This week marked the first time that the Trump administration used its recent quasi-legal orders declaring a nonexistent domestic organization that it calls “Antifa” to be a terrorist group, a designation usually only applied to foreign groups, as an excuse to arrest two people in Texas on “on one count of providing material support to terrorists, two counts of attempted murder, and three counts of discharging a firearm,” according to Axios. Those charges are in relation to the “July shooting southwest of Dallas that injured a police officer at an ICE detention facility,” but neither suspect “is believed to be the shooter.”
Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi, US “top cop,” compared this imaginary foe to a brutal drug gang, according to the Independent, saying: “It’s organized crime. They’re completely organized.” While Trump pushes to put the military on the streets of cities like Chicago, Ill. and Portland, Ore. to combat “Antifa,” “Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem likened Antifa to Hamas” and “administration officials and Republican members of Congress” are blaming the upcoming “No Kings” rallies happening this Saturday on, yes, “Antifa.” Meaning that the federal government is plowing ahead with its plans to throw America back to the McCarthy era with “57 Communists in the State Department” replaced with “[t]hey’re no different than MS-13 or any gang out there.”
This nonsense cannot stand. Smearing anyone who protests what they see as an increasingly fascist government as a terrorist is a direct attack on the First Amendment … and on reality itself, a dangerous combination. And pretty darned fascist behavior, if history teaches us anything. Given that, the best way to stop Trump and company from creating a conceptual scapegoat that they can use to drive their ill-conceived ideological spike even deeper in the heart of American democracy is to demonstrate incontrovertibly that millions of Americans simply won’t buy what they are selling.
So to anyone reading this note in the Boston area, I strongly encourage you to turn out this Saturday, October 18 at noon for the “No Kings” rally on Boston Common (or choose your nearest rally location around the US on the national “No Kings” website). The speeches and the Democratic Party leaders telling you “thanks for turning out, we’ve got it from here” are not the point. The fact of a giant public demonstration and thousands of others like it is.
And keeping such actions up and growing the movement for democracy in the streets is what can change the American political game and drive the hard right out of Congress next year and out of the White House and all the (surviving) federal agencies in 2028—either because the protests force the Democrats to stop trying to serve two masters and ally themselves with working people instead of the same billionaire-owned corporations backing MAGA or because the new movement leads to a powerful, popular, and (genuinely) progressive third party able to finally break the two-party duopoly.
Sometimes mass protests really do matter. And this is one of those times. Let’s get out there and win one for democracy.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
