Liberal Outrage over Antifa Terrorist Designation Omits its Violent History, Criminal Leaders

With liberals and their staunch mainstream media allies outraged over President Trump’s designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization Judicial Watch is in a good position to provide history that supports the recently issued executive order because we have for years closely tracked the violent leftist movement and successfully gone after one of its most powerful leaders. The president’s order accurately identifies Antifa as a “militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” Antifa uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism that involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of federal laws through armed standoffs with police, organized riots, violent assaults on law enforcement officers and threats against political figures and activists, the new order further states. This is not fabricated or embellished information, it is reality.

For years it has been well documented that Antifa protests are notoriously violent and can cause lots of damage in the cities targeted by the movement. During Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, Antifa militants broke store windows, set a limousine on fire and caused thousands of dollars in damage to businesses in downtown Washington D.C. Hundreds were charged with felony rioting. For years counterterrorism experts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have expressed concern about violence perpetrated by Antifa supporters at public rallies where they confront their ideological opponents, the Congressional Research Service writes in a 2018 report. In Congressional testimony nearly a decade ago, then FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed that the agency was pursuing a number of anarchist extremist investigations in which the subjects were motivated to commit violent criminal activity based on Antifa ideology. Former President Joe Biden famously dismissed Antifa as an idea, not an organization.

That was after a Judicial Watch investigation helped expose the criminal acts of one of the movement’s most popular figures, a national organizer for a radical leftist group called By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) which was founded by the Marxist Revolutionary Workers League and uses raucous militant tactics to disrupt conservative speaking engagements. Among its prominent figures is a California public school teacher, Yvette Felarca, well known for her violent Antifa activism. In 2016 the educator and two of her radical friends were arrested and charged with several crimes, including felony assault, for inciting a riot in Sacramento. Felarca was captured on video calling a man a Nazi and punching him in the stomach repeatedly while shouting obscenities at him. More than a dozen people were injured in the riot, at least 10 with stab wounds, and the capitol grounds suffered thousands of dollars in property damage. In 2017 Judicial Watch filed a California Public Records Act request seeking records about Felarca’s Antifa activism and its effect on the Berkeley Unified School District that employs her. She sued to stop the school district from furnishing the records and a federal judge determined that it was an entirely frivolous lawsuit and ordered her to pay Judicial Watch’s legal fees.

About a year later hundreds of radical leftists, including masked Antifa militants, confronted police and conservatives in downtown Portland, Oregon. Rowdy demonstrators used pepper spray against police and threw fireworks, bottles, rocks and ball bearings, according to a local news report. Videos of police in riot gear are embedded in the story, which says that protestors were armed with knives, traded blows, and drew blood. Among the rioters was a 31-year-old Antifa leader named James Mathew Mattox who praises cop killers on social media. Mattox was dressed in black bloc and a mask during the event and carried a shield with an anarchist symbol. Mattox provoked officers when they tried to disperse rioters by flipping them off, waving his shield and arms in the air, and yelling profanities. Using the alias of a prominent Communist Party member (Jack Johnstone), Mattox’s social media outbursts express support for terrorist attacks on law enforcement. He specifically names three renowned cop killers— Christopher Jordan Dorner, Micah Xavier Johnson, and Gavin Eugene Long—as his “personal heroes.”

These are just some examples that justify Antifa’s domestic terrorist designation. Not surprisingly, liberals are indignant, and the media is downplaying the seriousness of the violent left. One news report dismisses Antifa as a “loose network of people, groups and ideas united by opposition to fascism, white supremacy and authoritarian politics” that focuses on “nonviolent tactics” such as research and online exposure to extremist groups. Another news story describes Antifa as “primarily a movement and an ideology” while another claims Antifa is a “loose affiliation of mostly left-leaning activists” that is not highly organized. The reality is quite different. “Antifa recruits, trains, and radicalizes young Americans to engage in this violence and suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members,” according to the president’s executive order. “Individuals associated with and acting on behalf of Antifa further coordinate with other organizations and entities for the purpose of spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech.” This organized effort using coercion and intimidation to achieve policy objectives is domestic terrorism, the executive order confirms.

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