Panic World - The myth of the Antifa super soldier

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

We recorded this episode prior to the killing of Renee Good, but the resulting federal crackdown on the protests in Minneapolis has made this conversation even more relevant. That is, there's a need for an anti-fascism movement, especially under Trump 2.0, but where did the theory come from that it is an organized operation? Today, we’re joined by Ken Klippenstein to explore the myth of the “Antifa super soldier” and how worried we should be about the memorandum Trump released in September 2025, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” (which you can also view here). Our guest Ken Klippenstein is a journalist reporting on US national security and politics. Check out his writing on his Substack (https://www.kenklippenstein.com/) and follow him on the site formerly known as Twitter @kenklippenstein. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is it like being the leader of Antifa? Like, how has that been for you? Well, you know, we get our check every two weeks and I don't have to try to keep my head down. Sure. Yeah, yeah. I imagine the Molotov cocktail budget is quite expensive. Depends on how much we use on the Christmas party. You know, we're talking today about the myth of Antifa, the myth of anti-fascism as this sort of organized operation.

And I wanted to throw a little thesis at you before we really jump in. And the thesis is this. Trump 2 is obviously worse than Trump 1. And the need for Antifa as an organization to exist has basically become so important to them that, like, they have to make it real. Does that does that seem right to what you've seen? Yeah, totally. It kind of supplements a lot of anxieties that MAGA has. And to some extent, I'm a little bit sympathetic because there was this very high profile assassination of someone who was personal friends with a lot of people in the administration.

So I think talking to people in at least the national security part who themselves are in contact with these principal figures in Trump administration, you can't really overstate the amount of just like genuine fear they have about there being another event like that. And that manifests in all this paranoia that you're seeing right now. I do believe that Charlie Kirk was a close personal friend to many people in the Trump administration and that they are genuinely unable to process the idea that this would have been a random killing. It's almost more insulting, I think, to them. That is just something like that. Yeah, exactly. Within hours, you have the FBI director talking about how we're going to run down leads showing foreign influence. And he talked about there being suspicions of Chinese presence in the Discord chat.

That it was just bizarre. And this was within like 24 hours, which any investigator can tell you, they're not going to know anything in 24 hours because you've got a subpoena companies. And there's a whole process you have to go through to find anything out. Exactly. But that speaks to their mindset. And so today we're going to be talking about the myth of the Antifa Super Soldier. This has been on our list probably since we started the show. And this show is Panic World.

I'm Ryan Broderick with me as always as my producer and fellow Antifa Super Soldier Grant Irving. And Panic World is a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining us today is a guy that I'm a pretty big fan of. And I would say that you are someone who is not afraid to, you know, stick your thumb in the eye of the Trump administration. Ken, Clippetside, welcome. Thank you for coming on. On a personal level, like, are you tired? Are you, are you tired?

Genuinely, yes. We're going to be talking today about like how we came up with this idea of the Andy for Super Soldier. But let's start with NSPM 7 because you were, I think, I think you are the first reporter to pick it up. I've been citing your work whenever I bring it up. And the question that I have with it is a question that I have, about almost everything the Trump administration does and has done, which is how seriously should we be taking this bill?

Which just to summarize, who have not been following this, it is called the countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence. It's a presidential memoranda released in late September. And as you said, it basically just makes anyone who's not a Trump supporter illegal effectively or able to be sort of, you know, scrutinized legally. how seriously should the average person be taking this? Well, there's a continuum of ways that they can go about executing something like that. At the really extreme end, they can do what they're doing to people like James Comey and drag them in and bring the force of the federal law enforcement, FBI, DOJ against him. But at the earlier end of the continuum, which is what we're already seeing,

they can just make people's lives hell. And they can have a chilling effect on speech. I've interviewed protesters who have gotten visits from the FBI, not accused of any crime, not indicted for anything. And it frustrates me because you have these legal experts go on. There was one former Justice Department person I went on MSNBC recently. She was like, well, these charges will never stand up in court. No jury's going to indict this.

And I think she's probably right. But what that's overlooking is the fact that if some just young person like this guy in Arizona, who I interviewed, gets a visit from the FBI, they're going to be scared shitless. And he said to me, he wanted to go to. the No Kings protests and he didn't he decided not to because he was just freaked out by the whole thing that's what we that's the stage that we're at now and we should be worried about you know in the Chicago area broadview Illinois big ice facility there have been over a hundred arrests one person said that they were interrogated for over a day in a facility and ultimately released no charges

again that's no fun being interrogated by federal agents it is not no I've talked to FBI agents who described to me have being told to canvas their we're called confidential human sources that's like FBI speak for their informant networks, to go and canvas them, question them about what can you tell me, what can you give me to connect Antifa to various crimes? And a lot of the agents might not believe it. They might think of it as ridiculous as many people do, because as has been pointed out by Trump's first pick for FBI director, Christopher Ray, said Antifa's just like in ideology. It's not really a... I forgot about it. I completely forgot about Christopher Ray. Wow. Time flies with this guy.

