First: What Liberals Get Wrong About Trump’s Executive Order on Antifa by Matthew Whitley, The Intercept followed by the Editor’s content.
Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order claiming to designate antifa as a “domestic terror organization.”
On Thursday, he issued a directive for his government to pursue antifa. Talk spread of another, imminent order on dismantling left-wing groups. It was the culmination of years of obsessing over antifa.
As someone publicly associated with anti-fascist organizing, the proclamations weren’t the greatest shock. The repression is to be expected.
The reaction to Trump’s nakedly illegal designation from progressives, liberal media, and left-leaning think tanks, however, has given me a sense of dread.
That’s because opponents of MAGA have embraced a dangerous narrative:
The antifa designation is moot because there is, simply, nothing to designate. “Antifa,” in this telling, will simply be used as a catchall to repress anyone opposed to Trump when, in truth, it’s just an idea with no concrete grounding in the world.
Opponents of MAGA have embraced a dangerous narrative.
Trump will indeed label just about all his opponents “antifa,” but the terms “antifa” and “antifascist” aren’t hollow references to mere ideas.
Contrary to Republicans’ portrayals, there is no overarching antifa organization or official network. The terms “antifa” and “antifascist,” though, do reflect an actually existing world of activists, researchers, thinkers, and organizers at real risk of persecution and dedicated to a specific politics.
If left-wing organizing is to be defended against Trump’s repression, denying their existence will only do further harm.
From the Editor
Read our guide: What is Antifa? to learn more about the political stance of being against fascism. While there is no official or national organization of “antifa”, there are small groups of activists that use Antifa in the name of their club.
While our new domain may fool someone who isn’t knowledgeable about the characteristics of political ideologies*, anyone who’s into politics in a serious way will “see” the irony of a pro-democracy community of people fighting against the authoritarian Trump administration calling their website “Resist Hate.” (this is why I added a brief note to the Copyright at the bottom of the website: “Use of “Antifa” is purely satirical.”
* Read our new article about the communist Marxist socialist Democrat (or as I like to call them, Commumarxilists.”
However, I’ll be honest with you, I briefly panicked after hearing about the Executive Order because I’ve already received hate messages through the site from people “laughing” because “Trump is going to take you idiots down.” 🙄
I could see Donald Trump and Stephen Miller pulling up Google and searching for “Antifa headquarters” looking for the actual headquarters and finding this website instead. Those guys are psychotuc and MAGA goes all “death and rape threats” on anyone Trump complains about, so I went and removed all of my personal information that was available to the public as the owner of this domain.
I know very well how MAGA feels about the antifa group they invented in their head, so I wasn’t taking any chances that they’d start showing up here, trying to intimidate me.
I don’t mind the intimidation aspect as much as I just don’t have the patience to educate every conservative that comes through here after they see the domain and titld and immediately assume this is actually the headquarters of the “new” domestic terrorist group.
Me and a couple of my #RESISTANCE buddies on Twitter used to post things like, “Hey, what time is the antifa meeting again?” or “I’m bringing the chips to the antifa meeting, can you get the drinks?” We were trolling MAGA after the “It was antifa” theory about January 6th and their endless posts about the Democrats being “members” of antifa as if it were an official group or organization.
After Trump suggested he might designate antifa as a “terrorist organization,” it just wasn’t funny anymore so I wrote an article about what it is and what it’s not. I‘m still so confused as to why Republicans see the people who are fighting to save democracy from a facsist takeover as the “bad guys.” Some of our veterans are technically antifa because they fought in a war against a fascist regime
Last thing. In Germsny, people who were antifa were the good guys.
