Below is my column on the rise of Antifa deniers in Washington. Once embraced and even marketed on the left, Antifa has become the group that must not be named as political violence rises across the country. It does not matter that radicals identify as Antifa, coordinate protests, carry Antifa flags, wear signature clothing, and espouse the same ideas from the “Antifa handbook.” There have even been people elected as Antifa representatives. Yet, the current spin is to pretend that they do not exist as a single organization to deflect the debate over violence on the left. Even with the past and current FBI directors saying that they exist as a group, politicians are mocking those who object to Antifa, even journalists and others targeted by its members.
This week, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) claimed that “nobody” knows what the left-wing terrorist organization Antifa is and that it does not exist. However, he previously promoted the “Antifa Handbook” in 2018 and praised the group as terrifying Trump. Now, however, he has joined the chorus of Antifa denials as political violence rises around the country.
Here is the column:
Roughly seventy years ago, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover famously declared, “There is no organized crime in America.” Hoover’s stubborn denial of the existence of the mafia continued despite ample evidence to the contrary, from arrests to congressional testimony.
Many have speculated on why Hoover maintained his stubborn denial. Perhaps, they say, he was trying to avoid the political embarrassment of long ignoring the single largest criminal network in the country.
Many today seem to be adopting a Hoover-esque wilful blindness about another violent group: Antifa.
Politicians and pundits are denying that the left-wing anarchist group exists, mocking President Trump’s designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) seemed to morph into Hoover before our very eyes, including a posting in which he challenged anyone to “name one member of ‘Antifa.’”
Others on the left have joined Goldman in this absurd claim. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel committed part of his monologue to assure viewers that Antifa is no more than a mythical “chupacabra.” “You understand there is no Antifa,” he said. “This is an entirely made-up organization.”
I have testified about Antifa before Congress, run columns on the organization for over a decade, and wrote a book discussing Antifa. I did oppose declaring Antifa a terrorist organization due to free speech concerns, but I also know that it is very real.
By design, Antifa avoids typical leadership hierarchies and organizational structures. Antifa was first created in the 1920s, associated with the Weimar-era German communist group Antifaschistische Aktion.
It is easy to satisfy Goldman’s demand in naming some members, since they self-identify as members of Antifa. One such student came from my campus and proclaimed that Antifa was winning after his arrest for property destruction.
When another radical was arrested after taking an axe to a congressional office, he self-identified as a member of Antifa.
Before Kyle Benjamin Douglas Calvert, 26, implanted an IED device outside of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office in downtown Montgomery, he put up stickers reading “support your local Antifa.”
Numerous Antifa members have been arrested, including some who claimed to be journalists.
Many protesters belong to Antifa groups that have names like “Rose City Antifa” and offshoots like Love and Rage and Mexico’s Amor Y Rabia. Antifa members have been elected to the French and European parliaments.
Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” called by some the “Antifa bible,” explains that the group is united in its opposition to free speech. “Most Americans in Antifa have been anarchists or antiauthoritarian communists,” he writes. “From that standpoint, ‘free speech’ as such is merely a bourgeois fantasy unworthy of consideration.”
Law enforcement officials like former FBI Director Christopher Wray have long debunked the deniers like Goldman. “Antifa is a real thing,” said Wray.
Ironically, when many on the left are not denying its existence, they are rallying their members or actually selling Antifa merchandise. Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison — now the Minnesota attorney general — proclaimed that Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. His own son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer.
But ,with Antifa violence on the rise, Democratic leaders have gone back to denying its existence even as Antifa deploys its signature black hoodies and masks.
Indeed, some liberal activists admit to having coordinated violent protests with Antifa groups. For example, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Dwayne Dixon was a member of the radical gun club Redneck Revolt, a group recently referenced in flyers quoting the assassin of Charlie Kirk to rally the left. The flyers read, “Hey, Fascist! Catch! The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.”
During a panel at Harvard University, Dixon reportedly admitted that an Antifa-linked group requested his gun club to provide security during the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: “Prior to that day, as the planning for the defense of Charlottesville proceeded, the local Anarchist People of Color Collective … had requested that Redneck Revolt be present to secure Justice Park for a wide variety of activists who were expected to assemble.”
The denial of the existence of an actual group is meant to deflect the discussion of the rising violence from the left, as these same politicians fuel the rage with reckless rhetoric. But they’re not so good at keeping their story straight. While whipping up the mob with claims that democracy is dying and comparing their opponents to Nazis, they deny the existence of the very group that politicians like Ellison praise for targeting conservatives.
