The Artificial Bogeyman: How and why the right concocted the 'Antifa threat'

Demonizing antifascists not only diverted attention from right-wing extremist violence, but opened the door for official persecution of all left-oriented political activity

Stop and think about it: As existential threats to America go, “Antifa” and its “dark shadows” did seem to come out of nowhere, didn’t they? As recently as 2016, hardly any American could have even told you what the word meant, let alone pronounce it. (The latter is still a matter of debate: An-TEEF-uh or AN-ti-fuh? Your call.)

If there was one place the great “Antifa” bogeyman came from, it was the fevered imaginations of the white nationalists and far-right conspiracy theorists who demonized and distorted a leftist movement dedicated to opposing their ugly racial politics. They managed to conjure a frightening vision of scary and mysterious radicals whose “dark shadows” completely obscured the growth of violent white nationalism from public view. And it worked.

In reality, Antifa traces its origins to the leftist groups that organized in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, particularly in Germany and Italy, to oppose fascists in those countries. Its modern iterations began organizing in the early part of the twenty-first century, with the first local anti-fascist group, Rose City Antifa, forming in Portland in 2007. The movement remains deliberately decentralized with no official leadership. The essence of the movement (which in many ways grew out of the punk music scene) is the motto “We go where they go”—that is, they believe in confronting fascists in the public spaces where they appear and removing their materials. This is why doxing—the public exposure of the identities and even home addresses and phone numbers of far-right activists, who often work under cover of anonymity—is central to the anti-fascist mission, and is an aspect that goes little mentioned by its often hysterical critics on the right.

There is no national “Antifa” organization—only small local cooperative groups, all of them officially leaderless—and no national “leaders,” despite anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists’ risibly false claims that George Soros is the man behind it all. Most of all, its operating philosophy is not—contrary to the right’s characterization of the movement—focused on creating violence, but rather on preventing it if possible, particularly violence against vulnerable minorities frequently targeted by right-wing extremists and hate groups. At the same time, unlike other leftist groups, it does not eschew the use of violence to defend those minorities from violence—which is why so many of its members get caught up in street brawls and are regularly seen engaging in violent acts. And it justifies some violent acts as preemptive.

The majority, but not all, of Antifa’s violence is reactive—unlike that of the Proud Boys and other street brawling groups with whom they have been engaging, whose violence is almost entirely deliberate and provocative, not to mention central to their recruitment and purpose. Those groups’ entire reason for existence is to create violent scenes in liberal urban centers, all supposedly in defense of “Western civilization.”

None of that, however, is apparent to media audiences who have been subjected over the past three years to a steady and now fast-growing stream of reports from such outlets as Fox News—as well as right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Ben Shapiro—falsely depicting Antifa as a “Marxist” movement intent on destroying America, and poised to invade middle America to burn down their way of life.

Fox host Tucker Carlson’s June 2 rant crystallized the nightmare vision of a future under Antifa that right-wing media has been selling to the public: “Violent young men with guns will be in charge. They will make the rules, including the rules in your neighborhood. They will do what they want. You will do what they say. No one will stop them.”

As existential threats to our national well-being go, the “Antifa” bogeyman is actually a very recent addition to the American right’s long history of concocting dire enemies through the use of eliminationist rhetoric. Through all of 2016, for instance, Fox News only mentioned the movement once—in reporting on the violent melee that erupted in Sacramento, California, during a march organized by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party in June. Fox, of course, blamed the antifascists for the violence, despite multiple videos showing neo-Nazis starting the fights that broke out.

It really only first arrived on the right’s radar in January 2017, when a bundle of conspiracy theorists tried to claim that they were leading the charge for a communist attempt to prevent Trump from being sworn in as president, with Alex Jones of Infowars and “health ranger” Mike Adams leading the charge.

They were joined by a wide array of conspiracist right wingers. The website of the antigovernment group the Oath Keepers, as well as its Facebook page, shouted out apocalyptic warnings in the week leading up to the inauguration: “Communists Intend to Overthrow the United States Before Inauguration Day,” “10,000 Men With Guns To Prevent Coup on Inauguration Day,” “In Just 10 Days, the Radical Left Will Attempt to Overthrow the U.S. Government.”

At the Infowars conspiracy mill run by Jones, the theories were multifarious as well as frantic: “Anarchists Are Hoping To Turn Donald Trump’s Inauguration On January 20th Into One Of The Biggest Riots In U.S. History,” “Will The CIA Assassinate Trump?”, “Alex Jones’ Emergency Message To President Donald Trump To Deter Martial Law.”

The hysteria was all inspired by a series of protests planned for Washington, D.C., that week by a small Antifascist group called Refuse Fascism. The reality of those protests starkly contrasted with the dire threat suggested by the conspiracists: videos from those marches revealed that it is a small organization that managed to attract only a couple dozen protesters to march in Washington the weekend before the inauguration.

One prominent Oath Keepers blogger, using the pen name Navy Jack, wrote a blog post in the days leading up to the event titled: “Communists Intend to Overthrow the United States before Inauguration Day.” “So let it begin,” responded a user named Rev. Dave. “I don’t like commies any more than I like NAZIs [sic]. If law enforcement can’t put them down, I’ll be more than willing to help out by putting a few down myself.”

One of the Oath Keepers’ primary sources for their information about the planned disruptions of the inauguration came from “Health Ranger” Mike Adams, a longtime conspiracy theorist and onetime associated of Jones’ Infowars. (In 2013, just before the second inauguration of Barack Obama, Adams warned antigovernment “Patriots” that the president would soon be issuing a “mass of kill orders” for them.)

“What I am hearing is that there is an actual planned coup attempt,” Jones told his audience in a video that was promoted by the Oath Keepers. He then conflated the Refuse Fascism protests with the long-announced “Women’s March on Washington,” scheduled the day after the inauguration and expected to attract 200,000, saying that the “cover story” for the coup would be “the women’s march, the labor union march, whatever it is.”

“We WILL be there,” a commenter named Marlene wrote on the Oath Keepers Facebook page. “And we will be prepared. We will not allow soros [sic] and the globalists start a civil war where we fight against each other. But we are prepared for a full scale revolution against tyranny on OUR own terms at a later time. Most of these anti-American fascists are not even Americans. They represent the dregs of humanity Obama [sic] has brought into our country just for this purpose—all illegal all foreign and all who hate us because they hate themselves.”

