via Fox News
Some 50 radical Antifa cells in a wider network of nearly 300 groups mobilized to ensure last weekend’s demonstrations in France devolved into chaos and mayhem, Fox News Digital has learned.
Self-described Antifa groups working with a sprawling network of communist, socialist, far-left and anti-Israel groups, mobilized on two fronts this weekend: an “anti-fascist village” against conservative leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the city of Orléans and nationwide protests called Acte II to replicate the previous week’s violent riots.
A Fox News Digital investigation has mapped 287 groups in France’s expanding protest ecosystem, including 50 explicitly Antifa organizations, 27 explicitly communist, socialist, Trotskyist or revolutionary-left organizations, 24 labor unions and an expanding coalition of far-left anti-Israel, migrant-rights, environmental, feminist, transgender and other activist organizations. The demonstrations, which claimed to be about youth education, included just 27 student and youth organizations.
CHAOS INC: Who’s who in the Red-Green Alliance
The coordination came amid a wider transnational campaign of mayhem organized by communist, socialist and leftist groups in Greece, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere.
Fox News Digital has compiled a running who’s who of organizations in what has been dubbed “Chaos Inc.” and will keep updating the directory.
The size of the mobilization represented a huge expansion from the original 54 organizations identified in the previous weekend’s riots. The number of Acte II actions had also increased to 649 planned protests in Paris, including at 21 train stations, three ports, two oil depots and one refinery.
Scores of pages of planning documents and social media posts analyzed by Fox News Digital reveal that agitators laid the groundwork for a coordinated campaign with money, logistics and a communications infrastructure behind their efforts. The fundraising, transportation, youth outreach, ready-made materials and centralized information hub reveal an organized mobilization operation in place days before protesters even reach the streets with expected hammer-and-sickle and Palestinian flags.
A French administrative court reportedly overturned a ban on street protests issued by Paris police, although the order was not made public and it was unclear if it would have applied to other cities which have imposed similar orders.
Already, organizers have begun planning a next-stage Acte III on Oct 31, a broader strike and blockade mobilization on Nov 5 and a Europe-wide action on Nov 20.
In France, the numbers include signatories to two streams: a Ciao Fachos, or “Good-bye Fascists,” coalition that descended on Orléans and the Acte II, or “Action 2,” campaign, led by a group called the Yellow Vests that organized the previous week’s mayhem. Organizations had signed onto a roster and list headed to Orléans.
“Macron must leave and make way for the people!” the Acte II organizers had declared, calling “Yellow vests, high school students, university students, workers” into “demonstrations, roundabouts and blockades, everywhere in France.”
Last September, after the murder of conservative leader Charlie Kirk by an alleged leftist gunman, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Soon after, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, targeting far-left groups. It said the “groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations.”
Despite the clear global presence of groups with self-described names of Antifa, former FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in 2020 that Antifa was “not a group or an organization” but rather “a movement or an ideology.”
In the U.S., while they will wave flags that say “ANTIFASCIST,” far-left activists don’t typically operate under one formal national organization called “Antifa,” leading to denials that any “Antifa” organization exists.
In Europe, it’s a different story. Activists openly organize under the Antifa name, “antifascist” banners and Antifa flags with emblems of their local chapters, and a Fox News Digital investigation has found a sprawling network mobilizing activists for another weekend of protests.
Last November, the State Department designated four European groups linked to Antifa — Antifa Ost in Germany; the International Revolutionary Front, or Informal Anarchist Federation, in Italy; and Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense in Greece — as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specifically Designated Global Terrorists, accusing them of organizing or carrying out bombings, shootings and other politically motivated attacks.
Worldwide, Antifa chapters have built their movement around a seemingly noble opposition to “fascism,” but critics argue that they deploy tactics of threats, intimidation, harassment, violence, destruction and even murder that make them coercive, authoritarian, dangerous and deadly. What’s more, parroting the propaganda language of Russia, China and the Islamic Republic of Iran, “fascism” has become a loaded catch-all phrase to describe Western democracies.
For example, late last year, Neville Roy Singham, an American-born communist tech tycoon living in China, took to the stage at the Golden Tulip Hotel in Shanghai for a “Global South” conference and critiqued the alleged “fascism” of the United States.
Fox News Digital reported exclusively that an internal State Department assessment warns that antifascist groups could participate in a “potentially more confrontational protest” this weekend that could “expose further security shortcomings and deepen political tensions.”
Now, the organizations themselves provide a look inside the infrastructure being assembled on the ground.
