The Antidote to Fear is Courage

The executive memo released on September 25, just two weeks after Charlie Kirk’s murder, unleashes every facet of the government in an effort to ​“investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” activities and organizations the administration deems dangerous. Law enforcement agencies are directed to cooperate with the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate organizations and people who are anti-fascist. The attorney general is directed to prosecute groups before any crimes occur. The IRS is directed to take action and interrogate nonprofits and funders. The Treasury doors are thrown open to fund the operations.

NSPM-7 did not create new laws or new designations, but the directive is an expansive and dangerous signal that echoes the government-run counter-movement programs from the 1960s, like the FBI’s Cointelpro (shorthand for Counterintelligence Program). Cointelpro was a covert surveillance program that undermined social movements by using infiltration, intimidation, manufactured rumors that created rifts and damaged credibility, and led to imprisonment, exile, and assassinations of movement leaders.

Cointelpro was not exposed until over a decade after it disrupted many U.S. social movements. Now, the government is armed with new technologies and new powers, supported by massive agencies and apparatus developed since 9/11. Within days of September 11, 2001, the USA Patriot Act was introduced and expanded government capabilities to wiretap all residents within the United States using ambiguous, broad, and subjective definitions of terrorism. After 9/11, all branches of the US government radically reinterpreted and eventually changed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to enable mass surveillance. The law was changed to permit ​“foreign intelligence gathering” even if it was not the primary purpose of the surveillance.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the architect of the current anti-immigrant crackdown, names this expanded investigation of anti-fascist activity alongside the military occupations of U.S. cities as an ​“all government, unlimited support operation.” Stephen Miller consistently aligns with white nationalist groups and policy, particularly targeting immigrants with family separations, the Muslim ban on particular countries, and mass detentions. His daily calls with officials and extreme policies of deportation have turned the state department ​“into an anti-immigration machine.”

Trump threatened to designate ​“Antifa” as a terrorist organization in his first term. His attempts to criminalize fighting against fascism and racism emboldened the MAGA social base, which would be used to further weaponize white supremacist state institutions and groups.

That was in 2020. Movements serious about our fight for social justice continued despite these threats, as social movements do. As organizers, we recognize counter-movement efforts, and we look for opportunities to widen the path to participate, to speak up, to act in solidarity, and to resist from wherever we are located. 

It is now 2025. These Trump administration directives broaden the scope of who the state is naming as their enemies and go well beyond naming violent action to include political beliefs and positions on gender, race, economics, and religion. As recently as October 22, Project South was named as a group tied to terrorism by the sensationalist right-wing media for our work to educate and organize against state repression, to call out genocide, and to challenge attempts to weaponize definitions of antisemitism. A right-wing congressman has called on the Department of Justice to investigate the National Lawyers Guild for its work in defense of social justice movements. Lists are being drawn up, but our collective action protects us.

And collectively, there are large swaths of people who live in the U.S. who oppose fascism. Shane Burley who writes extensively on the subject believes that movements have to expand our understanding of anti-fascism beyond the perceived boogeyman of Antifa to include the tactics of civil disobedience to defeat Jim Crow to workplace strikes and many other forms of organizing.

This administration’s gameplan, initiated with the ​“War on Terror,” is to keep accepted definitions loose and pliable to create broad nets that include so-called anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity, as well as ​“traditional” American views on family, religion, and morality. Equating terrorism with anti-fascism is an attempt to intimidate and silence our movements.

The forces that are consolidating represent different worldviews. These ideologies overlap but advance distinct visions: Christian nationalism, white ethno-nationalism, tech and finance monopolies. We should be precise about the different forces, their methods and their base-building strategies, but we need not split hairs on whether or not what we are contending with is fascism.

Fascism does not need to have a precise definition, purposefully.

“We will never have a complete definition of fascism,” wrote George Jackson, a political prisoner and organizer who was assassinated for his political beliefs in 1971, the year that Cointelpro was exposed for its gross violations and political repression, ​“because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class.” 

Jackson names that fascism, at its core, it is an economic arrangement used by the ruling class to protect itself during extreme crises. A social base for fascism has been organized over time as the economic conditions worsen, particularly using the Obama years to expand its ranks using well-worn racist tropes in a 21^st-century context from maligning Colin Kaepernick for kneeling in protest at pro football games to weaponizing Critical Race Theory to target anti-racist educational systems. 

We cannot misunderstand or underestimate the levels of state capture, economic control and social manipulation we face at this time. These forces have been emboldened and resourced, and they are now using the murder of Charlie Kirk as a catalyst to mobilize massive numbers of young people to claim and move with Christian and white nationalism. The state of Tennessee recently announced a partnership with Kirk’s fundamentalist non-profit Turning Point USA to embed chapters in every high school, college, and university across the state.

As we learn from history, silence does not protect us — and silence endangers even more people when we do not create a stronger counterbalance. This is not a time to retreat or play it safe. This is the time to build a broad base to win.

This is not a moment to be quiet or mild about what is happening in the United States. This is a time to be courageous, to come together, and to act in small and large ways to defeat the consolidation of fascism.

And we need big, bold, broad-based social movements to do it.

The NSPM-7 directive names groups and people who challenge these economic, political and social arrangements as a movement against fascism. As the state offers monetary incentives for turning people in based on loose designations of anti-Americanism and radical gender ideologies, we have a responsibility to invite more people into a broad movement on multiple fronts. We can begin to build beyond a narrow antagonism to Trump as a figure or the Republican party as a group and start to widen our collective forces as people firmly against all forms of fascist control of our minds, bodies, and resources.

In order to build a broader front, we have to invite people from all walks of life into a vision of liberation. We also have to be brave enough to name our position as anti-fascist.

To name our fight as one against fascism allows us to connect the ways in which the economy is being fundamentally rearranged by an unaccountable, unsustainable tech sector of billionaires.

To name our fight as one against fascism puts us shoulder to shoulder with global social movements fighting authoritarianism, apartheid, climate crisis, and violent state repression.

To name our fight as one against fascism allows us to expand our ranks as social movements.

But we have to say who we are. We cannot be afraid to invite people into a politic of dissent and a practice of resistance. This administration is using the notion of antifa as a trap. We avoid it by standing strong and speaking out against fascism, which should not be a controversial position or politic.

We have a responsibility to connect the position of anti-fascism to a positive vision of real freedom and self-determination. We can step proudly into a legacy of movements that fight for justice, dignity, liberation, political participation, body autonomy, ecological sustainability, and economic self-determination. In fact, our connections to historical people’s movements for human rights and power should give us the courage we need. From blocking ICE from public venues, to refusing to comply with unjust laws, to preparing our neighborhoods for climate disasters and resisting military occupations — every action is part of building what we need to survive and win.

Whether we mobilize to demonstrate our dissent in mass street protests, create support for communities facing economic distress and food insecurity, assert our rights in our workplaces and schools, or build preparedness plans for climate crisis, we should claim who we are as part of a broad movement that stands against the fascism growing across the world.

By claiming our politic and position, we can expand our movements to protect our families, our neighbors and future generations. We are stronger if we do it together. Let’s name ourselves as teachers, nurses, lawyers, students, artists, and veterans against fascism.

That is what anti-fascism looks like, and we all have a role to play.

It’s time to be brave, bold, and loud.