FIGHTING WORDS

JULIA, A WRITER WHO LIVES IN THE San Francisco Bay Area, talks about the street-protest scene in Berkeley, Calif., this spring as if she had entered a war zone. “There are explosions happening everywhere. People are fighting. You’re not entirely sure who is an ally, who isn’t,” she says.

That’s part of the reason she won’t give her last name, since she fears that she will be targeted, harassed or doxxed like so many others who have had their identities attached to the blowups here. For a few days, the city’s mayor, Jesse Arreguin, even had to get himself security because of the threats he was receiving. “Our city is not going to be turned into a fight club,” he says defiantly, though no one is quite sure in this city of 121,000 long known as a test bed for the First Amendment.

As the far right and far left have clashed here over what kind of speech is permissible, Julia has tried to stake out new space created by the recurring violence. She helped found a group called Pastel Bloc, whose members wear disarming pinks in the streets as they provide water and support to other “antifascist” activists who might be engaged in more disruptive actions. Think of it as sort of a medic crew with fairy-dust slogans like RESISTANCE is MAGIC. Anything to fight the growing sense of dread. “It’s getting scarier to protest,” she