One of the more revealing exchanges in FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee involved a Republican congresswoman’s query about the nature of the threat posed by “antifa,” to which he replied by explaining the FBI’s view: “It’s not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.”
This was a direct contradiction of Donald Trump’s insistence that “the United States of America will be declaring ANTIFA a terrorist organization.” So naturally, in the alternative universe occupied by Fox News—where similar demands have become essential components of the right’s hysterical campaign of eliminationist demonization of the movement—this reality was immediately glossed over to emphasize one of the predicates of Wray’s remarks: namely, his acknowledgment that antifa is indeed “a real thing.”
The headline at the Fox News website shouted: “FBI Director Wray: 'Antifa is a real thing,' FBI has cases against people identifying with movement,” adding: “'It's not a fiction,' Wray says.” The story went on to focus on claims that antifascists pose a serious domestic-terrorism threat.
Wray added that the FBI had undertaken “any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists.” None of the Republicans (or Fox reporters) present seemed to apprehend the importance of Wray’s insistence that antifa is not an organization, since the FBI as a matter of standard policy has always insisted that it does not investigate ideologies, rather individuals or groups engaged in criminal activity.
Someone should be clear: No one has ever suggested that antifa is not “a real thing.” Rep. Jerrold Nadler did tell an interviewer that the claim that antifa was responsible for protest violence in Portland was “a myth that’s being spread only in Washington, D.C.,” but he was on firm factual ground in saying so: A survey of federal intelligence by the Washington Post the month before found that there was no identifiable connection between antifa and the protest violence.
What many people are saying is that the narrative of antifa as an existential threat and a major source of terrorism and protest violence is utterly fictitious. It is, in fact, a flimsy piece of scapegoating built on groundless conspiracy theories and complete distortions of the movement’s ideology and behavior on the ground.
There is nothing in antifascist ideology, which is primarily focused on confronting and disrupting fascist organizing, that explicitly promotes violence—rather, it does not eschew it altogether, reserving the right to defensive and reactive violence. (How movement adherents behave in reality is another matter, since individuals can and do act outside the bounds of what is already a very flexible belief system.) This is probably why one survey showed that, over the past 25 years, the death toll at the hands of antifascists has been (prior to the July killing of a far-right protester at the hands of a self-described antifascist in Portland, which sparked calls for “civil war” among the “Patriot” right) zero—contrasting starkly with the 329 people it listed as killed at the hands of far-right extremists in the same time period.
In the three years after Donald Trump was elected (2017-2019), according to a Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) database, there was exactly one incident of antifa-related domestic terrorism (the only fatality being the perpetrator), again in stark contrast to the 49 incidents of right-wing-extremist terrorism that killed 144 people.
And while Wray’s testimony may have helped clarify the FBI’s view of antifa—even if it fell on deaf ears—it suggested that the agency remains mired in the institutional blind spot involving right-wing-extremist terrorism over the past two decades, as the CIR’s 2017 version of the same database first revealed. In 2017, law enforcement’s attention was largely diverted by an outsized emphasis on Islamist domestic terror, while in the succeeding years, leftists and black militants have added to the primary diversions.
While progress by at least the FBI has been duly noted on this front in much of 2020—thanks largely to a number of arrests of white-nationalist domestic terrorists in January and February—the language used by Wray in his congressional testimony continues to defer to a term of art devised to wrap far-right extremists into the same category as antifascists and anarchists, thus satisfying the White House’s insistence that the latter two are an existential threat to America: “racially motivated violent extremists.”
The term, as the CIR piece explains, was a kind of compromise to obscure the FBI’s previous adoption of the term “Black Identity Extremists” to describe the potential terrorist threat posed by violent Black nationalists, which became conflated in some assessments with the Black Lives Matter movement. When its use became known, the FBI dropped the term from its lexicon, deferring instead to the new term “racially motivated violent extremists”—which remains flexible enough to include not just neo-Nazis and white nationalists but also Black Lives Matter and even antifascist activists.
As the piece explains:
The bureau’s insistence on using more generic language—“racially motivated violent extremists”—to describe what primarily is far-right White nationalist terrorism suggests that the FBI, especially under Wray’s leadership, has been reluctant to name the White nationalist threat. It also indicates that the agency may have not fully let go of the controversial claim that “Black Identity Extremists” pose a significant terrorist threat.
Yet in Thursday’s testimony, Wray repeatedly referred to the term “racially motivated violent extremists” in describing the activities of white supremacists, who he said have been responsible for the most lethal attacks in the U.S. in recent years. He added that so far this year, the most lethal violence has come from anti-government activists, such as anarchists and militia types—referring most likely to recent shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by a teenage militiaman and the subsequent Portland shooting.
It’s clear that the agency remains wedded to a narrative that leaves a diversion of resources and enforcement capacity—both within the FBI and the Department of Justice—to a non-serious threat like antifa at the expense of taking the threat of far-right-extremist terrorism and violence seriously not just a possibility, but given the FBI’s history and its longstanding cultural predilections, extremely likely.
Even at its most questionable, the antifascist movement is and always has been comprised of Americans who mostly believe in the same freedom of speech, as well as a multitude of other civil rights, as everyone else—but also are aware that fascist organizing is a potent threat to each of those freedoms. Moreover, even if you disagree with them, these are constitutionally protected political beliefs. The drive to deprive them of their civil rights by declaring them “terrorists”—being fomented both by Trump and Attorney General William Barr—is a looming travesty of historic proportions.
If indeed, as Wray insisted to a congressman who asked about recent comments by Barr that FBI agents “are agents of the attorney general,” that, to the contrary, “we, the FBI, work for the American people," then he and the agents who work for him are going to have to prove that in the months ahead—and it likely won’t be easy.