On the day of the inauguration, Oath Keepers and their cohorts were visibly present, vowing “to protect peaceable American patriots who are now being threatened with assault and other acts of violence by radical leftist groups.” As it happened, there was no violence and only a handful of arrests of protesters. But the rhetoric whipped up by the 2017 hysteria formed the template for the attacks on Antifascist protesters heard for the next four years: Antifa, in their alternative universe, had become so vast, powerful and insidious that it threatened to overthrow the American government through an overnight revolution that entailed the beheadings of white Christians.

Right-wing extremists and antifascists clashed violently in Berkeley, California, in April 2017. David Neiwert photo.

Over the spring and summer of 2017, anti-fascist activists were involved in a number of violent protests, notably in Berkeley, California; Olympia, Washington; and Portland, Oregon. In September, Fox News created a video calling Antifa an “alt-left group” in late June, claiming that antifascists’ goal was “political intimidation and chaos through the threat of violence.”

Coverage of Antifa became muted in right-wing media circles for the next couple of months—though Tucker Carlson’s publication The Daily Caller became a reliable source of stories demonizing Antifa during this time. Headlines like “‘Anti-Fascism’ Group Bears Striking Resemblance to Actual Terrorists,” “Revealed: The Antifa Plan to Get Liberals to Embrace Violence,” and “Here’s Why George Soros Is Siding with Fascists,” became common there.

The Antifa-demonization narrative then erupted widely in the wake of the horrifying events of August 11–12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the lethal Unite the Right march event. Fox News crafted a popular red-meat narrative by beating a steady drumbeat declaring Antifa to be the far more dire threat to the nation than violent white nationalists. It ran prominent stories on a clash between far-right provocateurs who attempted to organize protest rallies in the Bay Area the weekend of August 26–27, claiming that anti-fascists had “attacked peaceful protesters.” (The reality, as usual, was much more complicated.) It ran news stories attacking a Dartmouth professor who had the temerity to defend anti-fascists. (That same professor, Mark Bray, only recently finally fled the United States because of the death threats directed his way.)

The anti-anti-fascist backlash soon reached a fever pitch. An “open letter” at Fox to “the hatemongers” of “the violent extremist group Antifa” featured a bizarrely inverted version of the reality of what happened at Unite the Right:

In Charlottesville, you arrived on the scene with clubs and shields, prepared to commit violence. Instead, your sick plans were superseded by the monstrous behavior of neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other right-wing extremists as lunatic as you are. But they don’t have much of the liberal media working as agit-prop wings for them every day, like you do.

A Steve Kurtz piece similarly attacking the movement claimed: “Antifa gets to decide who the fascists are, and don’t look now, but it’s you.” And what appeared to be a straight news piece described how a petition presented to the White House urged the Trump administration to label Antifa a “terror group,” then added: “Antifa has earned this title due to its violent actions in multiple cities and their influence in the killings of multiple police officers throughout the United States.” (No police killings of any kind by members of Antifa have been recorded to date.)

A similar opinion piece by Ned Ryun insisted that “Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization” and demanded that Democrats denounce the movement. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson devoted a segment of his nightly Fox show to discussing whether Antifa should be barred from gathering on American college campuses.

The publisher of the right-wing site Red State, Erik Erickson, then penned the apotheosis of this smear campaign by using it as an excuse to give tacit approval to the gathering storm of far-right extremists: “Why should anyone condemn white nationalists if the left won’t condemn Antifa?” he wrote. “The truth is that if the left does not do a better job of vocally condemning Antifa, there really will be less people on the right willing to condemn the white nationalists.”

Rush Limbaugh weighed in after the Charlottesville events, claiming Republicans who denounced the white nationalists afterward were being weak by “conferring moral authority on militant leftist protesters,” and within a couple of weeks had shifted the narrative on its head, arguing that “the Democrats’ media and their Antifa pitbulls are the real threat to America.”

“I’ll tell you what this shows,” Limbaugh said. “It shows the power of the fake news media to create a crisis out of literally nothing because there is no threat to America from white supremacists. The number of white supremacists, in relation to voters, wouldn’t fill a bathtub.”

Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro paid a visit to the Berkeley campus in September, was met by protesters, but nonetheless gave a speech in which he denounced Antifa in crude terms, telling protesters “you can all go to hell, you stupid, pathetic, lying jackasses,” and that believing Antifa attacks on him means “you have to have your head so far up your ass you can actually see your colon firsthand.” Limbaugh invited him onto his show to talk about it.

***

Ten months after Trump’s inauguration, right-wing conspiracists—once again led by Alex Jones and Infowars—briefly resuscitated the same hysterical scenario, claiming that “Antifa” and associated Satanists were planning to spark a violent civil war, with Trump’s overthrow being the ultimate purpose—which was then carried credulously by mainstream right-wing media, notably Fox.

The planned rallies were factual: Refuse Fascism, a small organization with modest reach but associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, was advertising its plans to hold anti-Trump rallies in a number of cities around the country on November 4. The organization bought a full-page ad in the New York Times and set up a website devoted to the event, which was never billed as anything other than an entirely peaceful protest.

Viewed through the prism of right-wing conspiracism, however, the rallies were quickly demonized as potentially violent uprisings intended to spark a “civil war” against the government. And in response, a number of self-described “patriots” threatened to create violence on their own.

“Honestly, I’m happy,” one YouTuber told his audience. “Dude, we’ve been on the verge of the great war for what seems like forever and I’m just ready to get it going.”

Following a Refuse Fascism rally in Los Angeles in late September, where marchers carried a banner reading “November 4 It Begins,” Infowars reporter Paul Joseph Watson filed a piece headlined “Antifa Plans ‘Civil War’ To Overthrow Government,” warning that “antifa” groups had targeted November 4 as a day of nationwide civil unrest and violence, “part of a plot to start a ‘civil war’.”

Soon the John Birch Society, one of the hoariest of conspiracy-theory mills, began chiming in; their CEO, Arthur Thompson, posted a video warning society members about the looming “antifa” violence and offering helpful tips about what they could do about it.

