When Native land Safety Secretary Kristi Noem in comparison antifa to the transnational legal workforce MS-13, Hamas and the Islamic State workforce in October 2025, she equated a nonhierarchical, loosely arranged motion of antifascist activists with one of the most international’s maximum violent and arranged militant teams.
“Antifa is just as dangerous,” she mentioned.
It’s a sweeping declare that ignores a very powerful distinctions in ideology, group and scope. Evaluating those teams is like evaluating apples and bricks: They are going to each be organizations, however that’s the place the resemblance stops.
Noem’s commentary echoed the common sense of a September 2025 Trump management govt order that designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The order directs all related federal companies to research and dismantle any operations, together with the investment assets, connected to antifa.
However there is not any credible proof from the FBI or the Division of Native land Safety that helps this type of comparability. Unbiased terrorism professionals don’t see the similarities both.
Information presentations that the motion may also be confrontational and once in a while violent. However antifa is neither a terrorist community nor a big supply of arranged deadly violence.
Antifa, as understood by way of students and regulation enforcement, isn’t a company in any formal sense. It lacks club rolls and management hierarchies. It doesn’t have centralized investment.
As a pupil of social actions, I do know that antifa is a decentralized motion animated by way of opposition to fascism and far-right extremism. It’s an collection of small teams that mobilize round particular protests or native problems. And its techniques vary from non violent counterdemonstrations to mutual support initiatives.
As an example, in Portland, Oregon, native antifa activists arranged counterdemonstrations in opposition to far-right rallies in 2019.
Antifa teams lively in Houston all over Storm Harvey in 2017 coordinated meals, provides and rescue toughen for affected citizens.
No proof of terrorism
The FBI and DHS have categorized sure anarchist or anti-fascist teams underneath the large class of “domestic violent extremists.” However neither company nor the State Division has ever up to now designated antifa as a 15 may organization.
The knowledge on political violence reinforces this level.
A girl holds an indication whilst protesting immigration raids in San Francisco on Oct. 23, 2025.
AP Photograph/Noah Berger
A 2022 document by way of the Counter Extremism Mission discovered that the vast majority of fatal home terrorist incidents in the USA in recent times have been connected to right-wing extremists. Those teams come with white supremacists and anti-government militias that advertise racist or authoritarian ideologies. They reject democratic authority and steadily search to impress social chaos or civil battle to succeed in their objectives.
Left-wing or anarchist-affiliated violence, together with acts attributed to antifa-aligned other people, accounts for just a small fraction of home extremist incidents and virtually not one of the fatalities. In a similar fashion, in 2021, the George Washington College Program on Extremism discovered that anarchist or anti-fascist assaults are generally localized, spontaneous and missing coordination.
In contrast, the organizations Noem invoked – Hamas, the Islamic State workforce and MS-13 – percentage structural and operational traits that antifa lacks.
They function throughout borders and are hierarchically arranged. They’re additionally in a position to sustained army or paramilitary operations. They possess coaching pipelines, investment networks, propaganda infrastructure and territorial keep watch over. And they have got orchestrated mass casualties such because the 2015 Paris assaults and the 2016 Brussels bombings.
Briefly, they’re army or legal organizations with strategic intent. Noem’s declare that antifa is “just as dangerous” as those teams isn’t just empirically indefensible however rhetorically reckless.
Turning dissent into ‘terrorism’
So why make this type of declare?
Noem’s commentary suits squarely throughout the Trump management’s broader political technique that has sought to inflate the perceived danger of left-wing activism.
Casting antifa as a home terrorist an identical of the Islamic State country or Hamas serves a number of purposes.
It stokes concern amongst conservative audiences by way of linking road protests and revolutionary dissent to international terror networks. It additionally supplies political quilt for expanded home surveillance and harsher policing of protests.
Demonstrators dangle protest indicators all over a march from the Atlanta Civic Middle to the Georgia State Capitol on Oct. 18, 2025, in Atlanta.
Julia Beverly/Getty Photographs
Moreover, it discredits protest actions crucial of the fitting. In a polarized media atmosphere, such rhetoric plays a symbolic goal. It divides the ethical universe into heroes and enemies, order and chaos, patriots and radicals.
Noem’s comparability displays a broader development in populist politics, the place complicated social actions are diminished to easy, threatening caricatures. Lately, some Republican leaders have used antifa as a shorthand for all varieties of left-wing unrest or grievance of authority.
Antifa’s decentralized construction makes it a handy goal for blame. That’s as it lacks transparent barriers, management and duty. So any act by way of any individual figuring out with antifa may also be framed as representing the entire motion, whether or not or now not it does. And by way of linking antifa to terrorist teams, Noem, the highest anti-terror reputable within the nation, turns a political speaking level right into a declare that looks to hold the load of nationwide safety experience.
The issue with this sort of rhetoric isn’t just that it’s erroneous. Equating protest actions with terrorist organizations blurs necessary distinctions that let democratic societies to tolerate dissent. It additionally dangers misdirecting consideration and assets clear of extra critical threats — together with arranged, ideologically pushed teams that stay the main supply of home terrorism within the U.S.
As I see it, Noem’s declare unearths much less about antifa and extra in regards to the political makes use of of concern.
By means of invoking the language of terrorism to explain an anti-fascist motion, she faucets right into a potent emotional present in American politics: the will for transparent enemies, easy explanations and ethical simple task in instances of department.
However efficient fatherland safety is determined by proof, now not ideology. To equate street-level disagreement with arranged terror isn’t just improper — it undermines the credibility of the very establishments charged with protective the general public.