Hoover declined to admit the mafia existed until, on November 14, 1957, dozens of mobsters were found meeting in a farmhouse in Apalachin, New York.
What is different is that Antifa has repeatedly had such farmhouse moments, with prosecutions revealing a national movement with self-identified members. So why the denial? These are the shock troops for some politicians who think that they can use the violent group for political advantage. They are mistaken. Antifa is unlikely to have much use for establishment liberals once it gains more power.
Until then, Antifa can count on the Goldmans of the world to give them cover in denying that they exist.
In the film “The Usual Suspects,” the character Verbal Kint offered this explanation for the invisible villain Keyser Söze: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of the bestselling book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Mr. Turley, you’re an American, writing in America, for an American audience, so . . . please, use American English: It is spelled, “ax.” Thank you.
I see many using that book, which seems to be written by a scholar about Anti-fascist groups and organizations rather than Antifa. At least from the summaries. I think Antifa functions similar to the KKK, rise up when needed, inflict terror on its detractors, and then melts into the background. I found this article to be more interesting:
https://reason.com/2020/10/02/the-conservative-trans-woman-who-went-undercover-with-antifa-in-portland/?nab=0
Professor Turley:
Part of the difficulty you seem to be having relates to the definitions of “democratic” and “democracy.” Your apparent assumption that your interlocutors speak within an American Constitutional framework is false.
The campaign sloganeering of “Democratic Party,” such as “defend our democracy” and “vote as if our democracy depended on it,” betrays a very different perspective; the perspective that the “democracy” belongs, nearly exclusively, to the Party, which understands itself as being in the vanguard of “liberality,” thereby establishing its “progressive” nature.
This notion of “democracy” as the leadership of the Party, and representing the “true” interests of the citizenry, is a foundational principle of Leninism, around which both the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist government organized.
Under this formulation, The Party constitutes, by virtue of its leadership role in society, exclusive sovereign authority, entitling it to regulate the speech by others as enemies of the social order.
The understanding of sovereign authority as ultimately resident in the individual, and only in government apparatus by constitutional delegation, is uniquely American, and cannot be found prior to 17th and 18th century Enlightenment empiricism. Under this formulation, the individual has radical liberties, with freedom of actions constrained only by morality and by negotiated regulations for the commonwealth.
Its counterpoint is (German) Romantic idealism, which understands the individual as a creature of society, not the other way around. This idealistic notion is not especially revolutionary as it is a refinement of notions of monarchy (France and Germany), autocracy (Russia), and imperialism (Scottish Jacobian). Indeed, as “sovereign” the government/ruling class has a duty to defend itself by affirmatively regulating speech, along with other sumptuary and class privileges, which define are defined as “Freedoms.”
Antifa satisfies the definition of “anti-fascism” within a materialist dialectical framework that places The Party as representative of the working classes, as opposed to fascism, in which the Party orchestrates the industrial oligarchy symphonically.
The rhetorical “trick” of Antifa is the accusation that all American political parties, including the Democrat Party, are inherently creatures of industrial oligarchy and must either be co-opted into socialist revolution or destroyed as part of the work of establishing an authentic dictatorship of workers under the total leadership of The Party as Antifa.
What is necessary, therefore, is to focus on the rhetorical devices of the Left, not only as contrary to the American Revolutionary notion of the liberty of sovereign individuals, by more essentially on the principle, addressed by Mao Tse-tung, of contradiction. By attempting to contradict universal totalitarian Fascism, Antifa and its co-travellers, argue for the oppression of the masses by destroying the means of social production through total agency (totalitarian) control over the value of labor, the grand egalitarianism of slavery to the state enacted through the Party.
For Antifa, the Democratic Left, the Democrat Party, there is no “indispensable right” that belongs either to the people or to an individual, as they have marginal ontological status. What does have ultimate existential status, however, is the power of the Party to control society; the exercise of political power per se is an act of existence. Antifa rioters understand their existence as dependent upon the action of rioting itself.
Until you engage with this consistent ideological perspective, apologetic efforts for American constitutionalism will fall on deaf ears.
Thank you.
What if Antifa had killed Goebbels? Would you have been OK with that?
I would be ok with Goebbels killing Antifa
It is funny the number of people responding here in “defense” of Antifa are quite open that they endorse its fascist efforts to suppress speech.
Antifa is fa.
I always refer to the as antifafa
How many people have ever been killed by Antifa?
How many people have been killed by people who have ever freely associated inside a church?
