What is this "Antifa" group?

If you, like me, were surprised that such a groups exists, I've done a little digging, and found some interesting points.

• Many postings and news reports on them use similar language.
• Near as I can tell, the language originates with an article in the Atlantic by Peter Beinart. (The Rise of the Violent Left)
• Peter Beinart is a liberal writer, so he isn't making up stuff to smear liberals with.
• Although a pedigree going back to the 1920s is described, I haven't found any article about "Antifa" dated prior to January 2017.
• Included in this historical pedigree is the "leftist punks" of the late 1980s.

This last caught my eye, since in the late 1980s I was something of a leftist punk. I didn't follow punk bands on tour or anything, but my favorite bands included X, the Replacements, and Scruffy the Cat, and I was always on a search for a single I heard once (this was before Google), I believe by Flipper, that was manufactured with a deliberate skip, so it would end in an infinite repetition of "--you wouldn't understand anyway." If there had been a leftist political action group active at that time, I would think I would have known about it.

So I asked my 50ish friends, from various parts of the country. Had they heard of it? No. Now, none of them were leftist punks from Portland, which city occupies most of Beinart's history. It's possible there was such a movement in Portland, although in the later 90s I became enamored of the riot grrl punk bands, especially Sleater-Kinney, and Kathleen Hannah. They were in Portland in the early 1990s, and they were a part of the radical fringe. But they didn't lead me to "Antifa", either.

In about 1989 or 1990, I was studying with liberation theologian Jane Cary Peck, who was active in Central American justice. Leftist political action was what she did. When I had to write a paper, I proposed the topic of liberation in the United States. She said that, unfortunately, there was no radical activist movement in the United States--unless maybe I wanted to do Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. If there had been an antifascist movement in America, she would have known about it.

Then I noticed Beinart mention a group called the SHARPs, which stands for SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice. Ah hah! I cried. A group I have prior knowledge of. The only problem was, to quote a New Yorker article from the time, their "real political inspiration was methamphetamine." The SHARPs were a street gang, and they fought Nazis because the Nazis were the other street gang. If the Bloods or the Crips had tried to move into town, the SHARPs would have fought them, too. Hell, the SHARPs might have made a temporary alliance with the Nazis.

Conclusion: I don't buy the "historical roots" story. I think actual, political anti-fascist action groups are a very new development in the United States, sharing some past with the Occupy movement of previous years. I don't believe it is an organization. I don't believe it is an actual entity, at least not yet. I think it's a name. I think diverse small groups around the country may have adopted the name in the past few months. I think the name is being "reverse-engineered" onto grassroots action going back to Trump's Inauguration. This reverse engineering makes the movement look bigger than it is, and sweeps up non-violent direct actions, tainting them with the violence of Charlottesville.

I don't believe Peter Beinart is being deliberately misleading. He's trying to deliver an important message: a violent response to Trump supporters is hurting our cause. But I think he's guilty of "adjusting history slightly" to align with his message. And to some degree, he is inflating the role of a fringe group that he actually wants to diminish.