The first thing to understand about antifa is that it is not real. Yes, as a journalist, I’m obligated to offer some throat-clearing nuance: There is a thing called antifa that has existed for a long time, in the sense that there have long been leftists who fight fascism with tactics like outing, public shaming and a very occasional fist to the Nazi nose. But antifa, at least as imagined by President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters, simply does not exist.
The president recently signed an executive order declaring antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” which is not a legal designation. His memo was so thick with lies that it would take a week to debunk them all. Antifa is not “a militarist, anarchist enterprise,” nor does it use “illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism.” It doesn’t “conceal its funding sources and operations,” and it certainly isn’t involved in “spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech.”
MAGA’s imaginary version of antifa is no different than past urban legends about demonic possession and QAnon’s claims that Oscar winner Tom Hanks eats children’s brains. But this false conflation between individuals throughout history resisting fascism and “terrorism” is a deliberate attempt to confuse…
MAGA’s imaginary version of antifa is no different than past urban legends about demonic possession and QAnon’s claims that Oscar winner Tom Hanks eats children’s brains. But this false conflation between individuals throughout history resisting fascism and “terrorism” is a deliberate attempt to confuse, just like Trump’s ridiculous roundtable on antifa earlier this month. Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, one of the attendees, insisted that “antifa is real” and there were “various iterations” that go “back to Weimar Republic in Germany.”
Yes, if you’re following closely, he said the people who tried to stop the rise of the Nazis were the bad guys — and therefore that people who oppose fascism now are also villains.
This is all to say that the invocation of antifa as a bogeyman serves the same purpose now as it did when Nazis were creating concentration camps in the 1930s and justifying their construction with lies about socialist and Jewish threats. But while the echoes of this history are unmistakable, the more immediate inspiration for Trump’s strategy comes from the explosion, during his first term, of far-right paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers.
These are the people who conjured up the fantasy of antifa as a moral justification for their own organized political violence. Now Trump’s White House is adopting the tactics of fascist street gangs — but with the power to mobilize law enforcement and military in enacting violence on a level far beyond the Proud Boys’ wildest dreams.
It’s not an accident that Trump has settled on Portland, Oregon, to stage his real war on the imaginary antifa. As I reported for Salon in 2017, the city was heavily targeted by the Proud Boys and other far-right gangs from the early months of Trump’s first administration. They trawled the streets of Portland, Berkeley and other northwestern cities that were seen as progressive strongholds, bearing weapons, harassing residents and otherwise creating a spectacle of violence and chaos. The goal was not subtle: They aimed to be so annoying or threatening that locals would lash out at them. Even the slightest touch from a resident was construed as an “attack” that was then used to justify street brawls under the ludicrous pretense of self-defense.
The communities picked for this abuse were chosen for demographic reasons. The Proud Boys needed cities with large populations of young, white men from comfortable backgrounds but with leftist politics. Most men of that profile aren’t interested in getting into fights. But just enough of them do get caught up in masculinist violent fantasies — and are privileged enough to not worry about the consequences — to be interested in throwing punches with fascists. The Proud Boys only needed a handful of 20-year-olds with bandanas and Che Guevara shirts to create chaotic images for iPhone cameras that were disseminated on social media as “proof” that antifa was real.
After nearly four years of provocations, the Proud Boys and other pro-Trump groups finally got the violence they’d been seeking. In August 2020, a member of the paramilitary Patriot Prayer, Aaron Danielson, was shot dead by a troubled leftist named Michael Reinoehl in Portland. Pro-fascist groups had been menacing Black Lives Matter protesters for months, and Reinoehl walked right into the trap. Danielson became a martyr for the far-right, who used his murder to erase the statistical reality that there’s exponentially more right-wing violence than left-wing violence in the U.S.
The right’s strategy was effective. After all, it came from the same playbook that worked for Nazi Germany’s brownshirts of Nazi Germany. A lot of people want an excuse to support authoritarians, and they will believe in the specter of “leftist violence,” no matter how fake such a threat is.
The parallels don’t stop there. As with the brownshirts, the Proud Boys have adapted their tactics, moving from outside the government to being part of the official apparatus of the Republican Party. As Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo reported last week, the Proud Boys haven’t restarted their street fighting tactics during Trump 2.0, despite so many of them getting pardons for the Jan. 6 riot. It’s not because they are dispersing; they no longer see the need.
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Trump is deploying the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to progressive cities to stand-in for the Proud Boys. They are antagonizing the locals in hopes that someone will throw a punch, which could then used to justify unleashing even more fascist violence. In a move reminiscent of how the brownshirts were eclipsed by the formation of the even more intimidating — and official — Schutzstaffel (SS), chapters of the Proud Boys are now encouraging their members to join ICE.
This is all very depressing, but the past month has shown there’s a way to fight back effectively: Inflatable animal suits. As Andi Zeisler of Salon reported, protesters in Portland are increasingly showing up outside ICE facilities dressed as frogs, unicorns and chickens, in strict contrast to the “mouthy, black-clad activists” that Trump wanted to attract with his assault on the city. MAGA’s illusion that Portland is being run by antifa is a lot harder to pull off when the protesters look like they’re going to a kid’s birthday party and not an anarchist meetup. The president wanted another Michael Reinoehl. Instead, he’s getting dance parties and silliness.
Trump vented his frustration at a left who won’t take his bait by posting an AI video of him literally spilling feces on the heads of peaceful No Kings protesters. MAGA influencers aren’t coping much better. Fake journalist Andy Ngo has made a career propping up the myth of antifa. For years he has posted photos of people he claims are scary, often just on the basis of how they’re dressed or that they look momentarily angry during a protest. Ngo is not happy about how the animal costumes are ruining his propaganda.
“The costumes serve the function of masking the violent extremism and to whitewash the past ultraviolence,” Ngo recently complained on X. While he didn’t have evidence for the “ultraviolence,” Ngo did post a video of police shooting pepper spray directly into the man’s frog costume, which looks less like aggression and more like being the victim of police brutality to anyone who isn’t utterly MAGA-poisoned.
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Trump’s efforts at autocracy depend on the use of emotional propaganda and imagery to obscure a very basic reality: That he and the MAGA movement are the cause of rising political violence. As Brian Beutler of Off Message wrote, even if there’s a singular “instigating act” committed by “a pink haired trans woman with tattoos,” the larger climate of violence is strictly due to Trump, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and other MAGA followers creating the pretext.
None of this would be happening but for Trump. He has adopted the Proud Boys method of relentlessly attacking progressive cities with threats and violence, and openly begging for someone to fight back, so he can pretend he’s the victim. It’s the moral equivalent of pinning a person to the ground, spitting in their face and then crying foul if they push you off.
History, though, shows that these fascist tactics work. The best way to beat them is to not take the bait. It’s worth setting aside the moral questions around violence to examine this as a strategic matter. While may have felt justified and good for young leftist men to throw punches at Proud Boys, it provided them with photos that prop up MAGA’s antifa lie. Better to don a unicorn costume and play circus music, underscoring the absurdity of the situation.
Antifa is an illusion, but like many such fantasies, it has power. Derailing Trump’s tactics means puncturing that chimera, one floppy frog suit at a time.