Michael Reinoehl, Antifa member, murdered Aaron Danielson, but was killed by U.S. Marshals in a shootout.
How many people have ever been killed by someone who was a registered Democrat? How many people have been killed by someone who went to college? How many have been killed by someone who was a member of a labor union? How many have been killed by those who, like you, don’t have two functioning brain cells?
What of the tyranny of intelligence? What is in it for the unintelligent, talentless masses?
Hello ALL:
Before I leave today, I want to give you the direct link to Christopher Wray’s actual testimony on “Antifa.”
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-homeland-security-hearing-transcript-september-17-fbi-director-testifies
Certain members of this blog’s ‘frequent adversarial commenters’ have twisted what was actually said.
Wray’s explicit, direct testimony is that Antifa “is a real thing…..It’s a movement or an ideology.” What Professor Turley referred to as “groups” probably refers to Wray’s testimony of “regional nodes.”
So while Wray does not define Antifa as a discreet organization, he does at least twice refer to it as a “movement” with “regional nodes.” Of course, even those designations or terms may have been upgraded to reflect more contemporary/current events.
The testimony is lengthy, so I can give you some of the time markers for relevant testimony regarding Antifa (in hours: minutes: seconds):
00:27:59
00:57:21
01:11:30
01:32:09
01:42:15
01:43:10
03:01:25
Hope this helps all as to what was actually said.
(forgot to add this )
(01:12:16) “And we have seen individuals, I think I’ve mentioned this in response to one of the earlier questions, identified with the Antifa movement, coalescing regionally into what you might describe as small groups, or nodes. And we are actively investigating the potential violence from those regional nodes,”
How are the freedom-loving control-freaks doing today?
The police state fascist freedom-hating control freaks are retired but not forgotten. Both The Magical Marxist Mad Mulatto Brown Clown and The Oval Office House Plant are now off enjoying their life of Rich White Privilege.
They left us their Bolshevik Birthing Boyz, of course…
Let’s simplify this.
1. Antifa Exists – maybe not in the format projected, but then again, just as ISIS exists in cells which are sustained – even if not in vertical and peer hierarchies, so do these local cells.
2. Antifa will not be dissolved any more than the Brown Shirts and the Black Shirts were in the WWII Axis Alliance (note: Japan didn’t really need this, culturally it was “the nail that stands out gets hammered down”)
3. If a “re-organization” actually occurs to remove the stain of the the name Antifa, it would be appropriate to look at historical processes used for doing so. For example: the Sturmabteilung (SA), also known as the Brownshirts was dissolved on the Night of the Long Knives in Germany June 30, 1934 with assimilation into the NDSAP and the SS. At at that time, the SA had an individual cell membership total of approximately 4MM – most of whom did not have uniforms or even march in the “no kings” parades of 1933.
4. While the most recent American version of Ernst Röhm (Often associated as Merrick Garland) may have temporarily disappeared, it is highly likely a Reinhard Heydrich (similar/or Jack Smith?) is likely to emerge in or after the next US Congressional elections and/or the 2028 national elections.
If you want an example of how stupid the Trump administration is. DHS secretary Noen announced the arrest of the girlfriend of the founders of Antifa. There are no founders of Antifa. That’s how crazy stupid they think you are.
Rose City Antifa co-founders discovered living in Sweden after fleeing Portland
“The co-founders of the violent Portland, Oregon Antifa group Rose City Antifa have been discovered living in Sweden by independent journalist Christian Peterson.”
https://thepostmillennial.com/rose-city-antifa-co-founders-discovered-living-in-sweden-after-fleeing-portland
Founders of a local group. Not the founders of Antifa. They have a website. Here’s their goal:
“Rose City Antifa (RCA) was founded in Portland, Oregon in October of 2007.
RCA was formed after a coalition of local people and organizations formed the ‘Ad-Hoc Coalition Against Racism and Fascism’ in order to shut down a neo-Nazi skinhead festival called Hammerfest.
RCA continues the work of that Ad-Hoc Coalition and countless others who have worked to oppose racial prejudice, bigotry and fascism in our communities in Portland, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest more broadly.”
Seems like UpstateFarmer is against that sort of thing and therefore is in support of neo-Nazi skinheads.
Good people, on both sides, right?
Ano
Try re-reading what Upstate posted.
____________________
The co-founders of the violent Portland, Oregon Antifa group Rose City Antifa.
