NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has been quite clear a grave injustice in this moment is designating Antifa as a terrorist group. Summon the carefully selected Experts!
On Tuesday, the Lucas report warned: “As Trump talks of designating antifa a foreign terrorist group, experts see danger.” Lucas ushered in the civil liberties panic, over President Trump having designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization last month, after years of the group organizing into cells in progressive cities like Portland and picking fights and destroying both public and private property. But to NPR, the worst danger is Trump calling out Antifa.
Host Juana Summers sniffed, “It's unclear what that means in the real world. There's no statute for domestic terrorism. But now the president is talking about designating antifa a foreign terrorist organization. That would have legal teeth and likely enormous repercussions…."
Give reporter Lucas one cheer for accurately calling antifa “far-left.”
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Earlier this month, President Trump welcomed right-wing influencers to the White House for a roundtable about antifa, the far-left movement or ideology opposed to fascism. Some of the influencers gathered around the table urged the president to designate antifa as a foreign terrorist organization.
NPR ran audio clips from the gathering, then rebutted with Jason Blazakis, who worked in counterterrorism under Obama and Trump and who wrote an Los Angeles Times op-ed warning that Trump was "inching down" the path of "crushing democracy."
JASON BLAZAKIS: I do think it would be a highly dangerous step for the administration to pursue.
LUCAS: Blazakis says there are certain legal criteria to designate a group a foreign terrorist organization, including that it is indeed a cohesive organization. In the case of antifa, Blazakis says it is not a functioning group like ISIS or al-Qaida, which had clear leadership and a hierarchy. Instead, he and other experts say antifa isn't an organization at all. It's more of a movement of disparately linked people who share an ideology, which is that fascism is bad.
They also share a penchant for masked violence and property destruction, but NPR won’t report anything that would stain Antifa’s brave "anti-fascist" mythology.
Lucas next spoke with Thomas Brzozowski, former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Justice Department, who was even more aggressive in shielding Antifa and condemning the Trump administration's designation. There were no outside voices to offer a defense of Trump's stand.
LUCAS: The most immediate impact would be the ability for federal prosecutors to bring the criminal charge of material support to a designated terrorist organization. Material support is broadly defined and can mean something as small as a $10 gift card or a bottle of water....
BRZOZOWSKI: When that foreign terrorist organization is so ill-defined and nobody even knows what it is and it potentially includes all activity that can be painted as left-wing or whatever term you like to hang on it, that becomes potentially catastrophically dangerous for anybody, for everybody.
Lucas and his guest piled on the paranoia, suggesting universities, those hotbeds of extreme progressivism, “could cancel conferences that touch any topic that might conceivably relate to anti-fascism.”
BRZOZOWSKI: They're not going to insure these institutions if they touch anything where (inaudible) remotely concerns anti-fascism. And think about how broad that is. What does it even mean? It sounds crazy, Kafkaesque, but that's what this designation would bring into play.
The media may claim Antifa is merely an “amorphous concept,” but networks actually do know what Antifa is, and they kind of like it. In 2018, then-CNN host Don Lemon practically defended Antifa by giving them a “distinction” from neo-Nazis—that being fighting fascism, supposedly. CNN platformed an Antifa member in an attempt to humanize the group.
Lucas’s October 23 report for Morning Edition also fretted over Trump designating the violent rioters of Antifa a foreign terrorist organization. The next story in that show’s queue? The dangerous "far right" Young Republicans who got in heavily publicized trouble for obnoxious remarks in online group chats.
On top of that, Lucas turned up on The NPR Politics Podcast on Wednesday with the same frightened theme.
