Last July 4, a group of 11 protesters, among them a middle school teacher and a UPS worker, held what they called a “noise demonstration” outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center in the town of Alvarado, Texas, about 30 miles south of Fort Worth. Some spray-painted epithets on cars; others, it being nighttime on the Fourth of July, set off fireworks. There was no real violence at first. But then, an Alvarado police officer, Thomas Gross, arrived on the scene and drew his gun. He was shot, nonfatally, by a person in the woods, Benjamin Song, who was part of the protest.
The result was the arrest of a total of 19 people on a mix of federal and state charges, including at least eight who were not present at the demonstration. Of the 19, nine went to federal trial in Fort Worth in February on a range of charges: five for multiple counts of attempted murder of a police officer and unarmed correctional officers; eight for providing material support to terrorists, rioting, and using and carrying explosives; and two for “corruptly concealing” and conspiracy to conceal documents. In the end, Song was convicted of attempted murder, and he and the others of providing material support to terrorists. Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a green-card holder, was not even present at the protest. The government charged him with transporting “a box that contained numerous antifa materials.” In fact, he simply moved a box of anarchist zines, all unrelated to antifa, from his parents’ house to a different house in his hometown of Dallas. He faces up to 40 years in prison.
It may sound like a story from, say, the days of the Palmer raids or Hoover’s FBI. But this time, the government has a new, extremely worrisome arrow in its quiver: the charge of “domestic terrorism” related to its accusation that the protesters were members of a “North Texas antifa terror cell.” “Antifa,” despite what you may have heard about Minneapolis nurses or Iranian mullahs, qualifies as the Trump administration’s Public Enemy Number One, and the administration is preparing to deploy the entire capacity of the U.S. system of justice to destroy not only antifa but also every means of support it can locate anywhere in American society, going so far as to invent an entirely new category of crime to do so.
What is perhaps most important to note about these events is the fact that, despite the prosecution’s consistent claims to the contrary, not only did the government fail to produce any evidence at all tying “antifa” to this protest and the ensuing violence, but there is also no crime anywhere in the U.S. legal code defined as “domestic terrorism.” It’s a made-up category invented by Donald Trump and company to try to criminalize any and all forms of domestic dissent they find overly troublesome. And given the lack of respect for due process, standard procedures, and even common sense inherent relating to so many aspects of Trump’s vengeance-mad political prosecutions, these powers could soon be leveled at literally anyone.
What Is “Domestic Terrorism”?
The MAGA obsession with “antifa” is nothing new, but only recently has it become clear just how profoundly it had affected Trump supporters’ perception of reality. In the wake of the January 6, 2021, Trump-led insurrection, Trump adviser Jason Miller had texted a suggestion that Trump should tweet that “Bad apples, likely ANTIFA or other crazed leftists” had “infiltrated” the alleged “peaceful protest” by Trump supporters. This line was echoed by Fox News. Laura Ingraham reported that night that the rioters “were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson told the same lie, as did Republican Representatives Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Mo Brooks, all followed up by Rush Limbaugh. It spread roughly 8,700 times across cable television, social media, and online news outlets, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company. Zignal Labs also found that, in less than 24 hours, the lie that the rioters were actually antifa was mentioned more than 400,000 times online. A single tweet reading, “Remember, Antifa openly planned to dress as Trump supporters and cause chaos today,” received 41,100 likes and shares. By the end of February, fully 58 percent of Trump voters said they viewed the events of January 6 as “mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.”
With Trump out of the White House, the alleged problem lay relatively fallow for four years. But it returned with a vengeance following the assassination of right-wing hero Charlie Kirk on September 10, a tragedy that Trump blamed, of course without any supporting evidence, on “Radical Left terrorists.” This time, however, it was more than just talk. Twelve days after Kirk’s killing, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa to be a “domestic terrorist organization.”
Three days later, on September 25, he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” In it, Trump attempted to assert that pretty much every single act of political violence since his second presidency began as a “pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’” He blamed what he called “[t]his ‘anti-fascist’ lie” for being “the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties,” insisting that “the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying addi-tional assassinations.”
Next, on December 4, former Attorney General Pam Bondi followed up with a memo outlining the order’s proposed implementation. While widely leaked, it has never been officially published. In it, she describes antifa as “domestic terrorists” who “use violence or the threat of violence to advance political and social agendas, including opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality; and an elevation of violence to achieve policy outcomes, such as political assassinations.”
