Donald Trump’s idea of being even-handed is announcing that he plans to designate both the Ku Klux Klan and antifa—“people on both sides,” as it were—as domestic terrorist organizations, as he did last week. The problem, as it always is with Trump, is that the plan is utterly incoherent and meaningless, and in the end makes matters worse.
Neither the KKK nor antifa is a singular organization engaged in the kind of criminal acts required for such designations—and more to the point, neither is an active domestic-terror threat in 2020, though for entirely different reasons. It’s an announcement that, once again, demonstrates that Trump has no real regard for public safety or national security, but gleefully exploits the issues around them for political purposes—always, it seems, in ways that actually undermine our security and well-being.
Trump’s Friday announcement was packaged as part of a campaign appeal to Black people bundled alongside his so-called “platinum plan”—a gimmick proposal to supposedly create billions in investment in the Black community and millions of new jobs.
“If you vote Republican over the next four years, we will create 3 million new jobs for the Black community, open 500,000 new Black-owned businesses, increase access to capital in Black communities by $500 billion,” he said.
The announcement was promptly memorialized in a fundraising letter the Trump campaign emailed to its would-be donors nationally: “President Trump has made it clear he will not tolerate the disgusting acts of violence from the KKK and ANTIFA against innocent citizens, which is why he just announced that the United States will be formally designating each of these extreme, UN-AMERICAN groups as Terrorist Organizations.”
However, the letter also makes an interesting assertion: Namely, it describes both the KKK and “antifa” as “leftist” groups.
It’s important that EVERY American comes together at a time like this to send a united message that we will not stand for the radical actions of these left-wing radical extremists any longer.
Of course, the claim that the Klan was a leftist organization—most widely promulgated by historical prevaricator Dinesh D’Souza, but also given mainstream airplay thanks to pro-Trump propagandists such as Jeffrey Lord—has been floated out there for awhile now on the Trumpian right. It also happens to be demonstrably and laughably spurious.
At the event in Atlanta where he announced the “Platinum Plan”—specifically designed to shore up his vote among the African Americans he lost decisively in 2016—Trump claimed that the plan would focus on the prosecution of the KKK and antifa along with designating the groups terrorist organizations, while making lynching a national hate crime. The latter proposal made the cynicism inherent in the announcement crystal-clear: Democrats led by vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris attempted to pass an anti-lynching bill earlier this summer, and succeeded in the House, but were stymied by Republicans in the Senate. (And if you believe that $500 billion in investments in the Black community would actually materialize during a second Trump term, then I have a lovely Trump University diploma in economics to award you.)
However, the first and most obvious problem is that neither the KKK nor antifa is a single discrete organization. The Klan, even in the 1920s when it had chapters in every state in America, was always comprised of discrete and often competing groups. In more recent decades, it has devolved into even smaller, generally local entities; there are currently about 45 such groups scattered mostly throughout the South and the Midwest.
Most of today’s Klan groups focus on politics rather than terrorism. In the 2016 election campaign, as it happens, the largest of the remaining Klan groups, the Knights Party, eagerly embraced Trump: “White people are realizing they are becoming strangers in their own country and they do not have a major political voice speaking for them,” national organizer Rachel Pendergraft said. “Trump is one example of the alternative-right candidate Knights Party members and supporters have been looking for.”
Antifa, as we have explained in depth and as FBI director Christopher Wray explained in House testimony recently, is not an organization but an ideology, a very loosely bound movement focused primarily on preventing fascists from organizing and wreaking havoc in local communities. Even its individual groups—such as Rose City Antifa, the Portland-based group credited with being the first such antifascist group in the U.S.—are specifically amorphous, leaderless entities that eschew normal organizational hierarchies.
Even more significant, in order for any organization to earn a designation as a terrorist group of any kind under American law, it must be actively engaged in the specific criminal acts that comprise domestic terrorism—and it must do so at a sustained and intense level, enough that it comprises a genuine national-security threat.
Interestingly, while the KKK is one of the oldest radical-right organizations associated with extremist terrorism—it really is, after all, the original “hate group,” and one of the most significant sources of anti-Black violence over the course of the 20th century—it has been almost entirely superseded in the 21st century by newer forms of white-supremacist terror: the alt-right, white nationalists, neo-Nazi street brawlers, and “incels” have been responsible for nearly every single act of far-right terrorism in the past decade, and particularly in the past three years.
The hatefulness peddled by these groups all has its wellspring in old ideas first peddled by the Klan, but the KKK itself has come to be seen as outmoded and too backward-looking for the tastes of most modern white nationalists. Accordingly, only two incidents of domestic terrorism in the past decade can be connected to the Klan in any meaningful way:
- The 2013 plot by Glendon Scott Crawford, an active KKK member, and his associate Eric Feight to attack a Muslim community in upstate New York with a “ray gun” that was intended to disperse lethal levels of radiation.
