In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, U.S. President Donald Trump said he will designate Antifa as a terrorist group — but what is Antifa? For The National, CBC’s Ashley Fraser breaks down the origins of the movement.

Washington

US President Donald Trump has announced plans to designate Antifa as a major terrorist organization. Antifa, short for anti-fascist, is described by experts as a movement rather than a centralized group, with roots in international left-wing politics and a history dating back to opposition to fascism in early 20th-century Europe. In the United States, the movement became more prominent during Trump's first presidential campaign and the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

Legal experts highlight that the US lacks a domestic terrorist organization list, and Antifa's decentralized nature makes such a designation difficult. The renewed focus on Antifa follows the shooting of Charlie Kirk, though there is no evidence linking the suspect to Antifa. Critics suggest that using the term as a broad label could be an attempt to target political opponents.

What is Antifa and why is Trump targeting it?

On Wednesday night, US President Donald Trump said he would designate Antifa as a major terrorist organization. So what is Antifa? The word is short for anti-fascist in a number of languages. Now Antifa is sometimes referred to as a group, but experts say it's more of a movement or orientation. It's a specific international anti-fascist politics of pan-radical left bringing in different kinds of socialists and anarchists and other leftists in coalition to fight back against fascism in the far right from the bottom up. And this movement isn't new. Anti-fascism as a movement, it goes back of course to the formation of fascism in Italy, Benito Mussolini in 1919 and the opposition to his party and then of course from there opposition to fascism in Italy, Nazi Germany, in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, World War II. The North American version of the Antifa movement formed in the 1980s. That kind of militant anti-fascist politics really made its appearance in the U.S. with the creation of the anti-racist action network in the U.S., Canada and to a small extent in Latin America. But by the early 2000s, the Antifa movement was mostly dormant. It really flourished with Trump's first presidential campaign and the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally of 2017. That far right rally organized by white nationalists over plans to remove a confederate statue was met with many counter-protesters, including various anti-fascist groups. The professor I spoke to said President Trump has used the word Antifa frequently as a blanket term to describe left-wing groups. They show up in the helmets and the black masks and they've got clubs and they've got everything. Antifa! He uses Antifa to describe anyone who might be opposed to him specifically, but the politics of the right in general, particularly labeling the movement for black lives and the racial justice protests that occurred in the summer of 2020 as Antifa protests, even though they weren't Antifa protests. They were a separate movement that has existed for decades in the United States. And that's when the president first tried to label Antifa as a terrorist group. That failed in part because Antifa is not a centralized organization. It doesn't have a website or a list of members or a designated leader. It also didn't work because there's no legal framework to do this. We don't have a list of domestic terrorist organizations under law in the United States. We have a foreign terrorist organization list, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, for example. But you have to be foreign to be on that list. And there's no domestic designation because that could infringe on First Amendment rights. We have a freedom of association under the First Amendment, which means that everybody has a right to create whatever organizations it wants. And you also have the right to believe any ideas that you want under the First Amendment. And you have a right to give money or raise money to organizations that you believe in or support their ideology. So why has Trump called for this terrorist designation again? You have not seen Antifa groups in the street confronting the far right for years, and Republicans hadn't been talking about them for years. All of a sudden, it's no coincidence this is happening after the shooting of Charlie Kirk. There's this interest among right-wing circles to try and lash out against them, a nebulous formulation for the left, for those they disagree with, and suddenly it's come up again. Now, to be clear, there's been no evidence to suggest that the suspect charged with Charlie Kirk's murder had any affiliation to Antifa. But legal experts say Trump's announcement on the backdrop of Kirk's murder, where VP J.D. Vance has said a movement of left-wing extremism had helped lead to Kirk's assassination, could all be an effort to squash any political opposition. If there isn't a formal Antifa organization, then it's a vague label that can be applied to anyone who is a political opponent of Donald Trump or of the right more generally. As things are moving in more and more of an authoritarian direction, I think it's worthy of caution to think how that might be used that way, even if he hasn't done it in the past.

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U.S. President Donald Trump signaled new action against left-wing groups following the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, targeting the anti-fascist Antifa movement as a "terrorist organisation."

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