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In Trumpworld, the Culture Wars are seen as a long Cold War period in which the Right lost almost every battle, and they now want to turn it into a hot war. Since they now control most of the government and possibly the military, and many of the most powerful players in education, law, and the media are capitulating to them, they think they can now win back the culture, using the 82nd Airborne and the new TikTok to do it.
The way they see it, conservatives began to lose the Culture Wars in the 1960s, and they are now in position to win it all back. This means intimidating and suppressing the opposition using any means necessary. Kristi Noem is talking about arresting protestors and keeping them in jail forever, “making sure they never see the light again.”
Most of the people who voted for Trump did so because of inflation, the economy, and immigration. They did not vote for an authoritarian takeover of the government and the declaration of martial law to attack peaceful protestors. The Trump forces may finally be about to overplay their hand.
The “Antifa Roundtable,” on October 8, 2025, was televised live from the State Dining Room at the White House.1 Present were several members of Trump’s Cabinet, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, along with White House aide Stephen Miller and press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Also invited to the table were a dozen right-wing agitators and influencers who fancifully referred to themselves as “independent journalists:” Brandi Kruse, Jack Posobiec, Nick Sortor, Nick Shirley, Andy Ngo, Katie Daviscourt, Seamus Bruner, Julio Rosas, Savanah Hernandez, Cam Higby, James Klüg, and Jonathan Choe.
The purpose of this public meeting at the White House was to put on a show to convince the American people that the administration is going to war against a vast domestic terrorist organization called Antifa, bent on destruction, and they should support this. Kristi Noem said Antifa wants to “destroy the American people and our way of life” and has “infiltrated our entire country.” “We have arrested dozens of terrorists who are Antifa members or are affiliated with them,” she reported. “One of the individuals we arrested recently in Portland was the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa.”
Pam Bondi said “We’re not going to stop at just arresting people in the street,” but are going to “take down the organization brick by brick” and “destroy the organization from top to bottom.”
The rightwing activists at the table took turns obsequiously bowing to Trump and telling tales of the abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of Antifa and how Antifa is “running cover for homeless people” (“The Homeless Industrial Complex”) and is also aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. Trump made interjections, including asking all of the assembled activists to provide names of individual donors to progressive organizations to “Kash, or Pam, or even Kristi” for possible prosecution, and talking about how bad MSNBC, CNN, ABC, and NBC are while noting that “CBS has a great new president!” At one point, Jack Posobiec, past promoter of the Pizzagate and “Stop the Steal” conspiracies, said Antifa “has been going on for almost 100 years . . . going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.”
He was right about that. Antifa, short for anti-fascist, does go back to the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). They were the people trying to stop Hitler from coming to power, after seeing what happened when the fascists came to power in Italy under Mussolini. These anti-fascists in Weimar were primarily Social Democrats who believed in elections, freedom of expression, and the rule of law.
The more recent anti-fascists arose against white supremacist and skinhead groups in Europe during the Cold War and skinheads and neo-Nazis in the US in the 80s. And in 2017, it was Antifa that showed up to oppose the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and antisemites who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, during Trump’s first term, fighting them in the streets. Remember Trump’s statement that “there were good people on both sides?”
Most of the violence in the summer of protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 was blamed on Antifa, described by Trump’s FBI Director Christopher Wray as an ideology, not an organization.
Now Trump & Co. have adopted the term “Antifa” as a catch-all term to describe anyone speaking out against the Trump regime, and they are using it to move against peaceful protestors and demonstrators. But going against all the anti-fascists in the US today would mean going against the majority of the population. We are all anti-fascists now.
That said, the Antifa hoax that Trumpists are promulgating is an attempt to instigate a panic among Americans. The depiction of Antifa given by Noem, Bondi, and the others at the “Antifa Roundtable” is a fiction. There is no organized “domestic terrorist” group called Antifa. The attacks on this fictional organization will instead be directed to the peaceful protestors of No Kings Day II and other demonstrations, in an attempt to create unrest as a pretext for a crackdown.
In Portland, they’re wearing frog costumes and dancing in front of ICE warriors dressed in full battle gear. Trump and Holman wanted to instill fear in Portland but got back frivolity instead.
The administration seems especially afraid of the No Kings mass demonstrations happening on Saturday, October 18, in more than 2500 cities and towns all over the country, that will almost certainly be the largest single-day mass demonstration in US history. In the first such demonstration on June 14, more than 5 million people stood up against the Trump regime. If more than twice that many stand up this time, we will approach the 3.5% of the population needed to put a stop to the regime.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) has claimed that people protesting on Saturday are part of “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party, that are “playing to the most radical, small, and violent base in the country . . . . They just do not love this country.” And Speaker of the House MAGA Mike Johnson, doggedly running interference for the suppression of the Epstein Files, has now turned his ire on Americans peacefully protesting. He said this about the No Kings march: “They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and, you know, the Antifa people.”
We are the anti-fascist people, and hopefully there will be twice as many of us out on the streets this time tomorrow. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) responded to the Republican leadership’s comments in this way: “It’s a rally of millions of people all over this country who believe in our Constitution, who believe in American freedom and are not going to let you and Donald Trump turn this country into an authoritarian society.”
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.