The Torch Network today is perhaps the most “organized” of antifa organizations. The group is a renamed successor to Anti-Racist Action that initially began in 1987 as a group of punk anti-fascists who, if this be the word, “organized” around opposition to punk skinheads in Minneapolis. They rebranded, according to Mathias, to appeal to the younger generation with a focus on digital communication. Among their favored tactics was to go dumpster-diving outside the homes of neo-Nazi skinheads, find their true names via the mail they threw out, and then put up “Meet Your Local Nazi” posters in their neighborhoods. The goal, according to their website, is to “disrupt fascist and far-right organizing and activity.” They do so without “rely[ing] on the cops or courts to do our work for us.” They don’t rule out going to court, but they have little faith in the system. “This doesn’t mean we never go to court,” says the website, “but the cops uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They attack us and everyone who resists oppression.” They rely only “on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.”
What anti-fascists do best, and most often, is dox. They infiltrate far-right chat groups and then publish the names and faces of allegedly respectable citizens who participate in fascist forums, demonstrations, and other actions.
What anti-fascists do best, and most often, is dox. They infiltrate far-right chat groups, both (quite riskily) in person and online and then publish the names and faces of allegedly respectable citizens who participate in fascist forums, demonstrations, and other actions. The point, as Mathias put it in a Guardian piece, is that “antifa’s doxing tactic leveraged existing societal taboos against explicit white supremacy or neo-Nazism to create a social cost for being a fascist. ‘Oh, you want to join a Nazi group? We will name and shame you. You will lose your job. You will lose your girlfriend. Your family will shun you.’” Mark Bray told me that a second “Unite the Right” rally had to be canceled after Charlottesville because “leaders of the far-right groups told their members to stay home because they’re going to get doxed and it’s going to screw your lives up.”
Of course, doxing potentially exposes its targets to violence. At the same time, it’s true that in its doxing campaigns, antifa goes to considerable lengths to protect the innocent. Mathias notes in his book, “When antifa publishes a photo of a fascist with their family, for example, they’ll often blur out the family members’ faces to not make them subject to harassment or other ramifications they might not deserve.” (Antifa will also, as a running joke, often blur out a dog’s face.) He finds their standards for accuracy exacting, noting that antifa-style organizations are “usually made up of working-class and middle-class people” who “typically don’t have a good First Amendment lawyer in their contacts, or the disposable income to pay for one.” The result is that they tend to apply “exacting editorial standards” to their doxing efforts. “Everything has to be right. If anti-fascists do get even a minor detail wrong, a correction and an apology are quickly appended to the top of the article.” All of this has the effect, he averred, “of making a bunch of anonymous anti-fascists, almost all working other jobs, into really good journalists, even if they are almost never recognized as such by the mainstream media.”