A threat or just cosplay?
Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
In the wake of Donald Trump’s (not to mention Stephen Miller’s) threats of vengeance against the “radical left” for a totally unproven complicity in the assassination of Charlie Kirk, anyone concerned about civil liberties or democracy has waited with bated breath for the president’s next steps. At first, he just increased pressure on his subordinates to investigate and prosecute people high on the preexisting Trump-enemies lists, such as James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James. But now, he has issued an executive order, perhaps the first of many, targeting “the left.” It aims at the low-hanging fruit of a near-mythical movement known as “antifa,” labeling it a “domestic terrorist organization” and authorizing the investigation and prosecution of anyone alleged to have helped or funded it.
There are two immediate problems with this EO. First, there is no law supporting the designation of anything or anyone as a “domestic terrorist organization.” There is authority whereby the State Department can designate “foreign domestic terrorist” entities, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, but that’s obviously different. (It’s also worth noting that up until recently the second Trump administration has bristled at any talk of “domestic terrorism” as usually referring to conservative extremists it views as acceptable.)
The second problem is that antifa isn’t actually an organization, as the New York Times explains: “Antifa is a label for a political subculture or protest style. The phenomenon does not have a leader, an initiation process, membership rolls, a headquarters, a bank account or a centralized structure.”
Antifa is largely a label either adopted by or ascribed to a movement or, at most, an extremely loose network of activists devoted to resisting what they regard as incipient fascism. In some cases, putting on masks and carrying black flags may largely represent cosplay. The EO identifies antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” Perhaps that limits the crackdown to people who actually fit that description. But it’s important to note that conservatives toss around the term antifa rather promiscuously. In June, Trump ally Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene labeled her Democratic colleague Maxwell Frost a “former antifa member” in an apparent reference to Frost’s arrest at a peaceful 2021 voting-rights protest led by the Reverend William Barber II.
As for those thought to be working with or funding antifa, those who seem to be the real objects of the EO, you wonder what sorts of conspiracy theories investigators or prosecutors might resort to in order to discern links between “leftist” nonprofits or donors and protesters called “antifa” without any real evidence. One phantom menace can easily lead to another, creating the illusion of a threat to public order and justifying authoritarian measures that will simply drive more people into anti-authoritarian extremism. The very term antifa, moreover, could easily be stretched to put an outlaw label on every American who fears the country is drifting toward suppression of free speech by an imperial executive and a permanent ruling party.
MAGA folk have already been told over and over that all opposition to Trump stems from America haters who consciously tried to destroy the country during the Biden administration by inviting an “invasion” of criminal immigrants, rigging elections, and “weaponizing” law enforcement. The EO may suggest to them that the opposition is now armed, masked, and preparing to seize power violently. It certainly does not contribute to any lowering of temperatures.
