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fascism
'There Is No Antifa Organization,' But Trump Still Wants to Designate It a 'Major Terrorist' Group
"I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization," said one congressman.
Sep 18, 2025
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."
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Has Trump’s Reichstag Moment Arrived?
All Hitler needed in 1933 was an excuse, and it didn't take him long to find one. The fire this time may be the assassination of a key figure in the MAGA movement.
Sep 12, 2025
Is this America’s Reichstag moment? The murder of conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing Turning Point USA organization, and the overheated response it generated in MAGA world, may come to be seen as its own turning point on the path to autocratic rule in the United States.
Officials in Utah on Friday announced the apprehension of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson as the suspected murderer, but already in the less than 48 hours since the abhorrent assassination of a top Trump confidant, chilling echoes can be heard that remind us of how Adolph Hitler exploited a fire at the German Parliament, the Reichstag, in 1933 to remove his final impediments to unleashing a horrific dictatorship in the Third Reich.
Kirk had become a key figure in the Trump movement. His mobilizing on college campuses which was credited as spiking the youth vote for Trump, proclivity at demonizing Democrats and the left, mainstreaming racism, and outspoken role as a 2020 election denier, led Trump to call him “one of 3 or 4 people most responsible for my (2024) election.” Trump and multiple Trump followers quickly branded the murder as a violent attack on the entire Trump movement, “all of us,” promising threats of war. Fox News talking head Jesse Waters declared, “we’re going to avenge Charlie (Kiirk’s) death.”
As usual, Trump led the recriminations and threat of retaliation. “For years, the radical left has compared wonderful Americans like Charlie Kirk to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals,” said Trump in a widely broadcast video. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
In singling out attacks by the so-called “radical left” in his video, Trump seeks to create a counter-narrative of who is provoking political violence, for example, ignoring the recent murder of Democrat Melissa Hortman, the former state house speaker and her husband, Mark, by a reported Trump supporter, an act Utah Sen. Mike Lee blamed on “Marxists.”
Trump and others on the right mocked the attempted murder of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. Trump routinely urged supporters to assault protesters at 2016 campaign rallies. And, most notably, Trump pardoned over 1,500 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those who assaulted Capitol police officers and some of whom have since been re-arrested and charged with subsequent crimes.
Further, some of the most notorious mass killings in recent years were committed by shooters with far-right and white supremacist leanings, including at an El Paso Walmart, Buffalo grocery store, Charleston Black church, and Pittsburgh synagogue.
Blaming the left and Democrats in general for the Kirk shooting, and the broader array of what Fox personality Sean Hannity calls “ten nonstop years of rage and hatred and a vile language,” and a left whose “ideology is pure evil,” as GOP Rep. Rob Onder insisted on the House floor Thursday, signals the specter of a broader, dangerous response.
Since starting his second term, Trump has steadily moved to expand his authoritarian rule, emphatically evidenced by his draconian secret agent deportation raids and use of federal troops to invade cities in Democratic-led states and cities not to “fight crime,” but as a warning to political opponents. However, he has chafed against lower court legal setbacks and other perceived restraints on his power grab and prepared for opportunities to take the next step. Kirk’s murder, and the vitriolic demands for further crackdown by influential members of Trump's MAGA team and supporters, draw a parallel in history.
When Hitler was appointed Chancellor in Germany on January 30, 1933, he still had some limits imposed by right-wing coalition partners and the aging Weimer Republic President Paul von Hindenburg. A month later, on February 27, 1933, a fire broke out in the Reichstag gutting the building. Hitler quickly seized on the blaze as an opportunity to fulfill his dreams.
Rushing to the Reichstag, Hitler boasted “we will show no mercy anymore,” notes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days. “Whoever gets in our way will be slaughtered.” He meant Communists,” but also proclaimed “we also have to move against the Social Democrats. We are not sparing anyone.”
“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history,” Hitler told British journalist Sefton Delmer “that night as they watched the flames consume Parliament. The fire is the beginning,” recounts Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.
The next morning, Hitler persuaded the cabinet, and Hindenburg signed an executive order, the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State. The Reichstag Fire Decree, writes Benjamin Carter Hett in The Death of Democracy “tore the heart out of the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic, cancelling at a stroke freedom of speech and assembly, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.”
