In October 2016, I drove from Dallas to Houston after news of a White Lives Matter protest spread online. At a time of intense focus on police killings of Black Americans, rallying behind that slogan caught eyes. The group had already held a demonstration outside the NAACP’s Houston office that August, and participants showed up wearing Donald Trump hats, carrying assault rifles, and waving Confederate flags. The next demonstration would take place outside the Anti-Defamation League’s office.
A few watchdogs and media outlets had already uncovered the neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups behind the campaign to popularize the “White Lives Matter” slogan. A little more than a year earlier, Trump had announced his presidential bid by painting a grim, if unrecognizable, picture of a country besieged by crime and terrorism. Few pollsters imagined Trump could win the vote that November, but a fringe far right saw hope in his campaign promises to end immigration, build a wall on the US-Mexico border, and confront “radical Islamic terrorism.” Trump was soon in the uncomfortable position of having to address endorsements from the likes of former Knights of the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the KKK-linked newspaper The Crusader. The half-hearted disavowals convinced few people. Liberals and leftists still saw white supremacy hard at work behind his proposed policies, and far-right groups the country over continued to line up behind his presidential bid.
When I arrived in Houston to cover the White Lives Matter rally, it was a gray, muggy midday. Around 20 far-right demonstrators gathered outside the ADL office, while three times as many counter-protesters showed up to shout them down. The local police department dispatched hundreds of officers. Crowd control barriers were set up between the White Lives Matter demonstration and the anti-fascists and anti-racists on the other side. Tensions were high. One of the far-right participants repeatedly shouted through a bullhorn, “White lives matter,” while the anti-fascist side, referring to Adolf Hitler’s suicide, chanted, “Follow your leader, kill yourself.”
The White Lives Matter demonstrators chanted and held placards that read “Stop Killing Our Police Officers.” I walked through the crowd to get a sense of what kind of person felt threatened by a slogan like “Black Lives Matter,” but it only took a moment. Confederate flags flew above the demonstrators. Some had dressed in military fatigues and balaclavas. Others carried assault rifles. As it turned out, the demonstration was organized by the Aryan Renaissance Society, an outspoken neo-Nazi group. Wearing a Trump hat, one of the organizers commanded the bullhorn for most of the afternoon. The group raised a banner bearing their slogan and the ARS’s logo: a phoenix with crossbars and a lightning bolt.
The few far-right demonstrators that would speak to the press aired what were then considered fringe conspiracy theories. One man told me that white Americans were enduring a “genocide” brought on by immigration and interracial marriage. Another said nothing but handed me an antisemitic flier that warned of the “Jewish power structure” supposedly controlling the US government and the economy. A man who introduced himself as Scott Lacy told me he was a former convict who nonetheless supported law enforcement. He complained that the media unfairly depicted his group as “racists,” “haters,” and “terrorists” for simply being “pro-white,” then went on to blame “Black culture” for raising African Americans to “hate the cops and to hate white people period, actually.”
After the rally and the counter-protest cleared out, I drove back to Dallas considering what I’d seen and heard. That rank racism and tired conspiracy theories persisted among anyone struck me as a sad, worrying reality, but I was reassured by the fact that both everyday people and committed activists so convincingly outnumbered the neo-Nazis. When Trump won the vote that November, it breathed fresh life into the most radical fringes of the American far right. Still, across the years that followed, far-right calls for shows of public force routinely attracted far greater numbers of anti-fascists and fed-up Americans than supporters. Once in the Oval Office, Trump continued to issue dog whistles and energize the far right, but there was something to be said for the anti-fascists who refused to let outspoken neo-Nazis march in their cities without opposition. It seemed a given to me that, in a moment of rising white supremacy, anti-fascism was a moral imperative. After all, any time the far right speaks of their desires to inflict harm on an immigrant, a person of color, or other people they deem an enemy, they are also hinting at their plans for anyone else who doesn’t fall in line with their vision of society.
