Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced an action that was long overdue: He designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.
As Trump himself UPPER-CASED: “I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.”
The executive order comes on the heels of one of the vilest acts of political violence in our nation’s history — the assassination of Charlie Kirk — and as proof that when Donald Trump says he’s going to do something, he tends to do it. “It’s something I would do, yeah,” said Trump a week ago at the White House. “Also, I’ve been speaking to the attorney general about bringing RICO against some of the people … that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.”
RICO, of course, is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was originally enacted to go after the Mafia, but which would allow the administration to go after the moneyed interests behind antifa even if they didn’t directly commit the crimes in question. Under RICO, prosecutors could target not just the rank-and-file scum of antifa but also their financial benefactors. Who knows? Maybe an investigation will show that George Soros’s web of leftist organizations has been bankrolling antifa. After all, it takes money to put together a pallet of bricks and drop it off at a predetermined location. Perhaps the Trump DOJ will bring indictments against some of the anti-American organizations behind this leftist rabble.
Antifa, which is an unironically inspired portmanteau of “anti” and “fascist,” is, as the president’s executive order puts it, “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law” — and here’s the important part — “using illegal means, including violence and terrorism, to accomplish these goals.”
We can hear the leftist college professors bleating away about this encroachment on antifa’s First Amendment rights, but that, in a nutshell, is why college is such a racket. The First Amendment isn’t absolute, and it never has been. It guarantees you the right to say pretty much whatever you want without fear of government sanction, but it doesn’t say you can credibly threaten people with violence.
As the federal government’s exposition on the Constitution puts it, “The Supreme Court has cited three reasons why threats of violence are outside the First Amendment — protecting individuals from the fear of violence, from the disruption that fear engenders, and from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur.” Antifa routinely incites fear, disrupts the activities of others, and makes good on its threats of violence. Game. Set. Match.
Barack Obama couldn’t be reached for comment, but I’m sure he approves. After all, as his chief of staff once put it: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. … It’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
The editors at National Review argue that we can “smash antifa without designating them” as such. They write:
We’ve seen before what happens when there is an over-insistence by political leaders on supposed domestic political threats — you get cock-up investigations and confusing plots where it is unclear whether FBI agents and informers are investigating actual domestic terrorists, or merely seducing and entrapping people into plans mostly hatched by the agents and informers. Meanwhile, we should not be ceding more power to investigators to watch Americans without getting a warrant.
But why not, at long last, call them what they absolutely are? If an organization’s organizing principle is violence and intimidation, why shouldn’t we drop the gloves and go after them hammer and tongs?
In any case, the message to disillusioned young people looking for thrills and craving a sense of purpose is clear: Think twice. Antifa isn’t some edgy social club. It’s a domestic terrorist organization. And your participation in wanton violence and intimidation is neither a résumé-builder nor a harmless diversion from adulthood and decent citizenry. Instead, it’s a ticket to prison.
While it’s true that executive orders tend to have a shelf life — that they can be undone by a future president just as easily as they were enacted by his predecessor — this one would seem to have some staying power. Imagine a future Democrat president arguing on behalf of the leftist rabble of antifa. Imagine the political capital that some future Hopey Changey Guy would burn were he to do such a reckless thing. True enough, our nation’s next Barack Obama might well exercise prosecutorial “discretion” in going after antifa, but the group’s marginalized status as a terrorist organization will remain.
For this reason, we can be confident that Donald Trump’s executive order has ushered in a Turning Point on combating domestic political violence.
