Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said one congressman.

After US President Donald Trump absurdly announced late Wednesday night that he planned to designate the amorphous “antifa” movement as a “major terrorist organization,” a Democratic congressman had one request.

“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) on CNN.

Goldman added that Trump is using the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week “as a pretext to go after people he disagrees with.”

“He on the very night of Kirk’s murder, you will remember, accused the left of committing the murder when the murderer had not even been caught or identified,” he said.

“Antifa” is a portmanteau meaning “anti-fascist,” and the term encompasses autonomous individuals and loosely-affiliated groups of people who say they oppose fascism—but with no organizational structure or leaders, it was not clear on Wednesday how the White House would seek to designate the idea of anti-fascist protest “a major terrorist organization.”

As The Guardian noted, since antifa is a US-based movement, it cannot be included on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations as ISIS and al-Qaeda are, allowing the Department of Justice to prosecute those who give material support to those organizations.

“There is no domestic equivalent to that list in part because of broad First Amendment protections enjoyed by organizations operating within the United States,” the outlet added.

Trump’s former FBI director, Christopher Wray, also testified in 2020—during nationwide racial justice protests that Trump also linked to antifa—that there is no organization to designate as a terrorist group.

Mark Bray, a historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, suggested Trump’s threat was akin to a statement claiming that the White House could designate other social justice movements as terrorist groups.

“Antifa is a kind of politics, not a specific group,” Bray told Al Jazeera. “In the same way that there are feminist groups but feminism is not, itself, a group. Any group that calls itself antifa and promotes the basic principles of militant anti-fascism is an antifa group. There is no general headquarters or leader to get official recognition from.”

The number of members of the anti-fascist movement and their identities are not public, and though Trump called for the “funders” of antifa to be investigated, Al Jazeera noted that there is “no way of identifying and collating a list of financiers of the movement”—which mainly raises small amounts of money “for bail,” according to Bray.

“He is trying to promote the common right-wing conspiracy theory that there are shadowy financiers like George Soros playing puppet master behind everything the left does,” Bray told Al Jazeera.

With its stated plan to designate antifa a terrorist group, said left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, “they’re openly admitting they’re fascist.”

Veteran union organizer Charles Idelson added that “surely what Trump and his puppets repeating the lie really want is to ban is anti-fascist thought and speech, and imprison individuals who express it.”

Since Kirk’s killing last week, Trump and others on the right have asserted that left-wing groups and commentators were responsible for the assassination because some had tied Kirk to fascism and racism.

Trump’s claim that he will designate antifa as a terrorist group came soon after ABC, under explicit pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, announced it was taking “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air indefinitely after he remarked on the far-right MAGA movement’s reaction to the killing—a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment, said rights advocates.

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Washington Post that Trump’s plan for antifa’s designation would “raise significant First Amendment, due process, and equal protection concerns.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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