That's amazing. Yeah. So let's state this very clearly. I have covered both the far right and the response to the far right around the planet. You have as well. We have both been looking at this stuff for over a decade at this point. I personally have never seen any evidence of an organization like Antifa has described. Have you?

No, not as such. I mean, I think I know what they're trying to get at. they're trying to describe the kind of so-called black block people address in all black at protests and and you know adopt tactics like maybe they'll break a window or i don't believe that they've killed anyone ever no they like in any case i mean the ones in boston throw a lot of piss the ones in uh i followed like a group of black block in france once and they did light a couple cops on fire but like the cops were fine they were wearing body armor and stuff right like in greece But in the U.S., it's like just seems like property destruction.

I think some of the worst cases is destruction of a vehicle or something. And, you know, like those are crimes. But like to say that put them on the same footing as Al Qaeda and ISIS, which the administration has done by formally designating for the first time ever, like in history, Antifa is a domestic terrorist group. It's sort of outrageous. So that's another thing that I think there's just very glib response to, which is saying, oh, it doesn't exist. So we don't need to worry. I agree it doesn't exist in any. any formal capacity, let's say.

Right, definitely. But the admin doesn't define it that way. They're using this as a broad label to slap on what they consider Antifa to be, which sounds like people that, I mean, if you go and read National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it lists anti-ice protests as indicative of extremism. So you've got the real definition of the term, which is does anyone actually call themselves that? No.

but if you look at how the Trump administration, like they live in another world. They are consuming different media than a lot of the rest of us. They are in, when you talk about the principal figures in the administration, in the national security side,

they live in a rarefied world where they're all getting each other gassed up about these, you know, I mentioned before, foreign influence, foreign financing, and all this stuff. So they don't see, like you might laugh at Antifa,

but they see something very different. There was a segment recently on Fox, I saw that was like, talking about how they found the, what was it, a safe house for Antifa. There was just some young guys like in front of an apartment, you know, do you remember this? I do, yeah. Yeah.

And like, just to give you another example, Homeland Secretary Christy Noem alleged to, I'm not making this up, she said that we have arrested the girlfriend of the founder of Antifa. Yeah, that was awesome. So these are real. Spoiling. Yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry. Also like, so my take on on this has always been that it's a bit of projection also.

It's the sort of belief that like, okay, like we are coordinated. The far right is absolutely well funded and coordinated and fairly centralized in certain ways. I sort of have always thought of like conservatives assuming that anti-fo operated the same way as just them being like, yeah, of course they're set up the same way we're set up. I see this often in national security and law enforcement, which is states tend to see other things as state. Interesting. So let's get a little footing here. So 1932, pretty far back in our timeline as far as this show goes. A little political party called the Nazi Party gains power in Germany.

They get resistance from the country's official Communist Party. It creates an organization basically to fight back against them with force. In July of that year, they hold the anti-fascista action rally featuring a logo that is still used today. So that's where you get a lot of the early iconography, the stuff that would eventually come back around when we start talking about Charlie Kirk this year. In 1940s, during the war, the anti-fascist symbol is shortened to Antifa, and it's basically just like self-identification. So underground resistance movements operating largely in Germany can use it to sort of signal

that they're on the same side. After the war, there are attempts to turn these groups into stable political movements, but they fail, which I think is very important for going forward, that we are not talking about some sort of like international communist alliance. Like we were talking about like a thing that pops up basically as a direct response to fascist action. And it is a broad group of different people. In the 21st century, the name and the symbols of Antifa, you know, they still kick around, especially like in different parts of the world, largely in response to authoritarian movement. As early as 2016, even before he's taken office.

So this is from it's going down.org, which is a great resource for people who want to follow this world. I've been reading, it's going down for years. It is sort of an anarchist, leftist, anti-fascist publication. And they have some pretty good reporting. So they write in 2016, well, they sometimes have good reporting. I mean, it depends on how you want to. Anyways. Like, I think I should put it a disclaimer here for any sort of person who's not familiar with this world going into this world.

And I do this a lot with some sources we use is like take some of it with a grain of salt. Sometimes it gets a little tinfoil hat. Like, that's all I'll say. Unicorn riot. I'd also throw in there worth reading, but also take with a grain of salt. Okay, so it's going down.org writes, for many years until early 2016, the U.S. anti-fascist movement was small and relatively stable in numbers with only occasional national mobilizations. This year, however, new group started springing up largely in reaction to Trump's candidacy with Trump's election.

