Activism
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January 12, 2026
To protect us all from the violence of the Trump administration, we must defend antifa.
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A protester waves an anti-fascist flag at the Oregon statehouse on March 28, 2021, in Salem, Oregon.
(Nathan Howard / Getty Images)
Last week we learned that the Trump administration believes its secret police can murder anyone it deems a “domestic terrorist.” Renee Nicole Good posed no threat to the ICE agents that she was monitoring as a legal observer, but as she pulled away in her car, one of those cops shot her in the head in front of her wife. It was murder, committed in broad daylight and filmed by multiple bystanders. Yet afterward the Department of Homeland Security demanded that we not see what we had seen. In a statement, the agency claimed that the 37-year-old Good—an award-winning poet and mother who is survived by three children—was a “violent rioter” who tried to “kill” law enforcement officers in an “act of domestic terrorism.”
To justify her murder, Good was labeled a domestic terrorist, while her body may have still been warm. If such a dubious designation now marks any of us for death, it seems urgent to consider whom else the Trump administration has designated “domestic terrorists.” They might need some protection right now. And they don’t seem to be getting much help from the Democratic Party.
Last month, when Michael Glasheen, a senior FBI official, testified before the House Homeland Security Committee that antifa was the agency’s “primary concern” and the “most immediate violent threat we’re facing on the domestic side,” Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) listened intently before leaning into his microphone.
“So where’s antifa’s headquarters?” he asked, the first in a series of simple questions—“Where in the United States does antifa exist?” and “How many members do they have…?”—that seemed to flummox Glasheen. The FBI agent stumbled through his responses: “Well, that’s very fluid. It’s ongoing for us to understand that.… No different than Al Qaeda and ISIS…. Well, the investigations are active.”
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Thompson glowered at Glasheen like a disappointed parent. “Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.”
It was a bit of political theater from Thompson, and a video of the exchange went viral, laying bare the impossibility of Glasheen’s task before the committee: providing a factual basis for President Donald Trump’s fact-free anti-antifa crusade. Trump’s September executive order claiming to declare antifa a “domestic terror organization,” after all, is as dangerous as it is absurd: There is no federal statute to make such a designation, and antifa is not even an organization. Moreover, the violence antifa does commit is rare and has been, with one exception, nonfatal. It is beyond farcical to assert that antifa’s violence is “the most immediate violent threat” facing Americans today, and to compare antifa to ISIS and Al Qaeda—as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also has done—is the kind of fascist propaganda that would make Goebbels blush.
Still, as satisfying as it was to watch Glasheen squirm, this widely shared “gotcha” moment bothered me. The subtext of Thompson’s questions was a suggestion that antifa might not really exist at all. What if Glasheen—when asked “where in the United States does antifa exist?”—had accurately pointed to known antifa groups in Oregon, Georgia, California, and elsewhere? What if antifa did have a headquarters? Would that warrant its being labeled a “domestic terrorist organization?” I interviewed roughly 60, very real, very human antifa activists for my new book, To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right. What if Glasheen had started naming some of these activists before the committee? Would Thompson and other Democrats rush to their defense against this revolting, revived Red Scare? I fear not.
For the past decade, Democrats and the wider liberal and centrist establishment in the United States have often responded to escalating MAGA hysteria about antifa with a degree of dismissiveness, incuriosity, and snark. “This group ‘Antifa’… are they in the room with you right now, Mr. President?” Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) quipped on X after Trump signed the anti-antifa executive order. In another post, Representative Dan Goldman (D-NY) challenged the president to “Name one member of ‘Antifa.’” Journalist John Harwood wrote that antifa was “made up,” while former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said on his podcast: “I don’t even know what Antifa is. I know what the definition of Antifa is.… There is no group.” Joy Behar, the cohost of The View, once made fun of Republicans for being “scared of this fictitious idea of antifa, a thing that doesn’t even exist.”
