Inside the Antifa Militant Network
Can the Trump Administration shut it down?
In this week’s episode of Rufo & Lomez, we’re talking to domestic security expert Kyle Shildeler, who’s going to lift the veil on Antifa, explain its history, its origins, its ideologies, its tactics, and then give us a guided tour through the Trump administration’s actions, or, in some cases, inaction, related to shutting it down. This is going to be the most informative dissection of Antifa you’ll ever hear.
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Rufo: Kyle, you and I first got to know each other a number of years ago at the Claremont Institute fellowship, and this was during wave one of the Antifa riots in Portland. I think it’s fitting that we now reconnect on wave two of the Antifa riots all over the country. Before we get into that, I hope you can introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you’ve been working on, and help us set up this conversation about these pressing events.
Kyle: My name is Kyle Shideler. I am the Senior Analyst and Director for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Programs at the Center for Security Policy, where I oversee all of our research with a primary focus on domestic groups that are targeting national security, both from a kinetic standpoint—so terrorism—but also from a non-kinetic standpoint. I look at groups that are engaged in things like subversion against the U.S. government and the U.S. Constitution. The Center for Security Policy’s approach has always been to understand the ideology; we feel that if we understand what a threat actor believes, we can understand how they’ll operate. From there, you can start doing predictive intelligence on what they’ll do and then try to stop them. So I research, I write, I provide briefings to local and state law enforcement, and I try to assist them wherever I can. That’s it in a nutshell.
Lomez: Kyle, nice to meet you. I’m honored to have you on the show, and this is an important topic. Antifa has been this insidious force, kind of operating behind the scenes of American politics for years. They’ve become more prominent and more salient, and we’re seeing them more often now than we used to. But that question you just posed—which is, we’re trying to understand what these groups believe—okay, we hear all the time that Antifa is an idea, right? And obviously, on a straightforward level, they are anti-fascist. But what does that actually mean? What do they believe? What is animating their politics? Is there some coherent ideological through line that we can identify, or is it, as a lot of people on the Right, myself included, see them as merely these shock troops, these ground troops for the Left, who operate according to whatever ideology is most convenient at any given time in order to push back against whatever the Right might be doing?
Kyle: If you look at their writings, most of the Antifa groups—Antifa is inherently a united front—so you’re going to have a wide variety of revolutionary leftists organizing under the Antifa banner. But the vast majority of them are going to be anarchists or what’s called autonomous Marxists. This is an ideology that came out of Italy and Germany in the 1980s, and essentially what they said was, we’re tired of old, stodgy communist parties telling us that we have to do a bunch of boring organizing. We want it now. And so they came up with this concept of living autonomously, meaning they want to create spaces where they can live their ideology in real life.
And what that looks like in practice is what we saw in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle—push out the police with an insurrection, with violence, establish your own control of the area, and then live out your ideology, whether that involves trying to grow gardens on concrete or what have you, as they were widely mocked for doing. But they want to live there. They want to live their ideology, their communist ideology, and they want to live it right now.
Lomez: Does this include in CHAZ, by the way, being ruled by rapper warlords? If I remember correctly, this descended into this sort of warring tribes, and there were shootings, and we had people who were like former YPG soldiers involved somehow. Am I remembering this correctly? Is that what they mean by their ideal governing strategy?
Kyle: Well, the situation with the rapper was not their idea of an ideal, no. But yeah— I mean, the guy who had worked with the YPG was most likely a member of one of the John Brown Gun Clubs, which was running the armed security for the barricades at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. But fundamentally, Antifa views themselves as the community security defense of this autonomous effort. So push out the police, establish control, and live your ideology in real life. Now, the problem with that, as you pointed out—the problem with anarchism—is that they do suffer from, when people who do not subscribe to their ideology come in, you get warlordism and what have you. They spend countless hours and pages of digital lines of writing talking about how to avoid those problems, but they’ve never successfully done it.
But the other fundamental effort—and this comes straight out of anarchism—is that it’s politics by direct action. If you don’t like something, if you’re opposed to the building of a pipeline, if you’re opposed to Elon Musk and his Teslas, you burn them, right? You blow up the pipeline. If you don’t want something to be built, you chain yourself in front of the bulldozer. That’s politics by direct action, and that’s fundamental to the anarchist way of life. You see that played out in Antifa: if you think somebody’s a fascist, you punch them, you shoot them.