Remember, “domestic terrorism” is a made-up crime. Thanks to the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, U.S. law enforcement does operate under a much expanded legal designation of “terrorism,” which allows the government to freeze foreign groups’ assets and criminalize support for them; but of course this would not apply to antifa, even were it said to exist in the way that Trump and company pretend it does. And of course, there are already plenty of laws against shooting people or the destruction of property, harassment, and the like. Texas law enforcement officials had no shortage of potential charges to level against the Alvarado protesters. It’s the alleged antifa connection that allowed them to try, and convict, people who they merely claim have provided “support” for the shooting, employing the most tenuous definitions of the meaning of that word.
Trump had tried this same gambit during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, but was stymied by the fact that, back then, even Trump-appointed law enforcement officials still insisted that such designations make a modicum of sense. Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray explained that antifa was less an organization than “a movement or an ideology.” His boss, Attorney General William P. Barr, apparently sought to assuage Trump by insisting that “the violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly” and then proceeding to go back to work, pretending that the entire incident had never happened.
Not so Pam Bondi. Her memo instructed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF—made up of multiagency teams of agents, analysts, and other specialists responsible for preventing terrorism and prosecuting terrorism-related crimes alongside local law enforcement—to investigate not only those groups Trump imagines might be guilty of these alleged crimes, but also “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors” as well as “non-governmental organizations and American citizens residing abroad or with close ties to foreign governments, agents, citizens, foundations, or influence networks engaged … funding, creating, or supporting entities that engage in activities that support or encourage domestic terrorism.”
As analyzed by Thomas E. Brzozowski, a lecturer at the George Washington University School of Law who spent 10 years as the Justice Department’s counsel in the Counterterrorism Section, what Trump and Bondi did was “quietly [turn] domestic terrorism authorities into a standing program for targeting one broad ideological camp.” The memo defines the alleged enemy—just as it described the Texas protesters—as “antifa aligned extremists.” Trump and Bondi deemed these people to hold “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” and have made pursuit of them the priority focus for JTTF. This approach, Brzozowski writes in Lawfare, “reduces the domestic terrorism picture to one favored antagonist, ‘Antifa,’ a term so elastic it can be stretched over protest movements, community defense groups, and online networks that have never engaged in violence.” In an interview, Brzozowski told me that this framing carries “the potential for groups and individuals to be delisted, debanked, deplatformed,” to suffer “reputational harm,” and to have the JTTF even go after their funders, be they individuals, foundations, labor unions, or whatever, without any crime having been committed.
In a conference call in late January, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh urged his department to “go big and go loud” with antifa-related indictments. He apparently included in his instructions, according to a New York Times report, a demand that federal law enforcement do more “to attack the funding of these groups,” and he included an order to a group of U.S. attorneys to craft a plan to launch an investigation of George Soros (and, presumably, his son Alex) and their philanthropy and political giving.
State and local government officials who decline to channel resources into these priorities, Brzozowski noted, may be painted as “soft on Antifa” and discover that their access to certain grants or cooperative programs suddenly depends on their willingness to feed the antifa pipeline with tips and referrals. What’s more, it can all be done in secret.
Karen Greenberg, a future security fellow at New America and the author of Subtle Tools, Rogue Justice, and The Least Worst Place, has additional concerns. She told me: “What the administration is doing is essentially decreeing a domestic terrorism statute replete with the willy-nilly targeting of individuals and groups for political reasons, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were immediately labeled ‘domestic terrorists’ absent any references to fact.” She is especially worried about what she terms a “reliance on the unacceptably broad application” of the term “material support,” as applied to members suspected of belonging to so-called domestic terrorist organizations as defined in NSPM-7. This is “particularly alarming,” Greenberg explained, “as ‘material support’ to officially designated ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’ has already been used in overly broad ways to prosecute those accused of being foreign terrorists after 9/11.” Greenberg wondered: “Will individuals who are accused of associating with and sympathizing with so-called domestic terrorists now be subjected to … free-floating persecution without evidence?”
In other words, using any interpretation of an idea or ideology it desires, and based on a made-up category of law, the justice system under Trump can prosecute any individual or institution it so chooses.