During the early years of Trump’s first tenure, the far right continued to ride his administration’s coat tails, often appearing alongside pro-Trump groups that presented themselves as comparably more mainstream. Ultra-nationalist groups like the Proud Boys flooded cities under the pretense of holding Make America Great Again rallies that were often little more than provocations to engage in street violence. Neo-Nazi and white nationalist speakers enjoyed the protection of heavily armed militias that turned up at speaking events to supposedly ensure their free speech rights. Trump occasionally paid lip service to condemning white supremacy, but he trained the bulk of his ire on immigrants, Democrats, and the leftists who opposed him.
For its part, liberal media struggled to understand Antifa — shorthand for anti-fascism — and debated ad nauseum the moral soundness of “punching a Nazi.” Headlines and nighttime news played loops of street fights from Berkeley to Portland, from Seattle to New York, and leftists who stood with their communities in the face of far-right intimidation were subjected to endless hand-wringing. Still, anti-fascists around the country saw the situation for what it undoubtedly was: a confluence of open fascism and mainstream conservatism.
Then came Charlottesville. In August 2017, hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and avowed antisemites descended on the city to protest a recent decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. They held a night march at the University of Virginia, carrying lit torches, assaulting students, and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” then regrouped the next morning for what they called the “Unite the Right” rally. The demonstration hardly got off its feet. The governor issued a state of emergency, and the state police declared the gathering unlawful. Rather than disperse, the far-right participants chased and attacked locals, counter-protesters, and leftists across the city. By the time the violence ended, a neo-Nazi had plowed his car into a group of anti-racists, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring several more. Facing mounting public pressure, Trump went on television and insisted that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the confrontation in Charlottesville.
A far-right rally had resulted in the broad-day murder of a young woman, and even if the president wouldn’t unequivocally condemn open displays of Nazism parading on American streets, the backlash was swift. Warrants were issued and arrests were made. Lawsuits were filed and participants lost their jobs. Many on the radical right felt betrayed by the Trump administration, a shift that led the movement at large to reconsider the usefulness of protesting at all. Some rebranded and others moved underground. At the same time, infighting, legal challenges, public pressure, and popular pushback left the movement in shambles.
Far-right protests didn’t disappear altogether, and anti-fascists continued to organize against them. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and others still posed a significant threat, but it seemed for a brief moment they no longer had a front row in the MAGA movement. Trump continued to blame leftists for political violence, crime, and unrest — such as during the racial justice protests following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 — but his own base was changing. Christian nationalists moved up the MAGA ranks. A stranger, less coherent stripe of conspiracy theorists — such as adherents of QAnon, who believed there was a global scourge of mass child sex trafficking — gained traction. From the outside, it looked like it was only a matter of time before the MAGA coalition collapsed in on itself.
During the 2020 presidential election, Trump responded to the fractures among his followers the way he always does: through deflection. As the protests over Floyd’s murder spread throughout the country, he threatened to designate Antifa a terrorist organization. He never made good on that threat, but Republican lawmakers followed suit and helped drum up the scare campaign. In August 2020, US Senator Ted Cruz held a congressional hearing he billed as an investigation into supposedly rampant left-wing violence. The hearing included the testimony of right-wing provocateurs like the writer Andy Ngo and a self-described expert on anti-fascist violence who equated small groups of anarchists and leftists with international terror outfits like al-Qaeda. Cruz even blamed Antifa for the death of federal security officer Dave Patrick Underwood — who had, in fact, been killed by a member of the far-right boogaloo movement.
During the 2020 election campaign, Trump himself seemed to fear voters had soured on him. For months, he had accused Democrats of gearing up to steal the vote, insisting that he could only lose if the election was rigged. Far-right militias spoke of showing up armed at the polls, and as Election Day neared, watchdogs warned of potential political violence. Trump and his supporters continued to raise the specter of Antifa, blaming anti-fascists for violence during the George Floyd protests, and right-wing media parrotted their claims. When Trump and Joe Biden took to the stage to debate that September, Trump begrudgingly told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” but refused to disavow militias and white supremacist groups that attended MAGA rallies. To a debate moderator who asked him about violence, the president only replied, “Almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.”
