The Myth of a Global Antifa

In September 2025, Donald Trump designated “antifa” a domestic terror organization. Last month, his administration went one step further by declaring that the “extreme left” had developed the antifa network into a global threat. Marco Rubio announced at a press conference on July 16 that

Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training, materials, and target information through shared encrypted channels — moving through underground networks of safe houses, and finance and sustain their operations through transnational funds.

This description sounds eerily like what global far-right networks have been doing for years. The “antidem” network, crisscrossing the Atlantic and ranging up and down the Americas, has helped far-right politicians take over parties, those parties take power, and those resulting governments coordinate anti-immigrant, anti-climate, anti-LGBT, and fundamentally anti-democratic policies. This effort is well-funded by right-wing sugar daddies like Elon Musk and Robert Shillman .

In the United States, even more extreme right-wing militants have been responsible for 152 attacks and 112 deaths between 2016 and 2025, compared to 35 attacks and 13 deaths by the extreme left (according to the right-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Fascism, not anti-fascism, is the threat, both domestically and internationally.

It’s a common Trumpian tactic: to blame adversaries for that which the accuser has perfected. Thus, according to Trump, his enemies are always lying ; they’re completely corrupt ; they are anti-democratic . This from the most mendacious, corrupt, and anti-democratic force in modern politics. Remember the canard that it was actually “antifa” that caused all the havoc during the obviously right-wing insurrection on January 6? What better way to throw people off the scent of a vast right-wing conspiracy than to assert that something much more sinister is percolating on the left.

In practice, the administration is engaged in a category error. It assumes that organized opposition presupposes an organization. But, as Gertrude Stein once said rather cruelly of her hometown of Oakland, there’s no “there” there. Fascism has experienced a successful rebrand in the age of Trump. Lots of people and institutions are organizing against this fascism. But what the Trump administration calls “antifa” just doesn’t exist.

The Antifa that Isn’t

Understood broadly, anti-fascist forces defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and their various axis partners. Those forces would eventually include everything from the U.S. government to the Red Army to underground resistance movements. Later, such forces helped to suppress fascist parties in Germany. They challenged white supremacist and neo-Nazi formations in the United States. Anti-fascist movements saved democracy and then made it stronger.

But that’s not the “antifa” that the Trump administration has in mind. True, Vice President JD Vance has berated German politicians for refusing to partner politically with the far-right Alternative for Germany party. And the Trump administration has pursued a legal vendetta against the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the premier U.S. organizations that has gone after the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations.

But in invoking the “antifa” rubric, Rubio and company have a somewhat narrower focus. They have labeled several discrete assassinations (of far-right youth leader Charlie Kirk and health care CEO Brian Thompson), attempted assassinations (of Donald Trump), and plots to assassinate (Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh) as the work of this shadowy organization. Perhaps more to the point, the administration has been looking for ways to discredit the protestors and the organizations who have challenged the administration’s mass deportation campaign.

In June, the Justice Department celebrated the conviction of “eight North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” for their involvement in a protest outside an ICE detention facility in Texas. One police officer was injured in the incident. The man accused of shooting the officer received a sentence of 100 years in prison. Another defendant, charged with “transporting a box containing numerous Antifa materials” and trying to conceal what was in reality a box of his belongings that included some political zines, received a sentence of 30 years .

Credit the severity of the sentencing with the Justice Department’s tactic of calling the protests the acts of antifa terrorists. To make this case, the Justice Department lawyers employed the services of Kyle Shideler, who works for the Center for Security Policy . This is the outfit founded by Frank Gaffney, a notorious far-right fabulist who used Islamophobia as rocket fuel to ascend to infamy.

On the stand, Shideler frankly made a fool of himself by lecturing the judge and jury about the origins of antifa only to fall apart under the questioning of defense attorney Patrick McLain. Here’s Zoe Chase’s account for This American Life :

McLain approaches, asks some questions about Shideler’s credentials for this, pointing out he’s never held a position at a college or a university. He’s never published a peer-reviewed paper.

Then he gets to this.

McLain– “There is no national leadership of Antifa, is there?”

Shideler– “It would be inconsistent with their ideology.”

“Is that a no?”

“It would be inconsistent with their ideology, so they do not, no.”

