Manufacturing Terrorism: Trump’s war on ‘antifa’ at home and abroad raises the stakes for US resistance. A Special Report. (Pt 1 of 4).

The prosecution of a Texas anarchist group and revelations about secret FBI spying on activists mark a turning point in Trump's ginned-up efforts to paint leftist protesters as enemies of America.

US protester waving an anti-fascist flag at the Oregon statehouse in Salem, Oregon, March 2021.

Photo: Nathan Howard | Getty Images

11.26 —

Part 1 of a 4-part Special Report

Manufacturing Terrorism: Trump’s war on ‘antifa’ at home and abroad.

In recent weeks, we’ve had so much global media attention focused on the Epstein files and ongoing ICE raids — soon targeting New Orleans, LA, now wrapping up in Charlotte, NC— that scant attention has been paid to another screaming news development: the Trump administration’s escalating use of the terrorism label to go after leftist political critics at home and abroad; he calls these critics “antifa” – a broad term for anti-fascists, but not a specific leftist organization. By doing so, Trump is deliberately blurring the lines between hard left groups that may support the concept of armed revolutionary battle to fight neo-Nazis and fascists and the growing, amorphous, mass movement of Americans who reject political violence and vocally embrace peaceful nonviolent resistance to Trump’s authoritarian moves.

In another historic first on the domestic front, Trump officials are prosecuting the first case of an “antifa” black bloc group involving 16 US individuals who attacked an ICE detention center in Alvarado, TX on July 4. Trump officials have labeled them “the North Texas Antifa Cell.” They are reportedly members of a small group of individuals who identify with anarchist ideals, based primarily on an evidence box of anarchist instructional materials found among the group’s possessions after the attack. Federal prosecutors in North Texas stated that the group is “…part of a larger militant enterprise made up of networks of individuals and small groups primarily ascribing to an ideology that explicitly calls for the overthrown of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and the system of law.”

The “evidence box” of materials found by law enforcement after the Texas ICE site attack.

The Texas group acted in protest against abysmal conditions at Alvarado, where over 1000 ICE detainees languished. They lit fireworks and vandalized the building, and, in an unplanned turn of events, one of the protesters shot a police officer in the neck when confronted. He fled the scene, but the FBI captured him a week later. By then, they’d uncovered some 50 guns collected by the group. One member, an ex-Marine named Benjamin Song, stands accused of shooting the officer and collecting the firearms. They were found along the box of anarchist how-to materials.

Critically, Trump’s new presidential memo outlawing domestic “antifa” didn’t exist in July when they carried out this attack. Nor did his September 25 presidential memorandum, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Countering Political Violence,” which lays out a new law enforcement strategy to surveil and clamp down on leftist political groups. These laws are now being applied retroactively, despite the fact that “antifa” doesn’t exist as a real or specific organization. (See below for more discussion of the Texas group.)

Targeting European anarchists who beat up Nazis

On the foreign front, the State Department recently issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) that designated four foreign anti-capitalist and anarchist groups as “antifa” and added them to the US foreign terrorist organization (FTO) list, effective November 20. The State Department says the US will go after leftist anarchist and pro-Marxist groups who, they charge, “incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas.” The NSPM-7 allows the US government to freeze the assets of the foreign “antifa” groups and make it a crime to provide them with material support; it lacks the same authority to do so to domestic “antifa” groups.

The new foreign “antifa” FTOs are Antifa Ost (Antifa East) in Germany, the Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front in Italy (FAI/FRI), and two Greek anarchist groups, Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense. All four have engaged in political violence, often in clashes against neo-Nazi groups, but only one, Antifa Ost, has the term “antifa” in its name. The other groups aren’t known as “antifa” in their countries. (See Part 3 for more.)

Raising the stakes of protest

With these actions, Trump has again manufactured a new enemy by presidential declaration and created a fictional box and label to go after political critics of his policies. By lumping anyone who resists enforcement of his orders leftist “antifa,” he’s also moved to criminalize resistance and has raised the stakes for anyone protesting his actions. The unfolding Texas case shows how seriously Trump’s FBI is seeking to enforce his dubious presidential decree.