What Exactly Is Antifa?
When the FBI’s Michael Glasheen testified before the House Homeland Security Committee last December, three months after Trump’s executive order, he struggled to respond to the most basic questions imaginable about the nature, structure, size, or really anything at all about antifa. Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson asked him, “You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that?” He replied, “Well, the investigations are active.” Glasheen called antifa “our primary concern right now” and insisted that “the most immediate, violent threat” we faced was from these domestic terrorists. When Thompson followed up with the simple question of how many members the group was understood to have, Glasheen replied, “We are building out the infrastructure right now.” Pressed to elaborate, the best he could do was: “Well, that’s very fluid…. It’s ongoing for us to understand that. The same, no different than Al Qaeda or ISIS.” Keep in mind that Glasheen is a professional. He was the Biden administration’s head of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, and is now, in the Trump administration, one of the bureau’s current five operations directors. (Asked if the FBI had made any progress in its research on antifa-related issues, its press office said it would have no comment.)
In fact, much of what many of us think we do know about antifa is false. Its anonymous, leaderless, and decentralized structure allows outsiders and potential insiders to pretend to speak about or on behalf of the group without any recognized authority to do so. According to the Rutgers University historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, who recently felt it necessary to move his family to Madrid after receiving a series of direct threats in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, antifa is, alternatively, an “ideology, identity, tendency, or activity of self-defense practiced by people who seek to combat such social ills as racism, sexism, homophobia, and oppression, which they understand to be the building blocks of fascism.” Its members, Bray told The Washington Post, include “all kinds of radicals, from different kinds of socialists to communists, anarchists and more independent radicals,” united in an extremely loose ideological coalition without anything resembling a national headquarters or even a vertical structure.
“Sometimes I compare it to feminism,” he explained. “There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group.” As far as what they actually do, Bray said it mostly involves monitoring far-right groups and counterprotesting them, though these actions sometimes devolve into violent confrontations with the same far-right groups, as happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Bray estimates that there are anywhere between 10 and 25 such groups in various localities in the United States where people openly identify with antifa, with the number of those involved in single digits. (My inquiries to various antifa-identified groups online went unanswered.)
Bray traces antifa’s contemporary roots to the efforts in the United States and Canada of activists of Anti-Racist Action, or ARA, who pursued Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other assorted white supremacists from the late 1980s into the 2000s. Their motto was: “We go where they go.” If Nazi skinheads at a punk show in Indiana handed out leaflets about how “Hitler was right,” ARA was there to kick them out. If fascists plastered racist posters in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, ARA tore them down and replaced them with anti-racist slogans.
Antifa’s tactics inspired a national debate when, on January 20, 2017—Trump’s Inauguration Day—the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer was caught on video getting punched in the face by someone whose identity remains unknown, but who was clad entirely in black and therefore signaled to many an identification with antifa. The question of whether and under what circumstances it was OK to “punch a Nazi” gripped many in the punditocracy, who mostly decided it wasn’t OK, albeit perhaps not that big a deal.
Not long afterward, on the evening of February 1, the group’s prominence rose further, at least in the mainstream media, when former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos—at the time, among the most prominent of “alt-right” propagandists—was scheduled to give a talk at the University of California, Berkeley.
Yiannopoulos was known to use appearances to publicize his misogyny (“feminism is a mean, vindictive, spiteful, nasty, man-hating philosophy”), Islamophobia (“Muslims believe: when in Rome, rape everyone and claim welfare”), and transphobia ( “I make no apologies for protecting women and children from men who are confused about their sexual identity”). That night, black-clad antifa activists showed up at a larger demonstration against Yiannopoulos, tore down police barricades, launched fireworks, smashed windows, and spray-painted graffiti, all of which was alleged to have resulted in approximately $100,000 worth of damage and the talk’s cancellation, which led to a spontaneous dance party among the demonstrators.
