In this sequel to his 2016 book Fascism: Career of a Concept, Paul Gottfried turns his attention to antifascist critics and movements from the years immediately after the Great War up to the present day. The reader will learn that the contemporary treatment of fascism by self-described antifascists like Antifa is very different from how Marxist and liberal critics responded to the ideology and its adherents in the first half of the 20th century. Today the fear of fascism is used as a political weapon by the post-Marxist left to bully their politically disadvantaged critics. It is a form of indoctrination that serves to reinforce official orthodoxy. “Fascism became,” writes Gottfried, “the favored term of political scolds and those who sought to trample on the historical liberties of those who offended them.”
To accomplish this political purpose, fascism is defined broadly to include those who have no ideological connection to its original historical meaning. No longer “firmly anchored in time and space,” fascism has become “a ubiquitous, continuing danger to democratic societies” and a term “wielded by the powerful…in such a way as to silence pesky dissenters.”
Rerad the rest at American Conservative: Antifa and its Origins