When Everyone Is ‘Antifa,’ No One Is Safe

The following story is co-published with Failed State Update.

As a fan of trash TV, I still can’t get over the transformation that Dr. Drew has made over the years — from answering teenagers’ questions about herpes to platforming some of the least credible operatives of the political right. I still half-listen to his podcast while running errands, and this particular exchange grabbed my attention Monday:

DR. DREW: I’ve noticed a lot of these people that they [antifa] have recruited are a subset of the homeless population. There’s about 10% of people who live on the streets that are clearly sociopathic radicals, and they have shit all over their tents and things. And I’ve talked to some of them, and they are just horrible to talk to. Is that their street soldiers, and then what do you expect to find at the end of a year?

BRAD THAYER: Well, at the end of the year, I expect to find that we’re going to see that antifa was the muscle, but the brain and the nervous system really are going to be the key elements here, and the brain is going to be, I think, rooted in the Chinese Communist Party, through their intelligence apparatus, through their United Front Work Department, and other tools that they use to undermine the United States, working in conjunction, directly, but also as fellow travelers, with Soros Foundation, with ActBlue, with major donors to the Democrat Party .…

Thayer, a China strategy expert with some legitimate credentials, has a side-hustle spreading hysterical claims about the left in America. In his “Ask Dr. Drew” comments, he cast antifa as an advance team for an invading army, controlled by China. Watching this creation of a domestic threat out of thin air, right in front of everyone’s eyes, is fascinating.

Of course, the “enemy” they’re invoking (inventing) goes beyond antifa and its armies of the homeless. Thayer name-checks the Tides Foundation, George Soros and ActBlue. He’s been selling the idea that antifa is a formal domestic terror organization — even though the FBI director has testified that antifa is “not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.”

Thayer is one of many political operatives transforming a diffuse, leaderless movement into a monolithic organization they can designate, investigate and dismantle. Once you’ve defined your nebulous enemy, you can point state power at whatever can be fit into the definition.

The United States has no laws to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations — a deliberate constitutional protection. The Trump administration’s September 2025 executive order, despite its dramatic language about designating antifa as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise,” doesn’t actually flip any legal switch. The Cato Institute notes the order primarily signals enforcement priorities rather than creating new crimes. It can direct surveillance resources, encourage financial subpoenas and coordinate interagency efforts, but it cannot formally designate a domestic movement as a terrorist organization.

The president’s argument collapses under scrutiny. ActBlue is a payment processor for Democratic campaigns, essentially the left’s version of WinRed. Claims about George Soros funding antifa have been repeatedly debunked. Academic research on the movement consistently finds primarily self-organized groups with minimal formal funding structures. While congressional reports document CCP influence operations in American universities and technology sectors, zero evidence links Chinese intelligence to American antifascist street activists. Thayer projects his China expertise onto an entirely different phenomenon without supporting evidence.

The framework operates through multiple reinforcing mechanisms. First, transform a loose political movement into something targetable. Prosecutors’ leverage in bringing racketeering cases is procedural: Pretrial asset restraints and other freezes can be imposed before a verdict, driving up costs and choking operations; you can drain a group long before you win a case. The process itself is the punishment — sprawling conspiracy counts, discovery burdens and years of litigation — as the Georgia “Stop Cop City” saga showed: Sixty-one people were indicted on racketeering charges in 2023, and in 2025 a judge moved to toss those counts only after massive time and expense.

The foreign puppet-master narrative imports national security frameworks onto domestic dissent. By equating domestic activists with foreign entities, the administration blurs legal distinctions between terrorism and protected activism. Sophisticated counterterrorism tools, including heightened surveillance and financial monitoring, become available for use against U.S. citizens (even more than they already are).

False allegations persist despite corrections. Law enforcement debunked claims that antifa started the 2020 Oregon wildfires. The “Umbrella Man” who instigated violence at a mostly calm protest in Minneapolis that year was later linked to white supremacist groups. Yet corrections never catch up to original claims because accuracy isn’t the point. The goal is establishing a framework where any protest, any dissent, any opposition can be redefined as “antifa terrorism.”

When actual antifascist activists were charged with committing coordinated attacks in San Diego in 2021, normal criminal prosecution handled it. No special terrorism designations needed, no vast conspiracies uncovered, just standard assault charges. The system already has tools to handle actual violence. The new executive order serves another purpose entirely.

The anti-antifa framework gives political cover for actions that would otherwise face resistance. Once you’ve established that a decentralized movement is a coordinated threat with foreign backing, every crackdown becomes justified as “counterterrorism.” Campus protests trigger federal investigations. Environmental blockades prompt financial surveillance. Election integrity activists get swept into conspiracy prosecutions. The designation doesn’t need legal force when it provides political justification for a thousand smaller interventions.

The campaign against antifa fits within the systematic effort to challenge and suppress political opposition across various sectors: dismissing career civil servants, persecuting political opponents, attacking independent civil society organizations. The federal Insurrection Act looms as the ultimate tool, allowing military deployment against domestic protests once they’re reframed as a threat to federal authority.

Thayer (above, talking to Steve Bannon) holds a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago and is a founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China. He has testified before Congress on China strategy and taught at universities in the U.S. and Europe, including fellowships at Harvard’s Belfer Center. Yet he’s spending that credibility on a crackpot theory that’s both politically expedient and dangerous for democracy. When elastic definitions meet elastic crackdowns, constitutional protections become collateral damage. The anti-antifa designation isn’t about public safety, it’s about establishing precedent for treating political opposition as a national security threat. Once that framework is in place, it won’t matter whether the “brain” is in Beijing or whether ActBlue ever funded a single black bloc action. The apparatus will already be running, and the definition of who counts as “antifa” will expand to match whatever the moment requires.