A White House “roundtable” held Wednesday included several journalists – Andy Ngo, Katie Daviscourt, Nick Sortor, Brandi Kruse, and Julio Rosas – who have risked their personal safety to perform on-the-street reports about Antifa.
Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” is a network of violent far-left activists whose political view is typically a form of communism. Their typical uniform, known as black bloc, includes all-black clothing, helmets, and masks to hide their identities.
In the U.S., Antifa has cells across the country but is especially known in the radically far-left Pacific Northwest, where it has emerged as political muscle in and around Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon.
The group Rose City Antifa, which maintains its own website, is believed to be the largest and most organized Antifa group in the Pacific Northwest.
Despite its presence online and on the streets, Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler famously called Antifa a “myth” invented by the Right. Last month, former MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd played dumb about the group after interviewing an Antifa-supporting author in 2017.
“I don’t even know what Antifa is,” Todd told a show guest.
“I'm sitting here with a black eye, and a concussion,” Daviscourt told the president, “after being violently hit in the face with a metal pole while reporting outside the ICE facility.”
Daviscourt, a Post Millennial reporter, did indeed arrive at the White House sporting a black eye she received Oct. 1 in Portland while imbedded with violent protesters outside an ICE facility.
Among the table of journalists, Ngo might have been the most recognizable because he risked his life to publish first-hand reports on Antifa dating back to 2012. He described to President Trump how he was attacked by a violent Antifa mob in 2019 and suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage, more commonly known as brain bleed.
The roundtable meeting came after President Trump designated Antifa a domestic terrorist organization in an executive order he signed in September. Citing the journalists’ first-hand accounts Wednesday, he announced plans to declare Antifa a foreign terrorist organization, or FTO, which would be recognized by the U.S. State Department.
Reacting to the roundtable event, CNN show host Erin Burnett mocked the White House for comparing Antifa to more “sophisticated” terror groups, such as Hamas and ISIS.
“In fact, it's not even like the far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers which have national leaders unlike Antifa. There is not organized hierarchy to the group,” she told the CNN audience.
A similar blog post at MSNBC, written by “Rachel Maddow Show” producer Steven Benen, also downplayed Antifa. He described the group as “loosely affiliated anti-fascist activists” with “no budget” and no list of members.
“There are no offices or headquarters. There are no staffers, leaders or board members. There is no hierarchy for prosecutors to pursue,” Benen wrote.
However, the author interviewed by Todd in 2017, Mark Bray, donated the proceeds of his Antifa book to an international group, the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund.
Bray, a Rutgers professor, remains a vocal supporter of Antifa. He has now fled to Europe at the same time the White House has vowed to crack down on Antifa, Ngo recently reported.
Despite the first-hand accounts of violence, Burnett told her CNN audience Antifa violence is “rare and limited” compared to “right-wing extremists.”
Burnett said her source was the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a right-leaning think tank, but AFN could not find a report from CSIS describing Antifa violence as “rare and limited.”
In fact, CSIS reported in September that left-wing attacks – including attacks by Antifa members – have outpaced right-wing attacks this year for the first time in three decades.
Back at the White House roundtable, the table of journalists seemed to anticipate liberal media outlets, and Democrats, looking the other way.
“It needs to be said that Antifa is real. It's real. It’s a threat,” Rosas, a national correspondent for Blaze Media, told the president.
“How can we as a country begin to address it if we have large swaths of these people, who are supposedly decision makers and people who are supposed to inform, they don’t want to say that it exists?” Rosas complained.
“The single most powerful thing you've done to deal with this scourge,” Kruse told the president, “has been acknowledging that Antifa is a real thing.”
Ngo, who has documented Antifa’s organization over the years, told the president Antifa is so organized it has medical teams for injuries and legal teams to help members who are arrested.
“This is a coordinated network,” Ngo stressed. “It’s not just spontaneous anarchic violence. It’s quite organized.”
