Last month, the No Kings 2.0 protests across the United States gained national attention for their crowd size and opposition against President Donald J. Trump. For months, Democratic figures have pointed out both immoral and illegal actions the President has taken in his second term involving ICE, his tariff policy, and recently the military strikes on Venezuelan boats. The President’s actions outraged many Americans, leading a total of seven million people to protest across the country. The Trump administration’s stance on civilian protest, however, was far from normal.

The President and House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly declared that the peaceful, civil protests last month were arranged by a group of radical leftists called Antifa, without describing anything specific about the motive for the organization. The President focuses on Antifa as a label to describe the No Kings protests as a “hate America rally” and link the civilian-led No Kings organization with a perceptibly hostile group. Before a proper judgement can be made on that matter though, let’s take a deeper look and work to understand what Antifa is.

The name Antifa stands for “anti-fascist.” As the name entails, people within Antifa oppose totalitarian and fascist ideologies, as well as a few defining components that these regimes often possess. The general ideas that people in Antifa oppose are racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and white supremacy. The opposition to these qualities does not solely exist because Antifa members are looking out for different groups. Antifa members believe and realize that these qualities and the divisive, discriminatory rhetoric that follows them are the foundation of horrific governments. The Nazis, for example, used religious discrimination and racism to target Jews and xenophobia to target Soviet citizens. The Antifa ideology seeks to stop fascism in its tracks by calling out and dissolving qualities that are used as building blocks for such regimes.

A common mistake regarding Antifa is the fact that the media treats it like a formal organization, which is far from the truth. Anti-fascist ideology exists throughout the United States in every state, often through small activist groups. Most members of Antifa do not wear uniforms or follow any leader but are everyday people that make themselves known when the building blocks of fascism appear. In 2020 when George Floyd was killed, Antifa became prominent and stood against the racism that led to his death. Antifa gained attention at that time with both non-violent and violent activist groups making headlines. Understandably, Antifa has gained a bad reputation for the illegal actions committed by violent groups following its ideology. However, this does not mean all people who support Antifa are to blame. Antifa, which is composed of many different groups of people, appears to lack centralization, leadership, and organized funding. Well-known Antifa organizations in urbanized areas may receive financial support from those in the community and have a local organizer who sets their own principles to lead their group, but this does not mean that all Antifa members cooperate or have a centralized plan or leadership.

The one thing all Antifa groups have in common is the fact that they use direct confrontation to call attention to or disrupt the spread of hate speech, believing that it is not a form of free speech that should be tolerated. Antifa’s ideology uses direct confrontation and tends to be left-leaning, but Antifa also remains a foundational ideal for people with leftist ideals that don’t always align with the Democratic Party. The common cause of preventing authoritarian regimes from springing to life within the U.S. unites many groups of people on the left.

The Trump Administration, determined to demonize Antifa every chance it gets, recalls the events of the more violent Antifa groups. GOP officials have turned the name into a stigma by bringing up the property damage from the Black Lives Matter riots triggered by the death of George Floyd. The sister term, “the Radical Left” was also adopted to tie any left leaning individual to violence to further sway people away from the Democratic Party and other left leaning organizations. The No Kings protests were not an exception, with House Speaker Mike Johnson addressing the movement as the “Antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxist crowd.” All of the descriptors he used to follow Antifa represent the beliefs of a significantly small minority of people that fall under the umbrella of Antifa. He continued to berate the movement in the following message: “It’s not about the people, it’s about the message. It’s about the ideology. It is a dangerous ideology, and it is anti-American. It goes against everything that we stand for.” Nevertheless, no Kings 2.0 came around on October 18th and demonstrated peacefully throughout the entire country, proving Mike Johnson and the Trump Administration wrong. 

Prior to the No Kings 2.0 protest, however, the President delivered his official position on Antifa. Despite national security studies showing that far right extremists like the Jan. 6 rioters pose a greater threat to public safety, he defines Antifa on whitehouse.gov as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” In some instances, members of Antifa have openly and violently opposed law-enforcement, such as in the takeover of Portland Oregon in 2020, but in other cases Antifa seeks to end oppression, not the functioning of law, policing, or governance. Trump’s rhetoric often highlights and villainizes the more extreme forms of Antifa behavior, and the President later officially declared the movement a domestic terrorism organization.

The President and his government’s broad application of labels misrepresents some members of the Antifa movement as something that they are not and sows division in the American public. The President’s job is to serve the United States and its people, not to split the country apart because he dislikes recent expressions of dissent. The best thing that we can do to reverse the damage labeling has done is to speak to one another in an attempt to understand and investigate for ourselves the rhetoric we hear floating around in the media. Antifa exists to resist the use of propaganda to trick people into hating other groups. People believing in Antifa mostly defer to peaceful demonstration because they believe the best way that we all can grow as a nation is when we use our First Amendment rights to build community. Isn’t the ideal of civil dissent the most patriotic objective we’ve pursued throughout our history?