Jones began stepping up the hysteria with fresh theories. He claimed that financier George Soros had poured $18 billion in resources into the operation, and that the protests would be led by Women’s March organizer Linda Sasour, who he described as “the pro-sexual-mutilation Muslim.”

He also claimed that his critics accused him of “making up” the events, and then held up Refuse Fascism’s full-page ad in the New York Times as “proof,” though he neglected to note that the ad buy had nothing to do with the Times’ news operations and its existence only proved that the group had enough money to pay for the ad.

Amateur conspiracy theorists began piling on. A man named Jordan Peltz who self-identified as a “deputy” (although he was seen wearing a badge from the “United States Warrant Service,” a private company) posted a popular YouTube video (with over a million views) warning about the nefarious “Antifa” plans: “They will start off by attacking police officers, first responders, anybody that’s in uniform,” he said. “And after they have disrupted that enough in the nation, and us first responders are literally going everywhere, trying to resolve things, they will then go after the citizens and the people and the government and all of that. So if you’re white, you’re a Trump supporter, you’re a Nazi then, to them. And it will be open game on you.”

According to one theory, the Department of Defense was planning secret exercises designed to support the mass “Antifa” uprising. Another claimed that violent “Antifa” thugs were planning to behead all white Christian parents. A panoply of fantasies were spun up around the supposed “civil war,” including claims that attacks on police officers were also planned.

“Make sure you got enough ammo, make sure your guns are ready,” another YouTuber advised in a popular clip. “You have to understand these are vicious, vicious people. Your life means nothing to them. In fact, if you’re a white man, you don’t deserve to live.”

In the right-wing blogosphere and on social media, the hysteria reached ludicrous levels when the blog Gateway Pundit published a post claiming that “antifa” radicals were planning to “behead white parents and small business owners.” It quickly emerged that the Twitter post being cited as the basis for a claim was, in fact, a fairly undisguised attempt to mock the conspiracy theorists and nothing more.

The Oath Keepers, in the meantime, urged people to remain armed at all times and to insist on being permitted to bring their guns to church. Founder Stewart Rhodes urged his followers to expect “a wave of left wing terrorism targeting conservatives, libertarians, Christians, police, military, veterans, etc (anyone the left considers on the right or part of the system). Expect it. Prepare yourselves in case this does lead to a full blown civil war.”

This time, the Antifa panic spread to a broader audience, including Fox News, which carried a report claiming that “Antifa” planned to topple the “Trump regime”: “Will the so-called “Antifa apocalypse” come with a bang or a whimper?” a Fox News story asked in its lede.

When November 4 arrived, Infowars reporters spread out across the country to report on the Refuse Fascism rallies, with a warning from Jones at the website: “Attention, devil worshipers. Attention meth heads. Attention antifa scum. We’re fully aware of the globalists funding your operation to push for a violent revolution in America.”

However, they found that, just as predicted, only a handful of protesters showed up for them, and that moreover no violence or civil war was in the offing. This meant the conspiracy theorists who warned of a mass uprising—ignoring critics who predicted the rallies would be tiny and inconsequential—then were able to claim victory.

Infowars correspondent Owen Troyer reported from Austin, Texas: “Instead of the day that Refuse Fascism and Antifa started to bring down the Trump-Pence regime, no! Instead the Refuse Fascism Antifa march died. They’ve been embarrassed. Their numbers are dwindling, and Trump support continues to grow.”

No one seemed to notice that the looming existential threat of the Evil Antifa Horde—which they already had declared beaten—really was nonexistent. But the mythical monster, the Enemy that the conspiracist Trumpian army of wannabe heroes needed, had been born.

***

Fox’s coverage of Antifa went through cycles, and its ebb and flow there as a story reflect its usefulness as a propaganda tool for attacking liberals and defending Trump. Fox initially promoted the story hardest as part of a pushback against concerns about the rise of white nationalism after Charlottesville—but none of that compares to the open floodgates accompanying the nationwide protests over police brutality.

In 2016, Fox had carried one anti-Antifa piece; but after the violence of mid-August 2017, it rushed out eighteen pieces, all attacking the movement, mostly in the month of September. The network then ran ten Antifa hit pieces between October and December. The subject was comparatively deemphasized at Fox for 2018, with some twenty-one pieces in total—the majority of those appearing in August, around the time of the anniversary of the Unite the Right events. And for the start of 2019, the story seemed almost to vanish, with only six pieces running between January and late June.

However, the network began bashing Antifa again seriously after the June 30 assault by anti-fascists with a milkshake on Portland pseudojournalist/provocateur Andy Ngo—regaling the public with ten pieces attacking Antifa over the short space of the next seven days. For the remainder of the year, the Antifa hit pieces became more persistent, with thirty-four such stories running through early November (and then going quiet entirely for the next two months).

Indeed, Antifa largely disappeared from Fox’s news radar again for the first six months of 2020—but after the May 28 killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests against police brutality, the story came roaring back with a vengeance. Antifa, right-wing pundits unanimously proclaimed, was almost solely responsible for violence during the protests. These claims became common in the first week of the protests. Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue on June 2 raised the spectral bogeyman of Antifa, warning that they were coming soon to your neighborhood, where “violent young men with guns will be in charge. They will make the rules, including the rules in your neighborhood. They will do what they want. You will do what they say. No one will stop them. You will not want to live here when that happens.”

Between May 31 and June 6, 2020, Fox News ran a total of forty hit pieces blaming Antifa for the protest violence. Between June 8 and early September came fifty-seven more pieces. The national narrative that emerged from all this coverage, and which became entrenched conventional wisdom not just among Fox-watching conservatives but in rural and suburban America generally: Antifa and BLM had burned down American cities in the summer of 2020.

None of that was even remotely true.

In reality, the vast majority of that summer’s protests—over 95 percent of the 7,305 events in all fifty states that were recorded around the country—were peaceful, and Antifa was not a factor in any of those at which violence of some kind occurred; the more common source of violence involved street clashes between marchers protesting the Floyd murder (many of them under the banner of Black Lives Matter) and police deploying aggressive street crowd–control tactics. Police made arrests at only 5 percent of the events, while protesters or bystanders reported injuries at only 1.6 percent of them. And there was property damage at only 3.7 percent of them, with arson fires confined to a small handful of locations. Of the twenty-seven deaths associated with the protests, none were concretely linked to demonstrators. Several were killed by police.

