US President Donald Trump signed an order designating the Antifa movement as a domestic terrorist organization, the White House said, in a move sparked by the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Antifa is a shorthand term for “anti-fascist” used to describe diffuse far-left groups, and there have been questions since Trump first mooted the designation last week about how to define it.
Trump’s order described Antifa as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government” and was using “violence and terrorism” to suppress free speech.
“Because of the aforementioned pattern of political violence designed to suppress lawful political activity and obstruct the rule of law, I hereby designate Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization, ‘” said the order.
But in an apparent nod to the questions about how to define Antifa, his order accused it of using “elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives.”
It used the same methods to hide its sources of funding and recruit new members, the order said.
Trump’s order also casts a net wide against the nebulous group.
His order says US authorities can act against “any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa, or for which Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa provided material support.”
Trump has repeatedly warned of a crackdown on left-wing groups since the assassination of activist Kirk, who was killed on September 10 at a Utah university campus, sparking right-wing rage.
US authorities have charged the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, with murder. Robinson justified the attack by citing the “hatred” he accused Kirk of spreading, according to investigators.
ST PAUL, MN – DECEMBER 05: A man wears a hockey mask and a hat with a dollar bill imprinted with President Donald Trump looks on as protesters rally outside the Governor’s Mansion on December 5, 2020 in St Paul, Minnesota. People gathered to demand a response from Gov. Tim Walz and protest the state’s coronavirus lockdown measures and the results of the recent presidential election. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images/AFP (Photo by Stephen Maturen / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)
Rise In Violence
But Trump has also threatened action against what he has called Antifa since his first term.
He has blamed it for various wrongs, from violence against police to being behind the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, that aimed to block Joe Biden’s presidential election win.
Critics of the Republican president warn such a move could be used as a pretext to quash dissent and target political rivals.
While Kirk was a vocal conservative, the United States has seen violence targeting members of both political parties in recent years, amid a sharp rise in polarization and easy access to firearms.
Who is Antifa?
Antifa stands for anti-fascism, and the name comes from early 1930s Germany, where socialist “anti-fa” groups attempted to stand up to the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.
Antifa has no national leader or centralized organizational structure and is made up of “independent, radical, like-minded groups and individuals,” according to a 2020 Congressional Research Service analysis.
Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” said Antifa is “a kind of coalition politics of all kinds of radicals, from different kinds of socialists to communists, anarchists, and more independent radicals.”
“Sometimes I compare it to feminism,” Bray, a historian at Rutgers University, told The Washington Post. “There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are Antifa groups, but Antifa itself is not a group.”
Anti-fascist groups in the United States have campaigned on a range of social justice issues in the past two decades, but their principal focus has been countering the resurgence of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.
One of the oldest, Rose City Antifa of Portland, Oregon, began in 2007 to shut down a neo-Nazi skinhead music festival called Hammerfest.
Antifa-aligned activists, often masked and dressed entirely in black, protest against racism, far-right values, and what they consider fascism, and say violent tactics are sometimes justified in self-defense.
Such protesters have been increasingly involved in direct confrontations with right-wing groups since Trump’s first election to the White House in 2016.
During Trump’s January 20, 2017, inauguration, scores of black-clad, mask-wearing Antifa followers and other protestors smashed windows in Washington.
In August that year, they were at the vanguard of counter-demonstrations when white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, and engaged in physical fights with the rightists.
Can Trump Designate Antifa As Terrorists?
Unclear.
While federal law enforcement’s purview includes combating domestic terrorism, the United States has no statute that permits designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations, as there is for foreign groups like the Islamic State or Al-Qaeda.
During his first term in office, following the protests against police brutality sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Trump announced that he would designate Antifa as “terrorists” on the same level as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State but nothing came of it.
The global terror designation is a powerful tool for law enforcement: it permits the arrest and imprisonment of someone who merely expresses support for those jihadist groups or others.
That law has not been expanded to domestic groups for good reason: such a law, many fear, could tempt a leader to deploy it against political rivals and would violate First Amendment free speech protections.
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