Again leaning heavily on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR has several posts on Donald Trump’s announcement that Antifa is in his crosshairs:
Next comes the part where every NGO/nonprofit implicated in funding a major terrorist organization gets a proctological exam by people with no sense of humor at all.
As I have emphasized several times in the last week: the long game in taking down a terrorist network is to smash its funding chain.
ESR’s analysis begins thusly:
Antifa has just been declared a “major terrorist organization”. Putting on my intelligence-analyst hat again, I’m going to examine its strategic options in the new political and legal conditions following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
I’m going to start with a briefing on what Antifa is and what it does.
A reminder: Antifa is not a unitary conspiracy. It’s a cluster of horizontally-networked cells, some visible aboveground, some semi-covert, possibly some that are fully underground. By design it doesn’t have a central command.
So we’re really asking what range of behaviors Antifa cells normally choose, or can choose.
Before we can explore that we have to identify what Antifa is for and how it fits into the political ecology of the U.S.
None of what I’m about to tell you is speculation. It can be verified by reading Antifa’s propaganda and watching its behavior.
Antifa is an organization of Communists and Left-Anarchists; thus the red and black flags in the main Antifa logo. Its ultimate goal is a violent anti-capitalist revolution that will destroy American constitutional government. The Communists and Left Anarchists have agreed to argue about the shape of what comes afterwards after the revolution.
In practice, Antifa acts as willing street muscle for a range of associated Communist and Socialist organizations, most notably the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA), the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), and various SWP splinter groups.
Antifa also takes strategic direction from the left wing of the Democratic Party. My readers can make their own judgments about whether there is anything remaining in the Democratic Party other than a left wing; the answer to that question is not relevant to the rest of this analysis.
An important point is that the links between the Democratic party and Antifa are personal and deniable. They probably do not run through the Democratic National Committee. A good place for counter-terror analysts to look (and I’m sure Palantir already has this mapped) would be the politicians known as “the Squad” and their close associates.
The strategic sub-goal that was being executed when Charlie Kirk was shot was the creation of a climate of fear that would inhibit public speech by conservatives. This is an explicit goal of Antifa direct action.
Antifa’s funding is deliberately obscure. Before USAID was dismantled, a significant percentage of it was probably coming from the American taxpayer through several layers of shadowy NGOs.
It is very likely that one way or another most of its money comes from low-profile liberal dark money groups such as Arabella, the Tides Foundation, and the Open Societies Foundations.
The effectiveness of Antifa as a political actor has always depended on its ability to act as a terror instrument for left-wing American politicians while maintaining deniability that the politicians’ rhetorical hate-targeting of opponents ever cashes out as violent action.
The first major constraint on Antifa’s future behavior is that this deniability is going to be much more difficult to maintain from now on. Because while the deliberate diffusion of its structure makes legal proof that something called “Antifa” shot Charlie Kirk difficult, it also made Antifa affiliation of any left-wing assassin impossible to effectively deny.
In my next post, I will examine the consequences of this shift.
Continuing the discussion:
Mafia families don’t have membership cards.
Why am I bringing this up now? Because one attempt to head off the hammer coming down on Antifa that we’re hearing from its aboveground allies is that Antifa doesn’t exist.
It’s just an idea. There’s no central command. No common funding. No membership cards. No way to tell who’s a member and who isn’t.
The reductio ad absurdum of this bullshit is to point out that, following the argument, the Mafia cannot possibly exist. Which would be interesting news to all the people it murdered.
Historical note: there was a period when the Mafia was structurally different from Antifa in that it had a Boss of All Bosses, but the position was abolished by assassination in 1931.
In reality, when you’re dealing with a criminal or terrorist conspiracy that doesn’t have membership cards, you identify members of it the same way that other members do: by their willingness to cooperate with each other on shared projects.
And sometimes, by their participation in shared bonding rituals like a Cosa Nostra initiation ceremony or a “bash the fash” demonstration.
None of this is difficult, and it’s exactly the kind of situation that the RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were written to address.
From Trump’s public statements, I’m guessing that they’re going to go right past RICO to a Foreign Terrorist Organization designation.
This won’t be difficult either. If you have any doubt that at least some Antifa chapters are funded by Chinese Communist money, you really need to get out more.
The announcement clearly didn’t come out of the blue:
Still wearing my intel-analyst hat, and have realized something.
Trump’s announcement that Antifa is being designated a “major terrorist organization” doesn’t make any sense unless law enforcement is already holding evidence that the assassination of Charlie Kirk was an Antifa op.
Otherwise, the risk of political blowback from that announcement would be way too high. Trump can be erratic, but he’s cunning about stuff like this and obviously has a shrewd sense of what he can get away with.
So, yep. The most likely scenario was the correct one. The hoofbeats really were horses, not zebras. Everybody still in denial about this is destined for more pain.
And back to the analysis:
Continuing my analysis of Antifa’s strategic options following the Charlie Kirk assassination. These have changed yet again — narrowed considerably — following President Trump’s declaration yesterday.
The Federal Government has legal instruments that it can employ. The RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Influence) laws were specifically designed to attack a different headless network of horizontally connected nodes — organized crime. The fact that Antifa doesn’t have membership cards or a unitary command structure isn’t even going to slow the Feds down.
I think that it’s likely the Feds will designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization, zeroing in on Chinese Communist funding of some Antifa chapters. This will allow the direct use of the CIA, which is normally heavily restricted from operations on American soil.
Nothing Antifa itself can do as an organization will be able to prevent or deflect a massive multi-agency investigation. It is very likely that Palantir already has their core membership identified and their communications channels mapped. Fusion centers will be capturing an unknown but probably large percentage of Antifa message traffic.
(They’ll be helped by the fact that Antifa’s communications security is terrible — it uses Discord for most comms, which is strictly amateur-hour. To be fair, the inner membership is likely to be savvy enough to be using Signal.)
Antifa’s only hope is pressure by its aboveground allies in politics and media. The cells with intelligent leaders will understand that they must cease all direct actions in order to avoid putting those allies in any position of appearing to support assassinations.
Unfortunately for Antifa, in order for hunkering down to work, every single cell has to have leadership that is both strategically patient and capable of restraining its more mentally unstable footsoldiers.
A related problem is that subversive and terrorist organizations that don’t act tend to develop morale problems. A certain minimum level of satisfying violence is required to keep their troops engaged.
Antifa probably has a worse issue here than the average terrorist organization because they recruit so heavily from sexual deviants and borderline mental cases who are likely to have other MBD-related issues including impulsivity and high time preference.
Over time, external pressure for Antifa to look easy for its aboveground allies to defend will remain steady or increase. This is especially so if the Democratic Party line remains Joe Biden’s “Antifa is just an idea”.
At the same time, internal pressure for direct action will increase. Antifa’s survival may depend on how long it is able to manage that pressure.
Antifa needs the investigation to be stalled out and paralyzed by Democratic lawfare before its stupidest cells do something too public and violent for its allied mainstream media to willfully ignore or suppress.
Longer-term, if Antifa survives, it faces a different problem. It dreams of revolution, but is only capable of operating on the sufferance of a general public that largely dismisses it as a LARP for nose-ringed freakazoids. Having committed a gaudy murder of an Everyman figure, it is not likely to get that sufferance back.
