Always Find a Boogeyman
page four
Without question, the right-wing gaslight onslaught before, during, and after the 2020 protests and presidential election – and the Capitol assault on January 6th – worked like a charm. So much so that, even though 7 in 10 Americans didn’t believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump three years after the election, 57 percent of Republicans still believed President Biden’s election was illegitimate, compared with 2 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of independents.
A poll conducted weeks after the Capitol attacks by the American Enterprise Institute revealed that half of the Republicans polled said that it was “mostly or completely accurate” to say that Antifa “was mostly responsible for the violence that happened in the riots at the U.S. Capitol.”
It’s no secret why they think that. According to Zignal Labs – a media intelligence software service company – the Antifa narrative appeared 8,700 times throughout social media, cable television and Internet news outlets between the hour of 4pm and 5pm on January 6th alone. One tweet that said “remember, Antifa openly planned to dress as Trump supporters and cause chaos today” received 41,100 likes and shares. On January 6th and 7th, the MAGA didn’t storm the Capitol, Antifa did theory was mentioned 411,099 times on social media, cable news, and online websites.
The afternoon of January 6th, the conservative news outlet The Washington Times published a story saying that XRVision, a facial recognition company, had identified Antifa members at the U.S. Capitol. This is the story that Matt Gaetz referenced on the House floor.
However, XRVision quickly issued a statement clarifying that its software did not identify Antifa members but did identify members of neo-Nazi organizations and at least one QAnon supporter. Naturally, Matt Gaetz never corrected his earlier statement. The XRVision statement said, in part: “Our attorney is in contact with The Washington Times and has instructed them to ‘Cease and Desist’ from any claims regarding sourcing of XRVision analytics, to retract the current claims, and publish an apology.” Even though The Washington Times removed the story less than 24-hours after it was initially posted, the damage was done. Before it was taken down, the story received 360,000 likes and shares on Facebook alone.
It certainly didn’t help matters that white supremacist groups were posing as Antifa groups – both during the 2020 protests and during the Capitol riots on January 6th – to stir the already boiling pot. For example, a white nationalist group named Identity Evropa started multiple Twitter accounts during the summer of 2020, claiming to be national Antifa organizations. These fake accounts repeatedly incited violence in the name of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Twitter finally shut down the sham accounts, but the damage, once again, had been done. According to Zignal Labs, within two days of Identity Evropa’s bogus accounts releasing tweets intended to stoke violence, Antifa had been mentioned nearly 300,000 times. The next day, Antifa was mentioned almost 1.5 million times. That’s an increase of 1,200,000 million. In one day.
Others were doing similar things. Perhaps the best illustration of just how crazy and convoluted this got is Adam Rahuba. In 2020, Adam was a food-delivery driver and DJ who lived on his friend’s sofa. At the time, Adam was a self-described “democratic socialist” and Bernie Sanders supporter who took homegrown trolling to an entirely new level – targeting conservative extremists, commentators, and media outlets. Most of Adam’s hoaxes incorporated something having to do with MAGA supporters, using Antifa as bait.
For example, he once created a meme that showed photos of the crowd at a Trump rally that said, “Know any MAGA parents? Child Services will investigate any anonymous claim even without proof. Child Service agents tend to be liberal” – insinuating that people on the far-left were going to unlawfully take the children of Trump supporters away from their families. Patrick Howley, founder and former editor in chief of the far-right Big League Politics website, retweeted the post to his 42,000 Twitter followers, adding, “Self-identified ANTIFA operatives are filing false reports on Trump-supporting parents. Lots of sources say this is happening – don’t let them say this was a joke.” Which, of course, was exactly what it was. For a July 4th ruse, Adam announced that Antifa was having a flag burning “to peacefully protest for abolishing police nationwide.” The event was to take place at the Gettysburg Cemetery in Gettysburg, PA.
The Fox News website reported “possible disruptive or even violent actions by the militant left-wing group Antifa at Gettysburg National Park,” and conservative media outlet Breitbart News also reported on the story: “Should members of the Antifa movement carry out their plan to desecrate the graves of soldiers who fell at Gettysburg, they will join the Taliban, ISIS, and Turkish Islamists who have launched a campaign to destroy historic sites and desecrate graves of their enemies.”
Before Adam announced the “Antifa-organized” July 4th flag-burning event, he published an Internet phone number to make it even more fun. The Washington Post published several of the recorded messages he received: “Y’all going to get to real ….surprised in Gettysburg. I cannot wait to participate, you n------loving f---s.” Plus, “I hope someone shoots every one of you motherf-----s. I pray to God in heaven for someone to shoot everyone involved in that event.”
Sixteen local and federal law enforcement groups were activated to help monitor the fake event. They all gathered at a local middle school that had been turned into an actual command center. There were 100 Pennsylvania state troopers, mounted officers, and a helicopter. Hundreds of armed counter protesters, including militiamen and white supremacist groups, showed up to stop the supposed flag-burning madness. When the Antifa crazies never showed up – because, of course, there never really were Antifa crazies coming to this event in the first place – the counter protesters felt victorious, with many believing their very presence at the event frightened the Antifa flag burners away.
According to Adam, he does this just to screw with people for his own amusement, calling his hijinks “performance art.” He told The Washington Post, “I’ve found myself very annoyed with the rise of right-wing populism. So, I thought I’d do my own thing to push back against them. The message here was that any idiot on the Internet can get a bunch of people to show up at a Union cemetery with a bunch of Confederate flags and Nazi tattoos on their necks that just make them look foolish.”
