Trump’s New Blank Check to Eliminate Any Opposition – Label Opponents as "Antifa"

Trump’s New Blank Check to Eliminate Any Opposition – Label Opponents as “Antifa”

“Antifa” (short for “anti-fascist,” which sounds like the United States vs Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany in WWII) has never had a membership list, a genuine website, a physical address, any identified leaders or spokespeople or any clear criteria for recruitment. Simply put, it is word that rightwing America uses to denigrate anyone or any group, left of center, they consider a political opponent. Yet, it is often referred to by MAGA Trumpers as if it were a real, identifiable radical leftist organization. It isn’t, but the label is often applied as if it was a tangible force that has existed for some time.

But if you want some names of prominent anti-fascists, let’s start with every member of the Allied Armed Forces in the European theater of WWII… and their civilian leaders. The list includes FDR, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Bernard Montgomery and a passel of Congressional Medal of Honor winners, etc., etc. Many thousands of brave American soldiers died to fight those fascists, so it is shocking that Trump has selected a word to insult those heroes, who were all anti-fascists. To those who believe that Donald Trump’s quest for total power, pursued with autocratic zeal, is a real time, modern reflection of a fascist state, stand back and standby. Everyone of the nearly nine million who attended a March 28th “No Kings” protest is reflecting the anti-fascist views and values of all those who, throughout history, have railed against brutal dictators. If there were ever a modern assembly of anti-fascists, those participating in that national protest meet that criteria.

Yet, the Donald Trump, at the nadir of his popularity and approval level, needs to unleash every conceivable weapon he can grasp – from culling voter rolls of Democrat-likely voters (banning vote-by-mail and pushing for the Save America Act), to arresting or otherwise making his opponents miserable… using taxpayer money and government agencies and personnel to advance his autocratic ambitions. So, if Donald Trump can enlist his anti-constitutional loyalists under a virtual blank check to purge or disempower his opponents, simply by attaching a distorted Trump/MAGA created label, and thus render his opponents as “genuine” enemies of the state, who should be shown no mercy. Writing for the March 31st Puck.com, Julia Ioffe offers this excellent description of Trump’s most recent attempt to eliminate all those who oppose him:

“Since 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community has relied on the National Intelligence Priorities Framework to determine where its constituent agencies focus their attention and resources. The classified document tells the C.I.A. which organizations to infiltrate, the N.S.A. which signals intelligence to intercept, and the National Reconnaissance Office where to point its spy satellites. It’s historically included targets like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban. But in recent months, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the conversations, the Trump administration has been working to add a new top counterterrorism priority to the NIPF: antifa.

“This has been a dramatic and alarming development for many counterterrorism veterans, especially given that ‘antifa’ is not a coherent organization like Al Qaeda. The term has become a sort of MAGA catch-all for left-wing protesters—including domestically, where collecting intelligence on citizens is subject to a much stricter standard. The effort to shift focus to antifa has raised concerns among current and former counterterrorism officials that the administration aims to turn an intelligence apparatus built to combat foreign threats against domestic political opponents. ‘They’re putting antifa on the list and bumping them up in the queue in a way that doesn’t correspond to threats,’ one national security official told me. A recently retired counterterrorism official who was involved in the discussions confirmed this, saying, ‘The view from on high was that we had been ignoring this very dangerous threat and we needed to devote resources to confirm that.’ An administration official told me ‘it’s true’ that the process of adding antifa to the NIPF has begun. (The State Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions in time for publication.)

“Antifa has never been part of the NIPF before—and for good reason. The term, short for ‘anti-fascist,’ has its origins in the (woefully unsuccessful) German and Italian anti-fascist movements of the early 1930s. These days, it is a vague and mutable ideology, encompassing a broad range of far-left ideas—anarchism, communism, anti-capitalism—with no unified belief set. More importantly in the counterterrorism context, it’s not an actual organization with leaders, a command structure, or financing sources that can be targeted. What it is, however, is a central obsession of the second Trump administration.

“This tension was on stark display in December, when Michael Glasheen, the F.B.I.’s operations director for national security, testified in front of the House Homeland Security Committee that antifa is the bureau’s ‘primary concern right now’ and ‘the most immediate, violent threat’ domestically. But when questioned by Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s top Democrat, about the location of antifa’s headquarters or how many members it has, Glasheen was visibly flummoxed and could not answer.” In short, our major intelligence and governmental law enforcement agencies are using government personnel and taxpayer money to use intimidation and the criminal justice system to crush legitimate and peaceful domestic opponents of King Donald John Trump, in an effort which, for decades, has been severely limited by law.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am rather dramatically against Nazis, fascists, brutal dictators and anyone who wants to revoke the American experiment in democracy and end it after 250 years.