The Trump administration is using an imagined enemy—“antifa”—to justify turning ICE into an ultra-violent, unaccountable army invading US cities.
Shock and awe: Anti-ICE protesters clash with federal agents at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, Oregon.(Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / Getty Images)
The No Kings protests on October 18 were huge, astonishingly nonviolent, and massively widespread. There were more than 2,700 gatherings across the nation and beyond, not just in major cities and blue regions but in small towns and red regions. The people who marched carried flags and signs proclaiming their patriotism and love of country, taking both symbol and identity back from the right. And echoing the subversively festive protests against ICE in Portland, Oregon, inflatable costumes were everywhere—as were frogs, which had been adopted as a symbol by the far right but are now icons of progressive anti-Trump activism.
All the mild-mannered middle-aged and elderly people, kids, veterans, flag-wavers, and inflatable unicorns and eagles marching peacefully should undermine claims from Donald Trump and Mike Johnson that No Kings was a pitiful display of extremism by a marginalized minority. But it won’t stop them from screeching about antifa, which the Trump administration has officially designated as a domestic terrorist organization. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem even claimed to have arrested in Portland “the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa.” Antifa has never been an actual organization, just a contraction of the term anti-fascist (which of course raises the question: If you’re anti-antifa, aren’t you pro-fascist—or just fascist?). But the right has been claiming that the left is full of violence and terrorism even longer than it’s been hallucinating about antifa.
An authoritarian is nothing without an enemy to justify his brutality. Such a leader often resorts to imaginary or grossly exaggerated opponents, or casts an already marginalized minority as a malevolent threat. Trump and his supporters portray immigrants and the left, and anyone standing up against ICE, that way. Authoritarians routinely hype the peril we will be in if the enemy is not quashed, and that quashing customarily and conveniently requires a suspension of laws, a violation of rights, a seizure of power, or all of the above. Right now, it’s being used to claim emergency power and justify turning ICE into a violent, unaccountable army invading American cities.
Some pundits and scholars who should know better are getting on board with the idea that there’s a surge in left-wing violence. A recent report by the avowedly bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on “left-wing terrorism” begins, “In recent years, the United States has seen an increase in the number of left-wing terrorism attacks and plots, although such violence has risen from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers. So far, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.” You have to scroll way down in the report to find that the supposed increased number of left-wing terror attacks amounts to five incidents in 2025, some of them questionably from the left.
Amusingly, White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson tweeted a chart from an article about the CSIS report that shows clearly that there has been far more right-wing terrorism over the years. Nevertheless, The Atlantic saw fit to let the authors of the study cowrite a spin-off article, titled “Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise,” that pumps up the idea that this phenomenon is a significant concern. But the study leaves the critical questions unanswered: What is the left? What counts as violence? Are whole political affiliations responsible for the acts of individuals? And why has the massive surge of right-wing violence over the past decade become so normalized?
The study offers an impossibly broad definition of left-wing terrorism as motivated by “support for LGBTQ+ rights; support for environmental causes…or ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric.” Support for those causes could include a lot of the mainstream, some conservatives, some Girl Scout groups, and most queer people. In the No Kings marches, much was made of the revered anti-fascists of yore, in the “my grandfather fought fascism at Dunkirk” mode.
The overly broad characterization of the left leads to the inclusion of perpetrators who don’t seem much like leftists. One incident the study discusses extensively is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, allegedly by Tyler Robinson. The authors acknowledge that “details about Kirk’s alleged killer are still emerging” but claim that it is “likely” that the killing will be considered a “left-wing terrorist attack.” But Robinson, 22, was brought up by a Republican and Mormon family who taught him marksmanship; he is supposed to have used a gun that belonged to his grandfather. Apparently, Robinson is assumed to be on the left simply because he loathed Kirk and reportedly had a trans partner. The study also discusses the arson attack by Cody Balmer, the Army veteran who last April broke into the grounds of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion and set it afire while Governor Josh Shapiro and his family slept. Although Balmer said he was angry about Gaza, antisemitism may have also played a role in his deciding to try to burn alive a US Jewish family for Israel’s crimes. But it seems unlikely that political ideology was the driving force behind this attack. Balmer also had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, according to his mother—who had sought help for him just before the attack—and had a history of domestic violence. Luigi Mangione, who is charged with murdering a healthcare executive in late 2024, is likewise described in the article as left-wing. Yet a friend of Mangione’s told a journalist that Mangione was “left-wing on some things and right-wing on others”—for instance, “he was pro-equality of opportunity, but anti-woke: for example anti-DEI (and) anti-identity politics.” It’s a stretch to describe any of these people as having a genuine commitment to leftist ideals and movements.
The CSIS report declares, “Radicals will argue that peaceful politics will inevitably fail and that only violence will make a difference.” Who are these radicals? They’re not identified. In 40 years of observing and working with direct-action organizing, I’ve encountered theoretical enthusiasm for violence only from the sidelines and the occasional young hothead. As the CSIS study backhandedly admits, left-wing violence has been extremely rare and out of step with the larger progressive community for decades, which is why its authors had to make the most of five iffy incidents earlier this year.
