Inside the new breed of extreme activists

Scram-tifa?

The far-left radical movement known as Antifa has been getting its own taste of cancel culture.

Just look at what happened on Aug. 19 in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. Masked, fist-clenched agitators belonging to the anarchist collective turned up to sow chaos — but locals banded together to confront the troublemakers, telling them to get lost.

It was the 34th anniversary of the Crown Heights race riots and, instead of summoning a revival of 2020’s racial unrest, the Antifas slinked away as a crowd encircling them chanted, “F–k Antifa!”

Experts who track domestic terrorism and extremist movements aren’t surprised: Once the face of a grassroots leftwing insurgency, Antifa has lost its spark.

But experts warn that could be a dangerous thing — as the vacuum has given way to even more fringe and violent offshoots that are coalescing in the Marxist ether. And we’re only beginning to see the deadly fallout.

Last month, Benjamin Song, a member of the Antifa militant groups Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club and the Socialist Rifle Association, led a group of 10 radicals — eight of whom were found living in a reportedly squalid transgender commune — in an armed ambush at an ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas. The shooting left one officer injured.

In 2020, Song was just a run-of-mill, black-clad Antifa street brawler, arrested at a riot in Austin that year. He’d expressed “anti-fascist” and “anti-capitalist” beliefs.

Song then formed his own group, focused on “trans and queer identity issues,” and used an Arlington, Texas, martial arts studio, where his mother worked, as a base for training lefty militants how to fire guns.

 An even more gruesome story unfolded with the February arrest of Jack “Ziz” Lasota, head of a murderous transgender cult accused of a multi-state killing spree that took six lives. The so-called Zizians espoused an ideology of anarchism and extreme veganism, seeking to slaughter figures of “petty authority,” cops say.

“It’s a seditionist movement, where they are all in one box and they all believe a civil war, instability and burning the country down will bring in this greater era of prosperity that they think they’re going to implement,” Ryan Mauro, an extremist group investigator for the nonprofit Capital Research, told the Post.

“It’s more than just a consequence of general radicalism increasing on all sides. It’s part of an actual plan and a strategy. When you look at their internal communications, they describe themselves as guerrillas and insurgents by their own declaration,” he added of this new class of extremist cells.  

Antifa was never a structured organization but more of a catch-all movement for youthful anti-capitalist angst. That broad ideology exploded in popularity during Covid lockdowns and the social-justice riots of 2020 — attracting plenty of bored people under the banner of freedom fighting.  But from the ashes, as many fly-by-night activists have returned to their normal lives, truly dangerous figures are emerging.

It usually goes like this: Stragglers and lost souls latch on to a charismatic elder in the movement—someone with nothing else going on in life but the communist hustle — and new factions are forged under the general “anti-fascist” umbrella, said Gabriel Nadales, a 31-year-old former Antifa member.

The have names like Smash Racism, Redneck Revolt and Refuse Fascism. (It should be noted that those particular groups are not accused of murder or fatal violence.)

“You don’t really have to worry about your average high school or college kid who [joins a BLM march]. You have to look at the people who’ve been around five, 10, 15 years,” Nadales, who now works for a pro-America nonprofit foundation, told The Post. “Those people are dangerous. They know how to push the boundaries without getting caught.”

Antifa expert Mauro concurs: These elders, usually operating under anonymous online accounts or with the protection of well-funded nonprofits, know how to plant the seeds for vulnerable members to commit violent acts — without giving explicit, traceable instructions.

Lately, the most extreme sects seem to have a large number of transgender members. Nadales believes that is by design.

“One thing about counterrevolutionary movements is that they will look for people who they believe are rejected by society and they will embrace them,” he told the Post. “It’s not necessarily the fact they are transgender — rather ,they see the transgender movement as a revolutionary group, so it’s the new vehicle to attack ‘the system.’”

The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel, and the ensuing Gaza War, landed in the laps of America’s disparate network of Marxist revolutionaries — who follow news cycles with hawklike interest — just when they were feeling the most attention-starved.   

The idea that they are all dyed-in-the-wool, anti-Zionist/pro-Palestine protesters calling for global intifada is only opportunistic marketing, experts said. America is the only real target.

“They were all looking for that inflection point. You had all these extremists building ties with each other and, particularly since the riots in 2020, they were looking for the next big thing in order to show their power,” said Mauro, who monitors left-wing radical groups on platforms like Telegram, Discord and BlueSky.

Show of power is a primary tool of recruitment, according to Mauro. Blocking traffic and smashing up Wendy’s got old. The natural course is escalation to increasingly shocking, headline-stealing acts of violence and even murder.

In February 2024, Aaron Bushnell, 25, horrified a nation when he committed suicide outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, setting himself on fire while shouting “Free Palestine!”

He was a member of Democratic Socialists of America as well as extremist cells including the Burning River Anarchist Collective — and his heralding as a martyr by sister groups across the Marxosphere seemed to encourage an escalation in bloodshed.

Even mainstream lefty figures like academic Cornel West praised the self-immolator’s “extraordinary courage and commitment” and said he “died for truth and justice.” And many activists claimed, posthumously, that Bushnell was trans — as if to add another jewel to his crown.

A year later, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez allegedly assassinated two young Israeli embassy staffers in DC, also shouting “Free Palestine!” over the fallen bodies of his victims.

Rodriguez, who has been charged with first-degree murder and hate crime, was reportedly associated with Antifa satellite org the Party for Socialism and Liberation. After the shooting, the group said in a statement: “We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting. Elias Rodriguez is not a member of the PSL.”

Following the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Penn., by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who apparently had no ties to the PSL, the group released a rambling statement declaring, “In periods of major upheaval domestically and internationally, the tendency to resolve struggles within the ruling class using violence grows stronger.”

“It was very clear from what they were publishing: the overall objective here doesn’t stop with Israel,” Mauro said of groups he monitors.

While Middle East headlines come and go, the mythology of racism in America remains the Leninist Leviathan’s meat-and-potatoes.

“Months ago, they said they needed a strategy for beyond when the Middle East is out of the headlines, because it’s not really about Israel and Gaza — that’s what they said in some of these memos: That we need to shift to an anti-police movement that fights for racial rights. That has staying power,” Mauro said, referring to content shared through social networks.

Mauro, who advises law-enforcement agencies on domestic terrorism, said they’re often quite strapped, and even overwhelmed, to handle increasing violence from fringe and deranged Antifa spinoffs. 

“They really can only go after the most top-tier cases — and that’s just not enough, because you have so many bad actors capable of creating mayhem,” he explained.

“Anyone in law enforcement will tell you how it is basically a miracle that we’re not having attacks almost every day, because you have so many people out there that want to do it.”