Trump Is Lying About Antifa to Justify His Authoritarian Crackdown

But although these factual and legal observations are a good starting point to criticize Trump’s actions, they hardly capture the true nature of his project.

Antifa, as used by Trump and his friends, is a myth. The verification of the facts of a myth is never a fully adequate answer, because it does not deal with the emotional attraction that the myth serves. Mark Bray, historian at Rutgers University and author of Antifa: the anti -fascist manual (2017), noted in an interview that people who identify themselves as an anti -fas have not been “in the street as in recent years” and are certainly not funded by billionaires like Soros. Trump uses antifa rather as a “Boogeyman Catchall category” for all kinds of trends to which the law is opposed. Black Lives Matter, Trans rights and immigrant rights have all been grouped with antifa and terrorism.

The fiction soros has connotations of the Nazi myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The Nazis concocted the fantasy that the rich Jews subverted German society by funding the revolution: an ideological chimera which allowed the Nazis to pose as opponents of both unpopular plutocrats and frightening plebeians. The myth of the antifa funded by Soros could serve a function similar to Trumpism: uniting the populist and distant factions of the right.

The antifa myth is elastic enough to encompass the wide scan of the opposition to Trump, the liberals as well as to the radicals.

Writing on his substitution, journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that the national security directive signed by Trump has large -scale implications. Modeled after the approach of the war against the terrorism of groups such as Al-Qaeda, the directive authorizes the police to prevent the groups which could be a threat preventively. The “clues” or indicators of violence in the report are alarming. As Klippenstein notes, they include:

• Anti-Americanism,
• Anti-capitalism,
• Anti-Christiania,
• Support for the reversal of the American government,
• Extremism on migration,
• extremism on the breed,
• Extremism on sex,
• hostility to those who have traditional American opinions on the family,
• hostility to those who have traditional American opinions on religion, and
• Hostility towards those who have traditional American opinions on morality.

The Trump administration seems determined to use these new directives to attack the rights to the freedom of expression of its criticism. On Wednesday, Stephen Miller tweeted: “This language encourages violence and terrorism”, in response to the criticism of the governor of California Gavin Newsom with regard to the ice and the Trump administration as “authoritarian”.

Greg Sargent, a writer for The New RepublicAsked Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon, “if he thinks that Miller’s tweet means that federal police should and will now investigate groups that describe ice as” authoritarian “.

Bannon replied: “Yes. Stephen Miller is right – even more important, he is in charge. ”

The antifa myth is a corner that will be used to destroy freedom of expression. It is not enough to simply emphasize that it is a myth. On the contrary, Democrats must rally the Americans with the argument that the threat to Antifa will one day be used against anyone who denounces Trump.