifascist group. They then became the focus of reporting by ProPublica and PBS. Following this, authorities finally moved against the group for its activities in Charlottesville.

Emily Gorcenski is a Charlottesville survivor, antifascist activist, and data scientist. She has participated extensively in doxxing far right figures – including some who have previously threatened and attacked her – and has recently launched a website which tracks the many court cases which have commenced involving far right defendants.

Gorcenski says that her involvement in this activity began after a string of white supremacist demonstrations in her former city, culminating in Unite the Right.

“Charlottesville was definitely the catalyst for me.”

She says doxxing is both about community safety and accountability. So while “you can’t do antifascist organising if you don’t know they’re there”, exposing far right organisers is “also about accountability and justice”.

She also says that it is a way of disrupting the veneer of respectability that some far right figures like Richard Spencer have been trying to lend the movement.

“Attaching their names to the movement attaches their names to the violence and terrorism that movement creates”, Gorcenski says.

“They really care about appearing to be legitimate and morally good. Attaching their name to this movement which has killed at least 24 people in two years allows the public to make their own decision about that.”

A second strand of activism – which has taken myriad forms – is that which seeks to deny speaking platforms to the far right. Some no -platforming has gone through conventional channels, and has been carried out by people who do not even identify as antifascist.

Nyadol Nyuon, a lawyer in Melbourne, led a petition campaign earlier this year aimed at convincing Australia’s immigration minister to deny Gavin McInnes a visa for a planned speaking tour.

She used website change.org to amplify the campaign’s reach. But she delivered it the old fashioned way – in person – with the support of Labor and Greens parliamentarians, who had also opposed McInnes’s visit.

For Nyuon, who says that she does not identify as an antifascist, opposing McInnes’s visit was about pushing back against a rising climate of danger in Australia for refugees and people of color like her.

“I have never felt more unsafe in Australia than this year. I have felt unsafe because of the things I have experienced after speaking up”, she says.

McInnes’s planned visit, which came at the end of a string of visits by similar figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Lauren Southern, “was a clear case of extending this idea of free speech in a way that was dangerous,” Nyuon says.

“He is someone who advocates violence and calls for violence, and has a group who has acted on that,” she adds.

Especially concerning for Nyuon was that the visit came amid a politically driven scare campaign around so-called “African gangs” in Melbourne.

“During this moral panic around African gangs, where federal ministers made running commentary, no one in government felt the need to mention Gavin McInnes’s gang. I think it is about minimizing white male violence. Violence by white men isn’t taken seriously,” she says.

No-platforming has also happened on social, and even broadcast media.

In the last year alone, major platforms have acted to limit the reach of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who had previously been using the social media services to bring more eyeballs to his mixture of toxic myth making and snake oil sprucing.

McInnes and the Proud Boys were also banned from almost every major social media platform following their involvement in several violent incidents in American cities.

There are indications that online no-platforming works. After Milo Yiannopoulos was deplatformed on Twitter, he was made persona non grata but the very conservative movement he had been courting. Now he’s broke.

In all of these cases, social media companies responded only after sustained pressure from users.

It would be seriously premature to claim any lasting victory over the far right. The movement is still very active, more extremist groups are being uncovered, and the far right continues to be associated with violence around the world. But a broad, leaderless, international movement has shown that it is possible for everyone to play a part in fighting back.