"Fringe Groups Revel"

An old-fashioned fisking of this article seems to be in order.

Kyle Chapman expected he might find a fight. And he did — with a teenage girl.

Oh, he beat up a teenage girl, presumably weaker than himself? That's awful.

The girl was waving an anti-fascist placard last week at a protest against Shariah law in Midtown Manhattan when a scuffle broke out and she knocked an older woman to the ground.

Wait... she beat up someone weaker than herself, and he intervened to defend them?

“Assaulting our people?” Mr. Chapman shouted as he reached across the barricades and ripped her sign apart. “Your days are numbered, Commie!” he called after her as the police escorted her away. “The American people are rising up against you!”

So, actually he didn't touch her at all, right? Also, she was the one arrested for assault and battery. That seems like an important detail.

As the founder of a group of right-wing vigilantes called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, Mr. Chapman, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound commercial diver, is part of a growing movement that experts on political extremism say has injected a new element of violence into street demonstrations across the country.

Pretty sure your own description makes it clear that he is not the one "injecting violence into street demonstrations." The physical description is meant to make him sound scary, but it's his opponents who are physically attacking people.

Part fight club, part Western-pride fraternity, the Alt-Knights and similar groups recruit battalions of mainly young white men for one-off confrontations with their ideological enemies — the black-clad left-wing militants who disrupted President Trump’s inauguration and have protested against the appearances of conservative speakers on college campuses.

Those "black-clad left-wing militants" are also "mainly white." Antifa looks to be super-duper white, in fact. Elizabeth Warren white. Rachael Maddow white. Keith Olbermann white. So what's with trying to paint one of these groups as being defined by race, and not the other?

Along with like-minded groups like the Proud Boys, a clan of young conservative nationalists, and the Oath Keepers, an organization of current and former law-enforcement officers and military veterans, they mobilized on social media to fight in New Orleans over the removal of Confederate monuments; on the streets of Berkeley, Calif., where clashes between the left and right have increasingly become a threat for law enforcement; and at a raucous May Day rally in Los Angeles.

The Oath Keepers are like-minded? I think I know what the Oath Keepers think that they are doing: they conceive themselves as keeping their oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Is that also a priority for this other group? I wouldn't know, since the report hasn't said anything at all about their ideology or goals. It's just said that they are "mainly white."

We do get some indication of their goals a bit further down.

“There’s been a lot of organized violence on the part of the left against the right, so we have to organize,” Mr. Chapman said. “The purpose is to have a peaceful event. But if people are attacked, you have to be ready and willing to defend yourself and your right-wing brothers and sisters.”

This form of aggression is something researchers say they have not seen on such a scale before on the far right...

Wait: "this form of aggression"? What he said was that the purpose was to have a peaceful event, but that he was willing to defend his side if necessary. That's aggression? It sounds like an explicitly defensive strategy, not an aggressive one.

It doesn't get much better than this. I think the reporter needs to go back home and rethink this whole approach to understanding what is going on.