This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

There is still so much confusion about what antifa is and isn’t. Listen to President Donald Trump, and you’d think antifa is a “domestic terrorist organization.” Listen to many liberal pundits and you’d think antifa doesn’t really exist at all; that it is just an “idea,” a simple shortening of the word “anti-fascist” — a label most Americans would use to self-identify. 

But the truth about antifa is something far more interesting. Antifa is real, and refers to an underground network of anarchists, socialists and communists dedicated to destroying the far right “by any means necessary.” Although its activists sometimes punch neo-Nazis, its violence is rare, and equating antifa with “domestic terrorists” is absurd. The bulk of the work antifa does is nonviolent but nevertheless extraordinary. Over the last decade, antifa deployed spies to go undercover into the new generation of white supremacist groups organizing in the Trump era. These spies gathered intelligence that would eventually unmask thousands of pseudonymous neo-Nazis, revealing them to be your local police officer, your local high school teacher, your college professor, your pastor, and your local elected official. 

This great unmasking helped destroy multiple “alt-right” groups. Yet time and time again the anti-fascists doing this work were dismissed as radicals or leftist “extremists,” somehow the photo inverse, or the moral equivalent, of the very neo-Nazis they worked so hard to destroy. The story of American antifa is a Cassandra story: few listened when its activists sounded the alarm about rising fascism in America. 

My new book, “To Catch A Fascist: The Fight To Expose The Radical Right,” is based on exclusive access to this underground anti-fascist network. It begins, as you’ll read below, with one of my main characters beginning a five-month spy mission, going undercover into the white supremacist group Patriot Front.

Five white guys squeezed into a high-backed leather booth at 13 Coins, an upscale diner just across International Boulevard from SeaTac Airport. The restaurant had an open kitchen, and the sounds of clattering plates and servers barking orders at line cooks felt like a reprieve from the constant drone of jets taking off and landing nearby. The guys didn’t know each other’s real names, only the pseudonyms they used online. Normal American white guy names. John, David, Vincent, Charles, Anthony. Four of them were ardent white supremacists. One of them was just pretending to be.

This group was led by John, the director of Network 8, the Pacific Northwest chapter of the organization to which they all belonged. Less than a year earlier, four members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force — a Seattle police officer, two Kings County sheriff’s deputies, and an FBI agent — had knocked on John’s door. They had questioned him about Network 8 and some related vandalism in the area, but John had kept his mouth shut, opening it only to ask for an attorney. He’d still caught charges, but the prosecutor dropped them, prompting John to brag to Network 8 about beating the rap, reminding members to always mask up during missions. “No face, no case,” he’d told them.

John was feeling emboldened. Only two weeks earlier, in late July 2021, he and four other masked men, under the cover of darkness, had defaced a mural down in Portland, Oregon, that had honored the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery — all Black........

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