If you paid attention to the state of American political discourse this week, you will have noticed a familiar sight: a left-wing university erupting into riots over a conservative group’s speaking event.
“What happened, white boy? Hey white boy, what the f-ck happened?” Antifa rioters at the University of California, Berkeley, taunted an attendee of an event for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA after he was beaten and bloodied.
One person arrested for this assault was an American-as-apple-pie man named Jihad Dphrepaulezz.
In times past, no one would have been surprised by rioters at Berkeley clashing with police officers, breaking through barricades, and attacking attendees of a conservative event.
But many are surprised — and disillusioned — now.
That’s because Americans were told Antifa is considered a domestic terrorist organization and that the force of the federal government would be used to stop these violent leftists from enforcing their bloodthirsty will on conservatives attending events to talk about ideas and politics peacefully.
President Donald Trump designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization in late September, which is something he also said he would do in May 2020, just days after George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose and nationwide riots ensued over the false claim that a police officer asphyxiated him.
Trump 47 is much more swift than Trump 45, and the current administration has said it would go after Antifa’s vast funding network with Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) investigations into billionaire agitators like George Soros. In other words, these cells were supposed to be unearthed, and the violent tyranny of Antifa was supposed to be subdued.
One terror funding network was allegedly behind the U.C. Berkeley riots.
In response to the Monday riots, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a forceful statement:
Antifa is an existential threat to our nation.
The violent riots at UC Berkeley last night are under full investigation by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. We will continue to spare no expense unmasking all who commit and orchestrate acts of political violence.
Under President Trump’s leadership, and pursuant to his Executive Order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, the Department of Justice and our law-enforcement partners are dismantling violent networks that seek to intimidate Americans and suppress their free expression and First Amendment rights.
Additionally, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon issued a preservation order to U.C. Berkeley, requiring that they save all records related to “their response to the mob violence.”
Without deluding themselves into thinking that this law enforcement mission is necessarily easy, conservatives appear to be fed up with what appears to be a lack of action.
Responding to Bondi, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo noted, “This is great rhetoric, but the real measure of success is not tough tweets, but concrete actions that will shift the incentives against left-wing street terrorism: midnight raids, mug shots, case numbers, nonprofit-status revocations, asset seizures, inmate rosters.”
It’s not a new call by any means. As The Federalist reported, similar calls were made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but these terror cells have been growing in the United States for far longer than that. Conservatives have seen law enforcement work quickly before on things that were not even threats, like the purported greatest domestic terrorism threat, “white supremacy, ” or people praying outside abortion facilities.
The Federalist also noted several other avenues through which the Trump administration can make campuses safer for conservative speech and punish schools that fail: forcing them to pay for adequate security for conservative events, forcing them to host conservative events frequently in order to give exposure therapy to violent leftists who would otherwise want to maim or kill their fellow citizens, and forcing them to hire at least 50 percent conservative faculty.
And if the schools can’t do it, then they should lose all federal funding and be required to put in years of work in order to prove themselves worthy of it again.
But none of that will matter if the government doesn’t start jailing these terrorists en masse.
Many are resurfacing a 2017 tweet from Trump, posted just under two weeks after his taking office, about Berkeley’s inability to protect free speech, saying, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”
As The Federalist CEO Sean Davis said in response Tuesday to the 2017 tweet, “It’s been over 8 years. And since then these people have burned our cities and assassinated our friends. It sure would be nice if someone put an end to the never-ending terroristic violence of these savages.”
The American people look to the Trump administration to use whatever means necessary to eradicate this massive domestic threat, but there is clearly a sense on the right and among Trump supporters that those calls do not seem to be yielding any results.
But we know they can, as the administration acted quickly to revoke the visas of foreign students protesting about a foreign conflict in Gaza and Israel.
Likewise, hundreds of people went to prison for years over Jan. 6, and yet only a small number of people across the country have been arrested or indicted for terrorism, despite years of destruction.
“This has been a catastrophic failure that must be corrected,” Blaze Media host Auron MacIntyre said. “Radical leftists funding, planning, and executing violence must go to jail. Nothing about this is hard unless you’re unforgivably weak.”
With leftist violence persistently growing, far-left judges protecting the few who do wind up in legal trouble (encouraging more violence), and its leadership winning major elections, expectations for accountability are high among Americans, and the track record thus far has put confidence on a knife’s edge.
Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