The only police officer killed during the protests was David Patrick Underwood, a federal protective-service officer in Oakland shot by a far-right “Boogaloo” sniper named Steven Carrillo, who hoped to fob the blame for the violence off onto Antifa. Carrillo, an Air Force staff sergeant who also gunned down a sheriff’s deputy attempting to arrest him, trained in the California hills with a paramilitary group that was preparing to conduct a campaign of domestic terrorism.

Naturally, his act somehow was blamed on Antifa anyway. Donald Trump first blamed Underwood’s death on “professional anarchists, violent mobs, or, arsonists, looters, criminals, rider rioters, Antifa and others” in a June 1 Rose Garden speech: “A federal officer in California, an African American enforcement hero was shot and killed.” At a Senate hearing intended to demonize “Antifa” (titled “The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble: Protecting Speech by Stopping Anarchist Violence”), Texas Sen. Ted Cruz described Carrillo’s murderous act as part of the “leftist violence” at the protests—twice. While attacking his Democratic colleagues, Cruz claimed: “Not a word was said about the murder of federal law-enforcement officer Patrick Underwood. Not a word was said about the murder of retired St. Louis police officer David Dorn—both of whom are African-American! And both of whom were murdered. Oh, we won’t condone this, but we won’t say a negative word about this terrorism.”

When then-Vice President Mike Pence gave his acceptance speech as the vice-presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention that August, he denounced “the violence” that summer, “whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha,” used Underwood’s murder as an example of the leftist violence directed at law-enforcement officers he was condemning, versus the police heroes he and Trump defended: “People like Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Homeland Security Federal Protective Service, who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, Calif. Dave’s heroism is emblematic of the heroes that serve in blue every day.” Underwood’s sister was in the audience, and he hailed her.

“We will have law and order on the streets of this country for every American of every race and creed and color,” he declared.

***

It’s unlikely that Martin Gugino, the 75-year-old activist who Donald Trump labeled an “Antifa provocateur” for the sin of being knocked to the pavement on video by police in Buffalo, New York, during a George Floyd protest in June 2020, ever in fact identified as a member of an “Antifa” group. Not that it would make any difference to Trump, who only wanted to dehumanize and demonize the man by casting him as an embodiment of the right’s favorite bogeyman in the Trump era. But the message was constant and relentless.

Trump had incorporated it into his campaign speeches and on Twitter. In late May, he tweeted that “the United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization”—a mostly empty threat, since there is no place in American law that would enable him to make such a designation, and doing so would have been unconstitutional.

On Fox & Friends June 4, the cohosts, in aghast tones, told their audience that “Antifa is dropping off bricks and pickaxes to attack cops and take out buildings and stores,” showing them videos of blue plastic boxes filled with bricks and rocks. In reality, the containers were from construction sites and were nowhere near any planned protests. Similar tales of Molotov cocktails being delivered to protest sites turned out to revolve around a single incident in Las Vegas at which far-right “Boogaloo Bois” again were responsible for making the incendiary devices—with the intent of blaming Antifa for the violence—though they never got the chance to use them.

FBI officials, in fact, were firm in their insistence all summer that they had found no evidence of “Antifa” involvement in any of the violence at these rallies. Antifa was not involved in coordination, nor was anyone from the movement involved in planning violence.

Attorney General William Barr told reporters that he intended to use the power of the Justice Department to bring them to heel, and claimed—without any evidence—that its leaders and members were traveling across state lines to commit crimes.

“I’ve talked to every police chief in every city where there has been major violence and they all have identified antifa as the ramrod for the violence,” Barr said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “They are flying around the country. We know people who are flying around the country.”

“We see some of the purchases they are making before the riots of weapons to use in those riots,” Barr added. “So, we are following them.”

The culmination of the Evil Antifa Threat narrative may have occurred in October when the Department of Homeland Security’s acting chief, Chad Wolf, announced on Fox with Tucker Carlson that the Department of Justice planned on “targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, [and] the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country.” Wolf’s plan came on the heels of a viral video showing protesters heckling Sen. Rand Paul as he left the Republican National Convention in Washington, D.C., after which Paul demanded a similar investigation.

Its apotheosis was Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham the same week, in which he claimed that “people that are in the dark shadows” are “controlling the streets” of Democratic cities. And when Ingraham warned him that he sounded like he was promoting a conspiracy theory, he doubled down with a pitch-perfect rendition of the “evil Antifa thug” caricature central to the narrative attacking the movement.

“We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that,” he claimed.

All of this provided Trump’s DHS with a convenient pretext to send an army of contracted goons in to the city of Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020 to arrest citizens protesting against police brutality—summarily sweeping people off the street on the pretext of a kind of preventative arrest based on groundless speculation that they were “Antifa” conspiring to “burn down our cities,” as Trump put it.

The Floyd protests were an international phenomenon, spreading to thousands of cities and towns, occurring in all 50 states as well as in over 60 other countries. Demonstrators turned out en masse to support those seeking justice for Floyd and the wider Black Lives Matter movement, and standing up against police brutality. Most of these protests lasted one or two days; however, in Portland, where police brutality issues had taken on an extraordinary edge, the protests became a daily affair—one that eventually surpassed 100 consecutive days.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security deliberately worked to gin up a narrative blaming Antifa for the Floyd protests, particularly in Portland. By early July, most of the protests had become quiet and nonviolent, with only sporadic violence and vandalism, with the notable exception of an arson attack on the federal courthouse downtown—which is about the time that DHS agents began showing up, wearing anonymous military gear, arresting protesters on the streets, and spiriting them away.

It played out like a nightmare from a banana republic: Unmarked vans with federal officers drove around downtown Portland, coming to abrupt halts when a targeted protester was spotted, upon which they were surrounded by heavily armed agents and swept into the vans with no explanation why they were being arrested. The arrests were caught on video and shared on social media, and DHS acknowledged that these were their employees.

Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told National Public Radio that it was done to keep officers safe and away from crowds and to move detainees to a “safe location for questioning.”

“I fully expect that as long as people continue to be violent and to destroy property that we will attempt to identify those folks,” he added.

