“The anarchists had always been a cosplay clown joke,” he told me in early 2021. “On May Day they would come and fight the police and break some windows. We’d be like, ‘Okay guys, go back to your mother’s basement.’”2 Then, after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, the anarchists rebranded themselves as anti-fascists, said Young, and that increased their legitimacy in the eyes of Seattle’s progressive voters. “They said, ‘We’re here to fight the racists and fascists.’”