Jezzzzzzz
Based on your description RCA is a very typical antifa group. It was founded in order to silence someone else. I don’t know what Hammerfest really was (and certainly am not going to accept RCAs characterization) and I don’t really care. Even if they are neo-Nazi skinheads they have free speech right and it is emphatically not the right of RCA or anyone else to shut them down. And, of course, only an idiot would claim that being opposed to that means that one supports the neo-Nazis.
So the reality is that there are bad people on both sides ,and you too are on the fascist side of shutting down those who you disagree with. As is often side, there are two types of fascists: Fascists and Anitfa.
I suppose one not learning from history is doomed to repeat it. Free speech is not freedom from consequences. It’s not up to the government to intercede, but it’s fair game for those in the vicinity to decide what they are willing to accept and what they are willing to do. I think it’s a bad idea to let legitimacy flow to those who idolize the murder of millions of people for their religion and race.
You clearly think that allowing that normalization of terror is perfectly acceptable in society.
Here’s some information:
“The Hammerskin Nation, a neo-Nazi skinhead organization, aims to attract hundreds of hardcore racists to the group’s twentieth-anniversary celebration, to be held from today until Sunday somewhere in the greater Portland area. The group has not publicized the location of the event.
The Hammerskins, began life in 1987 as the Confederate Hammerskins. The group was founded in Dallas, TX gang specializing in violence against Jewish people and people of color, sexual minorities, as well as activists.
The Hammerskin Nation–a masthead for Hammerskin racist skinhead crews–has since gone national, and later international, with their bigoted agenda.
The Hammerskin Nation event in Oregon was planned in conjunction with Volksfront, a Portland-led white supremacist group with links to Kenneth Mieske and Kyle Brewster, two of the killers of Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Seraw in a 1988 racially charged crime.”
https://kboo.fm/media/4550-interview-local-fbi-about-hammerfest
Nice people. Invite them over and exchange ideas.
Oh oh, more stoopid …
And here comes the rabid pavlov dog, George, yipping at Turley’s heels like a lost puppy, hysterically exclaiming for the 21st time in 2 days, that Antifa is just an idea.
I’m still trying to figure out how the Trump administration is going to unlawfully prosecute an idea, or take away an idea’s right of free speech.
The lost puppy contradicts himself every time he opens his foaming mouth.
Every group, no matter how disparate, had a “founder” or the “egg” so to speak. The group/s didn’t just sprout from nothing. To believe you, is to believe the democrat KKK had no founders.
Wrong again george
A daily example of stupid that we can see is GeorgeX coming here religiously, thinking he has any credibility whatsoever as he yaps at Professor Turley all day. Is it a tragic love affair, GeorgeX’s obsession with stalking Professor Turley? Or just Lyin’ Like A Biden for the Democrat communist cause?
Antifa apologists hang their hat on the (silly) notion that it is leaderless, not a group, not an organization.
Okay, fine:
Antifa is a rudderless, disjointed, chaotic bunch of gangsters.
I don’t think that helps your cause.
More importantly, ignore that chaff. The essential issue is Antifa’s noxious ideas — collectivism, communism, and violence in the service of its political goals.
Yes, their useless idiot mouthpieces, like our own George, are unwitiingly attempting to distract from the main premise.
Its not that they’re a “group”. Its that they are TERRORISTS.
George thinks that you cant call these violent thugs terrorists, if its just an idea that is burning, threatening, destroying, assaulting, murdering, and intimidating.
As usual, his arguments are juvenile, or just entirely made up, so he has to keep repeating them like a rabid pavlov dog.
And, anarchy. From Trump’s Executive Order:
Section 1. Antifa as a Terrorist Threat. Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law. It uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals. This campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists. Antifa recruits, trains, and radicalizes young Americans to engage in this violence and suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members. Individuals associated with and acting on behalf of Antifa further coordinate with other organizations and entities for the purpose of spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech. This organized effort designed to achieve policy objectives by coercion and intimidation is domestic terrorism.
Since Trump is a supporter of neo-Nazis, he is an unreliable supplier of information about the American Antifa movement.
This is what the American Antifa actually believes:
“Rose City Antifa was formed in 2007 to coordinate opposition to a music festival that was planned to be held near Portland by neo-Nazis associated with White Aryan Resistance. According to one of its leaders, the group concentrates on “outing” people whom they believe to be neo-Nazis. According to Alexander Reid Ross, the author of the book Against the Fascist Creep, Rose City Antifa grew out of the group Anti-Racist Action (ARA) which first appeared in 1987. Through Rose City Antifa, “the European and American models were sort of synthesized and the current model of Antifa in the US was developed”.”
