Fact Check: Antifa is not a nationwide organized group. There are small groups that use Antifa in their name, like Rose City Antifa (RCA) In Portland, Oregon. It is an antifascist group
founded in opposition to a planned music festival sponsored by neo-Nazis who were part of White Aryan resistance. That’s as “organized” as it is.
Kristi Noem’s recent statement on C-SPAN, that one of those arrested by law enforcement was “the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa,” is more than a careless falsehood. It is a revealing act of rhetorical warfare. When seen in context, it maps directly onto a broader strategy: manufacture internal enemies, amplify threat narratives, and build pretexts for extraordinary state power. What Noem offered was not a factual claim, it was a signal that the American state is preparing itself for war against its own people.
Start with the specifics. Noem said federal agents in Portland had arrested “the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa” and were questioning her about the network. Antifa has no recognized founders. In both journalistic and academic accounts, Antifa is not a formal group with membership, hierarchy, or founding figures. It is a loose label for anti-fascist activists, local cells, and protest networks. That mismatch is not a small error, it is the point. The invented founder is the narrative key that turns a decentralized label into an organized conspiracy. She also told a White House roundtable that Antifa is “just as sophisticated” as MS-13, Tren de Aragua, ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and called it “just as dangerous.” She said they “have an agenda to destroy us.” Those are not neutral descriptions, they are an effort to shift how the public thinks about dissent.
This is a narrative weapon, not a report. It performs a political function by building a mythology that the country is infiltrated by a hidden, coordinated enemy. That mythology, in turn, justifies emergency measures, surveillance,
and the domestic use of military power. When you step back and look at the pattern, the claim fits neatly into a larger architecture that is being constructed day by day.
The strategy is not new. From the Red Scare and McCarthyism to COINTELPRO’s demonization of civil rights and antiwar movements, powerful institutions have projected existential threats onto domestic dissent to rationalize repression. The lie becomes ammunition for restriction, surveillance, and violence. Noem’s claim is a contemporary echo of that tradition.
The new layer is the president’s rhetoric to the military itself. In a speech to hundreds of top commanders, he said, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He also told them, “We’re under invasion from within.” The message was unambiguous. Cities are not communities to be governed by consent, they are battle spaces to be pacified. That reframing slides the country from a constitutional model of civilian policing into a posture of internal warfare.
The legal and administrative groundwork is visible. The White House issued a memorandum on countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence, directing agencies to scrutinize and disrupt groups swept under that umbrella. An executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization followed, not because such a designation has clear statutory force in domestic law, but because it signals priorities to the security apparatus and invites expansive interpretations of existing statutes. When these instruments meet the right narrative, lines blur quickly between peaceful protest, street scuffles, and terrorism.
Courts have pushed back. A federal judge in Oregon temporarily blocked the administration from deploying National Guard units to Portland, writing that the circumstances did not justify military force. That ruling does not end the effort, it shows how the story is supposed to work. Declare a domestic emergency, amplify isolated incidents as proof of conspiracy, argue that extraordinary measures are necessary, and then dare the courts to stop you. Even when judges do, the larger narrative keeps moving, conditioning the public to see dissent as threat.
The danger to democracy is not abstract. Once a state convinces itself it is fighting a hidden enemy, citizens become combatants in the government’s eyes. The space between protest and insurrection becomes a matter of narrative rather than fact. Civil liberties are recast as vulnerabilities, critics are labeled security risks, and journalists and educators are painted as mouthpieces for the enemy. If cities are training grounds and neighbors are infiltrators, then troops on streets and surveillance at scale start to feel not only acceptable, but inevitable.
This is why Noem’s statement needs to be treated as more than a lie. The nonexistence of a founder is not a semantic quibble, it is the tell. She is not describing reality, she is rewriting it into a form that makes militarized domestic governance seem like common sense. It is also why the insistence on equivalence with terrorist groups is so important to the script. If Antifa is “just as sophisticated” and “just as dangerous,” the logic points to using the same tools used against terrorists. That is how extraordinary power gets normalized.
We have been here before. The Red Scare began with whispers of infiltration and ended with loyalty oaths and blacklists. The war on terror began with the shock of mass murder and ended with warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention that long outlived the emergency. Fear dissolves resistance. The new war on “Antifa” is not really about ideology or violence. It is about control.
Kristi Noem’s “girlfriend” claim is not just false in its construction, it is preparatory. It accustoms the public to the idea that dissent equals conspiracy, and conspiracy equals war. When citizens accept that logic, they accept troops in the streets and the suspension of rights as necessary self-defense. Once a regime is granted permission to equate opposition with treason, democracy is no longer simply at risk, it is already being dismantled.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
