“Kyle Shideler Oral Testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution– August 4, 2020 It is a great honor to testify today before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution. The federal government has a fundamental responsibility to protect the civil rights of all its citizens, and paramount among these are the rights of freedom of speech and assembly. I hope my testimony today will correct some fundamental misunderstandings regarding the nature of the movement known as Antifa, which seeks to deprive Americans of these rights. Antifa is an anarcho-communist movement, whose goal is to use physical violence and intimidation to terrorize American citizens into disengaging from the political process. While they do this under the cover of “anti-fascism” the reality is that Antifa define the entire American political system -regardless of party affiliation- as “fascist.” Antifa developed out of the communist urban guerilla and terrorist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s such as the Weather Underground and Germany’s Red Army Faction. As a result, it possesses operational experience developed over more than half a century of radical left-wing organizing and political violence. Law enforcement has largely failed to understand the nature of this threat. Seeking a rigidly hierarchical organization some analysts have concluded, against all evidence, that Antifa does not exist in any meaningful sense. The reality is that Antifa demonstrates an elaborate but non-hierarchical structure. The most basic structure of Antifa is the affinity group, described by the pro- Antifa website CrimethInc, as the “essential building block” of anarchist organization- A small cell of individuals, known to each other, who agree to come together to participate in “direct actions”- including sabotage, vandalism, and premediated assault. Affinity groups come together to form clusters, and larger clusters may organize actions using what are called,“spokescouncils.”