Last week, President Trump announced that he will designate Antifa as a terrorist organization and will recommend investigations into people who fund it. He said the group “causes tremendous incitement, and the things they say and the things they do are horrible.”
We’ve been here before. Trump made a similar announcement in 2020, but never followed up.
In one sense, the exercise may be pointless. Counterterrorism law only allows the designation of foreign terrorist organizations, and in the past the Trump administration has branded Antifa a domestic terror outfit. Our domestic laws provide plenty of tools by which groups can be investigated and prosecuted for promoting any criminal activity, whether carjacking or violently intimidating people who are marching peacefully. We already criminalize contributing money to finance acts of domestic terrorism. Arguing about designation does almost nothing — what matters is investigating the conduct of people and charging them with relevant crimes.
Some may argue that designating Antifa is necessary because it has been regarded, to this point, only as a brand name adopted by individual criminals. It’s true that experts mostly view the organization as non-hierarchical. It has some entrepreneurial “leaders” who drift from one autonomous cell to another. It wants to look like a paramilitary movement that clears out “fascists,” or anyone on the right, from the streets, but the reality is more pathetic (if still malicious). But this is not a significant bar to law enforcement, who are completely justified in going after even loosely knit groups that conspire to commit crimes, and that don’t need a designation to do so.
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.
It would be better simply to act within the guidelines of our already ample federal law codes. Surveillance of American citizens for terror plots requires the FBI to show that they are being directed by foreigners and that they appear to be violating criminal statutes. Otherwise, the tools are already in the hands of law enforcement to treat violent members of Antifa, and their willing co-conspirators, with the seriousness they deserve.