The names of the other Texas accused are Bradford Morris (also known as Meagan Morris), Cameron Arnold (nickname Autumn Hill), Daniel Rolando Sanchez-Estrada, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto, Maricela Rueda, and Savanna Batten. They face a 12-count indictment and varying criminal charges. Others arrested were Nathan Baumann, Joy Gibson, Seth Sikes, and John Thomas. Charges include “providing material support to terrorists” (eight defendants); riot (eight defendants); attempted murder of officers and employees of the United States (five defendants); discharging a firearm during, and in relation to, and in furtherance of, a crime of violence (five defendants); conspiracy to use and carry an explosive – during a riot (eight defendants); conspiracy to conceal documents (two defendants); and conspiracy to conceal a document or record (one defendant) -- specifically, a box of “antifa” materials (see below).

On November 29, five of the group pled guilty to the charges and face federal arraignment on December 3 . If convicted, they face a potential sentence of up to 10 years to life in federal prison (Song, Rueda, Arnold, Evetts, Morris). Three others (Batten, Elizabeth Soto, Ines Soto) face 10 to 50 years, and one (Sanchez-Estrada, accused of concealing the “antifa” box) up to 20 years for each count (my emphasis added). Six of them (Baumann, Gibson, Kent, Morgan, Sharp, Sikes, Thomas) also face up to 15 years in prison for providing material support to terrorists. Lawyers say the legal process is likely to take some time before final sentences are handed down.

During recent national No Kings Day nationwide resistance events and neighbors counter-protests to ICE raids, protesters have worn inflatable costumes of cartoon animals that have become synonymous with opposition to Trump’s regime.

Image credit: Jesse Duquette

A reminder: anarchists target property not people

It’s important to note that, as an overall shared ideology, anarchists support the use of violence directed at property, not people. Some anarchist groups don’t support using violence, ever. Most claim a right to self-defense when it comes to confronting violence directed at them by neo-Nazis or police. Some in the Texas group claim they had only agreed to light firecrackers and deface the ICE building. But at least some of them were fully aware and on board with preparations to bring guns to the ICE attack, even if they were planned for self-defense. Luckily, they didn’t kill the officer they shot. But that’s going to be a tough argument now.

Now comes news that, in another McCarthyite turn, the FBI secretly spied on New York City volunteer immigrant rights activists doing “courtwatch” monitoring of DHS and ICE agents at three federal immigration courts this spring. The FBI gained access to the group’s private Signal conversation, a revelation that comes courtesy of public records obtained by the watchdog group Property of the People, a government transparency non-profit, who shared them with The Guardian. The FBI surveillance information turns in a few lines of an August 28 FBI-New York police department (NYPD) “joint situational information report” that quoted from the courtwatch group’s Signal chat. The report branded the volunteer citizen-court watchers “anarchist violent extremist actors”.

How and when the FBI accessed the Signal chat is unclear, and alarming, since Signal uses end-to-end encryption to guarantee user privacy, so law enforcement would need direct access to someone’s unlocked phone or be sent copies of the chat by a Signal group member. In a written reply to The Guardian, the FBI claimed that a “sensitive source with excellent access” introduced the report as a warning about “extremist actors targeting law enforcement officers and federal facilities”. In other words, someone who joined the group served as an FBI mole. That person, the FBI claimed, “participated in a debrief session held via a Signal call within the ‘courtwatch’ Signal groupchat” in late May. The FBI doesn’t name this individual and the FBI declined to provide more information to The Guardian. But as Levin reported, courtwatch monitors have been non-violent, and the FBI “offered no specifics or evidence to explain why the FBI characterized them as ‘anarchist violent extremists’ or whether the FBI had ongoing access to the Signal conversation.”

What’s clear is that the FBI, led by Trump loyalist Kash Patel, has allowed the agency to trample on our civil rights. We should also assume the FBI has directed its agents to surveil and spy on other activist groups engaged in monitoring ICE or organizing protests of Trump’s agenda.

We already knew that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies had increased their use of covert agents and cyber surveillance tools as part of its Trump’s beefed-up law enforcement and national security plan. The Trump administration has worked closely with Silicon Valley libertarian tech titans Peter Thiel of Palantir and Elon Musk at X, among others, to adopt the latest AI surveillance agents. No one should be naïve about Kash Patel’s zeal to spy on Americans either, including all the local neighbors turning out to monitor Trump’s ICE masked goon squads.