“OK. They don’t have membership rolls.”

“It would be inconsistent with their ideology, so no.”

“Just for the sake of efficiency, if there is a yes or no answer, could you lead with that?”

“Sure.”

“OK. Thank you. And no dues or hierarchy in anything that you would call Antifa, right?”

“No, they’re opposed to it.”

So, to summarize: no leadership, no membership, no dues. Shideler goes on to admit that the members of this supposed cell of a larger organization didn’t even refer to themselves as “antifa” in their private Signal chats.

The attempt to associate the defendants with this thing called antifa was so ludicrous that the defense attorneys saw no need to call their own expert witness. In fact, convinced that the Justice Department had badly screwed the pooch on the case, the defense didn’t even bother to call any witnesses of their own.

Having failed to prove the existence of antifa, the prosecution fell back on the more general charge of “terrorism.” In the spirit of the Sacco and Vanzetti case (which used “anarchism”) and the Rosenberg case (which used “communism”), the jury and then the judge threw the book at the hapless eight because they supposedly served as the pawns of an all-powerful shadowy force.

Global Ties

The failure of the Justice Department to prove the existence of antifa notwithstanding, the Trump administration has worked hard to play up the threat of this shadowy organization and connect it to other convenient bogeymen.

If Vladimir Putin weren’t a friend of Trump’s, Russia would no doubt be on the State Department’s list of antifa supporters because of its Soviet credentials and its stated goal to root out Nazism in Ukraine. The administration has sought an economic accommodation with Beijing, so China is out of the picture as well (though congressional Republicans have nonetheless gone after other left-wing groups for their closeness to China).

What remains are Iran and Cuba , which Secretary of State Rubio accuses, without providing any credible evidence, of supporting the vast left-wing conspiracy. Even if any sort of connections could be proved among the three—ayatollahs, communist apparatchiks, and anti-fascist campaigners—it doesn’t add up to much of an “axis of evil.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the Trump administration has been unable to convince anyone other than itself about this supposed threat. The State Department held a meeting in The Netherlands in May about left-wing violence, but it had to be at the U.S. embassy since the Dutch declined to host the event. In June, a similar gathering at the U.S. Institute for Peace failed to launch. A request sent by the State Department to a number of countries for information about antifa didn’t elicit much response. The four foreign left organizations that have earned the label “terrorist” from the U.S. government have, at worst, committed some acts of vandalism, and European countries have by and large rejected the designation.

More interesting than the tortuous arguments deployed by the administration to pursue its case are the likely reasons and the timing of the campaign. The United States is at war with Iran, so it’s an obvious candidate for demonization. The administration has talked of regime change in Cuba—as soon as it wraps up its war in Iran—so the “antifa” charge is but one of many placed at the island’s doorstep as a rationale for intervention.

But the real target is the “enemy within.” Trump has been eager to portray the Democratic Party as extremist, as anti-democratic, as a front for its more radical members like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). It is thus simultaneously preparing an electoral campaign to defeat the opposition in the November elections and a post-electoral campaign to marginalize a party likely to win one if not both chambers of Congress.

The open question is whether the administration will use the antifa conspiracy and the terrorist label to widen the scope of arrests. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to detain hundreds of thousands of people, some of them U.S. citizens, in his fervor to whiten the country through mass deportations. Perhaps the two final years of the administration will be spent sending members of an imaginary conspiracy to detention centers.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the U.S. government targeted immigrants and left-wingers in a single campaign. In 1920, for instance, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered the arrest of thousands of people on the suspicion that they were anarchists or communists and were planning an insurrection against the U.S. government. Later he warned of assassination plots against U.S. officials. Many of those arrested were immigrants and, like celebrated activist Emma Goldman, unceremoniously kicked out of the country.

If it hadn’t been for the courageous actions of Louis Post , an assistant labor secretary in the Wilson administration who was also in charge of immigration, thousands more people would have been deported. In an administration staffed by the likes of Stephen Miller and Kash Patel, it might be nearly impossible to find a modern-day Louis Post to head off any future witch hunt. The obvious alternative is to put up as many roadblocks to the mass deportation campaign as possible before it destroys more lives and spreads to other segments of the population.

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