My recollection of the "mainstream awareness" of antifa is that around the time of Milo Yannapoulis it was viewed with mixed feelings on the left. A few expressed glee (types of friends who are openly 'radical' and they and hated both parties). Most didn't like the means to the end. Bit it could be complex, some schadenfreude mixed with pragmatic concern, etc.
Charlottesville is when the attitude changed and it became a badge of honor for even a moderate fiscal conservative with a social conscience.
My experiences from some while back (Occupy, very early BLM) was they were just always trouble and made up of an odd proportion of trust fund kids/middle-class suburban young adults.
Not a lot of folks struggling to stay clinging to the bottom rung of the ladder have resources for all that cosplay gear.
Both early on and as recently as some clips seen even a year or so ago. Antifa and BLM still get in each other's faces about tactics at times.
One side thinks the other is ungrateful for the help. The other side doesn't think coming to burn down a neighborhood they don't live in is very "helpful."
A black woman chastised two young white girls chicken scrawling "BLM" on a shop window. They object "but we're allies!"
All links to Wikipedia:
Based on my (European) experience, I would say that you are talking about a certain
segment of Antifa, or maybe not even Antifa but a kind of Antifa hangarounds who are only there to take advantage of a crowd they can hide in, which may make it difficult to distinguish them from right-wing militia or looters pretending to be Antifa. (Even more so if they are dressed up for the part.) We would call them the 'autonomous' in
Danish or
German.
The German article links to this article in English,
Autonomism, but I don't think it's quite right. It defines them like this:
"Autonomism, also known as autonomist Marxism, is an anti-capitalist left-wing political and social movement and theory."
However, I don't think they usually have much (or any) theory. Their ... let's call it
sentiment ... is more akin to the
Spontis, who were downright enemies of theory:
"Some of Sponti sayings, such as "Wissen ist Macht, nichts wissen, macht auch nichts" ("Knowledge is Power, (but) knowing nothing does not matter anyway") survived for many years after Sponti times, sometimes acquiring different meanings." My translation would be:
"Knowledge is power, but knowing nothing is perfectly fine." (There's a pun in there in German that is lost in translation.)
The Spontis are all about "
Frust abbauen", reducing Frustration by living it out, i.e. smashing something. If it accomplished anything other than that isn't important.
I hadn't heard about chicken scrawling, but I'm happy to learn that no chicken was harmed in the process.