The elevated stakes for the US resistance

What this means is that the US resistance movement must now contend with the reality that FBI agents and moles are infiltrating leftist protest circles groups and are advancing Trump’s ginned-up narrative of “violent extremist leftist activists.” This, despite clear evidence that courtwatch volunteers have engaged in entirely peaceful monitoring of court activities, including filming ICE in its arrests of individuals at courthouse hearings. We need to be equally aware of provocateurs who deliberately seek to disrupt peaceful political events, since it’s clear that we’re in J. Edgard Hoover territory now with Patel and DHS head Kristi Noem, and Tom Honan at ICE and Attorney General Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice. They’ve all shown a willingness to flout the law for Trump.

The threat of moles isn’t new to the American left, either; it’s the oldest intelligence spy tool used to gather evidence and build a case of criminal wrongdoing, in this case by critics of the president. We’ve clearly crossed a Rubicon now. It’s crystal-clear that, facing very negative public polls, Trump is acting with increased desperation to stop his critics. He went so far as to threaten several Democratic lawmakers with arrest and execution, accusing them of “seditious behavior” in a Truth Social post on November 20. Their crime? Reminding US military and intelligence officers of their public duty and right to refuse any “illegal orders.”

After public outcry, Trump walked back his threat, denying he meant that. But days later, the Department of Defense announced it would open a “review” of “serious allegations of misconduct” against Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz), one of the lawmakers involved. For his part, Kelly has pushed back, refusing to be intimidated. “I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power then protecting the Constitution,” Kelly fired back in a Nov. 24 post on X, while sharing a snapshot of his uniform shirt pocket, festooned with a dozen medals honoring his military and public service.

Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz) shared a snapshot of an impressive set of military medals that reflect his many years of decorated public service in a pointed rebuttal to Trump and bogus accusations of “seditious” actions.

Source: Mark Kelly X post, Nov. 24

As critics see it, Trump is the main actor inciting partisan violence, which serves his agenda. If violence breaks out, he could try to argue that he has to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law and send in troops to reassert control. He’s avoided doing that — so far, because protesters have been careful to engage in non-violent resistance. But we’ve already seen him send federalized national guard troops to aid ICE enforcement efforts in Washington, DC, California, and elsewhere, with an obvious goal of intimidating residents and signaling who’s in charge. It’s all part of the autocratic playbook. The fabrication of “anarchist leftist terrorists” is just a new chapter. But clearly, we’ve also crossed a political Rubicon.

Trump’s gone so far as to threaten several Democratic lawmakers with arrest and execution, accusing them of “seditious behavior” in a Truth Social post on November 20. Their crime? Reminding US military and intelligence officers of their right to refuse “illegal orders.” After public outcry, Trump walked back his threat, denying he even meant that. But the cat’s well out of the bag. Trump is trafficking in fear and threats of violence and jail, and more. Outside the US, he’s okayed extrajudicial murders of some 80 foreign nationals in Venezuela already that also dubbed drug traffickers-cum- terrorists (see Part 3 on Trump’s attacks on foreign “antifa” for more). As broad resistance to his presidency grows, we should expect he’ll up the stakes further in his effort to silence critics. As Sen. Kelly’s response to Trump shows, that isn’t working so well for Trump. But that doesn’t mean he’ll stop, even when the courts move to block him.

The underlying goal: “ordered liberty”

Ken Klippenstein is a respected independent journalist and former Intercept reporter who covers national security on his Substack and is among a handful of US reporters closely covering the details of Trump’s NSPM domestic terrorism strategy. Like Project 2025, this strategy makes America’s “homeland” the top priority for the military; it’s being led with gusto by Christian Zionist Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense. Project 2025 called for the creation of an uber-Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that integrates other law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies, oversees a massive ICE detention and deportation program, and helps patrol and seal the US border. Project 2025 also suggested an expanded focus on anti-terrorism (pg. 160) and use of wartime emergency powers as strategies to go after critics it deemed enemies of the state. Project 2025’s authors complained that the Department of Justice had failed to prosecute “radical agents of the Left like Antifa” (pg.13).

