Remember all the antifa marching against Mitt Romney? No? That's because in the absence of fascists, antifa wouldn't be doing anything. They only popped up because the president had the likes of Steve Banon in his inner circle and a glowing recommendation from the KKK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Racist_Action
Generally considered the predecessor to Antifa and Antifa follows a lot of the same tactics and methods.
This is one of those situation where I might agree with their message, but I don't agree with their methods at all.
That article doesn't make your point. They explicitly exist because of fascist groups like the neonazis, one of the quotes in the article is "everywhere they go we go". They do seem like a precursor to antifa but their politics aren't exactly the same. Recruited from "skinheads and the punk subculture", described as "anarchists" where as antifa are republicans in the
old meaning of that word.
I would agree that precursor movement is pretty accurate and that yes, this is finally a genuine instance of violent leftists from the modern US. And I would be in opposition to their methods. However the methods described in detail
here, do not resemble antifa's methods. The SPLC describes them as beating and kicking bloody any neo-nazi who went to the wrong punk club. Their 15 minutes of national level news fame was in 2012, running into a restaurant hosting a white nationalist meetup and beating everyone bloody with clubs. Yeah, its awful and they should stop. But like, that doesn't resemble any other US leftist group I know of antifa included and I have a hard time believing that represents some kind of larger rot in the left. More to the point, the factual distortions from Fox and the NRA,
weren't targeted against these guys anyway, so my point still stands.