What too often gets described as left-wing violence at protests is property destruction, which can be dangerous and intimidating and is usually opposed by protest organizers, but should be regarded as distinct from harming human life. For example, at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, a small cadre among the 50,000 protesters smashed a lot of shop windows quite spectacularly. But there were few if any reports of activists harming human beings. Police, on the other hand, used tear gas, pepper spray, rubber and wooden bullets, flash-bang grenades, and armored vehicles against protesters, resulting in many injuries. This event was portrayed by many mainstream media outlets as an occasion of shocking activist violence.
More recently, conservatives have decried the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 as violent. It’s true that there were a handful of riots involving vandalism and retail theft early on in that long, hot pandemic summer of George Floyd, but riots are not protests, and the protesters at these monumental demonstrations that went on for months across the nation were overwhelmingly nonviolent against the living and not involved in property destruction.
It was striking that in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the founder and leader of Turning Point USA, the country’s largest right-wing youth organization, Democrats and leftists were accused of culpability merely for disliking him or disagreeing with his views. (Six foreigners who were insufficiently reverent about Kirk’s death had their visas revoked by the Trump administration, and this official act follows on all the unofficial hounding of anyone with anything bad to say about Kirk, demonstrating the seamlessness between the administration and the mobs and influencers of the right.)
I know that many important organizations are asking you to donate today, but this year especially, The Nation needs your support.
Over the course of 2025, the Trump administration has presided over a government designed to chill activism and dissent.
The Nation experienced its efforts to destroy press freedom firsthand in September, when Vice President JD Vance attacked our magazine. Vance was following Donald Trump’s lead—waging war on the media through a series of lawsuits against publications and broadcasters, all intended to intimidate those speaking truth to power.
The Nation will never yield to these menacing currents. We have survived for 160 years and we will continue challenging new forms of intimidation, just as we refused to bow to McCarthyism seven decades ago. But in this frightening media environment, we’re relying on you to help us fund journalism that effectively challenges Trump’s crude authoritarianism.
For today only, a generous donor is matching all gifts to The Nation up to $25,000. If we hit our goal this Giving Tuesday, that’s $50,000 for journalism with a sense of urgency.
With your support, we’ll continue to publish investigations that expose the administration’s corruption, analysis that sounds the alarm on AI’s unregulated capture of the military, and profiles of the inspiring stories of people who successfully take on the ICE terror machine.
We’ll also introduce you to the new faces and ideas in this progressive moment, just like we did with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. We will always believe that a more just tomorrow is in our power today.
Please, don’t miss this chance to double your impact. Donate to The Nation today.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher, The Nation
Progressive groups know that they are at risk of being accused of being terrorists, and that is in part why their public espousal of nonviolence is strategic as well as a genuine reflection of their values. Indivisible and the other organizers of No Kings made it clear that nonviolence and the de-escalation of any conflict initiated from outside were core parts of the agenda and trainings. Of course, some newcomers to progressive movements and others impatient with the pace of change see violence as effective because it seems direct and impactful, though the record shows that in this country, in this era, it often backfires and seldom succeeds in generating meaningful or lasting change. That is a particular risk in this era. ICE, on behalf of the Trump administration, is thought to be seeking to provoke the kind of violent response that would justify an escalation of the invasion of cities and the violation of rights.
We saw this in earlier moments of mass protest, including during the Black Lives Matter protests, when some notable incidents of violence turned out to be false-flag operations by right-wing groups, including the murder of one guard and the injuring of another at an Oakland federal building by Air Force Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, who was associated with the far-right Boogaloo Bois, and another Boogaloo Boi incident in which a member fired shots into a police station in Minneapolis. Other right-wing violence at the BLM protests in 2020 included incidents of driving cars into crowds and the double homicide in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by Kyle Rittenhouse, who subsequently received massive support from right-wing donors and Republican politicians (including Trump). But like the Seattle WTO protests 20 years earlier, the 2020 BLM protests themselves are routinely described as violent.
No such demands for absolute nonviolence are placed on right-wing groups. Kirk himself had hardly been held accountable for Turning Point USA’s targeting of hundreds of educators, which has led to years of campaigns of harassment, including death threats. One such campaign, which targeted the Rutgers history professor Mark Bray, grew so menacing that this October the professor fled to Europe with his family. In September, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that “since landing on the list, some professors have gotten hateful emails, online messages and letters threatening rape or death, and in some instances, have seen that activity intensify since Kirk’s death.”
As someone who writes mostly about violence in the context of violence against women, I find that the most overlooked aspect of violence of any kind is the sense of entitlement that accompanies it, the idea that the perpetrator has the right to harm and even take a life. Such arrogance is at odds with many left-wing ideas about human rights, equality, and justice. Many of us on the left oppose the death penalty not only because it’s unequally applied but because it’s homicide. Arguably, violence itself is a political position that fits in better with justifications of inequality, including male dominance and machismo, militarism, and authoritarianism.