Project 2025 also urged the next GOP president to dismiss what it deemed the targeting and silencing under Biden of right-wing actors accused of illegal actions (pg. 548, 564-5). States Project 2025: “The FBI harasses protesting parents (branded `domestic terrorists’ by some partisans) while working diligently to shut down politically disfavored speech on the pretext of its being `misinformation’ or `disinformation.’” It’s no small irony that Trump is now doing this to critics of his policies and actions. Project 2025 promotes the goal of “ordered liberty,” a legal concept that, in essence, argues that some laws can be ignored or superseded in order to maintain social order under the guise of protecting the common good. With Trump, that doctrine has translated to invoking emergency wartime powers and resurrecting obscure 19^th-century laws to go after drug cartels or try to limit birth control, for example. The strategy of expanding the terrorism box to go after US and foreign leftists is another.

New US “National Defense Areas”

The new Trump NSPM directive also sets up militarized “National Defense Areas” within the US – a warning of what’s being planned, which is further militarization of domestic law enforcement. “This isn’t just border security – this is Trump declaring war on America itself,” as Klippenstein puts it, warning of what’s ahead. “This is just the beginning.” Regarding expansion of foreign “antifa” on the US FTO list, Klippenstein added, “The move seems to be an attempt to make people accustomed to white westerners being treated as terrorists.”

Image Creator: Julia Beverly | Photo: Getty Images

Conflation is the name of the game here, too

Just as Trump has invented “antifa” as a specific terrorist organization, versus a descriptive label for anti-fascist political views, he’s deliberately stretching the box of what defines a US foreign terrorist organization, conflating groups engaged in violence with a growing nonviolent US resistance. The newly designated FTOs have engaged in violent attacks – in some cases clashes with foreign neo-Nazi groups or the bombing of government targets. That gives a level of credence to their being included on the US foreign terrorism watchlist. But they don’t actually fit the legal criteria for being on the US watchlist as direct threats to US national security. None has attacked the US or Americans in the US, a key FTO criteria.

The main common bond they share is ideological: they are hard left, pro-Marxist or anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, anti-Zionist, self-defined anarchist groups or networks. The European anarchist groups have risen up to monitor and counter violence by neo-Nazi groups affiliated with far-right political parties and leaders, and with autocratic regimes like Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary or Georgia Meloni’s in Italy; she was previously head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, which has fascist roots.

Trump’s weaponizing of the terrorism label to target “antifa” groups could even be viewed as a form of political gaslighting: he labels the groups who organize to fight neo-Nazis as the criminals, not the other way around. He’s also moved to legalize the actions of US neo-Nazis by pardoning those who participated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection and welcoming them into the ranks of his expanded ICE shock troops (see below for more on this).

This is what Trump – and autocrats – deliberately do: they promote a false narrative or version of facts, and keep repeating this until people accept that version. That doesn’t make it any more true or legal, but it may score victories in the court of public opinion and on the internet where right-wing disinformation has become a potent political weapon. For years, MAGAland has promoted a disproven narrative that left “antifa” groups are terrorists, violent threats to public security, when the hard facts show that groups and young men who espouse right-wing beliefs are responsible for most political violence, including mass shootings in America (see data chart, below).

It doesn’t take much of a leap, then, to wonder if Trump’s expanding counterterrorism and NSPM-7 national security strategy will lead to more Trump critics being labeled “antifa” – i.e., a terrorist danger to public safety – and subjected to FBI surveillance or investigation. That’s a real concern being raised by legal and civil rights experts. They worry about the escalated risks to ordinary Americans across the country who step up to confront or film ICE agents violently arresting their neighbors during enforcement raids. That means the US resistance movement has to be fully aware of Trump’s strategy and prepare to avoid being drawn into violent clashes with DHS agents or federalized national guard troops backing ICE.

That’s easier said than done, too: we have seen so many reports of ordinary people merely observing or filming ICE activities, which are legal, and yet, they still get arrested, roughed up, and sometimes detained and jailed. Last week, a federal judge in Chicago ruled that a DHS officials and ICE agents baldly lied when they claimed protesters had initiated violence against their agents to block enforcement, after bodycam footage challenged those statements.

