Q: What is antifascism?

A: There are lots of definitions and we argue with none. (Except bad-faith ones whose purpose is to harm the movement.) Here’s the definition we use at Teatime:

Antifascism is the opposition of fascism.

Q: Okay then what’s fascism?

A: We are not political historians! You might have a better definition than we do. For our purposes– which are more action than theory– we choose the historian Robert Paxton’s, quoted in Joshua Clover’s introduction to Mark Bray’s Antifa:

“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Q: That sounds bad.

A: We think so.

Q: What does this look like, day-to-day?

A: Mostly, where we live, it looks like white supremacy, misogyny, and anti-queer oppression. That doesn’t necessarily mean saying the n-word or the f-slur, although it can. What you’re more likely to hear (in public!) is talk about tradition, strength, and people taking care of their own group. Their private chats are much dirtier and more violent.

There’s also often a lot of talk about protecting children, who are imagined as currently pure but potentially corrupted or harmed by exposure to non-fascist ideas.

Q: Is that really what they believe?

A: It’s hard to say. A lot of these people are cynical power-grabbers who’ve found a way to manipulate each other. For example: if you tell an angry and confused young white man who isn’t sure how to live in his identity that the reason he feels this way is immigrants are taking his resources, or women have stepped into his role, you may be able to control where he channels his energy. In this situation the young convert may be a true believer; the one leading him around by the hate often is not.

Likewise, some of the people holding up signs about protecting children from gender-affirming care might genuinely believe children are receiving gender reassignment surgery left and right. (They aren’t!) Most of them just think queer people are deviant and impure, and framing it around protecting children is politically convenient.

The people we’re most concerned about are doing more than carrying signs. If you want to dive deep, you could start researching white supremacist symbolism, looking for tattoos, watching for code phrases. But diving deep will probably ruin your day, and you don’t have to dive deep to know that fascist ideology is poison.

To truly retreat into straight-white-patriarchal-culture-only would be to live in a world so intellectually and artistically impoverished that we almost feel sorry for anyone who chooses it. Not many do. There are a whole lot of racists listening to good hip-hop by Black artists. And honestly, we have more fun things to do than try to sort through their self-contradictory thinking. Dentist appointments, for example.

At the end of the day, we don’t care that much who’s a true believer and who is full of shit. We care about their actions.

Q: How do you oppose fascism?

A: There are an infinite number of ways to be antifascist. Each of us works where we find ourselves, with the skills we have.

This page is dedicated to spilling the tea about fascists in our communities. Our purpose, always, is to inform the people.