A series of violent clashes also took place in Portland, Oregon, during this period between alt-right groups and antifa with police usually intervening against the latter. Claims and counterclaims make it difficult to know who started what. The highest-profile clash involving antifa, however, took place on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville during the “Unite the Right” rally. Despite a massive police presence, a series of clashes ensued when the white supremacists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and members of various militias who had been chanting “Jews will not replace us” a day earlier were now met with a massive counterdemonstration that included anti-fascists who had prepared for a confrontation. During the chaos, James Fields Jr., a 20-year-old self-proclaimed admirer of Hitler, drove his car into the crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring nearly three dozen others. Famously, three days after the rally in which video clearly demonstrated where the aggression arose, Trump had trouble distinguishing between the guilty and innocent in the melee, insisting that there was “blame on both sides” for the violence, and that there were “some very fine” people among the neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Soon afterward, Merriam-Webster added “antifa” to its dictionary, and The Oxford English Dictionary short-listed it for its “word of the year.”
Christopher Mathias, author of the recently published To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right, has gotten to know many members of antifa, having gained their trust over time by reporting on them sympathetically in HuffPost, where he worked for 14 years. He told me, “Antifa is a network of everyday people from different walks of life with perhaps a couple of demographics overrepresented.” These include trans and queer people, who Mathias believes see anti-fascist work “as kind of an urgent form of community self-defense,” together with “neurodivergent people,” who he said are “very good at this type of research, and who see the kind of recruiting the far right does as targeting neurodivergent spaces online,” and who see “anti-fascist work as also an urgent form of community self-defense.”
To be clear, self-identified antifa partisans are not “liberals” in any of the term’s connotations. They are unimpressed by foundational liberal commitments to ideals such as the right to free speech and free assembly. Anti-fascists will not defend to their deaths anyone’s right to say whatever they want however much they disagree with it. They prefer to disrupt fascist advances, Bray wrote in Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, in ways that range from “singing over fascist speeches, to occupying the sites of fascist meetings before they could set up to sowing discord in their groups via infiltration, to breaking any veil of anonymity, to physically disrupting their newspaper sales, demonstrations, and other activities.” Violence, when anti-fascists do resort to it, is without exception presented as a means of countering or preventing fascist violence. It does not include terrorist violence. There will be no antifa murdering of innocents as a means of advancing the cause in the manner of the old anarchist adage about “the propaganda of the deed.”
The Torch Network today is perhaps the most “organized” of antifa organizations. The group is a renamed successor to Anti-Racist Action that initially began in 1987 as a group of punk anti-fascists who, if this be the word, “organized” around opposition to punk skinheads in Minneapolis. They rebranded, according to Mathias, to appeal to the younger generation with a focus on digital communication. Among their favored tactics was to go dumpster-diving outside the homes of neo-Nazi skinheads, find their true names via the mail they threw out, and then put up “Meet Your Local Nazi” posters in their neighborhoods. The goal, according to their website, is to “disrupt fascist and far-right organizing and activity.” They do so without “rely[ing] on the cops or courts to do our work for us.” They don’t rule out going to court, but they have little faith in the system. “This doesn’t mean we never go to court,” says the website, “but the cops uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They attack us and everyone who resists oppression.” They rely only “on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.”
What anti-fascists do best, and most often, is dox. They infiltrate far-right chat groups, both (quite riskily) in person and online and then publish the names and faces of allegedly respectable citizens who participate in fascist forums, demonstrations, and other actions. The point, as Mathias put it in a Guardian piece, is that “antifa’s doxing tactic leveraged existing societal taboos against explicit white supremacy or neo-Nazism to create a social cost for being a fascist. ‘Oh, you want to join a Nazi group? We will name and shame you. You will lose your job. You will lose your girlfriend. Your family will shun you.’” Mark Bray told me that a second “Unite the Right” rally had to be canceled after Charlottesville because “leaders of the far-right groups told their members to stay home because they’re going to get doxed and it’s going to screw your lives up.”
Of course, doxing potentially exposes its targets to violence. At the same time, it’s true that in its doxing campaigns, antifa goes to considerable lengths to protect the innocent. Mathias notes in his book, “When antifa publishes a photo of a fascist with their family, for example, they’ll often blur out the family members’ faces to not make them subject to harassment or other ramifications they might not deserve.” (Antifa will also, as a running joke, often blur out a dog’s face.) He finds their standards for accuracy exacting, noting that antifa-style organizations are “usually made up of working-class and middle-class people” who “typically don’t have a good First Amendment lawyer in their contacts, or the disposable income to pay for one.” The result is that they tend to apply “exacting editorial standards” to their doxing efforts. “Everything has to be right. If anti-fascists do get even a minor detail wrong, a correction and an apology are quickly appended to the top of the article.” All of this has the effect, he averred, “of making a bunch of anonymous anti-fascists, almost all working other jobs, into really good journalists, even if they are almost never recognized as such by the mainstream media.”
