Trump Declares Antifa (Which Is Not An Organization) A “Domestic Terrorist Organization” (Which Isn’t A Thing In Federal Law)

On Sept. 21, Trump signed an executive order declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.”  But antifa is not an organization and there’s no such thing as a “domestic terrorist organization” under federal law. Antifa simply means anti-fascist, and refers to activists focused on fighting the rise of fascism–which explains why Trump and his base are angered by them. 

But antifa isn’t an organization, it’s a fluid collaborative of activists and allies, who, for example, played a leading role in confronting the white nationalist “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when a neo-Nazi drove his crowd into a crowd of anti-fascists, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

That violence threatened to badly split the right, so an online troll known as Microchip started a petition to get antifa labelled as terrorists. At the time, Politico reported, “he wrote it with the explicit intent of stoking conservative rage and forcing the GOP establishment to take a stand or risk becoming targets themselves.”

“It was to bring our broken right side together” after Charlottesville, he told Politico, “and prop up antifa as a punching bag.”

“So the narrative changed from ‘I hate myself because we have neo-Nazis on our side’ to ‘I really hate antifa, let’s get along and tackle the terrorism,’” he said.

There’s more neo-Nazis than ever on Trump’s side. So this new executive order makes perfect sense, strategically, as nonsensical as it is in terms of reality.