Anti-Anti-Fascist?

Donald Trump has done it again: labeling “Antifa” a terrorist organization, as if it were a centralized group with a hierarchy, a payroll, and a board of directors. Spoiler alert: it isn’t. Antifa isn’t a group. It’s not a club you can join with a membership card. It’s a loosely connected ideology—a philosophy, really—that means “anti-fascist.”

So let’s unpack the absurdity. By declaring war on Antifa, Trump is basically saying he’s anti-anti-fascist. In other words, if we parse this like a logic problem from a bad high school textbook: anti-antifa = pro-fascist. Congratulations, Mr.President: in your own tortured syntax, you’ve just claimed to be on the fascist team.

And let’s put this in historical context. The real anti-fascists—the ones who didn’t just shout slogans on Twitter or at protests—were the soldiers, partisans, and civilians who risked everything to fight Hitler and Mussolini in World War II. They didn’t need a hashtag. They needed courage, strategy, and a willingness to confront real fascism head-on.

If you believe the right wing media, “Antifa” is a marauding gang that goes around looting property and killing people. In fact, they’ve repeated this fiction so often, many people believe it to be true. It isnt. They aren’t real. Declaring “Antifa” a terrorist organization is not only legally and practically meaningless, it’s historically ridiculous. It conflates a philosophy with an enemy army, all while ignoring the true lessons of anti-fascist resistance.

Trump’s “anti-Antifa” proclamation is a masterclass in absurdity: a double negative that reads like a confession, a misreading of history, and a convenient bogeyman rolled into one. If anyone needs a reminder, anti-fascism has a proud, real history. What Trump calls a “threat” is really just ordinary people standing against what he, apparently, embraces.