Demonstrators hold shields during a free speech rally Sunday, Aug. 27, 2017, in Berkeley, Calif. Several thousand people converged in Berkeley Sunday for a "Rally Against Hate" in response to a planned right-wing protest that raised concerns of violence and triggered a massive police presence. Several people were arrested for violating rules against covering their faces or carrying items banned by authorities. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo)

On a recent episode of "The Daily Show" — yes, "The Daily Show" still exists — host Trevor Noah spent a segment condemning the antifa, the anti-fascist activists who have become a topic of intense conversation in the wake of Charlottesville. Noah first scratches his head: Who are these antifa, anyway? It's impossible to know! Then he plays video of antifa activists punching white supremacists and labels them "vegan ISIS," arguing their violent tactics only strengthen their enemies' hand.

Noah is not alone in his critique. Excoriations of antifa abound: from Nancy Pelosi to Homeland Security to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Most of these denunciations betray considerable confusion over what, exactly, antifa is. But more than that, they involve both a fundamental — and politically convenient — misunderstanding of the history of violence and protests in America.

The first major problem with criticism of the antifa is a studied unwillingness to learn anything about the group. The work of historian Mark Bray, author of the just-released "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," is a good start for clearing this confusion. Bray showed that, contra Noah's assertions, the antifa do have a clear set of ideas and tactics. Their history winds through the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, through resurgent neo-Nazism and skinhead racism in the 1980s and 1990s, to the rising power of alt-right white nationalists in the U.S. today.

Antifa tactics, and the philosophy behind those tactics, is also clear. They believe that fascist and violent racist groups have to be confronted in their infancy, when they number in the dozens, lest they soon number in the thousands or even millions. The antifa's primary tactics are nonviolent — protests, online research, naming and shaming — but they also believe that violence is an appropriate response to inherently violent ideologies.

A portion of this page is unavailable in this experience. For a richer experience, click here.

It is that stance that makes the antifa so controversial. As Pelosi said when she condemned the group, "In California, as across all of our great nation, we have deep reverence for the Constitutional right to peaceful dissent and free speech. Nonviolence is fundamental to that right."

Pelosi states this as a universal truth, that nonviolence is fundamental to the protection of our First Amendment rights. What she fails to note — indeed, what most commentary fails to note — is that a belief in nonviolence as effective and laudable is of fairly recent vintage, and was only adopted when white Americans found it convenient.

The history of American political activism is a history of violence, from tax revolts in which collectors were tarred and feathered to John Brown's deadly raid on the eve of the Civil War to labor revolts at the turn of the century to the Black Panthers' armed self-defense creed in the 1960s.

Indeed, nonviolence emerged as a recent exception. Martin Luther King Jr. was not the first American activist to reject violence as a mode of political protest — the women's suffrage movement was largely modeled on nonviolent political action — but in the 1950s and 1960s he popularized nonviolence as both a tactic and a philosophy. Despite the glory now heaped on King, at the time white moderates showed little affection for his tactics. Indeed, throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans disapproved of the civil rights protests.

A portion of this page is unavailable in this experience. For a richer experience, click here.

Nor was nonviolence universally accepted within the civil rights movement. Many black activists argued for both self-defense and displays of force. Emblematic of that change: in 1966, Stokely Carmichael changed the name of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Student National Coordinating Committee, stripping nonviolence from one of the principle organizations of the movement. From there, Carmichael went on to advocate for black power.

For many white Americans, this moment represents the dividing line between the "good" civil rights movement and the "bad" black power movement: Nonviolence won orderly progress in the realm of law; militant tactics led to a white backlash. This is nonsense. The white "backlash" preceded King's movement, endured throughout his life, and continues today. Nor was victory tied to nonviolence. When King took his "good" nonviolence to Chicago, when he used it to fight for economic equality, victory eluded him. When black citizens led uprisings through urban neighborhoods in 1968, passage of the Fair Housing Act quickly followed.

Nonviolence won universal praise only once it could be used to discredit other forms of activism. Which is not to say Americans who have a moral commitment to nonviolence are insincere in their beliefs, but rather that the embrace of nonviolence is also the result of less laudatory political calculations — especially noticeable when praise for nonviolence goes hand in hand with absolutism on gun rights or empathy toward the Bundy militia or unquestioning faith in the righteousness of the police.

A portion of this page is unavailable in this experience. For a richer experience, click here.

Which brings us back to the antifa. Many of the antifa reject nonviolence as a moral commitment. That choice is worthy of debate, perhaps even of condemnation. But it does not excuse the sloppiness with which the group has been covered. Commentators often confuse tactics for ideas, arguing that because they engage in violence, the antifa's philosophical arguments are null, that there's no reason to dig deeper.

Here's why that's absurd. For a year now, journalists have covered neo-fascists and alt-right white nationalists in minute detail. We know about Richard Spencer's fashy haircut and tweedy jackets and preference for fussy New American meals. We know the wide range of alt-right factions, the white nationalists, the Proud Boys, the alt-light, and their intellectual and pseudo-intellectual heroes. We know about Pepe the Frog and the cult of Kek and Breitbart and all the rest.

If that kind of care and attention can be given to fascists and racists, whose underlying philosophies are inherently and irretrievably brutal and violent, why is it withheld from anti-fascists and anti-racists, whose tactics may be objectionable but whose ideas are far more honorable than those of the groups they oppose?

This is not an appeal to embrace the antifa, but it is a plea to attempt to understand them, and to understand the broad American tradition from which they draw. To do otherwise is to indulge not only in a false equivalence that puts fascists and anti-fascists on the same moral plane, but to refuse to grapple with the more complicated history of American activism and violence.