Assuming this is one person running the blog, what made you as an individual realize you needed to take real action against fascism and those who condone it? Was it something specific?

antifainternational:

Actually, we’re not just one person running this blog: we’re a collective of anti-fascists in different countries around the world.  Hence, antifa international!

But here’s how a few of us have responded to your question:

I think for me it was a combination of:
– seeing how little cops were doing to stop nazis from organizing and attacking minorities.
– experiencing once or twice how doable and effective it was to stop these nazis by ourselves.
That was all. Dangerous problem meets doable solution.
***
For me it was not something specific that got me to be more involved. I just grew very tired of thinking to myself “something should be done by someone about these racists and fascists” and not doing anything useful myself.
***
Neo-nazis and racist extremists became a lot less abstract for me when they started turning up at shows I was going to or places I’d hang out.  Suddenly my friends who were racialized or LGBTQ+ were afraid to come out with me because they were worried about being harassed by boneheads or worse.  The boneheads got increasingly violent and eventually we decided we had to band together and confront them.  We started as a small group of maybe 5 or 6 people and quickly grew to about 40 people in our crew.  Once we hit that level, we quickly made it unwise for fascists to be seen in public, confronting them everywhere we caught them.  Eventually, we succeeded in running them out of town!

Once I saw that it was me & my friends that succeeded in making our town safer where the authorities had all failed to do anything effective at all, I was hooked!