I had traveled to Arizona to cover the elections. As the results began to trickle in, it was clear that, no matter the outcome, Trump no longer commanded the same grip he once had on a majority of voters. While the votes were still being tallied, I drove to the Maricopa County Elections Department building in Phoenix, where a few hundred MAGA demonstrators were protesting what they were convinced was a rigged election. One protester took the microphone and led the crowd in prayer. “Lord, our president is fighting for us right now,” he said, kneeling on the parking lot pavement. “And I say us as in the people that are standing here, the children that are being sex trafficked, that poor boy and girl that’s being raped at this current moment somewhere here in the United States.”
I left with the feeling that the MAGA movement had drifted into so dark a direction that it would struggle to offer broad appeal in the future — even in a country as paranoid as the United States. When the final vote tallies came out and it became official that the president lost his reelection bid, I wondered if the Republican Party would recalibrate for a post-Trump world. Even that following January, when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to prevent the certification of the election results, it felt like the desperate, dying gasp of a movement that had tried and failed to dispense with the pretense of American democracy. Unsurprisingly, Capitol rioters and some of their defenders falsely blamed anti-fascists for the violence and vandalism that Trump supporters carried out that day. On national television, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham claimed that the rioters “were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd,” a statement she had to retract the following day.
Many of the hardline neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups that were active during the first Trump administration have disbanded, but their worldview lives on in the harsh policies of his second administration. It’s a trend happening the world over, as mainstream center-right and right-wing parties adopt increasingly far-right policies that were once confined to the fringes. Trump returned to office in January after a Democratic campaign marred by failed attempts to chase the Republicans to the right on issues like immigration. Now, the authoritarian push his second administration has undertaken has far outdone his first stint in office.
The president has publicly fantasized about shipping American political opponents to foreign prisons and stripping some of his prominent critics of their citizenship. In cities on both coasts, American soldiers patrol the streets — in the case of Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the deployment would help “liberate the city from the socialists.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wantonly snatch people from their workplaces or in courthouses, or out of their homes or cars, and disappear them to detention facilities. Students who protest or even write critically about US foreign policy are arrested and tarred as “terrorist sympathizers.” Even believers of the long-discredited white genocide conspiracy theory had their day when Trump dressed down South African President Cyril Ramaphosa over the fictitious “persecution” of white farmers in his country.
“Trump’s own record offers a different view of incitement.”
Last month, the far-right activist Charlie Kirk, a cofounder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed during a campus event at a university in Utah. Authorities have offered no evidence that the alleged shooter had any links to left-wing groups, but Trump and loyal Republicans have seized the moment to accuse the president’s political opponents of encouraging and endorsing widespread political violence. At Kirk’s funeral, he hailed the far-right provocateur as a “martyr for American freedom,” then blamed the “radical left” for his death. Vice President JD Vance, who once compared Trump to Hitler, went as far as to claim that criticizing the administration’s increasingly authoritarian policies created the conditions that led to Kirk’s killing. “If you want to stop political violence,” he said, “then stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.”
Trump’s own record offers a different view of incitement. During the first 10 days following his first electoral victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 867 incidents of harassment linked to Trump’s win. There is also his frequent description of migration as an “invasion,” a cynical depiction of people in search of safety and stability as a foreign military power. In October 2018, a neo-Nazi named Robert Bowers, who believed Jews were orchestrating the flow of “invaders” into the country as part of a plot to undermine its white majority, stormed the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and gunned down 11 worshippers, injuring several more. Less than a year later, in August 2019, white nationalist Patrick Crusius drove from his Dallas suburb to El Paso, where he shot 45 people, killing 23, and left behind a manifesto explaining his hope to help stop the “Hispanic invasion.” This June, an alleged far-right assailant shot and killed Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband.
