Trump Has No Idea What Antifa Is, Designates It 'A Major Terrorist Organization' Anyway
That should end well.
As the crackdown on our First Amendment rights continues, Donald Trump has officially declared “Antifa” a major terrorist organization.
“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post. “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
There are many problems with this. First, there is no such organization as “Antifa.” Second, no one is funding “Antifa.” Third, there is no actual mechanism in federal law to designate a group as a domestic terrorist group or to explicitly charge someone with committing or supporting domestic terrorism (as there is for foreign terrorist groups).
As explained in a Congressional Research Service report:
Unlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with DT, which sometimes makes it difficult (and occasionally controversial) to formally characterize someone as a domestic terrorist. Further, domestic terrorists may adhere to the ideologies of certain extremist movements or belong to hate or extremist groups, but unlike the formal process involved in designating foreign terrorist organizations, DT movements and groups are not officially labeled as such by the federal government, thereby making it difficult to categorize the threat presented by any group or movement as a DT threat.
There are obviously significant First Amendment issues with designating any group to be a domestic terrorist group — especially when that group, like antifa, is not a group at all.
In a way, you might say there are two “A/antifas.”
There is actual antifa — which is primarily a political philosophy held by loosely organized, leaderless autonomous groups that use a variety of tactics, mostly of the non-violent civil disobedience variety, but occasionally of the violent variety, to agitate for various left-wing causes and against the far Right and white supremacists.
This would be akin to defining “MAGA” as a domestic terror organization.
Then there is the Antifa that exists in the fevered imaginations of Donald Trump and friends, which is difficult to define for a different reason — that reason being that they kind of just make it up as they go along. They seem to believe that these groups are well-organized and well-funded by shadowy groups (often shadowy foreign groups, or just George Soros). I have to tell you, from personal experience, the very idea of that is absolutely hilarious. We’re talking about small, local, direct action affinity groups largely made up of anarchists and communists in their late teens and 20s whose biggest political expenses (aside from bail money) include things like bandanas and gas money.
Who do these MAGA folks think they even know who would give them money? Do they think these kids are hobnobbing with billionaires at $10,000 a plate dinners? Maybe they do, because that’s exactly what their young activists are doing, but let’s not get it twisted.
The Left does not have anywhere near the funding that the Right has. We don’t have 87,000 streaming news channels, we don’t have ginormous, live-streamed conventions funded by wealthy donors, pretty much all of our partisan media at this point is funded by “viewers like you” (thank you by the way!), we’re not out here buying up FOX News and forcing it to comply with our political beliefs.
I’m also going to have to point out that the rich donors we do have are known to freak out about people like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, so what on earth would they be doing funding grassroots anti-fascist groups?
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while it is still legal to do so!If Trump were to somehow get his way, create an official federal classification and federal charge for domestic terrorism and label “Antifa” as a “major domestic terrorist group,” the fact that they don’t know what antifa is and have no interest in learning would make this whole situation even more dangerous. They could say that absolutely anything they want is “Antifa” and throw people in prison accordingly. They could perhaps even say “Hey! Wonkette doesn’t seem to like fascists very much! Let’s arrest them, along with everyone who donates to them for ‘providing material support’ to a terrorist group!”
The fact is, it’s scary even if he can’t do that, because there are a whole lot of people out there who think he can, and the more they are willing to accept that, the more likely it will be that he will someday have that power.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
You know, they said that the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would be first against the wall when the revolution came, but the revolution turned out to be fascists, and though I don't want anyone to die, if Trump and his goons are going to come for folks, I'd be honoured to be first against the wall.
Yes, hello, it is I, Auntie Fa. I told all those kids to do political actions.