Over the course of the summer, between June 4 and August 31, DHS sent at least 755 officers—from agencies that ranged from the Federal Protective Service to US Customs and Border Protection, as well as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secret Service, and US Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis—to Portland, tasked with protecting the city’s downtown federal courthouse. An internal DHS review later revealed that it was also an extraordinary exercise in authoritarian incompetence. It showed that senior DHS leadership pushed unfounded conspiracy theories about anti-fascists, encouraged the contractors they hired to violate protesters’ constitutional rights, and made spurious connections, based on no real evidence, between protesters who engaged in criminal activity. It also revealed poor training and inadequate guidance, which contributed to the federal intelligence officers’ lack of knowledge on legal restrictions for the collection of such information, and turned the entire operation into a massive mess.

“The report was a stunning analysis of the incompetence and mismanagement and abuse of power during the summer of 2020,” Oregon senator Ron Wyden, who released a redacted version of the document, told Oregon Public Broadcasting.

It found that senior DHS leaders attempted to politicize intelligence in order to support Trump’s claims that a massive “Antifa” conspiracy was behind the many anti-police protests around the nation, but particularly so in Portland. The same leaders pressured subordinates to illegally search phones, and, when legal staff objected, sought to cut them out of the discussion. An inexperienced team of open-source intelligence collectors, tasked with analyzing information obtained from public sources, also created dossiers on protesters and journalists—which they called “baseball cards”—despite having no clear connections to domestic terrorism or security threats.

The internal review found that out of the forty-eight reports provided, thirteen of them involved people accused of nonviolent offenses. One “baseball card” focused on a person who was arrested and accused of flying a drone and identified on social media as a journalist.

“The report documents shocking, coordinated efforts by our government to abuse its power and to invade liberty in violation of the Constitution,” said Oregon federal public defender Lisa Hay. “In Portland, we were concerned that the government unconstitutionally collected information, including through the illegal search of protestors’ cellphones last summer. This report confirms that was their intent.”

Over the next few nights, they clashed with protesters in the area around the courthouse, using flash-bangs and munitions to disperse the crowds. One protester was shot in the forehead by an “impact weapon” round that caused him brain damage. Another protester—a Navy veteran who was attempting to speak with the DHS officers—was brutally beaten with batons, breaking his hand.

That was when the scene exploded. On the night of July 24, thousands of Portlanders took to the streets to protest the arrests. The protest was entirely peaceful—drum circles, groups of teachers and nurses, a marching band, a Wall of Moms contingent wearing yellow shirts—until the DHS officers began unleashing tear gas on the crowd. A brigade of “fathers” arrived with leaf blowers and blew the gas back at the officers.

The protests continued nightly. DHS officials called the protests “criminal violence perpetrated by anarchists targeting city and federal properties.” It brought in reinforcements on July 28, even though many of these officers lacked proper training, and both Mayor Ted Wheeler and Governor Kate Brown—along with both of the state’s senators—demanded the DHS police be withdrawn. Eventually, they negotiated a phased withdrawal, and the DHS arrests ceased.

It was quickly apparent that the right-wing attempt to make “Antifa” and Black Lives Matter into bogeymen responsible for the protest violence was utterly bogus. An Associated Press review of the arrest documents from the summer’s protests showed that most of the people taken into custody were not left-wing radicals and had no ties to larger movements. It had already been clear for months that “Antifa” was not responsible for the violence—which in many instances appeared in fact to have been instigated by police pushing back on protesters. Eventually, Trump’s goons packed up and left.

The internal review at DHS revealed that the push for concocting intelligence about Antifa intended to fit this narrative came from the top. Though the names are redacted, it is safe to assume that Chad Wolf, the DHS’ unconfirmed “acting secretary,” was particularly involved, since he made numerous public statements at the time that mirror the shape of the discussions within the agency. The review also found that Wolf and his immediate underlings pushed staffers to describe the protests as “Violent Antifa Anarchist Inspired” (VAAI) actions—an entirely new category that had no evidentiary support or background.

The review also noted that Federal Protective Services officers requested assistance from DHS’s Homeland Identities, Targeting, and Exploitation Center to search protesters’ cell phones. The latter team found the searches were illegal, and resisted pressure from senior Homeland Security leaders to assist in the searches.

No matter; Republicans took the bogus narrative and functionally made it an official one widely believed across the country—namely, that “Antifa and BLM burned down cities across the nation”—and subsequently used it to justify the January 6 Capitol insurrection by claiming the summer 2020 violence was far worse and a greater threat to the nation. The narrative also was primarily responsible for the failures by both DHS and other federal law-enforcement agencies, notably the FBI, to adequately take the very real and building threat of white-nationalist terrorism seriously. The result, in fact, unleashed a plague of far-right violence that reached a high-tide mark on January 6, but which has still not receded. If anything, with Trump back in the White House, it is reaching a new high-water mark.

***

The Antifa hysteria hit its peak in July 2020: In rural towns across America, men with guns could be seen roaming the streets, looking out for the threat to their homes they were warned about on Facebook: hordes of ravening “Antifa” activists, loaded en masse onto buses and intent on wreaking havoc. Local sheriffs jumped on the bandwagon, too. Nevermind that it was all a hoax.

In at least one case, a suspected “Antifa bus” (actually occupied by a multiracial family of four, out for a camping excursion) was surrounded in a parking lot and chased out—then later harassed at their campsite by locals felling trees across their access road in order to trap them.

The hoaxes were primarily spread on Facebook, though some Twitter accounts relayed the fake information as well. A typical post followed the formula used in others: a claim to have “real information” about “antifa” piling into buses from nearby urban centers with the intent of attacking defenseless small towns.

One such hoax circulated in the Midwest, citing the notorious conspiracy-theory operation Natural News, and claiming that “Antifa operatives are organizing a plan to bus large numbers of Antifa terrorists to the vicinity of Sparta, Illinois, where they will be directed to target rural white Americans by burning farm houses and killing livestock. The purpose of the attack, according to sources, is so that Antifa can send a message to white America that “not even rural whites are safe” from the reach of Antifa, and that if their radical left-wing demands are not met, all of America will burn (not just the cities).”

It went on:

Antifa terrorists are currently expected to move along state routes 154 and 4, seeking out rural targets including isolated homes and farms to cause maximum mayhem and property destruction. Although our sources did not specifically mention the methods by which killing livestock would be accomplished, it seems almost certain that firearms would be the most effective way for Antifa terrorists to achieve that morbid goal.

