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.
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.
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.”
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.”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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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 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.”
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.)
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.”)
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
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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