> how many bigger groups of militarized anti-fascist groups exists today in the US?
They tend to run largely independent scenes from city to city. You'll usually have anywhere from one to a dozen people acting as the core organizers of a given group. The groups range in size from around a dozen people to upwards of four hundred, depending on the city. Some cities might also have multiple groups active at a given time. I don't know what the scenes look like now but around 2018 I can remember at least two independent groups operating out of Portland, for example. These groups are usually no more than a phone tree of people they can mobilize for protests. Organizers may also be in contact with scenes from other cities; it's not uncommon for demonstrators to be bussed in to a protest from another city or state. It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters.
> It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters.
Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, they don't exist" :)
Would make sense if our friends in the US would also arm themselves, similar to militias on the right, but I wonder why that isn't the case? Even the non-extremists seems to have (to me) extremist opinions about guns, so I guess I'm kind of surprised only the far-right side got militarized compared to the left. I guess it gets a lot easier when you have more friends in the right (no pun intended) places.
> Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, it doesn't exist" :)
It's not that simple. Leftists will discount what these groups did in 2020 but you're talking about a few dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage. These groups are not "militias" in the way anyone would understand the term (namely, as an organized group training with firearms), but they are capable of terrorism at a tremendous scale. The difference is that their shootings tend to be spur of the moment (I can think of only one or two notable exceptions in the last ten years), whereas most right wing terrorism consists of spree killings conducted by a single killer.
> Even the non-extremists seems to have (to me) extremist opinions about guns, so I guess I'm kind of surprised only the far-right side got militarized compared to the left.
Gun culture in America is highly bifurcated. Urban whites in the areas that Antifa is most prevalent rarely own firearms. This has been changing as some of them are authentically worried that Trump is coming to put them in death camps, but most of the people involved in these groups are (to be frank) neurotic and lack both the desire and the temperament to operate firearms, so the trend doesn't really seem to have caught on. Historically, American leftists had no such aversion to firearms and were strongly in favor of the second amendment. These days, political tribalism in America is so extreme that you end up with really weird scenarios like people who are ostensibly anarchists making fun of libertarians for owning guns.
I know you seemingly don't want it to appear that simple, but it really is. Original question was regarding organized and armed anti-fascist/far-left movements and if there was any investigation into those. Since we aren't organized, hierarchical (by design) nor armed/militarized, like the far-right, investigations into those are harder and AFAIK, haven't happened as of today.
If you have some concrete evidence for those investigations existing and being published on the open internet, feel free to link those.
Otherwise this conversation kind of lost track of it's original topic, as you're somehow dragging into "urban white rarely owning firearms" which might be true or not, but not sure how it's related to the topic at hand. Your language is also starting to become emotional and colorful enough for me (and others) to recognize that we're spilling into sharing anecdotal and personal experiences/beliefs, rather than talking hard concrete data and events.
> I know you seemingly don't want it to appear that simple, but it really is. Original question was regarding organized and armed anti-fascist/far-left movements and if there was any investigation into those.
And my reply was that the issue is not as simple as you are making it out to be. For example, since you have referred to these groups as "we," I could infer that you endorse the acts of terrorism linked to these groups. You would then probably say: "Wait, my it's not that simple, my position is more nuanced than that, despite agreeing with these people in principle I don't support all of their methods." If I replied: "I know you seemingly don't want it to appear to be that simple, but it really is. You support terrorism," you would rightly judge that I was being disingenuous.
> If you have some concrete evidence for those investigations existing and being published on the open internet, feel free to link those.
It's unlikely that there have been any such investigations since (like I said in my original post) these groups do not generally operate as militias. This does not indicate that these groups are not dangerous. You are trying to evade that issue by restricting the discussion to your original claim that "from the outside it seems like mostly people on the right are the ones running the militias over there" - which I never contested. When I said "It's not that simple," I was arguing that the idea that militias are an exclusively right-wing phenomenon (which is nearly true) would lead one to the erroneous conclusion that politically-motivated violence is also an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. This isn't the case; to which end:
1) On May 28, 2020, Oscar Lee Stewart Jr. is trapped and burns to death in a pawn shop set on fire in Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots. This was one of approximately two hundred such fires set during the course of these riots.
2) On May 29, 2020, Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis (both lawyers) used a molotov cocktail to set fire to a police car in New York. [0]
3) On June 29, 2020, 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. was shot to death by a member of Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) security. 14-year-old Robert West was left in critical condition. The boys had allegedly carjacked an SUV somewhere outside of the zone and had driven it into the area in an attempt to avoid attracting the attention of law enforcement. [1] Some have speculated that Mays was shot by a member of the John Brown Gun Club (an antifascist armed leftist group) [2], but so far as I know, his killer has never been arrested, nor identified.
4) On July 28, 2020, Gabriel Agard-Berryhill set fire to the Mark O. Hatfield courthouse in Portland, Oregon using "an incendiary device." [3]
5) On December 17, 2021, Ellen Brennan Reiche was convicted of placing shunts on railroad tracks in Washington state "in protest of a natural gas pipeline through Indigenous land in British Columbia." [4]
As I was reading about Antonio Mays again, I also came across a Kansas-area group with ties to the John Brown Gun Club, which I had not been aware of: "Redneck Revolt" [5]. Of particular interest from its core principles: "We believe in the right of militant resistance. We believe in the need for revolution."
> Your language is also starting to become emotional and colorful enough for me (and others) to recognize that we're spilling into sharing anecdotal and personal experiences/beliefs, rather than talking hard concrete data and events.
If you don't want people to respond this way to you, you shouldn't ask disingenuous questions and respond to good faith comments with adolescent tripe like: Quite a long answer overall that boils down to "No, it doesn't exist" :). This kind of low-effort quipping isn't acceptable here.
They tend to run largely independent scenes from city to city. You'll usually have anywhere from one to a dozen people acting as the core organizers of a given group. The groups range in size from around a dozen people to upwards of four hundred, depending on the city. Some cities might also have multiple groups active at a given time. I don't know what the scenes look like now but around 2018 I can remember at least two independent groups operating out of Portland, for example. These groups are usually no more than a phone tree of people they can mobilize for protests. Organizers may also be in contact with scenes from other cities; it's not uncommon for demonstrators to be bussed in to a protest from another city or state. It's quite rare for these groups to be truly "militarized." They often form violent mobs, but they rarely have any hierarchical structure beyond "leadership" (the organizers) and they don't generally make use of firearms. This has been changing in recent years; there have been a number of high-profile shootings involving Antifa-affiliated shooters.