There is a post at the /r/matialarts subreddit that exposes the historical european martial arts / hema community as being a recruitment grounds for the antifa movement, in particular one of its largest organizations called the hema alliance
https://www.reddit.com/r/martialarts/comments/ijakix/controversy_within_hema_related_to_antifa/
The thread was crossposted to r/WMA (the hema subreddit) and some of its members have started pouring in to downvote the /r/martialarts thread, likely because the mods of this subreddit were demonstrated to be censoring information in the subreddit to assist antifa types with harassing others.
Here is a repost of the original post,
More people should be aware of what I am about to share.
Within the niche HEMA (historical european martial arts) community there has arisen an element seeking to politicize the schools, especially in the USA and Canada, toward far left leaning politics. This has been encouraged mainly by the HEMA Alliance (HEMAA), one of the larger federations based in the US, but also through groups they are affiliated with such as "FAR" (Fighters Against Racism) whose name is misleading, as it is actually a recruitment ground for antifa which a great deal of focus on spreading propaganda and even encouraging HEMA gyms to participate in riots forming shield walls, and other such behavior. But even before the rioting, there has been a concerted effort of this faction to harass and bully anyone who doesn't expressly subscribe to their political beliefs and questions their motivations, with various false accusations of racism and sexism labeled against people who do so. This kind of "canceling" has become very routine within the US HEMA community as a means of control over it and has worked to a large degree due to how small it is compared to the wider martial arts community. Many HEMa clubs are too small to gain insurance on their own, and rely on HEMAA for these benefits so being denied membership or even kicked out excludes people from being able to participate.
Things reached a boiling over point about a month ago, as a Canadian club named Valkyrie Western Martial Arts publicly accused another club in their city, Academie Duello, of a variety of things. although these are Canadian clubs, Valkyrie is deeply entrenched into the HEMAA online community and leveraged their relations to key officers and other members of the US HEMA community to unleash a tremendous amount of harassment against students at Academie Duello and its instructors, while simultaneously silencing any dissent using moderator privileges at FB and other groups (such as the HEMA subreddit) in order to control the narrative. They have demanded that AD and its student body, and defenders, be shunned from participation in tournaments, seminars, and other involvement in the rest of the HEMA community. This is despite that most of the allegations Valkyrie made against Academie Duello were investigated years ago by an independent law firm and concluded to have been untrue. What many people also did not know and was intentionally censored, is that Valkyrie is actually a kind of cult that does not actually teach HEMA but rather a new invented martial art developed by its head instructor that has a lot of strange ideas intended to make sword fighting relevant for modern day combat, among a lot of other bullshido practices. And Valkyrie made these accusations because Academie Duello was in the process of joining with other schools in Canada to create a new federation and Valkyrie wanted AD (who is a much larger school than themselves and their main business competitor, operating in the same city) excluded from it completely.
As a response to the censorship, a blog has been created that provides a substantial amount of evidence for the claims that Valkyrie is a cult, teaches bad self defense bullshido and has actually committed a lot of the same abuses they claimed Academie Duello made. As an example they accused AD of taking advantage of female students and claimed it was not a safe space for them, but meanwhile Valkyrie's instructors asked its students (male and female) to pose nude for over 2,000 photos so they could make a calendar to sell to the general public as a school fundraiser.
The link to the blog providing a breakdown of the different controversies is https://fightersagainstnarccistic.tumblr.com/post/627589661355835392/fighters-against-narcissistic-abusers-in-hema
Most people here probably are not very interested in this particular drama between two schools. What may be of interest however is the documentation the blog has of the HEMA Alliance officers involvement in groups like FAR that advocate and encourage looting, violent protests and how its members are turning HEMA gyms into centers for training antifa protesters to engage in violence with police officers.
Direct links to the evidence for these things are at the follow pages,
Edit: There are now some individuals rushing in from the HEMA subreddit to downvote this post and spread misinformation. One of these people is the VP of the HEMAA making the inaccurate claim that the HEMAA has no influence and that its officers are not representative of the organization as a whole (lol!) , and another is Tea Kew who has authored articles on the HEMA antifa blog.
So you're telling me white knight larpers are into HEMA? No way!