In light of the revelations of secret FBI spying on activists and Trump’s labeling of leftist “antifa” as terrorism, resistance leaders keep stressing the importance of individuals and the general public being informed and trained to attend No Kings Day rallies and monitor local ICE raids, of knowing their rights, and, critically, of committing to nonviolent action as important steps to avoid falling into Trump’s trap.

Manufacturing enemies: a slippery slope

As it stands, the FTO label is proving very convenient. It’s allowed Trump’s team to seek political legal cover for its ideological war on leftist critics of US policy – and Israel’s. Early on, Trump also slapped the terrorism label on student and faculty pro-Palestinian protesters, arguing that they were aligned with terrorists, namely Hamas.

Now comes news that Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has declared the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a “foreign terrorist organization,” a label he also recently slapped on the Muslim Brotherhood. He ordered the Texas Department of Public Safety to work with the FBI to investigate these groups, banned anyone from associating with them, and prohibited their members from owning land in Texas. The Muslim groups seek to “forcibly impose Sharia law,” Abbott declared, and to gain “mastership of the world.” Like his pal Trump, Abbott is manufacturing enemies and advancing lies while he increases his surveillance of Muslim students and Texas residents suspected of being pro-Palestinian. He is, as pundits put it, playing to the MAGA base.

Counter-protests in Seattle counter Muslim hate outside of a ‘anti-Sharia rally’ in Seattle.

Photograph: David Ryder/Reuters

He’s also blurring the lines and conflating just as Trump has: CAIR is hardly a terrorist organization, it’s a US national Muslim civil rights group whose mission is to “enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.” It tracks anti-Muslim violence and bias. Last year, CAIR recorded 8,658 anti‑Muslim / anti-Arab complaints, up 7.4% from the previous year, of which 647 were hate crime-oriented, suggesting a rise in potentially violent bias. The group actually works with law enforcement to defend Muslims against discrimination. A day after Abbott’s announcement, CAIR sued Abbott over the terrorist designation and the land ban.

By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 with chapters around the world. It claims to be a peaceful, democratic organization, but Hamas, which is on the foreign terrorist list, is one of its offshoot branches. US officials have sought to put the Muslim Brotherhood on, too, but can’t. That’s because the entire organization doesn’t operate as a single, centrally directed entity, a key requirement for FTO status. Since 2015, Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have classified the Muslim Brotherhood as an FTO. Now, Trump has moved to get around that limitation. On November 24, he followed Abbott’s lead by issuing a presidential memo (another one!) stating that the US has begun a process of designating certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as FTOs and Specially Designated Global Terrorist groups.

What’s important to focus on here is how Abbott and now Trump have lumped a US civil rights NGO — CAIR — in with a foreign affiliate of Hamas — the Muslim Brotherhood — that’s now being put on the foreign terrorist list, too. That’s hardly accidental. It all follows Trump’s criminalization of US groups, including those foreign students in the US who took to the streets to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and oppose US funding of Israel’s far-right Netanyahu government.

“The whole thing is a bit ridiculous,” stated Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the extremist watchdog Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, about Trump’s elevation of US “antifa” to the ranks of terrorists, “because the groups designated by the administration barely exist and certainly aren’t terrorists.” She’s not alone in pointing out that the smattering of small, loosely organized anarchist and “black bloc” groups in the US are a far cry from being a “coordinated domestic terrorist” threat, and hardly in a par with organized criminal enterprises, including US mafia networks, drug cartels, or transnational networks such as Al Qaeda or ISIS. Let’s not leave out the slew of US right-wing extremist groups who have fomented the bulk of US political violence, often directed at leftist counter-protesters in recent years. J6 insurrectionist shouldn’t get a pass, either.

But that’s the whole point of Trump’s – and Project 2025’s – strategy, one that blurs the lines, conflates, and stretches the profile of who can be labeled an an enemy of the state, while they continue consolidating a police state by presidential decree. The real target here, of course, is American democracy, lest anyone get overly distracted debating who is or isn’t “antifa.”

END of Pt. 1.

See Pts. 2-4 for more.

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