A former Antifa member has shared how the organization grew so brutal, and who has been complicit in fostering its violent activities in recent years.
Insider Gabriel Nadales wrote in a recent opinion article in the midst of the backlash against the brutal attack on Quillette reporter Andy Ngo who was violently assaulted by multiple members of Antifa while he was reporting on a demonstration last weekend in Portland, Oregon.
“But I’m not surprised by this horrific behavior—I was once behind the mask,” Nadales wrote in the opinion piece for Fox News.
Nadales wrote about how he first joined Antifa in 2010, while still a high school student. He said he participated in several demonstrations with the group. He admitted to destroying property, shouting curse words, but never hurting anyone.
He then remarked about how the Antifa of today has grown much more violent.
“While I walked away from the movement over seven years ago, I have been following its growth and today’s Antifa members are far more brutal, thuggish and bold than anything I experienced,” he wrote.
According to the website for the Leadership Institute, a conservative organization active on college campuses, Nadales is now its Pacific Regional Coordinator. The website also says that Nadales was at the White House when President Trump signed an executive order to protect free speech on college campuses.
In the Fox News piece, Nadales described how Antifa has been “allowed to thrive” in America’s educational institutions, with some staff actively encouraging their students to embrace the group’s philosophies.
“The seeds of this violence have been planted and are encouraged by leftist professors in the classroom. Over the last few years, there has been a growing trend of extremist professors advocating for violence and intimidation to force leftist ideology onto society,” Nadales wrote.
He mentioned that there have been academics trying to legitimize Antifa by seeking to justify the group’s use of violence, such as Dartmouth visiting scholar Mark Bray who wrote “Anti-Fa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.”
Nadales also pointed out Assistant Professor Stanislav Vysotsky at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater who wrote an opinion piece titled “On America’s Streets, Antifa’s Militant Anti-fascism Isn’t Terrorism—It’s Self-defense.”
Nadales also mentions professors at Purdue University and Stanford University who started a “Campus Antifascist Network” to organize people in the name of “fighting fascism.”
He added that even school administrators have been complicit and that police have been told to let the violence play out.
“Antifa has been encouraged and allowed to thrive on our college and university campuses. Police are often forced to work with their hands behind their backs, as we saw from the footage of Ngo’s attack, and administrators have failed to hold those who commit acts of violence and intimidation accountable.”
He went on to say that the Antifa platform is being weaponized by the left to target conservative voices and the democratic process—especially leading into the 2020 presidential election.
“The reality is, Antifa violence is nothing more than an attempt to intimidate conservatives from organizing political groups and being part of the political process. Its actions are a form of voter intimidation.”
Nadales was also interviewed on Fox & Friends where he described what Antifa is and talked about his experiences in the group.
“But ultimately, it’s just a gang,” he told Fox & Friends.
He said that a lot of the Antifa members who attacked Andy Ngo in a mob were probably just following the crowd of fellow Antifa members and didn’t necessarily know who Ngo was.
Nadales also revealed why he eventually left Antifa and became a conservative.
“Any time I talked to them and I raised an objection about the things that we were doing, they told me to ‘shut up or get out.’ Meanwhile, when I was talking to conservatives, they were very understanding. And even though we disagreed at the time, they were always willing to just engage me in conversation.
“That’s something that Antifa and the Left seriously lacks,” he said.
Fox & Friends also addressed rumors that Antifa was planning to attend a free speech rally in Washington D.C. this weekend for the purpose of carrying out acid attacks.
