Denouncing Antifa violence does not require regarding the group as equivalent to the Nazis or the KKK. They are distinguishable, most importantly in these two respects:
The ends of both Nazis and the KKK are unsurpassed in their moral depravity: Those groups stand for genocide and racial terrorism, and while they presently claim that their means are nonviolent, both their historical means and the future they are working toward are inseparable from massive amounts of violence; the utter destruction of the societies within which they operate; and mass killing.
While extralegal violence on the right and left alike are alarming, corrosive to society, and worth denouncing, regardless of the relative threat that they pose, the actual number of people killed by extremists on the right and left suggest an asymmetry in destructiveness. If the measure is body count in my lifetime, for example, the two movements that pose the greatest threats to the American homeland would seem to be Islamist terrorists (the first attack on the World Trade Center, the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino killings, etc.) and far-right terrorists (the attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, the bombing during the Atlanta Olympics, the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, the Charleston church shooting, etc.) That doesn’t mean the far-left is incapable of posing a bigger threat—it did so during the late 1960s and 1970s, and Antifa violence should be discouraged now in part so that it does not grow into the sort of problem that caused so much destruction in bygone decades and helped reelect Richard Nixon. But the recent body count suggests the threat to life posed by Antifa violence is not close to the threat posed by right-wing terrorism; and historically, the KKK is the most prolifically violent terrorist group in United States history, while the Nazis are among the most murderous regimes in Western history. Folks on the right who don’t understand those who don’t see Antifa as equivalently dangerous might reflect on the body count as the reason for that viewpoint.
