Donald Trump has attempted to stoke fears among his base—and perhaps to undermine the protests for racial justice that have erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing—by suggesting that dangerous antifa operatives have hijacked demonstrations across the country to wreak havoc in American cities. Without evidence, he accused antifa of looting and rioting in Minneapolis. He has suggested that the media is coddling the group, which is “very bad for our country,” and vowed to designate the loose collective, with no apparent structure, a terrorist organization. And, on Tuesday, he promoted an outrageous and baseless conspiracy theory that the 75-year-old man knocked down and injured by police in Buffalo during a protest may have been an “ANTIFA provocateur.”
To hear Trump and his allies tell it, the Black Lives Matter protests across the country are an utter hotbed of subversive antifa activity. There’s just one problem: Though Trump and Attorney General William Barr have blamed antifa for the violence that has sprung up at some of the demonstrations, none of the cases the Department of Justice has brought so far amid the tumult have links to the movement. According to NPR, which reviewed the federal cases that have been brought so far, none of the 51 people who have been rung up on federal charges as of Tuesday had antifa connections. In fact, the only people arrested on federal charges to have a connection to an extremist group were not part of the left, but members of the right-wing Boogaloo movement; three men associated with the group trying to instigate a second Civil War were charged with plotting violence in Las Vegas.
As Barr told Fox News on Monday, the lack of charges against people associated with antifa does not preclude such prosecutions in the future and does not necessarily mean those aligned with the group have not been present for the protests. “We have some investigations underway, very focused on investigations on certain individuals that relate to antifa,” the attorney general said. Still, the absence of any cases so far would seem to undercut the president’s already-shaky contention that antifa is playing a major role in the protests. If these demonstrations are teeming with antifa chaos agents, as Trump has contended, why has a DOJ seeking to root them out been unable to do so to this point?
Trump’s narrative has never been based on much more than rumor and speculation. As usual, it’s not entirely clear if Trump believes what he’s saying or if he thinks there’s some gain for him in spouting off about it. Perhaps he believes fear of antifa will prime his audience for his new “law and order” campaign message, or maybe he thinks linking the largely peaceful protesters to a collective associated with left-wing violence will discredit the demonstrations and blunt their momentum. In any case, he and his allies have long used the group as a bogeyman responsible for all manner of chaos, and have turned up the intensity amid the Floyd protests, with Trump acolyte Matt Gaetz tweeting earlier this month that the government should “hunt them down.”
Such characterizations, however, imply that antifa is a more cohesive group than it appears to be; with no apparent organizing structure, antifa—short for anti-fascist—is more of an ideological movement than a left-wing terrorist outfit capable of plotting “seditious conspiracy,” as Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton has accused them of doing. Nevertheless, Trumpworld has continued to portray antifa as a sort of leftist counterweight to the so-called “alt-right,” the neutered label white nationalist extremists like Richard Spencer have affixed to a broad set of far-right, racist ideologies and groups.
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June 11, 2020 at 02:19AM
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Trump’s Antifa Fearmongering Looks Like Pure Fantasy - Vanity Fair
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