The (Mostly) Proud History of Global Anti-Fascism
Regardless of whether one shares their values or approves of their strategies, antifa partisans have every right to be proud of the anti-fascist traditions they feel themselves to be a part of. The first “antifa” organization historians tend to credit was the Arditi del Popolo (the People’s Daring Ones), founded in Rome in 1921 in response to Mussolini’s Blackshirts. It is also perhaps the closest antecedent to what antifa is—and isn’t—today. Bray wrote of the group: The “entire range of anti-fascist militants (communists, anarchists, socialists, and republicans) joined together under the Arditi’s decentralized, federal militia structure.” Joseph Fronczak, a Princeton historian who has written on fascism, noted that unlike, say, another frequently mentioned antecedent, Germany’s Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action, nicknamed “antifa”), which arose more than a decade later, the Arditi was a truly independent organization that “was about people of different ideologies joining together,” without any specific guidance from any political party, who felt compelled to confront the threat of fascism by whatever means they could find. (The German group was largely a Communist front group, and its members were sent underground by Hitler, using the 1933 Reichstag fire as his excuse.)
Another chapter that deserves to hold a special place in anti-fascist history is “Antifa of Palestine.” The group arose in 1934 on behalf of a vision of a shared Arab and Jewish future and, like the Arditi, was unconnected to any political party. Fronczak explained in his book The Five Ages of Antifascism, “They stressed that local acts of solidarity, exchanged among Arab and Jewish comrades, could bring about liberation for all in Palestine and also could contribute to the global struggle against fascism. They portrayed fascism as a particularly bellicose and terroristic ideology of exclusionary nationalism; they argued that both Zionism and Arab nationalism had succumbed to its influence and further argued that the British Empire had intentionally propagated fascism on the ground in Palestine so as to divide its peoples and thus more easily rule over them.” In July 1935, the group called for joint Jewish/Arab general strike against British rule, which occurred in April 1936 but, alas, ended in violence. An antifa pamphlet blamed the violence on “Jewish fascists, overexcited by the provocations of the Arab coreligionists.” Members traveled to Paris for a conference presented by the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism in September 1936 and to New York in February 1937 to give speeches and to try to drum up support. These events were sponsored, according to a contemporaneous Jewish Telegraphic Agency report, by “the American Antifa Committee,” which included Roger Baldwin, who had co-founded the ACLU 17 years earlier. This visit marked the very first appearance of “antifa” in the United States.
The country saw its first homegrown antifa-style demonstration on November 20, 1934, when, just outside the City College of New York, student demonstrators burned effigies of Benito Mussolini and of the school’s hard-line conservative president Frederick B. Robinson, because he’d invited a group of Italian fascist students to campus. (Robinson called their conduct “worse than that of guttersnipes,” which led CCNY students to wear buttons saying “I AM A Guttersnipe I FIGHT Fascism.”)
In March of the following year, anti-fascists arose in protest of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. Its assistant pastor, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., called on the crowd to take up the “struggle against fascism,” adding, “Fascism is eating into the very vitals of our people!” Both events were tied closely to the efforts of the U.S. Communist Party and so were of limited appeal beyond its ideological confines, though independent anti-fascist groups did arise in response to black-shirted marches by Mussolini supporters in Italian neighborhoods in New York and elsewhere.
As Mark Bray observed, one can point to certain small “successes” on the part of these groups, but they obviously failed to stop the rise of fascism. The Republic lost the Spanish Civil War, and fascists arose to state power in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, and elsewhere. But “from the point of view of militant antifascists of recent decades,” Bray said via email, “the question is not whether previous iterations of their politics always won or lost but whether they kept fighting and did everything they could to stop the threat of fascism whether mainstream society approved of it or not.” Certainly, they were on what activists like to term “the right side of history.” And so, given the fact that these groups were not at all afraid to fight violence with violence, “When militant antifascists carry out violent acts, they think of themselves in that tradition.” Joseph Fronczak, on the other hand, calls upon the arguments of the great (anti-fascist) German philosopher Walter Benjamin, articulated in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The value of the past in this context is as a means of “appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” Those “memory flashes,” Benjamin believed, help with “fanning the spark of hope in the past.”
