Life and Death of an Anti-Fascist

Few anti-fascists were as influential on Portland’s recent protest scene as Sean Kealiher, a young anarchist who became a fixture on the city’s streets after he joined an Occupy Portland encampment in 2011, when he was 15. Over the years, Kealiher moved in and out of many of the city’s leftist groups, as he kept reelaborating his belief system to be more radical than most others’ in his circle. “Once other people caught up to him, he would look for ways to go even further left,” one of his friends told me. Kealiher was always arguing with someone and would regularly storm out of meetings with other activists, accusing everyone of being a bunch of liberals. But he would always turn up at the next protest. “If something was going down, he would be there,” his mother, Laura Kealiher, told me.