Who Isn’t ANTIFA?

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday declaring “ANTIFA” a domestic terrorist organization and directing federal agencies to investigate and disrupt individuals and networks the administration says enable the movement.

The order is sweeping in rhetoric and spare in statutory detail, a classic piece of policy theater that asks prosecutors to do the impossible and the public to stop asking awkward questions. Federal law contains well-worn mechanisms for designating foreign terror groups, but it lacks a clear legal pathway for branding a decentralized, leaderless movement inside the United States the same way — a gap that legal scholars and analysts say cannot be papered over with a tweet.

Administrations always prefer tidy villains. Antifa is not tidy. The label traces to European anti-fascist networks of the 1920s and 1930s, migrated through punk and Anti-Racist Action in the 1980s and 1990s, and today describes a patchwork of mutual-aid volunteers, online investigators who track extremists, and small autonomous groups that sometimes use confrontational tactics. That lineage matters, or it would if politics still cared about history.

Why now? The White House tied the move to a recent spike in political violence — most notably the deadly shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk — and vowed to go after “those who contributed to this atrocity,” a line the president has repeated as justification for broader crackdowns. Critics point out that evidence linking the suspected killer to antifa is thin, and that the order reads more like a campaign promise than a prosecutorial roadmap.

The practical effect of a presidential roar against a leaderless ideology is easier to imagine than to implement: neighbors deputized by rumor; grant applications audited for “material support”; concert promoters and landlords nudged toward preemptive disassociation. The order’s real muscle may come from the cascade it triggers — banks, platforms and employers deciding it’s simpler to sever ties than to run afoul of the new political climate. That is how intimidation migrates from the courthouse to the coffee shop.

Part-time plumber Tad Crater of Bowling Green, Ky., called the order “a blunt instrument for a country that prefers metaphors to facts.”

“Vagueness is a weapon,” Bixby said. “Stretch a word until it means everything and you hand prosecutors a fishing license.”

Jenny Marston, a sophomore at Ohio State whose grandmother faced Mussolini’s followers in an old immigrant neighborhood, said the designation felt personal. “They can call people terrorists with no charter, no meeting minutes, nothing,” she said. “My grandma is 93. She remembers punching Nazis. Now she has to wonder if she’s on some list.”

Carl Bixby, a self-styled organizer of “Back the Statue” rallies outside Ackland County, cheered the move and promised to help “follow the money.” “If they’re funding chaos, haul ’em in,” Crater said, smiling as if he’d just volunteered for a bake sale and a kangaroo court.

Vice President J.D. Vance took the show to the West Wing lawn and gave the administration’s amiable definition of the threat: antifa, he said, is less an organization than a mood. “It’s the kid in the hoodie who boos the president, the professor who won’t say the pledge, the donor who funds chaos,” Vance intoned, turning a political posture into a criminal taxonomy. “We will follow the networks, the money, and the moral rot.” His voice had the comforting cadence of someone announcing a new breakfast cereal and the legal subtlety of a PTA bake sale rule.

The satire here writes itself: once you allow a label to stand in for evidence, everyone becomes evidence. Anyone who retweets the wrong thread, volunteers at the wrong food pantry, or apologizes to the wrong uncle can be recast as material support. If anyone can be ANTIFA, then anyone can be conveniently arrested, investigated, or administratively erased from civic life. That is not speculation — it is the arithmetic of convenience.

Defenders of the order say it will help law enforcement focus on financiers and violent actors. Skeptics answer that law enforcement already has tools to prosecute actual crimes — assaults, property destruction, illicit arms transfers — and that the president’s novelty is rhetorical: it remakes public life by changing how private institutions think about risk. Rhetoric here is legislation’s stealthier cousin; it rewrites incentives even when it does not change statutes.

In the end, the most damaging sentence in the order may not be the one that commands an investigation but the one that reframes dissent as a precrime. In a republic, protest and argument are how citizens live; in an irony not lost on anyone who has read a certain English novel with telescreens and slogans, silence is how citizens die. If the goal of power is to keep the streets quiet, label inflation is a very cheap way to buy it.

For now, courts, Congress and civil-liberties groups will sort the legal mess. The political effect — a chill on conscience and a multiplication of small tyrannies — may be the lasting one. In a country that once measured itself by a guiding North Star, the administration’s new rubric asks people to look down, count their steps and learn to keep their mouths shut. That is not security. It is surrender dressed in executive stationery.