How the Media Play Into Trump’s Framing
Donald Trump claims that “the radical left causes tremendous violence,” asserting that “they seem to do it in a bigger way” than those they oppose. As is so often the case with Trump and company, however, their accusations can be best understood as accidental admissions. Actual domestic terrorism, or “domestic violent extremism,” as the FBI describes it, has been almost exclusively a right-wing phenomenon in the United States. As sociologists Art Jipson and Paul J. Becker write: “Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.” More recently, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism stated that, for the three years ending in 2024, all “extremist-related murders” it found were tied to “right-wing extremism.”
These facts have never prevented Trump, his aides, and the right-wing media from asserting the opposite, loudly and frequently. In June 2020, for instance, as Black Lives Matters rallies erupted spontaneously in virtually every city in the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a Buffalo, New York, police officer shoved 75-year-old Martin Gugino to the ground while enforcing a city curfew. Thanks to someone’s phone video, millions of people could watch as the senior citizen’s head hit the pavement, hear the horrific noise it made in doing so, and then watch the police march past him, leaving him lying there, bleeding, eventually causing what his lawyer said was a brain injury. What was Trump’s reaction? Gugino “could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” he opined. His evidence-free musing continued, insisting that Gugino was “appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment” and claiming that Gugino “fell harder than was pushed.” The New York Times reviewed dozens of arrest records and found “no known effort by antifa to perpetrate a coordinated campaign of violence,” notwithstanding “vague, anti-government political leanings among suspects.” Even so, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr joined in the fun, terming violent actions by protesters as “antifa-like tactics.”
The MAGA playbook, as Mark Bray told Al Jazeera in 2017, is pretty consistent. “They have a pretty simple formula: They find something that is uniformly agreed upon as horrific and then photoshop images and claim Antifa is complicit.” When 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley murdered 26 people and injured 20 others in a church outside San Antonio that November, for instance, far-right websites created a phony image of Kelley holding a flag reading “anti-fascist action.” Alex Jones made the same claim on his Infowars podcast, describing Kelley as “an atheist [pedophile] obsessed with death” who matched what they called the “classic Antifa profile.” Much the same happened in October 2017, when Stephen Paddock shot and killed 58 people in Las Vegas, and Infowars and others insisted on Paddock’s imaginary affiliation with antifa.
These interventions have partially succeeded in creating an alternate reality in the minds of millions of Americans about antifa’s abilities. Research shows just how central Trump is personally to all this. Curd Knüpfer, a political researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, undertook a study back in 2020 in which he collected 437 articles that mentioned “antifa” from 29 U.S. right-wing or far-right websites, ranging from Fox News and Breitbart to ones most of us have never heard of. He found that without Trump labeling individuals or organizations as antifa, about 20 percent of right-wing media outlets described antifa as “terrorists.” But after Trump did this, they all followed suit.
Last October 23, Trump announced to the country, “I looked the other night, Saturday night, Portland is like burning to the ground and these people are saying it’s just friendly stuff, the whole place is burning to the ground…. That’s like an insurrection.” What Trump had almost certainly seen was a Fox News segment on Portland that used footage of violence and property destruction in that city from five years earlier during the far more intense and widespread protests in support of Black Lives Matter. One of these showed a man getting tear-gassed in the face; the other shows the burning of the base of a downtown fountain. Until he saw the videos, Trump admitted that he “didn’t know that was still going on” in Portland, “but when I watched television last night,” he discovered that “they’re walking and throwing smoke bombs into stores.” He then added a favored false conspiracy of the far right: “These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators, these are profess—I watched that last night. I’m very good at this stuff—these are paid agitators.”