In Idaho, rumors spread by the militia group Real Three Percenters of Idaho on Facebook claimed that antifascists were being bused into Boise and neighboring counties to ransack local businesses. “Their plan is to destroy private property in the city and continue to residential areas,” the post said. “We are calling on all business owners to contact us if you are concerned for your business and your private property immediately. We are here to protect you, your private business, and have teams on the ground standing by.”

In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the local chamber of commerce spread the rumors, tweeting out: “We’re being told that buses are en route from Fargo for today’s march downtown. DT businesses—please bring in any furniture, signs, etc. that could possibly be thrown through windows. Let’s keep our city safe and peaceful!”

In northern California, law-enforcement officials played a key role in spreading the rumors among police departments. The panic apparently originated with a law-enforcement official in Redding who, on Jun. 1, shared screenshots with her staff of a couple of social-media posts warning of approaching “antifa buses.” She asked them to check out the reports.

One was an Instagram post: “BE AWARE,” it read, “I have heard, from a reliable source, that ANTIFA buses with close to 200 people (domestic terrorists) are planning to infiltrate Redding and possibly cause distraction and destruction.”

The other was a Facebook post featuring a grainy image of a van with “Black Lives Matter” written on the back. It claimed that busloads of protesters from Portland had stopped in Klamath Falls, Oregon, “but there was no rioting or burning as they decided to move on.”

These posts were similar to others that were shared in a number of locales across the country, often spurring a similar response. Indeed, the scene in Klamath Falls had been spurred by similar hoax posts, as NBC News reported at the time.

“I am not one to spread false information,” one claimed. “There are two buses heading this way from Portland, full of ANTIFA members and loaded with bricks. Their intentions are to come to Klamath Falls, destroy it, and murder police officers. There have been rumors of the antifa going into residential areas to ‘fuck up the white hoods.’”

That thread gained support with a screenshot message from Col. Jeff Edwards, commander of the Oregon Air National Guard’s 173rd Fighter Wing based in Klamath Falls, posted to one of the groups, reading: “Team Kingsley, for your safety I ask you to please avoid the downtown area this evening. We received an alert that there may be 2 busloads of ANTIFA protesters en route to Klamath Falls and arriving in downtown around 2030 tonight.”

A spokesperson for the 173rd Fighter Wing confirmed that the message had come from Edwards, saying he had sent it “to the Citizen-Airmen of the 173d Fighter Wing for their situational awareness and safety.” She noted that Edwards’ message was shared with local law enforcement, and it spread from there.

In Klamath Falls, the whole town was buzzing with anticipation of the incoming “antifa buses.” It became something of a game, shared on Facebook: An empty green bus at the community college was spotted. So was a white bus with “Black Lives Matter” and peace signs painted on it, in the local Walmart parking lot. A U-Haul in front of T.J. Maxx somehow set off alarms.

“I saw some scattered SJWs and some in black at Albertsons,” one woman posted.

A handful of Klamath Falls “Patriots” took to the streets, weapons in hand. “As you can tell, we are ready,” one such man said in a Facebook livestream. “Antifa members have threatened our town and said that they’re going to burn everything and to kill white people, basically.”

The person whose Instagram post was circulated by Redding law enforcement commented on the scene as well: “Word got out and the populace of the area showed up in town armed to the teeth. Never seen so many AR-15s.”

The same day that Redding officials circulated the memo, NBC News reported that at least some of the rumors were started by the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, posing on Twitter as “antifa” and threatening to “move into the residential areas” of “white hoods” and “take what’s ours.”

Among the law-enforcement officials contacted by Redding police about the rumors was Elizabeth Barkley, then the CHP northern division chief. She asked colleagues to look into the stories and “notify our allied agencies in town.” Shortly afterward, her request was shared with officers by another CHP official, who commented: “The thought is these buses are roaming—looking for events to attend (and possibly cause problems).”

In short order, a CHP sergeant told a listserv of commanders that “possible ANTIFA buses [are] heading to Redding,” and that they “could be wandering around Northern Division.” He added that the agency’s tactical alert center had been notified and that an aerial search was underway: “Air Ops is currently up and trying to locate them on I-5 if possible.”

A spokesperson for the 173rd Fighter Wing confirmed that the message had come from Edwards, saying he had sent it “to the Citizen-Airmen of the 173d Fighter Wing for their situational awareness and safety.” She noted that Edwards’ message was shared with local law enforcement, and it spread from there.

In Humboldt County, Sheriff William Honsel not only spread the hoax widely, but insisted afterward that it was perfectly legitimate: “We did have reports—substantiated, law enforcement reports—that said antifa did have people in buses that were in southern Oregon and in the Central Valley … ,” he said. “These aren’t unsubstantiated stories. This is the reality, and we have to deal with that.”

In Curry County, Oregon, Sheriff John Ward informed his constituents: “I don’t know if the rumors are true or not just yet but I got information about 3 bus loads of ANTIFA protesters are making their way from Douglas County headed for Coquille then to Coos Bay.”

And in Snohomish, Washington, the police chief responded to the Facebook rumors by staging 50 officers at an emergency operations center, “ready to converge if necessary” should any reports of arriving antifa buses or accompanying property destruction arise. The chief also positioned officers on the roof of the city hall.

Some law-enforcement officers did try to squelch the false rumors. In Toms River, New Jersey, the sheriff and county prosecutor posted warnings on social media that the widely circulating rumors of “antifa” planning to riot in “primarily white neighborhoods” were “not true.” “I am spending an inordinate amount of time dispelling social media rumors and misinformation,” said Ocean County prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer.

Yet even despite those warnings, the outcome became predictable in an age where armed “Patriots” eager for a “Boogaloo”: Businesses boarded up their windows, and militiamen began organizing street patrols through social media.

In Klamath Falls, as Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins reported, the whole town was buzzing with anticipation of the incoming “antifa buses.” It became something of a game, shared on Facebook: An empty green bus at the community college was spotted. So was a white bus with “Black Lives Matter” and peace signs painted on it, in the local Walmart parking lot. A U-Haul in front of T.J. Maxx somehow set off alarms.

“I saw some scattered SJWs and some in black at Albertsons,” one woman posted.