- Frazier Glenn Miller’s 2014 attack on a Jewish community in Overland Park, Kansas, that left three people dead. Miller was a longtime Klan organizer, though he had left the organization some years prior to his murderous attack.
Both incidents were horrific, but the Klan’s role shrinks to a minor one in the context of the 162 other incidents of right-wing-extremist domestic terrorism recorded from 2008 through 2019, which produced a total of 220 fatalities. The majority of these lethal incidents were perpetrated by white-nationalist “lone wolves.”
Along the same lines, there was exactly one case of domestic terrorism involving any antifascists during the same 12-year period, and it did not produce any fatalities. The only recorded fatality involving antifascists—namely, the shooting death of a right-wing “Patriot Prayer” marcher at the hands of a self-described antifascist in Portland on August 29—was not a case of terrorism but of interprotester violence.
Given that record, there’s no defensible reason to even attempt to designate antifascists as terrorists—especially considering that, as we have pointed out on multiple occasions, there is nothing in antifascist philosophy that either encourages or embraces violence for anything other than defensive purposes. The general nonviolence of antifascist thinking as well as its organized behavior in the streets starkly contrasts with the relentless hatefulness and expressions of genocidal violence common to white nationalists and neo-Nazis, as well as the paranoid threatening behavior of the far-right “Patriot”/militia movement—both of which are established engines of domestic terrorism, but neither of which have ever been mentioned by Trump in that regard.
Most of the accusations of domestic terrorism directed at antifascists—particularly those by Trump and Attorney General William Barr—have been in the context of violence at the anti-police-brutality protests. But those are similarly misguided and not based on any real-world evidence.
“We’re all concerned about protest violence, but framing the issue as a problem of anarchist violence only spreads misinformation that puts law-enforcement officers and the communities they serve at greater risk,” domestic-terrorism expert Michael German recently explained in testimony before a Senate committee. German noted that “attributing violent acts to a particular group or movement without evidence is dangerous, because it misleads law enforcement about actual threats”:
Media analyses of protest arrests do not support the allegation that antifascists or anarchists are playing a significant role in the protest violence. The Trump administration has amplified this misinformation, however, blaming antifa and threatening to designate it as a domestic terrorist organization. Antifa is not an organization, however, and there are no homicides related to antifascist actions for at least the last 25 years, so it would not be an appropriate target for such a designation.
This is why Trump’s proclaimed action probably is not even technically feasible. As Jason M. Blazakis and Colin P. Clarke explained in Slate, there aren’t any currently existing tools within the framework of American counterterrorism laws that would make it possible for Trump to designate either of these groups, particularly antifascists:
The United States doesn’t have a domestic terrorism law—though several have been proposed in the wake of recent attacks by domestic extremists—and that also limits what the president can do against domestic based-entities. Even if antifa were an organization and not a loose-knit set of individuals who identify as anti-fascist, there is no underlying statute the president could use to sanction it. The only outlet would be for the president to create a new executive order that designated antifa as a domestic terrorist group.
Such an order, moreover, likely would not survive legal scrutiny, since it plainly violates the First Amendment rights of citizens who adopt antifascist views. There is no small irony—not to mention hypocrisy—in the claims by a broad spectrum of the American right that antifascists are abrogating their free-speech rights simply by protesting them (even though those protests are themselves acts of free speech), while they simultaneously advocate for criminalizing these same activists simply for their political beliefs.
In many regards, Trump’s effort is a smokescreen that obscures the reality that Trump has unleashed a plague of white nationalism on the United States that is as potentially deadly as any virus, primarily through malign neglect of its law-enforcement duties and deliberate twisting of intelligence, as recently revealed by a whistleblower.
The spread of toxic white nationalism and its always-attendant violence has become, as Renée Graham at the Boston Globe observes, another kind of pandemic that Trump has downplayed and allowed to spread. Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.
The claims of an existentially dire “antifa threat” are part of this smokescreen. As Cassie Miller at the Southern Poverty Law Center recently noted: “The ‘violent left’ narrative is dangerous not only because it heightens already raised suspicions, but also because it can be used to delegitimize genuine political activism and justify right-wing acts of violence and even terrorism.”
Trump’s threat, however, is not one that only affects antifascists (and, much less likely, Ku Klux Klansmen), but a broad spectrum of the public—especially given the fact that conservatives seem increasingly unable to distinguish between antifa and mainstream liberal Democrats. A favorite right-wing claim—bandied about on Fox News and other right-wing media with abandon—is the false (and deeply anti-Semitic) charge that George Soros is somehow mysteriously funding these antifascist groups. Trump himself commonly claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and presidential nominee are somehow nefariously connected with antifa. A recent right-wing dirty prank tried to further this narrative by creating an “antifa.com” page that redirected readers to Biden’s campaign page.
This tells us, chillingly, where the drive to criminalize antifa is headed: When such a loosely defined and little-understood movement becomes the pretext for arresting people as terrorists, virtually anyone can be accused of being one, and put on trial for it. That is terrorism too: the official, state-sanctioned kind.