The decree not only “suspended all legal protection of speech, assembly, property, and personal liberty, and permitted authorities to arrest” people at whim,” observes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, it had another provision that may look especially attractive to Trump. “It gave the federal government authority over the state governments’ police power.” Now, adds Carter Hett, it even “allowed the central government to remove any state government from office.”
A month later, following a new election that increased Hitler’s hold on government, an additional emergency decree transformed the “constitutional and temporary dictatorship” into what Fritzsche calls an “unconstitutional and permanent dictatorship.”
“Hitler had secured the ability to govern without any checks on the exercise of his authority,” says Ben-Ghiat. “The fire allowed the Nazis to create a society where it was always wartime, the single act of terror a justification for emergency rule,” writes Fritzsche. “The Reichstag Fire Decree became the legal foundation for Hitler’s twelve-year dictatorship,” says Carter Hett.
“The Left is the party of murder,” posted Elon Musk on his X platform after Kirk’s murder. “It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” declared Trump’s influential friend Laura Loomer. Trump reiterated the heart of these themes in his video address.
Will he make this his Reichstag moment? Only stepped-up opposition by all of us to dictatorship can stop him.
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Democratic Senators Should Refuse to Fund Trump’s Fascist Government
Keeping the US government funded now is to participate in the most atrocious misuse of the power of the United States in modern times.
Sep 09, 2025
The US government runs out of money September 30.
Under ordinary circumstances, I would see that as a huge problem. I was secretary of labor when the government closed down, and I vowed then that I’d do everything possible to avoid a similar calamity in the future.
Under ordinary circumstances, people like you and me—who believe that government is essential for the common good—would fight like hell to keep the government funded beyond September 30.
But we are not in ordinary circumstances. The US government has become a neofascist regime run by a sociopath.
That sociopath is using the government to punish his enemies. He’s using the government to rake in billions of dollars for himself and his family.
He’s using the government to force the leaders of every institution in our society—universities, media companies, law firms, even museums—to become fawning supplicants: pleading with him, praising him, and silencing criticism of him.
Morally, Democrats must not enable what is now occurring. Politically, they cannot remain silent in the face of such mayhem.
He is using the government to disappear people from our streets without due process. He is using the government to occupy our cities, overriding the wishes of mayors and governors.
He is using the government to impose arbitrary and capricious import taxes—tariffs—on American consumers. He is using the government to worsen climate change. He is using government to reject our traditional global allies and strengthen some of the worst monsters around the globe.
Keeping the US government funded now is to participate in the most atrocious misuse of the power of the United States in modern times.
So I for one have decided that the best route is to shut the whole f*cking thing down.
Morally, Democrats must not enable what is now occurring. Politically, they cannot remain silent in the face of such mayhem.
To keep the government funded, Senate Republicans need seven Democratic senators to join them.
Last March, when the government was about to run out of money, Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, voted to join Republicans and keep the government going. Schumer successfully got enough of his Democratic colleagues to follow him that the funding bill passed.
As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has argued, even if you supported Schumer’s decision then, this time feels different.
By now, US President Donald Trump has become full fascist.
Congressional Republicans are cowed, spineless, deferential, unwilling to make even a small effort to retain Congress’ constitutional powers.
The public is losing faith that the Democratic Party has the capacity to stand up to Trump—largely because it is in the minority in both chambers of Congress.
But this doesn’t mean Democrats must remain silent.
If they refuse to vote to join Republicans in keeping the government open, that act itself will make them louder and more articulate than they’ve been in eight months.
It will give them an opportunity to explain that they cannot in good conscience participate in what is occurring. They will have a chance to show America that they have chosen to become conscientious objectors to a government that is no longer functioning for the people of the United States but for one man.
They will be able to point out the devastating realities of Trump’s regime: its lawlessness, its corruption, its cruelty, its brutality.
They will be able argue that voting to fund this government would violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
Then what?
They can then use their newfound leverage—the only leverage they’ve mustered in eight months—to demand, in return for their votes to restart the government, that their Republican compatriots give them reason to believe that the government they restart will be responsible.
It is time for Democrats to stand up to Trump. This is the time. This is their clearest opportunity.
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