A handful of Klamath Falls “Patriots” took to the streets, weapons in hand. “As you can tell, we are ready,” one such man said in a Facebook livestream. “Antifa members have threatened our town and said that they’re going to burn everything and to kill white people, basically.”

They didn’t find any “antifa buses” in Klamath Falls. But in the coastal Washington state town of Forks, they thought they had. It actually was a family of four from Spokane, who had arrived in town with a full-length bus they had converted to a camper, intent on visiting the local rain forests (Forks also attracts a number of visitors because it is the setting of the popular Twilight series of vampire novels and movies). First, they paid a visit to a local sporting-goods shop in town to stock up on supplies. According to the sheriff’s office, after getting their goods, the family found itself confronted in the parking lot by “seven or eight car loads of people,” who “repeatedly asked them if they were ‘ANTIFA’ protesters.”

The family—comprised of a husband and wife, their 16-year-old daughter, and the man’s elderly mother—told their interrogators that they had nothing to do with the movement and were just there to camp. Thinking the matter was resolved, they nervously drove their bus past the groups and got onto highway 101, then drove up the side road taking them toward the Sol Duc River. They found themselves being followed by about four vehicles from the parking lot, and told the sheriff later that they believed a couple of people in the vehicles had semi-automatic rifles. Eventually, they turned onto a logging road and pulled off to set up camp.

While parked there, they began to hear gunfire and the sound of chainsaws. So the family decided to pack up and head back, but now found that their way had been blocked by trees their pursuers had cut across the road. Fortunately, some local teenagers arrived from the other side and cut down the blockade, freeing the family, who promptly fled the area and called authorities. Apologetic deputies helped the family get its bus running again after a brief breakdown.

Local “patriots” were quite happy with themselves on social media afterward. A set of screenshots showed a picture of the trees blocking the road, captioned: “Protect your town! #forksstrong.” One of the replies: “This makes me happy. I love our locals and feel pretty damn safe.” Another resident said: “U think they realized they [came] to the wrong place yet?” To which one replied: “I think they have a good idea now.” He later added that “it’s like the purge.”

In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, dozens of people showed up on armed patrol, toting AR-15s and wearing body armor, at a downtown shopping strip mall. In a cellphone video shared on Facebook, one videographer said: “If you guys are thinking of coming to Coeur d’Alene, to riot or loot, you’d better think again. Because we ain’t having it in our town. … I guess there’s a big rumor that people from Spokane are gonna come out here and act up. But that shit ain’t gonna happen.”

A “prepper” YouTube personality added: “There’s a lot of good guys with guns out here. I don’t think they’ll be setting foot in Idaho.”

A similarly disturbing scene developed in Snohomish, a suburb about 30 miles outside Seattle, where similar rumors grew so thick that a large contingent of heavily armed “Patriot” militiamen showed up on the streets of the town, ready and eager to defend local businesses from marauding antifascists. As the scene grew rowdier, Confederate flags began to show up. Proud Boys also made their presence known, flashing white-power “OK” hand signals and wearing body armor.

Snohomish County Sheriff Adam Fortney nonetheless defended them afterward: After speaking with two groups of armed locals on opposite sides of the Snohomish River bridge, he pronounced them all to the county council as Snohomish parents and business owners, “not white nationalists, they were not extremists.”

And in Coos County, following the rumor posted by the neighboring sheriff, hundreds of armed men turned out on the streets of the county seat, Coquille, determined to fend off the antifa hordes. “...When people tell us someone is coming to our hometown, after hearing threats and reading them online, I feel defensive and want to protect my home,” one of the men told a local reporter.

Police in Columbus, Ohio, targeted an old school bus called “Buttercup” used by a group of artists but decorated with “Black Lives Matter” and other slogans, suggesting that it was being used to transport violent protesters. On Facebook and Twitter, Columbus police on Jun. 1 posted a photo of it being pulled over and explained: “There was a suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters. Detectives followed up with a vehicle search today and found numerous items: bats, rocks, meat cleavers, axes, clubs, and other projectiles. Charges are pending as the investigation continues.”

No charges were ever filed, but the disinformation spread like wildfire. Angry Facebook commenters railed against antifa rioters, claiming they were funded by George Soros. On Twitter, where CPD’s post was retweeted nearly 14,000 times, others commented: “Here ya go doubters ... this bus was bringing riot tools to protests in Columbus. Columbus police caught them. Good.”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio joined in the hoax, quote retweeting the CPD post with the comment: “Police in Ohio found a bus near protests filled with bats, rocks & other weapons. But I guess still ‘no evidence’ of an organized effort to inject violence & anarchy into the protests right?”

On several occasions, the turnout of large groups of armed men were in response to actual protests of the killing of George Floyd by local activists, mostly Black Lives Matter groups and their liberal associates. And when that was the case, their presence has served mainly to intimidate and threaten the protesters, who frequently were simply young people carrying no weapons.

This was the case in Medford, Oregon, as well as in Klamath Falls, where the intimidation was even more self-evident: The armed “defenders” carried “flags, baseball bats, hammers and axes. But mostly, they carried guns.”

Frederick Brigham, 31, Klamath Falls resident and musician, told NBC News that the presence of the armed “defenders” was chilling: “It felt like walking through an enemy war camp,” he said.

In Sandpoint, Idaho, a “Black Lives Matter” protest was met with a similar attempt at intimidation. That prompted the mayor of the town to post a protest of his own on Facebook: “None of the young protesters I spoke with felt any safer in the presence of these armed vigilantes,” Shelby Rognstad wrote Wednesday. “Rather, they felt scared, intimidated and in some cases harassed. None of the downtown business owners I have since spoken to felt any safer from the militant presence.”

Local ‘Patriot’ militiamen in Oregon tried to set up “Antifa” checkpoints during wildfire season in August 2020.

The same dynamic played out later in the August 2020, when similar hoax rumors on social media claimed that “antifa arsonists” were secretly behind the wave of wildfires that were then ravaging the West Coast. Once again, rural areas were subjected to clusters of heavily armed men roaming their towns and even setting up vigilante checkpoints along roadways—all while being encouraged and enabled by local law-enforcement officers.

A particularly popular set of posts, shared thousands of times on Facebook, originated from a hoax account called “Scarsdale NY Antifa,” and claimed to be helping set the fires: “We and other chapters of Antifa around Oregon have collaborated to ignite fires around the state to draw attention to #climateemergency,” one post read. Others from the same account made similar claims.

