Trump Held 'Antifa' Roundtable To Protect America From Dancing Unicorns
Oppose Trump, you're a terrorist, basically.
Donald Trump and some of his top flunkies held a very important meeting at the White House yesterday where they claimed that “antifa” — the idea of opposing fascism, not an actual organized group — is a very real terrorist threat that must be countered with the full force of the federal government. The White House invited a bunch of rightwing social media cranks and conspiracy theorists to take part in the “Antifa Roundtable,” and used the opportunity to elevate those bozos — whose output is regularly and easily debunked — as serious “journalists” who are getting the real truth to the American people.
Among the truth-tellers invited to the confab was Absolutely Fabulist conspiracymonger Jack Posobiec, the weirdo who was a chief promoter of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. He offered some historical context for the discussion, insisting that Antifa is very real, very much a distinct organization, and that it “has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.”
Gosh, makes you wonder what became of the ordinary folks who were victimized by those early antifascists in Weimar Germany. Given the absolute brutality of antifa, they were probably wiped out and never got to sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”
But it would be a huge mistake to simply dismiss the meeting as a clown show and a distraction. Yes, everyone at the event was a deeply unserious person, administration figures included. But the fuckers at the head of the table, Trump and his Cabinet of Freaks, have real power and intend to use it to crack down on opponents (if paywalled, archive link) of the administration. These people are a joke, but the power they have is not.
Liar-in-Chief Donald Trump offered this wholly unsupported vision of hell on earth in Portland, which bears no relation to reality.
“You look at Portland and you see fires all over the place,” Trump said. “You see fights, I mean, just violence. It’s so crazy. And then you talk to the governor, and she acts like everything is totally normal. There’s nothing wrong. Are you waking up from a dream or something? You see it on your network, you see it all over the place, and it’s so bad. It’s so crazy. It’s like the movies you see for the kids, where you have these bombed-out cities and these bombed-out people.”
Trump added even more wild bullshit, claiming, “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows. Most of the retailers have left.”
Portland remains resolutely not in ruins, however. Apparently the costume shops haven’t closed, or perhaps brave smugglers have brought inflatable costumes through the front lines.
Yesterday’s Running of the Bullshit involved a lot of delusional nonsense that’s being translated, through the magic of unchecked abuse of power, into very real policies. Among other things, Trump said at the meeting that he’s designating “Antifa” as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a label that will potentially allow the administration to impose financial and legal penalties on actual groups and people, at least if the courts go along with that designation of an idea as a terrorist organization.
Gluttons for abusing their eyes and ears can watch the whole sordid thing here, but we won’t embed it because we love you.
Trump also claimed that his August 25 executive order ordering the Justice Department to prosecute burning the US flag, and jailing offenders for at least a year, had actually performed a small miracle. Never mind that the Supreme Court declared flag burning a protected form of free speech. The order insists that some acts of flag burning constitute “fighting words” or incitement of “imminent lawless action,” neither of which are protected by the First Amendment. By that pretended legal alchemy, Trump bragged nonsensically,
We took the freedom of speech away because that’s been through the courts, and the courts said “you have freedom of speech” but what has happened is when you burn a flag, it agitates and irritates crowds — never seen anything like it, on both sides — and you end up with riots.
So we’re going on that basis. We’re looking at it from, not from the freedom of speech, which I always felt strongly about, but never passed the courts. This is what they do is they incite when you burn an American flag, you incite tremendous violence.
Aren’t you glad we told you ahead of time what the fuck he thought he was talking about? You certainly couldn’t have made sense of it from what he actually dribbled from his mouthparts.
And again, while what Trump is proposing here is yet another attempt to sidestep the Constitution, he fully intends real prosecutions and will spend real money to defend that unconstitutional action in court.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem explained that the dreaded nonexistent terrorist organization is “just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA (Tren de Aragua), as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas — as all of them — they are just as dangerous.” This might have been more convincing if she hadn’t made a big deal on social media this week of how she faced down the Antifa army in Portland: several protesters, photographers, and a guy in a chicken suit.
But again, the fact that the “terrorists” are college students dancing around in funny costumes isn’t going to get in the way of potentially lethal action. Here’s AG Pam Bondi promising to do to “Antifa” what the administration has already been doing against drug cartels, which the administration has proclaimed to be “terrorists” — also on flimsy legal grounds.
Bondi promised that the administration will escalate well beyond “just arresting people in the street.” Now that Antifa is a “terrorist organization,” she said, the administration will move on to “breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels. We’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa, destroy the entire organization, from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart.” Bondi didn’t explicitly say that would include extrajudicial murder via drone strikes, but that certainly has been a key part of Trump policy.
