A proposed nonbinding resolution by Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy to designate antifascist activists, also know as antifa, as “domestic terrorists” is an unsurprising but deeply worrisome escalation of the GOP’s steady embrace of white nationalism and its inevitable efforts to suppress domestic dissent. This escalation has now extended to an effort to obscure the violence of right-wing extremists.
Portlanders like myself are more familiar with antifa than most Americans, as they have a relatively large presence in our city, pretty much in direct relation to the fact that Oregon and the Pacific Northwest are the unfortunate repository of a variety of right-wing hate groups and white-supremacist organizations. The city has been the site of various fairly large-scale altercations between antifa and these right-wing extremists, involving both violence and injuries (including to bystanders harmed by the police response). My personal commitment to non-violent protest means that I find myself in full opposition to antifa tactics, even as I have no quarrel with their identification of right-wing extremism as a force that must be countered and rolled back at every opportunity. But at this point, it appears that, in Portland at least, antifa efforts are having the opposite of the effect they intend, their tactics muddying public perceptions of the clear and present danger of right-wing extremism; their actions mean that the politically delegitimizing taint of violence is not associated solely with right-wing freaks, and they create a sense of equivalence between the two sides so that right-wing extremism is not seen as sharply as the unique threat that it is.
Yet, having said this, there is simply no real comparison between right-wing extremists and the efforts of antifa. In an era of rising far-right violence that has claimed literally hundreds of lives over the past decade, antifa activists have been responsible for exactly zero deaths. That’s right — none at all. And while their violence and resulting injuries should not be excused or ignored, antifa simply lacks the organizational coherence, aims, or tactics that would argue for a domestic terrorism label for the movement. There is no antifa entity or hierarchy to be targeted; in a similar vein, its aims simply do no match the standard conceptions of terrorism. For instance, the Patriot Act indicates that “a group commits domestic terrorism by committing crimes dangerous to human life that seem meant to intimidate the public, influence government policy by coercion or affect the government’s conduct by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” Antifa street brawling does not meet these ideas of “mass destruction,” “assassination,” or “kidnapping.” In a broader sense, domestic terrorism is an attack on a free and open society, by using violence to remove the sense of personal safety necessary to conduct public and private life: again, this description does not fit antifa, which directs its efforts at a specific group of far-right agitators and ideologues.
On the other hand, right-wing extremism, in its various violent manifestations, fully meets these standards for defining domestic terrorism. The targeting of Americans for the color of their skin, for their gender, or for their religion aims to make vast swathes of the American population feel under threat, and reflect agendas that seek to fundamentally degrade the lives of literally millions of people.
Give these facts, alongside the statistics I cited above that leave no doubt that the preeminent and ongoing terror threat facing Americans today comes not from the far-left, or anarchists, or jihadists, but from far-right extremists, it might seem puzzling that the Republican Party has decided this is a fine time to direct law enforcement’s attention against a movement that identifies itself primarily by its opposition to. . . far-right extremists.
Even if there were no rising threat of white supremacist and right-wing extremism that cries out for far more massive and coordinated law enforcement and political attention than exists at present, it would still be a massive overreach and waste of resources for the government to deem antifa as domestic terrorists. The most benign explanation for GOP interest in such a move is to play to its Fox News-addled base, for whom the network has painted antifa as a dire threat to the republic. But I think we are well past benign explanations for the Republican Party’s actions regarding the politicization of terrorism and of protestors deemed left-wing. A more persuasive motivation for this Senate maneuver is to attempt to associate progressives and liberals with antifa, which is much more destructive an effort if antifa can be called, with federal imprimatur, a terrorist organization. It is also quite believable that such a “domestic terrorist” designation, based on such a loosely defined group, could be used for even more corrupt purposes; in the worst scenario, it would be a tool to suppress any sort of demonstrations against right-wing extremism, a possible misuse that’s been raised by the Anti-Defamation League in response to the proposed Senate resolution.
We also can’t look away from how the GOP has been conquered by white nationalism, a racist ideology which inevitably sanctions state violence against minorities and others, and so is contiguous with non-governmental violence against these same groups. A guiding strategy that puts the interests of white Americans above all others is racist, and racism is always an invitation to dehumanization of and violence against those excluded as not full citizens, not to mention those who aren’t citizens at all. And when the president of the United States feels comfortable using racist language to argue that brown-skinned U.S. representatives don’t belong in this country, and incites hatred against whole populations, many extremists will take this as tacit encouragement for their individual and collective acts of violence against these same groups. From this perspective, then, there might be a tacit understanding that the GOP needs to downplay the expressions of violence by extremists who differ from many Republicans in degree but not in kind. How better to blur the stakes than to demonize a group that opposes right-wing extremists?
It is also not convincing that Republicans would point to the apparent antifa assault on conservative journalist Andy Ngo in Portland last month as an example of the left-wing threat. President Trump has now called journalists “the enemy of the people” countless times, his campaigns and rallies are well known for the mass hatred and threats directed toward the reporters who cover them, and the largest mass killing of journalists since 9/11 occurred at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland in June of last year. It strains credulity that after remaining silent in the face of such totalitarian and inciting language from the president, the GOP is suddenly concerned with protecting the safety of our free press.
The real story behind these shenanigans by Cruz and Cassidy is a conspicuous conservative blind spot when it comes to the far greater threat from right-wing violence, a blindness that one begins to suspect is willful when they instead choose to demonize those people explicitly dedicated to stopping white-supremacists and other far-right malefactors. But politicians like Ted Cruz and the brain trust (such as it is) at Fox News aren’t so naive; they’re aware that they’re putting the thumb on the scales in favor of right-wing extremists by hyping an alleged public threat that, in a real two-fer, happens to be a movement opposed to the right-wing extremists they can’t bring themselves to prioritize as public enemy number one.