When Neo-Nazis and Antifascists Clash, This Professor Wants to Be in the Thick of It

For Billie Murray, an associate professor of communication at Villanova University, getting close to her research subjects occasionally requires choking through tear gas or dodging flash grenades. As a scholar who studies community responses to hate speech, she gravitates toward incendiary confrontations.

If there’s a battle brewing between neo-Nazis and masked antifascists, Murray tries to be in the thick of it, notebook in hand.

The blockades, rioting, and rock throwing she occasionally encounters are all fodder for a book she’s working on: Allied Tactics: Public Responses to Hate Speech, scheduled for release in 2020 by the University of California Press.

Murray also brings lessons gleaned from her fieldwork into the classroom. Among her observations: Answering hate speech with more speech is more problematic than it sounds, and lighting trash on fire or mocking a neo-Nazi with humor can both be justified as forms of resistance.

Her research coincides with alarms about the rise in anti-Semitic, racist, and other hate incidents on college campuses.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found that incidents of white-supremacist propaganda at American colleges jumped 77 percent in 2017-18.

Meanwhile, professional provocateurs who thrive on controversy have, in recent years, tested colleges’ commitment to free speech. Except in extreme cases, campuses have allowed speakers who espouse racist or misogynist views to speak, shelling out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover security and sometimes staging diversionary side shows.

In that environment, antifa, a loosely affiliated movement of left-wing activists bound by a fierce antipathy for white supremacists and others they deem fascist, is a ripe topic for research. A Dartmouth professor’s “antifascist handbook” last year garnered widespread media attention, as well as criticism from those who felt he was defending a radical group’s violent tactics.

At Villanova, a Roman Catholic institution in a Philadelphia suburb with a strong commitment to social justice, Murray says she hasn’t received criticism, on campus or off, for her connection to the antifa movement.

“I am antifa as a set of beliefs and values about the world,” says Murray, who holds a joint appointment in the university’s Center for Peace and Justice Education. “As an activist, I support antiracist action and antifascist organizing, but I draw the line at engaging in violence.” She understands, though, why antifa groups engage in what she calls symbolic violence.

“The way they understand what they do is that lighting a trash can on fire or smashing a Starbucks window encourages a group like the Proud Boys to treat antifa as the enemy rather than going down the street and beating up a Muslim or Jewish person,” she says. The Proud Boys, an all-male organization of self-described “Western chauvinists,” dispute the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of them as a hate group.

‘I Don’t Need to Be in Their Way’

Critics accuse antifa protesters of escalating violence and inflaming tensions when their tactics turn destructive. At the University of California at Berkeley last year, dozens of protesters smashed windows and started fires in an effort to stop Milo Yiannopoulos, a onetime Breitbart editor who was on a campus tour, from speaking inside the student union.

Yiannopoulos, who frequently mocked feminists and transgender people, drew particular ire at Berkeley, where he reportedly threatened to publicly identify undocumented students. Berkeley officials blamed the mayhem on black-clad outsiders known as a black-bloc group. The lines between antifa, black-bloc, and anarchist identities are often blurred.

Although Murray sympathizes with the goals of antifa, she says she does not dress in black, destroy property, or punch Nazis, a reference to a blow to the face that a protester landed on Richard B. Spencer, a white-nationalist leader, during Inauguration Day protests in 2017. “I stand back and observe that,” she says. “I don’t need to be in their way.”

Murray, who got her start in social-justice work as a victim advocate at a rape-crisis center, and who has demonstrated against war, torture, corporate greed, and discrimination against gay people, has long been frustrated by the constraints placed on protesters.

While working on her dissertation, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she saw protesters relegated to tiny free-speech zones, often far from the people they were trying to influence. Those “cages,” as she calls them, prevented protesters from moving freely and disrupting events. And disruption, she says, is the whole point of a protest.

One prominent example she cites: the civil-rights activists who refused to leave after being denied service at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960.

She’d like to see colleges turn away more speakers whose messages incite violence against marginalized people. But she understands the tensions campuses face in responding to hateful rhetoric that has escalated in the current political climate.

“The problem with allowing speakers to espouse racist or misogynist views is that you don’t want to be seen as stifling those ideas, but at the same time, it’s providing a platform that is in some ways seen as an endorsement of those views,” she says. The targets of hate speech may be afraid to take on people who are calling for their genocide, she says, so free-speech protections can end up stifling their own rights.

“Our legal institutions put the onus on communities to answer hate speech with more speech,” Murray adds, citing the oft-quoted maxim for dealing with offensive viewpoints.

What she wants to know, as an “activist scholar” who’s personally invested in the movements she studies, is: “What does more speech look like? What does that mean in practice?”

‘Invading Hordes’

She usually learns about protests and counterprotests by following various activist groups on social media. She arrives at a protest scene early, staying as close as possible to the police lines and the potential flashpoints.

As an observer and a participant in rallies, she is careful not to photograph anyone or use people’s names in her research notes without their permission.

“Because I’m white, I feel like I’m safer than any person of color in that space,” she adds.

Once, when a protester she assumed was with a far-right group began taking photos of antifa activists, she blocked the man’s view with her body and tried to explain to him why exposing the protester online could endanger him.

And another time, when a war veteran and a leftist protester were engaged in a heated argument and appeared to be about to come to blows, she stepped in to broker a dialogue about what they had in common — the protester’s brother was serving in the military, she said.

Conversations that would be appropriate in this instance would be unrealistic, she tells her students, if the sparring parties were, say, a Proud Boy and an anarchist.

In her class on theories of rhetoric, she points out how far-right activists called their recent gathering in Philadelphia a “We the People” rally that would be pro-police and pro-law and order.

“They’re not going to say, ‘Hey, we’re having a racist, fascist rally.’ You have to look at the undertones of their coded language,” Murray says. “Rhetoric takes complicated issues and simplifies it. I tell students our job as educated people is to recomplicate the issues. How does using terms like ‘invading hordes’ instead of ‘asylum seekers’ shape our views?”

The counterdemonstration at the “We the People” rally took on a festive air when activists sang, danced, and poked fun at a small band of flag-waving, MAGA-hat-wearing demonstrators.

“There are lots of tactics available for people who aren’t comfortable with confrontive, in-your-face approaches,” says Murray. “It may not rid us of all the harms of hate speech, but we’re not going to sit at home and just accept it.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.