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It is true that the antifa of MAGA’s fever dreams is a fiction. For years, right-wing propagandists have worked tirelessly to manufacture an antifa bogeyman, baselessly blaming antifa for mass shootings, wildfires, and train derailments. They spread preposterous rumors about “busloads of antifa” roaming the countryside looking for white-owned businesses to burn and “antifa supersoldiers” preparing to “decapitate white babies.” During the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, the Trump administration falsely asserted antifa was responsible for fomenting the mass demonstrations, and in the fallout from the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Republican lawmakers initially rushed to blame antifa provocateurs for the violence—before eventually deciding instead to take credit for, and celebrate, the bloody insurrection.
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Despite these constant distortions, the truth about antifa—what it actually is, where it comes from, what it’s accomplished—is still spectacular. “Antifa,” a shortening of the word “antifascist,” refers to a decentralized, underground network of radical leftists dedicated to destroying the far right. Its activists are mostly anarchists, communists, and socialists, and, though they might differ in ideology, they all subscribe to a specific militant tradition of antifascism holding that fascists need to be fought “by any means necessary.”
Although antifa groups are very real, and often collaborate, there is not an overarching organization. There are no leaders. No hierarchies. No org chart or headquarters. Decisions are arrived at locally and collectively, with no rich donors to appease. What little money antifa needs is taken from the shallow pockets of its practitioners, mostly working- and middle-class Americans who keep their activism a secret to prevent reprisals from the fascists they fight.
The antifa activists I talked to were a mix of veterans of older militant groups like Anti-Racist Action, formed in the 1980s and ’90s to kick Nazis out of the punk scene, and newer arrivals to the radical left: everyday Americans who suddenly felt their communities were under siege and who had lost faith in the ability and will of their institutions—including the Democratic Party—to protect them. Many have had personal brushes with fascists, like a Texas woman I talked to who was struggling to console a friend whose family member was among the 22 Latino people massacred by a white supremacist inside an El Paso Walmart. Many of the activists I talked to were queer, watching warily as the GOP adopted genocidal anti-trans language. And still others identified as rednecks and soccer moms, radicalized by news events like the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Though antifa is most often associated in the public imagination with violence, few of the activists I talked with had ever punched a Nazi—though most would have no moral quandaries in doing so. The activists I met were mostly spies and researchers who had formed something altogether extraordinary and, I would argue, grossly under-appreciated. They created an informal, grassroots underground intelligence agency across America, organized around one guiding principle: If you’re a fascist, you don’t get to hide behind a mask. I followed anti-fascist spies as they went undercover, at great personal risk, into white-supremacist groups that burst onto the scene in the Trump era. These spies gathered intelligence that would go on to unmask, or “dox,” neo-Nazi police officers, politicians, pastors, professors, teachers, a therapist, EMTs, businessmen, soldiers, and other men in positions of authority and power—many of whom would lose their jobs as a result.
Thousands of secret neo-Nazis have been identified by antifa over the last 10 years. This tactic, combined with chasing Nazis off the street and deplatforming them from social media, led directly to the destruction of various white-supremacist groups, including Identity Evropa and many of the other groups that marched in Charlottesville. (“Antifa is winning,” Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi best known for getting punched during Trump’s inauguration, famously conceded at the end of 2017.)
Antifa’s intensive research into these groups made them Cassandras, seeing before most mainstream pundits and Democratic politicians that American conservatism was taking the hardest of right turns, that what was once considered “fringe” was not fringe at all, and that the United States was likely veering toward some new iteration of outright fascism. Antifa warned that the the people they were spying on, and sometimes battling in the streets, might one day attain power—and then would no longer need to wear masks at all.
Again and again, however, antifa was dismissed by liberals and mainstream pundits as hysterics or radicals or extremists or worse: not even a thing.
As we saw with the justifications for killing Good in Minneapolis, Trump’s executive order targeting antifa was only the beginning—the first part of a larger project to crush the left and the rest of the president’s opponents. MAGA is counting on liberals’ throwing antifa under the bus, so that it can move on to other targets. To protect us all, liberals owe antifa solidarity, not derision. Admitting that antifa exists, that it is real, and that it is worth defending would be a good place to start.
Christopher Mathias
Christopher Mathias is a journalist covering the far right and the author of the forthcoming To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right.