Even before Trump’s rise to power, far-right bloodshed far outpaced and outkilled any other form of political violence. In fact, a report published by the bipartisan Center for Strategic & International Studies found that “right-wing terrorists” and “ethnonationalists” committed 60% of all “terror attacks” in the United States between 1994 and 2020, killing at least 340 people. That report blamed leftists for 25% of terror attacks and 22 deaths — the left-wing groups targeted property far more often than people. Just last year, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the US Department of Justice, published a study that said “far-right extremists” had carried out more than 227 attacks and killed more than 520 people since 1990. That death toll was more than six times higher than what the NIJ attributed to “far-left extremists” in the same period.
The same week news broke that the Department of Justice had scrubbed the NIJ report from its website, Trump’s top policy advisor, Stephen Miller, described the “radical left” as “a vast domestic terror movement.” He said the US government would “use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”
As Republican calls for revenge after Kirk’s death continue to grow, Trump has answered with a promise to break the back of an American left that exists only in the imagination of the president and his supporters. In late September, he signed a legally questionable executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. That description is hard to square with the fact that Antifa is a political worldview and not an organization, a fact that Trump-appointed FBI director Christopher Wray admitted in a 2020 congressional hearing. That is, after all, part of the executive order’s danger: Anyone the administration dislikes will be dubbed Antifa, and the pretext of cracking down on anti-fascism will justify any and all steps it takes toward entrenching authoritarianism.
That plan is already at work. Just days after Trump signed the executive order, he announced the deployment of troops to Portland, in his words, to protect “ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa.” The state has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, while the mayor of Portland and the governor rushed to point out that there is no unrest in the city, but this is the United States in 2025, a country whose far-right politicians control every branch of the government and still see the ominous threat of Marxism lying in wait around every corner.
It doesn’t matter that the president misrepresents his administration’s targets, nor does it make a difference whether his most ardent supporters truly believe that large pockets of the country are havens for left-wing violence. As the administration continues to take an axe to the country’s institutions, it might not even matter whether Trump’s executive order is legal. In the wake of Kirk’s death, people who have made flippant comments about his killing or simply attempted to correct the record on his political legacy have lost their jobs. The Trump administration has reportedly already floated the possibility of cracking down on philanthropic and nonprofit groups that fund liberal or progressive causes and criticize the government’s policies.
In the face of this top-down pressure, it’s hard to imagine that calling for nuance or pointing to the numbers will help. Attempts to appeal to reason won’t beat back the wave of far-right propaganda. That’s because neither the Antifa executive order nor the current wave of right-wing hysteria is truly about political violence. If it were, Vice President Vance wouldn’t have lashed out at The Nation over an article that examined Kirk’s legacy of “hate, bigotry, and division” while also insisting that no one “should be murdered because of their views.” Instead, he might have taken aim at a recent piece in the pro-Trump Daily Caller that calls for “blood in the streets,” instilling “a public debt for anti-social and subversive behavior,” and “Disproportionate. Violent. Action.”
Many will undoubtedly seek to distance themselves from the word anti-fascism. Some may even, following former President Biden’s lead, speak out against anti-fascists altogether. Once you find yourself in the crosshairs, throwing anti-fascists under the bus won’t deter the Trumps and Vances and Millers who depend on vilifying leftists to deflect anger over their own political failures. That day in Houston nine years ago was the first time I saw anti-fascism depicted as morally unacceptable. Surrounded by fellow neo-Nazis, a masked man with a large knife hitched to his belt stood there and cut me a hard look. It took me a second to notice the words on his hoodie: “Anti-Antifa.” If calling yourself Antifa says only that you oppose fascism, then it’s worth asking what exactly it means to label yourself an anti-anti-fascist.
