Creative Commons
These antifa activists were seen near Lafayette Square ... two years ago, protesting a white nationalist rally in Washington, D.C.
When 65-year-old Scott Gudmundsen of Loveland, Colorado, saw two men in blue polo shirts bearing the name of a roofing company in his neighborhood, he knew just what to do. He called the police, warning them that there were “antifa guys” in the area, and “I am going out there to confront them.” When police arrived on the scene, they found Gudmundsen in fatigues and tactical gear, holding the two young men at gunpoint. Weirdly enough, they turned out to be not “antifa guys” but … roofers.
It’s one small story, albeit one of particularly vivid stupidity. But there is a specter haunting American conservatives. It’s clad in a black hoodie and bent on destroying their homes, their communities, and their very lives. Antifa, they believe, is coming for them.
They believe it because it’s what they’re being told, not only by conservative media but by the president of the United States, who among other things claimed that the 75-year-old man in Buffalo who was pushed to the ground by police in riot gear was actually an “antifa provocateur.” And there’s a very good reason it’s happening right now.
It’s not because antifa itself has in any objective sense grown more powerful or threatening in the last month or so. It’s because the urgency of the movement for police reform, and the striking change in Americans’ opinions about Black Lives Matter, has left many on the right in a psychologically difficult spot.
Many of the subtle and not-so-subtle ideas about societal order and the threat from supposedly criminal (or generally uppity) black people that they’ve relied on in the past have become more problematic to argue for in public, at least for the moment. And because anger and fear are both the foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency and the ideology of media outlets like Fox News, a temporary redirection was in order. Enter antifa.
While anti-fascist groups have existed for about as long as fascism itself, in its current American incarnation, antifa is more of an idea than a movement. It’s shared by people who believe that the best response to white supremacists and other far-rightists is to confront them in person, often with fists. As historian Mark Bray wrote in 2017, “There are antifa groups around the world, but antifa is not itself an interconnected organization, any more than an ideology like socialism or a tactic like the picket line is a specific group.”
Periodically through his first term, Donald Trump threatened to declare antifa a terrorist organization, a threat made empty by two facts. First, in American law only foreign groups can officially be declared to be terrorist organizations, a process that goes through the State Department. Second, antifa isn’t an organization.
That’s not even to mention that people associated with antifa haven’t actually committed any acts of terrorism; they’ve killed no one, and their violence has been mostly confined to the occasional street brawl with marching white supremacists. The most notable antifa action to date was when someone punched white supremacist Richard Spencer on television—satisfying to many, but hardly likely to result in a catastrophic breakdown of American society.
But when the protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis began spreading across the country, conservatives quickly became terrified that violent antifa activists were preparing to rampage across the country.
On Fox News and other conservative news outlets, the protests have been portrayed as a kind of nationwide riot with a bit of legitimate protest on the side. And antifa is at the center. “It’s obvious to pretty much everyone with a brain that antifa is instigating a lot of the devastation that we have been seeing,” said Fox host Laura Ingraham.
“Violent young men with guns will be in charge” when the police are gone, Tucker Carlson told his viewers recently. “They will make the rules, including the rules in your neighborhood. They will do what they want. You will do what they say. No one will stop them. You will not want to live here when that happens.”
Antifa isn’t the sole instigator of this vision of coming chaos, but it’s a key component. So on social media sites like Facebook and Nextdoor, rumors began spreading that antifa is organizing thugs to come to cities and small towns, where they’d wreak untold havoc and destruction. In one town after another, residents panicked over busloads (or occasionally, planeloads) of violent antifa fighters who were supposedly on their way.
If you’re a Fox-watching, Trump-loving retiree, what do you see at the moment? Those protests, with their stunning demands to “defund” or even “abolish” the police, look like the leading edge of a remaking of societal power relations.
In one particularly absurd case, hundreds of armed vigilantes in Klamath Falls, Oregon, population 20,000, assembled on a Sunday to repel the antifa invasion they were convinced was arriving that night. “They had heard that antifa, paid by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, were being bused in from neighboring cities, hell-bent on razing their idyllic town,” NBC News reported. Some of these hoaxes have been amplified by credulous conservative media figures like Lara Logan of Fox News.
To be clear, antifa is not imaginary. It exists. But it is not an organization or a large movement, it has no widely read sympathetic news outlets or stockpiles of weapons, and it is not invading anyone’s town. It is not a threat to the health and safety of the elderly white people who make up the bulk of Fox News’s audience.
But if you’re in the business of creating anxiety and fear, antifa is gold, particularly right now.
If you’re a Fox-watching, Trump-loving retiree, what do you see at the moment? Those protests, with their stunning demands to “defund” or even “abolish” the police, look like the leading edge of a remaking of societal power relations. It’s shocking, disorienting, and threatening. But at the same time, with everyone from major corporations to Mitt Romney repeating the words “Black Lives Matter,” the old rhetoric of threatening black people and besieged whites that you’ve been fed for so long now sounds a little discordant.
So the specter of violent young people (most or all of them assumedly white) obscuring their faces and seemingly determined to destroy the very foundations of social order—and even literally drag you from your home—is so compelling that you just have to tune in to hear how far the chaos has advanced toward your block.
In its way, antifa is a more politically correct thing for people on the right to fear than the black mob—especially at a moment when support for Black Lives Matter and agreement that there is a fundamental racism problem in American policing have skyrocketed.
When they watch police in riot gear pour through a crowd of protesters, launching tear gas and swinging batons, the viewers can say to themselves and each other, “It was terrible what happened to that George Floyd, and of course black people have been mistreated. But those antifa anarchists really have to be kept under control.” It offers a way to look favorably on a police crackdown—the maintenance of existing hierarchies of power through state violence—at a time when police crackdowns are not so popular.
Back in the real world, whatever minimal antifa presence might have appeared at the fringes of the protests over police brutality, it amounted to essentially nothing. “Federal and local arrest records in dozens of cities make virtually no mention of antifa,” The Washington Post reported on Sunday. “Law enforcement officials who had braced for the purported invasion of antifa militants in cities large and small now mostly acknowledge the threat has not appeared.” But that won’t stop President Trump and conservative media from hyping the threat. Until they can come up with something even scarier.