The ranks of the left include many groups whose members have a strong moral opposition to violence, including Buddhists, Quakers, and others whose religions preach nonviolence; gun-control activists; anti-war activists; and anti-death-penalty activists. Anand Giridharadas wrote in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder:
Democracy is, in the beginning and in the end, a belief that we can live together despite difference and choose the future together. It is a beautifully reckless idea, because it is hard enough for a family to decide what to have for dinner. But it works; in fact, it works better than all the other systems. It is built on the idea that the way to change the world around you is to try to change others’ minds.
If you wholeheartedly believe that, you don’t believe in violence as a legitimate political tool in civilian life.
“The sudden decline in right-wing terrorism is both more striking and harder to explain,” says the CSIS report, but I think it’s easy: The Trump administration is doing would-be right-wing terrorists’ work for them by terrorizing and attacking their enemies. Why would they risk life and liberty to assault women, trans people, religious minorities, immigrants, and non-white people when the government will do it instead? For decades, the anti-abortion movement stoked lethal violence, which led to murders, mostly of doctors and other employees at facilities that provide reproductive care, as well as the harassment of women seeking services. In June, a far-right anti-abortion advocate assassinated former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, who survived. A list of Democratic politicians that was found in his car suggests he intended to kill far more, but he was apprehended and awaits trial. (This is the one incident chalked up to the right in the CSIS report’s tally of right-versus-left terrorism in the first half of 2025.)
But now those extremists’ goal has been ratified at the highest levels: The justices whom Trump nominated to the Supreme Court secured the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and Republican state governments are now criminalizing miscarriages and scaring medical workers out of providing even life-saving care to pregnant women. The Trump administration is committing thousands upon thousands of acts of terrorism against immigrants domestically, taking rights away from trans youths, and promoting white supremacy, as well as blowing up civilians in ships in the southern Caribbean in violation of international law. The threat is coming from inside the (White) House, but the CSIS report doesn’t include state terrorism. On the other hand, a critique of the report from scholars at the research and news site Just Security argues that it overlooks a lot of far-right terrorism to reach its claim that in the first half of this year, the left outdid the right.
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
The January 6, 2021, attack on Congress involved a convergence of violent groups who gouged, speared, sprayed, slugged, and otherwise beat members of the US Capitol Police, vandalized parts of the Capitol Building, and sought to attack and possibly assassinate elected officials. It should be forever shocking that the insurrectionists who had been convicted of crimes were pardoned by Trump upon his return to office, and that the man who instigated the rampage is now president. Right-wing violence is at an all-time high, and it now comes directly from the White House (and a pardoned January 6 berserker has been rearrested for death threats against House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries).
There are numerous reports of death threats against Republican politicians, particularly those in Congress, that keep them in line with Trump’s agenda, and some have spoken out about the fear they live under. There’s no firewall between the Trump administration and the forces of right-wing terror. And that points to something essential about violence: It’s a way of making people do something they don’t want to do or stopping them from doing something they do want to do. It’s a tactic by those whose ability to get people on board by peaceful means has failed, who have given up the democratic processes of persuasion and coalition-building that Giridharadas wrote about.
Left-wing violence largely failed in the 1960s and ’70s, with the symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground demonstrating that small groups using lethal violence were outliers and burdens for the movements they claimed to represent (the SLA, it should be said, was in essence a misguided cult). An overlooked aspect of 1970s radical politics, beautifully documented in L.A. Kauffman’s book Direct Action, was the rise of nonviolence as a strategy and an ideology, and the ways in which trainings were paired with processes meant to democratize decision-making within activist groups. Nonviolent activism can genuinely change the world and often has changed this country, from the abolitionist movement to the climate movement. Acknowledging the power of protest means acknowledging that the protesters are thereby legitimately dangerous to the status quo. Recasting protesters as dangerous in the sense of criminal has long been used as a strategy to undermine that legitimacy and to justify suppressing protest.
Unfortunately, feature filmmakers love left-wing-violence plots. One way to explain it is that secret gun-toting guerrilla groups, shootouts, explosions, car chases, hunted fugitives, and the rest work well—for movies, whose only job is to hold our attention for a couple of hours. To actually change the world usually takes years, even decades, and requires collective work to build coalitions, shift public opinion, or pass legislation, which happens through stuff like meetings, lawsuits, protests and public events, more meetings, and fundraising. I’ve seen climate and Indigenous and feminist and queer-rights victories following the underlying shifts in public opinion: none of it at the point of a gun, all of it from the kind of often tedious, sometimes exhilarating work of peaceful activism. I yearn for more films that show how the world actually does get changed—and less nonsense about violence on the left.
Rebecca SolnitRebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist whose more than 25 books include Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, and Men Explain Things to Me. She writes most regularly at meditationsinanemergency.com.