Online threats by right-wing extremists to attack antifascists and embark on a “civil war” against “the left,” particularly on YouTube and social media, have become as common as fleas. What isn’t so common is for mainstream conservatives to give those voices a national platform.
Yet that’s what Portland, Oregon, radio-show host Lars Larson did last week by inviting a U.S. Marine war veteran onto his nationally syndicated broadcast and having him explain in detail his plans for a national campaign to hunt down and kill antifascists in their homes.
Bizarrely, Larson at no point in his interview with Sgt. Shane Michael Kohfield—an Iraq War veteran who suffers from bipolar disorder—pushed back on Kohfield’s proposal, other than expressing generic incredulity at his willingness to commit murder. At one point, Larson agreed with Kohfield about the dire threat posed by antifascists, and he concluded simply by thanking him for his service.
Kohfield drew the attention of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in July when he joined a protest outside the home of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler organized by the far-right street-brawling outfit Patriot Prayer. Handed the group’s bullhorn, he had proceeded to tell them that he had a plan for wiping out antifascists on a national scale. “If antifa gets to the point where they start killing us, I’m going to kill them next,” Kohfield, 32, said. “I’d slaughter them and I have a detailed plan on how I would wipe out antifa.”
In response, the FBI invoked Oregon’s “red flag” law that allows for seizure of weapons from people deemed a threat to the public. Coming on the heels of the massacre at an El Paso Walmart by a white nationalist who was radicalized online, it was perceived as part of an effort by the FBI to reel in some of these threats even as they metastasized into a near-daily phenomenon.
Kohfield, whose father says he receives treatment for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder after serving two tours of duty in Iraq, was not charged with any crimes, but he did surrender five weapons, including an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Larson, an ardent opponent of the “red flag” law, invited Kohfield on to discuss his brush with the law.
Kohfield described for the July gathering how he had “infiltrated” the ranks of antifascists at a November 2018 Portland protest, at the end of which he claimed they had assaulted him while trying heroically to protect reporters. As a result, he said, he drew up a lawsuit to file against “antifa” but couldn’t find anyone to bring it to court; as a result, he wrote to Rep. Dan Crawford of Texas—an outspoken opponent of antifascists—first informing him what a dire threat the movement poses to America, and then closing the letter with his plan to fan out and murder antifascists “when they start killing us.”
That letter, he admitted then, drew the attention of the FBI. Kohfield then began claiming that the whole point of publicizing the plan was to create a “nuclear deterrent” that would prevent violence by scaring antifascists away from any plans to commit killings.
“I looked unhinged. I looked dangerous and have the training to be dangerous,” Kohfield told The Oregonian. “I figured that the key to de-escalating the situation was to not be the most violent person in the room,” he added. “It was to be the scariest person in the room.”
Kohfield explained this to Larson as well, describing antifascists as innately ultraviolent. “I have a plan that I created, that if the violence got to the extent that Antifa’s sitting there beating us over the head with crowbars, killing us, shooting us with guns, stabbing us with knives—the event before the August 17 event [a Proud Boys march in Portland], Antifa was chasing conservatives around with knives, right in front of the police, and the police didn’t even stop Antifa,” he told Larson.
“I agree,” Larson said. “I think that’s a problem.”
Larson asked Kohfield to describe the plan for his listeners, and he obliged by reading from a plan he had already published online:
Veterans join Antifa’s social media pages and groups and get names of most active members on social media along with getting the arrest records from rallies and record the names of all previous and future offenders.
The Veterans will use background check programs to find home addresses of all the members of Antifa.
The Veterans will take a map of cities with members of Antifa that live there.
Grid overlays will be placed over those maps the cities.
The Veterans will be broken down into squads. Each squad will be assigned its own Grid and given a list of names and addresses in their assigned grid square.
He then described how he planned to use a phone app used by delivery truck drivers to “hunt down the most violent members of Antifa in their beds at night until everyone of them was gone in every city in America, if need be, in a single well-coordinated night.” He predicted “catastrophic” effects for the antifascist movement.
But Kohfield also insisted there was “no chance” he would ever act violently, because his whole plan was contingent upon antifascists killing people first—and his “nuclear deterrent” had effectively prevented that.
"Now that the nuclear deterrent is out there if people were afraid of me at rallies they will be afraid of me everywhere and I hope that my nuclear deterrent will stop violence," he posted at the (now defunct) blog he had created.
In the same post, Kohfield accurately noted that antifascists have not yet killed anyone. What he neglected to note, however, is that in the past year alone, white nationalist terrorists have murdered 86 people in mass shootings around the world—and have been responsible for the largest numbers of lethal domestic terrorism incidents in the United States for the past decade.
