| From | xxxxxx <[email protected]> |
| Subject | The Great Antifa Hoax |
| Date | May 8, 2026 5:20 AM |
Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
[[link removed]]
THE GREAT ANTIFA HOAX
[[link removed]]
Eric Alterman
May 3, 2026
The New Republic
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
_ Yes, it exists. It’s not really a threat to anyone except
neo-Nazis—but that’s all the excuse the Trump administration needs
to turn the machinery of federal law enforcement loose on anyone with
“dangerous” ideas. _
Illustration by Wesley Merritt / The New Republic,
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
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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.
An anti-fascist protester carried an upside-down American flag in
Portland, Oregon, in 2021. (Photo: Nathan Howard // The New
Republic)
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
an executive order designating antifa to be a “domestic terrorist
organization.”
The alleged problem of left-wing terrorism returned with a vengeance
following the assassination of right-wing hero Charlie Kirk last
September, a tragedy that Trump blamed, of course without any
supporting evidence, on “Radical Left terrorists.”
Three days later, on September 25, he issued
[[link removed]]
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 additional 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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.
Left, protesters at last October’s “No Kings” rally in
Washington, D.C.; right, a touch of humor at the Atlanta march the
same day (From Left: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call; Julia Beverly //
The New Republic)
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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_
[[link removed]]_,_
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
[[link removed]]
_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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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_
[[link removed]]_,_
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]], 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 and then publish the names and faces of
allegedly respectable citizens who participate in fascist forums,
demonstrations, and other actions.
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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.)
Left, a 1933 protest at Columbia University against the presence on
campus of the German ambassador; right, a Socialist Workers Party
anti-fascist rally in New York circa 1940 (From Left:
Keystone/Hulton Archive; Fpg/Archive Photos // The New Republic)
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_
[[link removed]],
“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
[[link removed]] “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 Jewish philosopher Walter
Benjamin, articulated
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]:
“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
[[link removed]]
that, for the three years ending in 2024, all “extremist-related
murders” it found were tied to “right-wing extremism.”
Antifa marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2018, one
year after the confrontation with white nationalists in that city
(Logan Cyrus/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // The New Republic)
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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 _Infowar_s 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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 [[link removed]]: “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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]]
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.
_[__ERIC ALTERMAN_ [[link removed]]_ is
a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, the
director of scholarship at the Nexus Center for Antisemitism Research,
and the author most recently of __We Are Not One: A History of
America’s Fight Over Israel_
[[link removed]]_.] _
* antifa
[[link removed]]
* antifascism
[[link removed]]
* Domestic Terrorism
[[link removed]]
* Nazis
[[link removed]]
* neo-nazism
[[link removed]]
* fascists
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Pam Bondi
[[link removed]]
* Justice Department
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* Prairieland
[[link removed]]
* Right-wing agenda
[[link removed]]
* far right
[[link removed]]
* Charlottesville
[[link removed]]
* Proud Boys
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT
Submit via web
[[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]
Bluesky [[link removed]]
Facebook [[link removed]]
[link removed]
To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
THE GREAT ANTIFA HOAX
[[link removed]]
Eric Alterman
May 3, 2026
The New Republic
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
_ Yes, it exists. It’s not really a threat to anyone except
neo-Nazis—but that’s all the excuse the Trump administration needs
to turn the machinery of federal law enforcement loose on anyone with
“dangerous” ideas. _
Illustration by Wesley Merritt / The New Republic,
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
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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.
An anti-fascist protester carried an upside-down American flag in
Portland, Oregon, in 2021. (Photo: Nathan Howard // The New
Republic)
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
an executive order designating antifa to be a “domestic terrorist
organization.”
The alleged problem of left-wing terrorism returned with a vengeance
following the assassination of right-wing hero Charlie Kirk last
September, a tragedy that Trump blamed, of course without any
supporting evidence, on “Radical Left terrorists.”
Three days later, on September 25, he issued
[[link removed]]
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 additional 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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.
Left, protesters at last October’s “No Kings” rally in
Washington, D.C.; right, a touch of humor at the Atlanta march the
same day (From Left: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call; Julia Beverly //
The New Republic)
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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_
[[link removed]]_,_
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
[[link removed]]
_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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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_
[[link removed]]_,_
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]], 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 and then publish the names and faces of
allegedly respectable citizens who participate in fascist forums,
demonstrations, and other actions.
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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.)
Left, a 1933 protest at Columbia University against the presence on
campus of the German ambassador; right, a Socialist Workers Party
anti-fascist rally in New York circa 1940 (From Left:
Keystone/Hulton Archive; Fpg/Archive Photos // The New Republic)
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_
[[link removed]],
“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
[[link removed]] “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 Jewish philosopher Walter
Benjamin, articulated
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]:
“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
[[link removed]]
that, for the three years ending in 2024, all “extremist-related
murders” it found were tied to “right-wing extremism.”
Antifa marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2018, one
year after the confrontation with white nationalists in that city
(Logan Cyrus/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // The New Republic)
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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 _Infowar_s 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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 [[link removed]]: “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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]]
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.
_[__ERIC ALTERMAN_ [[link removed]]_ is
a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, the
director of scholarship at the Nexus Center for Antisemitism Research,
and the author most recently of __We Are Not One: A History of
America’s Fight Over Israel_
[[link removed]]_.] _
* antifa
[[link removed]]
* antifascism
[[link removed]]
* Domestic Terrorism
[[link removed]]
* Nazis
[[link removed]]
* neo-nazism
[[link removed]]
* fascists
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Pam Bondi
[[link removed]]
* Justice Department
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* Prairieland
[[link removed]]
* Right-wing agenda
[[link removed]]
* far right
[[link removed]]
* Charlottesville
[[link removed]]
* Proud Boys
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT
Submit via web
[[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]
Bluesky [[link removed]]
Facebook [[link removed]]
[link removed]
To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
Message Analysis
- Sender: Portside
- Political Party: n/a
- Country: United States
- State/Locality: n/a
- Office: n/a