The claims spread faster than the fires themselves on social media—and so did calls to rural police departments. In Molalla, Oregon—which was surrounded by the fires and was given Stage 3 evacuation orders —the police department posted a plea for people to call 911 and report “any suspicious activity (strange people walking around/looking into cars and houses/vehicles driving through neighborhoods that don’t belong there),” because “a lot of rumors and posts are going around about looters.”

This plea was promptly interpreted by right-wing conspiracists as the work of antifa. Far-right provocateur Katie Daviscourt retweeted the police bulletin with a message of her own: “WARNING: Multiple sources in Emergency Response have confirmed that the fires along the West Coast are caused by dozens of arsonists,” she wrote. “These fires are allegedly linked to Antifa and the Riots.”

The comments from people who believed the claims proliferated on Facebook: “All evidence antifa is behind Oregon and Washington state fires,” read one. Another, after listing various reports of arson arrests, none of which have been connected to politics, concluded: “These are probably coordinated by antifa or homegrown terrorists.”

One comment widely shared on Facebook laid out a scenario straight from an action film:

So my brother is a logger as you all know. One of the guys he works with owns about 50 acres between Welches and Sandy. Last night he saw somebody trying to start a fire on his property. He went down to the property and discovered a group of antifa throwing Molotov cocktails on his property. He had a fire truck on his property and immediately went down with his guys and tried to put out the fire. He also took his AR’s and they exchanged over 200 rounds of fire with the people. They called 911 and said that they were trying to light their property on fire and the police told them they were on their own.

“Has anyone seen or heard of 3 guys with Hoodies throwing bottles of gasoline in the Boring golf course?” one person speculated in a private Facebook group for the town of Boring. “I don’t know if it’s true, so I’m asking here if anyone knows.”

Crude homemade signs have begun appearing in rural Oregon along county roads vowing: “Looters will be shot!” Another one read: “We won’t call your family. Your body will never be found. Bang bang!” A third: “Home and Armed: U Loot We Shoot!”

More disturbingly, small groups of armed vigilantes began popping up in short order in rural Oregon, primarily in Clackamas and Multnomah counties, forming ad-hoc “citizen checkpoints” demanding drivers give them identification and interrogating them about their politics. Some of these chased journalists, including an Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter and a photographer on assignment, out of the areas.

The Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office tweeted out a statement explaining that such behavior is illegal: “Deputies have contacted several groups of residents in Corbett who have set up checkpoints and are stopping cars,” it said. “While we understand their intent is to keep the community safe, it is never legal to block a public roadway or force other citizens to stop.”

Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts similarly told CNN that he was concerned about the checkpoints: “The first thing I’d ask them to do is please stop that,” Roberts. “It is illegal to stop somebody at gunpoint.”

However, Roberts’ pleas were undermined by one of his own deputies, Mark Nikolai, who turned up in a pair of YouTube videos that went viral giving advice to the vigilantes on how to avoid prosecution for shooting anyone they suspect of being a looter—and moreover amplifying the claims that antifa was targeting rural areas with arson and looting.

In the first video, Nikolai can be heard advising the checkpoint vigilantes to stay within the law, because “the courts don’t give a shit about what you’re trying to do.” Later, he can be heard advising them how to prepare for a criminal case in the event they shot anyone: “You have to prove there was a serious physical injury or death, now you throw a fucking knife in their hand after you shoot them, that’s on you,” he said.

In the second video, Nikola fills a reporter in on likely Antifa activities: “What I’m worried about is that there’s people stashing stuff. It means they’re going to go in preparation,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like a doomsdayer but it’s getting serious. We need the public’s help on this.” Then he adds: “Antifa motherfuckers are out causing hell, and there’s a lot of lives at stake and there’s a lot of people’s property at stake because these guys got some vendetta.” Nikolai was suspended shortly afterwards.

Special Agent In Charge Renn Cannon of Portland’s FBI field office, told Oregon Public Broadcasting there was no basis for the conspiracy theories. “FBI Portland and local law enforcement agencies have been receiving reports that extremists are responsible for setting wildfires in Oregon,” Cannon said. “With our state and local partners, the FBI has investigated several such reports and found them to be untrue. Conspiracy theories and misinformation take valuable resources away local fire and police agencies working around the clock to bring these fires under control.”

Eventually, the wildfires were extinguished and no evidence was found of any political motivation involved. But the hoax artists on social media never retracted their false claims, and proceeded to continue their careers of concocting scapegoating narratives directed at “Antifa” and “the Left.” Many continue to operate to this day.

Indeed, Daviscourt was among the right-wing “journalists” assembled recently by the White House for the purpose of once again ginning up the same old phony narrative about Antifa and the Left. This time, she sported a shiner she obtained while covering an anti-ICE rally in Portland, when a protester swinging a flagpole in the crowd managed to smack her in the eye. Daviscourt, of course, claimed she had been “assaulted.”

These incidents all vividly demonstrate the ability of law enforcement and other official authorities to inflame hoax-driven hysteria and potentially create violence in their communities. Their propensity for gullibility in the hoaxes also reflects their own sympathies with right-wing extremist conspiracism, an outgrowth of the growing problem of radicalization among law enforcement.

Michael German, a national-security expert with the Brennan Justice Center, told Sam Levin of the Guardian that the behavior of California police amid the hoax rumors was dangerous on multiple levels. Using a photo of a specific van while warning officers to “be on the lookout” could have “resulted in serious harm to people who are driving that kind of bus when there was no evidence that anybody has done anything wrong,” German said. “Based on the vagueness of the rumor, it’s hard to imagine why they would have deployed those tactical resources,” he added.

Moreover, these incidents illustrate how pervasive right-wing ideologies have become within American police agencies, German observed. Departments have repeatedly shared baseless claims about antifa or BLM endangering them, he said, but have downplayed or ignored real threats to their safety, whether from COVID or far-right extremists such as sovereign citizens, who have an extensive track record of lethal attacks on officers.

“Something that really does kill police officers is treated as not a problem, while imaginary threats are treated as real,” German said.
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Note: The above is mostly an excerpt from The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy, Chapter 9, “Concocting Enemies,” with additional updates and restored edited material.