In other bullshit as policy, Trump insisted that protesters all over the country are clearly being given financial support, because, you know, the signs!
When you see the signs and they’re all made out of a beautiful, beautiful paper, beautiful nice stiff, very expensive paper with beautiful wood handles, all the same, all the same color. They come from very expensive printing machines.
Obviously, such a thing would not be possible without the deep pockets of a George Soros, or at least not without a lot of businesses that offer fairly affordable commercial printing on demand.
But again, while the example is insane, the actions the administration is taking are very real, and as we expected, are aimed at embuggering the finances of liberal groups. “Antifa” may not have a bank account, but ActBlue, superPACs that fund progressive causes, and other nonprofits certainly do, as do big individual donors Trump has already targeted, like George Soros and Reid Hoffman.
FBI Director Kash Patel told the Gathering of the Jerkalos that the FBI “will not rest until we find every single seed money, donor organization and funding mechanism” that can conceivably be portrayed as connected to “antifa.” He said his agency is partnering with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “who is allowing us to map out these networks through their financial criminal activities, which has been going on for decades.”
Again: there’s no actual “antifa terrorism.” But simply designating groups as “criminal” opens very boring political funding groups to invasive investigative fuckery in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Even if the administration never actually manages to link any acts of violence — such as the murder of Charlie Kirk — to progressive groups, the costs of dealing with the “investigations” will be burdensome, the threat of legal fishing expeditions into donors will reduce contributions, and groups trying to fight fascism will have a harder time of it. Chilling effect? Your funding is frozen in it.
And as this Reuters piece on the multiagency effort to investigate liberal groups (archive link too) explains, the fuckery is already afoot, and Trump’s chief goon Stephen Miller is running the whole operation in the name of fighting “domestic terrorism.” The story’s main source is an unnamed White House official, who explained that Miller is taking a “hands on” role in digging into nonprofits’ funding, and meets regularly with Trump, as well as with Bondi, Bessent, and other Cabinet officials to make fucking over leftish groups a whole-of-government project.
In response to a request from Reuters,
[The] White House highlighted seven political protests in 2023 and 2025 that included acts of violence directed against law enforcement officials, and two incidents of vandalism at Tesla dealerships this year as well as half a dozen social media posts celebrating the damage.
It named nine liberal groups, donors or fundraising organizations that it said helped finance or plan protests where the violent incidents occurred. […]
The list includes Soros' Open Society Foundations; ActBlue, the funding arm of the Democratic Party; Indivisible, a grassroots coalition opposed to Trump policies and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a Los Angeles-based group.
A second White House official said, for the sake of legal ass-covering, that the groups on the list weren’t necessarily being investigated for criming, but just the fact that the administration has a list is pretty fucking worrying. Yet another White House official, playing bad cop, said, “The goal is to destabilize Soros’ network,” because even if they can’t actually charge him with anything, they have the power to fuck with progressive groups, so they will.
Again, all of this is based on bullshit, but the damage they can do is considerable. As Reuters explains, there are a whole bunch of investigative and law-enforcement tools ripe for the abusing, including some that could actually shut down groups the administration targets. Their chief weapon is fear. Fear and surprise. And also a fanatical devotion to Great Leader. But also, there are:
IRS investigations to strip them of tax-exempt status; criminal probes by the Justice Department and FBI; surveillance by federal law enforcement agencies; the use of RICO statutes typically used for organized crime and financial investigations under anti-terror laws to identify donors and funders, according to people familiar with investigations and public statements by officials.
In coordination with the meeting of rightwing liars yesterday, the administration also released a weird list of gripes from seven Actual Portlanders that supposedly prove Portland really is a war zone. Or at least, in a detail from a BBC report the White House didn’t mention, the one square block around the ICE facility is. (The statements are remarkably non-war-ravaged, though one business owner said his place had been broken into ten times, which surely means the Marines must be deployed immediately. One other resident claimed that it’s “like a war zone” because sometimes the tear gas fired by ICE gets into her place.)
Hilariously, even though some White House interns gleaned all seven of the examples from press reports and social media posts, the press release is titled “Fake News Ignores Antifa Violence, Residents’ Pleas for Help.” That’s every bit as real as the rest of this made-up crisis — but it’ll still translate into real repression.
OPEN THREAD!
[CNN / Independent / Reuters (archive link) / WaPo / BBC]
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BTW choking on a shot of vodka will most definitely set your lungs on fire and and have you seeing sparkly stars like in cartoons. Do not recommend.
OT
Remember that rape case in France? Gisele Pelicots’ husband arranged for multiple men to drug and rape her. All the men were convicted.
One of the men appealed his case. Result: he got a longer sentence. 🥳🎉🎊