This tactic is quickly becoming a trend among the Gen Z set. For example, in 2017 billboards saying “Birds Aren’t Real” started to pop up in several major American cities. Birds Aren’t Real followers had a strong presence on social media, plenty of merchandise for sale, and had even protested outside the Twitter headquarters, demanding that the company change its logo (which, of course, was a bird).
On the surface, the Birds Aren’t Real people – and its leader, then twenty-three-year-old Peter McIndoe – seemingly believed that regular ‘ol birds were drones the U.S. government used to spy on the American people. However, behind the scenes, the movement freely admitted that it was nothing more than a parody, created to shine a light on the absurdity of modern-day misinformation and conspiracy theories. Claire Chronis, a Birds Aren’t Real organizer from Pittsburgh, put it this way: “It’s a way to combat troubles in the world that you don’t really have other ways of combating. My favorite way to describe the organization is fighting lunacy with lunacy.”
Now, it appears we have reached Round Three of Donald Trump v. Antifa. On September 27, 2025, President Trump said he was directing the Pentagon to send troops to Portland, Oregon because the city was “under siege from attack by antifa.” Essentially, there had been protesters outside a Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility for over 100 days and he didn’t like it.
Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, portrayed the protests as “weeks of violent riots at ICE facilities,” which was a blatant mischaracterization of what was happening. In truth, the protests had been peaceful, with tear gas and other crowd dispersal tactics being used once back in June 2025.
The protesters themselves certainly took issue with the Trump/ Vance administration’s portrayal of the protests. Dina – the wife of a veteran, a deacon at an area church, and a protest organizer – said she was there because she regards the deployment of the guard to U.S. cities as a “moral injury” to her husband saying, “We are not going to stand for people following illegal orders.” She believes that Ms. McLaughlin framing the protests as violent “perpetuates the Trump administration’s posturing about how we are dangerous protesters.”
“We are not,” she clarified. “We are average, everyday citizens who are tired of the illegal actions of this administration, and we are out here protesting well within our constitutional rights.”
The week before his Portland troop announcement, President Trump signed an Executive Order targeting “Antifa,” posting on social media: “I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices.”
However, there are two major problems with his order. First, it describes Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” a designation that does not exist under U.S. law. Although federal law gives the government the authority to designate overseas groups as “foreign terrorist organizations,” the United States doesn’t have an equivalent domestic terrorism law.
The second problem may be an even bigger one. Antifa is not an actual organization at all. There is no leader, no list of members, no bank accounts. Although there are organized, localized chapters – like NYC Antifa and Anti-Fascist Sacramento – Antifa is not some sort of colossal, looming presence that has designated leadership and a hierarchical structure. In fact, lack of structure is something they take pride in. Antifa is more of what some people call an “affinity group.”
Former FBI Director Wray underscored this distinction when he told members of the U.S. Congress, under oath, that while Antifa is certainly the “real thing” and that the FBI had led “any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists,” what people refer to as Antifa “is not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.” He continued, “Trying to put a lot of these things into nice, neat, clean buckets is a bit of a challenge, because one of the things that we see more and more in the counterterrorism spaces is people who assemble together in some kind of mishmash… a bunch of different ideologies. Almost like a salad bar of ideologies, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and what they’re really about is the violence.”
Typically, the main thing that antifascism activists have in common is their distaste for anything racist, alt-right or, of course, fascist, and they generally show up when there are big gatherings of white nationalists. For the most part, antifascism activists send out “calls for action” and then like-minded people just show up.
To refresh your memory, the term fascism was created by Benito Mussolini, the Prime Minister of Italy from 1922 until 1943 and the man who established the first one-party fascist state in the world. Mussolini intended for fascism to be a form of authoritarian ultra-nationalism with the hallmarks of dictatorial leadership and the aggressive silencing of all kinds of opposition. Fascism, as defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica, is a “political ideology and mass movement that dominated many parts of central, southern, and eastern Europe between 1919 and 1945 and that also had adherents in western Europe, the United States, South Africa, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East.”
Essentially, in its purest form, antifascism is literally an opposition to fascism.
< One of the more fascinating things about the word “fascist” in today’s charged up political environment is that both those on the right and left use it to insult their opponents. Its use is all over the map: Charlie Kirk’s killer inscribed, “Hey fascist! Catch!” on the bullet that killed him; those on the left use it to insult Donald Trump, at times comparing him to the most famous fascists; and Donald Trump used it to insult Kamala Harris – “We have a fascist person running who’s incompetent. She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.” >
So now, just by reading a little more about what antifascism and Antifa actually are, you can probably guess that the last thing they want is to be somehow linked to an organized political party. But that’s exactly what Donald Trump, Bill Barr and their allies from conservative media outlets tried desperately to get people to believe back in 2020 and are trying to get people to believe now.
Beginning in 2020, they all worked hard to conflate Antifa with the Democratic Party, which – although many people associated with Antifa generally support causes considered to be more left-wing like communism, anarchism and socialism – is pure fiction. At one point, President Trump even flat out said, “In my book, it’s virtually part of (the Democratic) campaign, Antifa.” Bill Barr told Mark Levin that, with Antifa, the United States is grappling with a new form of “urban guerrilla warfare” driven by the left’s “lust for power.”
They also worked hard to merge Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement in an obvious attempt to position Antifa as a “black” organization… the perfect dog whistle for the racists in their ranks… but, again, is pure fiction.
It’s not hard to understand why they tried this last one. Antifa is the perfect boogeyman for white supremacist groups and their champions to use, because the entire storyline feeds directly into the false narrative that already plays loudly in their heads: Antifa people, who are “probably black,” are crazies from the radical left who defend the wicked Black Lives Matter zealots. They are scary terrorists who are devoted to the Democratic Party and fight for their Socialist agenda, and are funded by people like the evil George Soros, blah blah blah…