According to the president, “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government,” using “illegal means to organise and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism,” which includes “coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organised riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers.”
Trump added: “Antifa recruits, trains, and radicalises young Americans to engage in this violence and suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives.”
The US security establishment revelled in the president’s hyperbole. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was quick to follow the president’s lead, comparing Antifa to “MS-13, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State”, according to The Guardian.
Visiting a standoff between protesters and federal agents, an Independent headline read, “Kristi Noem praised for ‘staring down’ Antifa. It was a dozen reporters and a guy in a chicken suit.”
American antifascists are having a good laugh.
The whole point of Antifa’s modern anarchist existence is that it is not an organisation, but an idea that motivates autonomous groups of activists who confront fascists and racists, whether they’re gangs of white nationalists or federal agents terrorising American cities.
The US government has plenty of experience investigating Islamist terror cells and organised crime. Since the 1960s, law enforcement has identified cadres of leftist militant groups and tied incidents to those organisations, like the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Far-right groups such as the Proud Boys are no exception. Their leaders and deeds are well documented.
If the White House could point fingers at prominent Antifa leaders, identify the organisation’s headquarters and prove a criminal conspiracy, it would have already done so.
Noem has stated that agents arrested the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa. However, the names of the founder and his partner, along with the charges against them, have yet to be revealed.
Trump’s terrorist designation fulfils a promise left over from his first administration.
As I reported for Haaretz, protesters who were detained during the nationwide Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020 said that they were questioned about their political beliefs, particularly when it comes to antifascism and Antifa, not just by local police but by federal agents, as well.
With the feds now severely repressing immigrant communities across the United States, the threats against Antifa appear more dire.
And it’s especially concerning when put in the context of another Trump national security directive, which states, “There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism,’” adding that fighting fascism has become a rallying “cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.”
According to the directive, “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
As investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein explained, the Trump Administration is instructing law enforcement agencies to view anyone who harbours such beliefs as potential criminals who must be stopped because they create damage.
These thought crimes, as the regime lists them, are so incredibly vague that anyone with a library that includes volumes on family abolition or worker collectives could be viewed by the state as proto-terrorists.
A letter signed by 3,000 nonprofit organisations said that Trump’s order “is about using unchecked power to silence opposition and voices he disagrees with”, which is “un-American and flies in the face of the Constitution, including the First Amendment bar on targeting organisations for their advocacy”.
On the one hand, this means that agencies like the FBI will dedicate time not to stopping crime but will engage in large-scale espionage against groups that oppose the regime, a hallmark of paranoid authoritarianism.
FBI director Kash Patel recently told journalist Armstrong Williams that his force would be investigating funding for protesters combating mass deportation efforts. “It is an organised effort that someone or some groups are paying for,” he said.
The Patel Patrol is unlikely to find anything noteworthy on Antifa.
As the Center for Strategic and International Studies assessment of Antifa said, “The threat from Antifa and other far-left networks is relatively small in the United States.”
However, like his predecessors, Patel can use resources to infiltrate antiracist groups to subvert them. And outside of government, these types of directives will empower non-government actors to ostracise and attack Americans as “terrorists” if they are even thought to hold beliefs the regime opposes.
Fox News, America’s leading rightwing news network, has gotten a running start, labelling Antifa a widespread national threat.
A rightwing journalist told Fox that she “was assaulted by an ‘Antifa-affiliated protester’ during a protest in Portland”, according to the Independent. “Antifa attacks ICE facility in Portland” blasted another Fox News headline.
The Turning Point USA chapter at Rutgers University is not just calling for the dismissal of historian Mark Bray, who has written widely about Antifa. The academic reported on social media that death threats against him and his family made them decide to leave the country.
Bray and his family are just some of the victims of the mob-led McCarthyism. These sweeping directives about Antifa could embolden the enormously powerful national security apparatus to investigate a broad array of political actors, including Democratic Party campaigns.
A roundtable of far-right activists meeting with Trump indicated that this amorphous, undefined movement was linked to various political activities, suggesting that all the levers of government will target dissenters.
Reuters reported: “The Trump administration plans to deploy America’s counter-terrorism apparatus–including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department–as well as the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department against certain left-wing groups it accuses of funding and organising political violence.”
As Lawfare wrote of the designation’s chilling effect, “Protesters who would otherwise attend a rally stay home; young activists scrub posts; journalists worry that sourcing from, or covering the wrong protest could expose them to watch listing or investigation; lawyers second-guess whether representing an unpopular client could be reframed as ‘support.’”
Ironically, something is refreshing about the administration’s openly anti-democratic intentions in making antifascism and the ideologies around it a thought war against the regime.
It will be scary. But that’s why people who are fighting for democracy should speak up more than stay silent.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
