Debunking ANTIFA

How the alt-right created a meme the Trump regime intends to use in its crackdown

Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s murder, with no evidence, Donald Trump blamed “the radical left.” That was a conscious decision by the regime to use the event as an instrument to attack its political opponents. The removal of Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves was the beginning of the crackdown.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The stifling of free speech is only part of the goal. Trump also announced that he would be designating “ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” The goal is to use RICO, conspiracy statutes, and potentially the Insurrection Act to sweep up people merely adjacent to “Antifa.”

This article will debunk the claim that Antifa exists in any form other than right-wing propaganda.

Here is the Google Trends chart for “antifa”—which shows the number of times the word was searched for—showing almost no activity at all until 2017.

With the exception of Rose City Antifa, a loose group of anti-racists and antifascists in Portland, Oregon started in 2007 to protest a neo-Nazi festival, it did not exist as a national concept until 2017.

Zooming into the period when the term “antifa” suddenly leapt into prominence, we see minor activity in 2017 and then a peak in August. Low-level activity continued through the Trump administration until another huge peak in summer of 2020, and another spike leading up to January 6th, 2021. Effectively all of the activity on these charts is right-wing propaganda.

On August 17th, 2017, infamous alt-right troll Microchip posted this petition to the White House. It was picked up by right-wing outlets like Breitbart and promoted heavily through the MAGA echo chamber. Note the spelling, with a capital-F, a flourish that did not survive its later permutations.

A week later, 8/24/17, Politico interviewed Microchip who made it very clear what “antifa” really is:

“It was to bring our broken right side together” after Charlottesville, he said, “and prop up antifa as a punching bag.”

“So the narrative changed from ‘I hate myself because we have neo-Nazis on our side’ to ‘I really hate antifa, let’s get along and tackle the terrorists,’” he explained.

Here are some of the Discord logs released by Microchip, along with his partner James Brower (“Dreamcatcher”) that show them in the process of turning the petition into a weaponized meme. Microchip celebrates when Russian state media parrots the false narrative and says he “told my fake antifa accounts as well, so they are spreading it to the Left now.”

But Microchip and his allies didn’t stop there. They continued to push the idea of a violent Antifa into the echo chamber. This resulted in an extremely misinformed Atlantic article called “The Rise of the Violent Left” centering on a few activists in Portland and gave the trolls exactly what they wanted.

On October 4, 2017, Microchip and his allies spread a false rumor about an “antifa civil war” on 4chan. As PBS explained, this was algorithmically surfaced at the top of Google searches leading to more people being exposed to the meme. The rumor was that “Antifa” was planning a violent “Communist Revolution” on November 4th, 2017.

What was actually happening on that day was a small non-violent protest by the group Refuse Fascism. There was no civil war. It was another hoax.

Despite the continuous stream of hoaxes and lies about the phantom of Antifa, a bill was introduced the House in June 2018, the Unmasking Antifa Act, which sought to penalize people for up to 15 years for wearing a mask while committing a violent act. It didn’t pass, but it validated the idea of “Antifa” as a threat and kept the term in the public consciousness.

Antifa continued to be stoked online through fake accounts through 2019 and by white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys, who used it as their rallying cry—“Fuck Antifa! Fuck Antifa!” This was punctuated by an incident in 2019 in which alt-right provocateur Andy Ngo, working for the Thiel-funded Quillette, was sprayed with silly string and hit with a milkshake by antifascist activists at a Proud Boys rally.

As Rolling Stone wrote, this was pure manipulation, but it was not just the mainstream media who went along with the gag. Senators Bill Cassidy and Ted Cruz introduced “A resolution calling for the designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. They cited Andy Ngo and other isolated incidents that showed no organization at all. It was a preview.

After the murder of George Floyd, protests by Black Lives Matter and many others erupted across the U.S. Sporadic violence, often induced by law enforcement of federal officers was spun into a mass “Antifa” movement by Trump and his supporters.

On May 31, 2020, Trump tweeted that he would designate “ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization” for the first time. This was entered into the congressional record, although Christopher Wray declined to take further action.

One of the accounts on Twitter that was claiming to be Antifa and wrote incendiary tweets like this one—“Tonight’s the night, Comrades”—was actually run by neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa.

Nevertheless, Trump and his allies continued to push “Antifa” as a boogeyman and blamed every incident of violence on it, despite the FBI never finding such a link. At one point Twitter became so concerned with Trump’s rhetoric, they put a label on his tweet.

After most the George Floyd protests were over, Christopher Wray testified in Congress on 9/17/20 and confirmed that “Antifa,” to the extent it exists, is an “ideology” not an organized group.

Regardless, the biggest push to weaponize Antifa as a scapegoat came after the election in 2020, when the plan to create a violent insurrection at the Capitol was coming to fruition. The Proud Boys and their allies spent weeks baiting Antifa to come to DC on January 6th.

The day before the insurrection Trump announced by memorandum that no one from Antifa was allowed to join his administration “based on organized criminal activity”—despite no evidence. This was an attempt to blame Antifa for the violence in advance.

On the day of the insurrection, Joe Biggs and the Proud Boys continued stoke the meme that Antifa was their adversary.

In fact, there is no evidence that Antifa, or any antifascists, were present on January 6th.

Donald Trump’s claim that Antifa is a “MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION” that can be legally designated as such is simply false. There is no Antifa organization in America, except in the minds of MAGA. Any action that the Trump regime takes against people on this basis is fraudulent, unconstitutional and illegal.

If you found this information helpful, please feel free to share it with anyone who may be misinformed about this eight-year-long right-wing hoax.

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