What are “illegal means to organize?” Are they using telephones to make calls, getting together over take-out pizza?
Trump is clearly depending on propagandists to make up word salad.
Are they “radicalizing” people in the same sort of Clockwork Orange method of playing loud music with eyelid clips to force them to watch?
Are the “elaborate means to shield the identities of its operatives” anything like the face coverings and plain clothes used by ICE to prevent anyone assaulted, shot, or kidnapped from identifying those involved?
I don’t recall any armed stand-offs with anyone. The last notable armed stand-off was at Waco, Texas where the Feds managed to get a bunch of children burned to death because they could not take a better tactical position and decided that torture was the way to proceed to “save” the children that became corpses. Mission Accomplished.
AFAIK Antifa doesn’t care about ICE, but it is clear that the Trump propagandists have decided to try the message that everyone not actively supporting Trump are somehow Antifa.
The only speech Antifa is looking to disrupt is from facists, particularly neo-Nazis, aka Trump supporters.
Oh oh, more stoopid
Color me “Confused”??? The very people who shout and chant, “From the river to the sea!” are OPPOSED to NAZIS??? Howcum??? Looks to me like the Nazis should be their heroes. What a strange world we live in.
“The only speech Antifa is looking to disrupt is from facists, particularly neo-Nazis, aka Trump supporters.” In other words, Antifa are just like fascists they use violence to suppress the views of anyone they disagree with. Bizarrely, you think this is a defense of them. But, at least you have admitted that Antifa are politically motivated terrorists. You just think that is a good thing.
I would like to see local Antifa internet provocateurs arrested and prosecuted for fomenting political violence.
What I would not like is to give the Trump Admin police state powers which they will cravenly abuse as ideologues.
Declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization strikes me as risky. The FBI should be able to figure out who the bad apples are build cases with hard evidence. They should trace the foreign money and charge people with FARA violations.
The precedent of claiming extraordinary police powers to combat your political opposition’s extremists is dangerous. It will carry over to the next Dem Admin. Antifa can be snapped back with diligent law enforcement.
There is no such thing in US law as a domestic terrorist organisation. As Andy Ngo has pointed out, this is mere signaling of an investigation priority; there are no additional powers. This contrasts with a designation of a group as a “foreign terrorist organisation.”
OK, that’s mildly reassuring. Becoming an “investigative priority” of the FBI could destroy your future life and reputation, though you never get charged. Think about how the Atlanta Olympics hero (a guy who saved many lives) Richard Jewell. The “Behavioral Sciences” branch of the FBI thumbed their nose at the 4th Amendment (which was meant to protect citizens from “statistical profiling” and “hunches”). Or how about Steven Jay Hatfill, the govt. scientist named to the press as a “person of interest” in the anthrax mail attacks post-9/11 without any solid evidence linking him besides he had access to govt. anthrax? Or, how about the Catholic clergy singled out for harassment?
There’s a delicate balance to be maintained when it comes to FBI police powers and citizen rights. I support law enforcement generally. They have enough power to fight domestic terrorist cells as is. We don’t need to expand their powers.
With so much foreign money flowing in to influence domestic politics, why isn’t FARA being enforced? In my mind, there’s no distinction between foreign money going to privately lobby a Senator, or to organize street demonstrations. Where are the FARA indictments?
pbinca posted: What I would not like is to give the Trump Admin police state powers which they will cravenly abuse as ideologues.
You never whined about the real police state fascism of the Obama administration or the more recent Biden administration with Merrick Garland – including the fascism that involved committing felonies.
Aside from that, the tell that you hate freedoms you don’t want is your demands that adult American women and men lose their Second Amendment rights and be subjugated to an “apprenticeship under a mature adult mentor” before being given those rights as though they are a privilege.
You are a cheap fake Kalifornia American, with terribly twisted definitions of what rights and freedoms are.
“You never whined about the real police state fascism of the Obama administration or the more recent Biden administration with Merrick Garland – including the fascism that involved committing felonies.”
Can’t whine about what didn’t exist.
Stoopid ^^^
You’re just making stuff up in your mind. I was very much opposed to Garland/FBI harassing parents who spoke out stridently at school board meetings. I commented publicly in these pages. You have no idea who you are disparaging, but that doesn’t seem to matter, does it?
I’ll throw it back as a question ( I don’t read minds ). Do you support giving the President police-state powers to harass his political enemies? What about if a Democrat President gets elected?