In his work The Strategy of Social Protest (1990), William Gamson undertakes a phenomenological analysis over a vast number of protest groups and organizations and found that groups that were willing to use "force and violence" against their opponents tended to be more successful than groups that were not. Order your copy here: https://www.amazon.ca/Strategy-Social-Protest-William-Gamson/dp/0534120784

It's not bait. They are fascists. Antifa opposes fascists. If you don't want to have antifa opposing fascists, maybe you need to look a little deeper and ask why there are fascists in your screwed up country. And not just why there are a few, but why they are considered mainstream, to the point that people think it is appropriate to come on a discussion board for ANARCHIHSM, and ask for justifications for why we hate fascists and why we oppose them in the manner that we do.

Listen, I'm going to assume good will from you here. Have a look at this documentary (that is not exactly new, and remember that anarchists have been militantly opposed to fascists as long as there hsve been fascists to oppose). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9zvOU3JpV0

The quote at the end sums it up for me.

"Fascism doesn't start with concentration camps. That's where it ends."

Please watch this doc.

We oppose them at every step, at every corner, and we generally don't listen to all the whinging from people worried about PR and the way we are represented in the mainstream media. We are not going to stop acting the way we have always acted, and we are not going to stop getting up in the faces of fascists and disrupting them in whatever ways we can. Actually, you should be worried when you don't see antifa opposing them in public like or at their events, because that will mean that they are strong enough that we will decide to go underground. That will mean, well, that won't mean anything good...