CNN’s Daniel Dale, like a disembodied voice in the wilderness, has continued to do whatever one person can do to track Trump’s lies, while most of the mainstream media has decided they are not important or just part of the landscape like the sunrise and sunset. Dale tweeted: “Portland isn’t burning. There’ve been protest clashes near one ICE building in a 145-square-mile city. Federal agents used tear gas and smoke Saturday; The Oregonian reported their canisters sparked small fires that rain quickly put out. Fire dept. wasn’t even summoned.” The rest of the mainstream media cannot fairly be said to have ignored the facts described in this story, but they have, crucially, failed to provide the necessary context to understand why they matter and what exactly is the nature of the threat they pose to our freedoms and the Constitution itself. Part of the problem is that historic bugaboo, “false equivalence,” or as it is most frequently practiced among American political journalists, “bothsidesism.”
A Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting study during the month following Charlottesville found that in the six best-read broadsheet newspapers in 2017—The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, The Mercury News of San Jose, and The Washington Post—pundits produced virtually equal amounts of condemnation for both fascists and anti-fascists.
Even more worrisome than this annoying tendency has been the media’s inability to focus on how the pieces of the administration’s assault fit together. Remember, Bondi was driving virtually the entire U.S. federal justice apparatus toward enforcing Trump’s made-up category of crime, which can take in any person or institution that can be said to support it in virtually any fashion. If you hold views that Trump and company believe to constitute “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity” or “extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders” while opposing “traditional views on family, religion, and morality,” you are already at risk. That “antifa” does not exist in anything like the fashion that Trumpers and their MAGA minions imagine is beside the point. Virtually all opposition can be attributed, indirectly, to what the Trumpers profess to believe to be a part of an alleged antifa-support network described as “antifa” no matter how tenuous or even imaginary the connection.
Remember, also, none of the nine people convicted in Texas under the “antifa law” have been shown to have a connection to any antifa organization. Bondi’s fantastical depiction of this ragtag group of societally disaffected individuals as “no different” from the MS-13 drug gang ignores the facts that the 19 have no known history of trafficking drugs or engaging in gang violence. Stephen Miller somehow believes that ICE officers are forced to “street battle against antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night, to come and go from their building in Portland.” And Mike Johnson thinks that supporters of the peaceful “No Kings” rallies across America on October 18 last year were “Marxists, the socialists, the antifa advocates, the anarchists, and the pro-Hamas wing of the far left Democrat Party.”
A series of reports earlier this year by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Kovensky demonstrates that “across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his political enemies.” And there can be no question anymore, as The Wall Street Journal put it in a March 7, 2026, headline, that “Americans Are Now a Target in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown.” What lies beneath the Trump administration’s phony antifa panic is the creation of a one-stop-shopping option for the Trump assault on virtually every aspect of American civil, legal, and public institutions he thinks are arrayed against him. So far, we’ve seen him go after universities, law firms, and media companies that he disapproves of; employing the definitions Bondi outlined, he can now accuse them of aiding and abetting alleged antifa “domestic terrorism.”
Don’t forget, moreover, that Kristi Noem stuck to her guns in her final appearance before Congress when called out for her ridiculous claim that both Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed owing to having been caught in an “act of domestic terrorism,” when, in fact, millions of people all over the world saw the videos that clearly disprove this transparently false allegation.
Noem and Bondi may be out, but their departures had nothing to do with these claims. Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files reportedly caused Trump to sour on her, and Noem goofed when trying to pin her self-promotional advertising budget on him. Noem’s replacement, Oklahoma Senator and 2020 election denier Markwayne Mullin, took the same position on the Minneapolis slayings, calling Pretti a “deranged individual” and insisting that Good’s killer “didn’t have an option” and had to “engage.” Rather than an official investigation into those incidents, he suggested instead, “If they’re investigating anything, they need to be investigating the paid protesters, and who’s paying them to obstruct federal officers from doing their job.”
There you have it. U.S. law enforcement has now been directed to go after whomever it wishes to pursue on the basis of a made-up crime tied to an “organization”—if that be the word—that is effectively little more than a nuisance to local cops and actually does some good when it comes to exposing neo-Nazis. And they are doing so with a near-complete lack of transparency regarding their choice of targets and the methods they choose to pursue them. “Antifa,” in this context, Thomas Brzozowski noted, functions as little more than merely “a stand-in for a set of ideas that … the administration is broadly characterizing as effectively progressive, radical, [and] left-wing.” The government is right to investigate crimes. But now, it will be investigating and potentially prosecuting beliefs—and only one kind of beliefs at that.
