Donald Trump. (image: Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
01 June 20
t’s not a real organization, “ANTIFA.” And even if it were, there is no such thing as a domestic federal terror designation.
But President Donald Trump’s tweet that the U.S. “will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization” is a very real threat.
Trump’s Sunday offering came as federal and local authorities across the country scrambled to contain increasingly violent protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police
in Minneapolis. Trump, who over several years has launched numerous
tirades against anti-fascists, blamed the movement—really, a set of
organizing tactics—for vandalism at the protests.
Although he has previously threatened legal action
against anti-fascists (“ANTIFA,” in his preferred Twitter styling), the
tweet was followed by a statement from Attorney General William Barr
claiming that “violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other
similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and
will be treated accordingly.”
Veteran FBI agents and Homeland Security analysts
immediately called the “terrorism” label little more than a cynical
maneuver to encourage police violence at antiracist demonstrations that
have increasingly been labeled the work of nefarious outsiders.
“Why the strong rhetoric directed at antifa when you
haven’t come out and condemned white supremacists as domestic terror
groups?” said Daryl Johnson, a former DHS analyst stifled during the Obama administration for warning about far-right extremism.
“Anti-fascist” is, among many things, an adjective,
not a group. The term can apply to people who personally object to
fascism—a large segment of the American populace—as well as people who
actively oppose fascism as part of several localized groups across the
country.
There is, however, no centralized organization.
“Anti-fascism consists of a variety of different
actors and actions,” said Stanislav Vysotsky, an associate professor of
sociology at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, and author of a
forthcoming book on the subject. “Those can be informal: any kind of
practice that opposes fascism, and can be taken on by individuals, or
they can be formal, which are based in affinity group structures.
There’s no formal organization, but there are people who organize as
anti-fascists in order to oppose fascist activity.
Sarah Smith, who spoke to The Daily Beast under a
pseudonym for fear of reprisal, is a member of Atlanta Antifascists, one
of those organized groups. She said the broad usage of the term
“anti-fascist” leads to right-wingers conflating everyone from members
of organizations like hers, to “anybody who says anything bad about
Nazis, for example.”
She added that groups like hers are often accused of
being much further-reaching than they actually are. “If a right-winger
stubs their toe, it’s ‘oh no, it’s antifa.’ At a certain point, we’ve
got a little inured to it,” she said. “But what Trump is saying is going
to increase that trend of blaming us for everything people don’t like,
even though our mission is very specific. We really do what we say we
do: we monitor the far-right locally.”
Just as “ANTIFA” doesn’t exist in the sense that Trump
pretends it does, neither does an official “domestic terrorism” label
for groups inside the United States.
Only the domestic adjuncts of
foreign terrorist organizations fall under the rubric of “designated”
terrorist organizations, as so labeled by the State Department. Moreover, the chief investigative and prosecutorial tools against such
designated organizations are material-support statutes, designed to
choke off the flow of money into banned groups. Antifa, which is not an
organization, simply does not work that way.
But that doesn’t mean federal and local agencies won’t
take action against anti-fascists in an attempt to comply with
directives from Washington.
The FBI declined to comment Sunday on what
“counterterrorism” measures it would take against anti-fascists. Barr,
in a statement after Trump’s tweet, pledged to use the FBI’s Joint
Terrorism Task Forces, which combine state, local and federal law
enforcement, to “identify criminal organizers and instigators.”
Mike German, a former FBI special agent who disrupted
neo-nazi organizations in the 1990s, suggested Trump was making antifa
into a scapegoat even as more nefarious right-wing actors were lurking
on the periphery.
“It seems to be an effort to distract from the
documented presence of white supremacist militia groups at these
protests and their rhetoric in wanting to instigate further violence
that would potentially flow into a civil war or a race war,” he told The
Daily Beast.
But experts said that, however pre-textually, Trump and Barr’s directives pose real dangers to protesters.
DHS’ Fusion Centers, information hubs to state and
local law enforcement, can run database checks and put out notices for
local cops to monitor known or suspected criminals who might be
protesting. German said he expected high-level pressure on the FBI and
JTTFs to result in “aggressive investigation and selective prosecution
against people the FBI labels with this umbrella term” of
anti-fascist—resources he expected would flow out of investigations of
violent white supremacist or militia groups. The DHS did not immediately
return a request for comment.
Adding to the potential for harm is that, while more
experienced activists may take measures to protect themselves from
scrutiny, casual opponents of fascism might not, Smith, the Atlanta
anti-fascist noted.
“We don’t have any [membership] dues, we don’t use
real names. There would be nothing to make illegal,” Smith noted. “If
the government is coming after us, it probably won’t affect us as much
as it would normal people who are engaged in normal, anti-fascist
things.”
Vysotsky echoed Smith’s concern that an effort to
target anti-fascists could affect “any organization or individual that
aligns left of fascism. It opens up a huge space to designate virtually
any person who opposes any kind of authoritarian movement toward
fundamental inequality and violence as being a terrorist.”
That includes many of the thousands protesting racism and police brutality in the wake of Floyd’s death.
Welcome to the club, says the group New York City Antifa.
“For a lot of inexperienced folks who haven’t engaged
in activism much before, the realities of the police state and
surveillance apparatus can be shocking or incredibly frightening,” NYC
Antifa told The Daily Beast, noting past government infiltration and
surveillance of anti-war, environmental, and racial justice groups.
“Solidarity is essential, because the next person on
these lists could really end up being you,” they added. “When we all
support each other and know we don’t have to face down the government
alone, it circumvents the fallout of these ‘terrorism’ designations.”
Even though the feds have no mechanism to add an
official “domestic terror” title for anti-fascists, people who could be
described as antifa have previously faced aggressive prosecution when
accused of “conspiring” with each other. In 2017, more than 100
protesters at Trump’s inauguration were charged with an alleged
conspiracy to riot, based on characteristics stereotypical of
anti-fascists, like wearing black clothing. The charges, for which
defendants faced decades in prison, were later dropped after it was revealed that prosecutors partially based their case on deceptively edited video from a right-wing organization.
The terror title is “a convenient label for them to
target activists with grand juries, investigations, arrests, and
potentially longer prison sentences,” NYC Antifa said.
Trump previously threatened to label anti-fascists as “a major Organization of Terror” in July 2019. “Would make it easier for police to do their job!” he claimed.
While provocative tweets emanate from him all the time, shots at “antifa” are one of Trump’s preferred rhetorical ploys, German noted.
Trump previously threatened to label anti-fascists as “a major Organization of Terror” in July 2019. “Would make it easier for police to do their job!” he claimed.
While provocative tweets emanate from him all the time, shots at “antifa” are one of Trump’s preferred rhetorical ploys, German noted.
“It’s somewhat of another method of Trump’s rhetoric
giving aid and comfort to white supremacists and militias and
encouraging violence, whether it’s state violence, police violence, or
non-state groups,” he said. “The effort to label the demonstrators as
‘outsiders’ was meant to justify an increasingly aggressive and violent
police response. That was indiscriminate. You didn’t see them attack
‘outsiders,’ you saw them attack people in the streets and journalists.”
But, he added, speaking forebodingly of the potential
blowback on the street of such a statement on high, “If anti-fascist
organizations are your enemies, that is what law enforcement would call a
clue.”
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