The trickle turned into a flood of interest, along with renewed interest, has also come a flood of commentary by people who seem to consider themselves experts on the Antifa movement. They are lining up to give us instructions or to criticize us what's common to them all, whether from good or bad intentions is that they know very little about the existing movement and therefore grossly misrepresented. I can't stress enough how much as I get better sources and closer to the admin and what's going on, I see they really believe this stuff. It's not rhetoric. I thought so much of it was like, oh, they're trying to scare people when I first came

into this. I would say that's a big shift, is seeing the circular nature of their information diet where they're just getting the same stuff. And it might, maybe it starts out as rhetoric, but, but then people around them start repeating it. And then the people they watch, repeat it. And then they all believe it. We're talking about rhetoric. So the, the sort of anti, the extremist rhetoric around Trump is there from the very beginning. I think a lot of this is memory hold, but like the KKK is holding rallies in 2016, basically supporting Trump. The New York Times publishes an article at the, at the time writing. They were talking to a former state rep and they write, we must show everyone.

not to fight fire with fire, fight fire with love and compassion. Another city rap says we don't accept violence. It doesn't matter who started it. We need to work on listening and learning from each other. And they talk to high school students who like say the same thing. But very early, there are violent clashes between extremist groups and counter-protesters, which I would put under the category of anti-fascist. Later that year in 2016, we started getting the DHS and FBI.

saying that they're tracking Antifa as a terrorist movement. By the summer of 2016, there are 30 injured after white supremacists and counter-protesters fight in front of the California State House in Sacramento. And it's one of the first times in recent U.S. history that anti-fascists specifically get blamed for violence. The San Francisco Gate right at the time, Jim Cooper, Democrat from Sacramento, was downtown when he heard about the violence and went to the capital city for himself. He saw counter-protesters ready for a fight and for no reason. The neo-Nazis, he told me, were way outnumbered. The counter-protesters could have yelled and drowned at the neo-Nazis who then would have gone home, but the counter-protesters had shown up ready for action, quote.

To close the article, the writer goes a little wild here, writing, these, quote, anti-fascists are a threat to civil society. They have no idea what freedom is. I shudder to think what they would have to do to get on the Southern Poverty Law Center's radar. What do you make of sort of the immediate reaction in both the press and law enforcement in America to, like, violent counter protest is like you're actually worse. Yeah, it speaks to their worldview. I mean, the law enforcement has a very particular picture of the world where you get to know them.

And just like I was saying before, they tend to really believe things and they really believe in this law and order picture. And anything that threatens like perceived stability is seen as some sort of threat. And so there's a lot of conflation of different actors saying, you know, oh, well, you know, you've got these Nazis here. and then you've got black block there. It all, it's all the same thing. Just the national security mindset is kind of like the Terminator movie where he's like scanning

around looking for threats. Like you start seeing ones that either aren't there or maybe are much smaller of a threat than you think it is. Sure. Not just there are threats because cops would always see that, but that there's some huge threat and the whole point of counterterrorism is preempting an attack before it has happened because the idea, the theory is, well, the attack will be so devastating. that we're going to kind of suspend some of the norms around finding evidence beforehand,

and we're going to go and disrupt and prevent something. And that's really what the Trump administration is doing when they slap these labels and move it into the domain of terrorism. The question is, I think people rightly look at it and say, well, Trump says a lot of crazy things. Why should we take this seriously? But like you said at the top, this allows them to go and look at and investigate and surveil, penetrate with human sources, with technology, what they believe to be networks,

in anticipation of some big event in the future, well, this is the new al-Qaeda. If I had to imagine any kind of coordination between quote-unquote anti-fascist organizers, it would probably just like, when they're done playing settlers of Catan, they're like, hey, do you want to throw piss at cops at the ICE raid protest? Like, that's what I'm imagining this is like. This is all happening. And then I would argue the minute America sort of understands that there's going to be violent opposition to Trump initially. is when Richard Spencer is punched.

I remember watching that video. I was in, weirdly enough, I was in Japan. And I remember just thinking, like, oh, things have, like, really spiraled out of control in America. And what were your thoughts other than, you know, I'm sure you thought it was, maybe you didn't find it funny. What were your reactions to when Richard Spencer was punched during the inauguration? Well, I've always focused on the national security state.

And so I'm immediately thinking, oh, God, what is the FBI going to do in terms of changing its priorities and conceptualizing political violence around like the left now. That was my first reaction. And it took a while, but that's basically what's happened. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. It took this long to get to where we are. I imagine, I mean, I guess why do you think it took this long to get to where we are?

Well, these institutions are like battle cruisers. There are these huge ships that, you know, FBI and Homeland Security is the biggest national security agency in the country. country has more federal law enforcement personnel than the FBI, tens of thousands of people with guns. So it's kind of like a small military. And because of that, change happens gradually. The ship turned slowly. But that doesn't mean the time to worry about it is early on. Once it's turned, it's similarly hard to turn it back, if that makes sense. Do you think something like NSPM 7 would have happened if Trump hadn't been

like elected again. Like do you, you've, no way. No way. No. So, because I guess what I'm trying to ask is like, if you see these sort of like massive institutions as these very slow moving kind of rocks, was it already moving in the first Trump administration? We were always going to end up with more.

For sure. And to some extent, it was moving also under the Biden administration because after January 6th, that's a lot of wind that the national security states back to say, oh, look, there's a domestic political enemy. And so then when Trump comes into office, all you've got to do is swap the names around. It's like, okay, well, we were going to focus. Because I don't know if you remember, they opened up like hundreds of domestic terrorism cases against the January 6 people, which I was-

- Whatever happened to those? I was uncomfortable with at the time because I thought a lot of the cases could be charged under different crimes that don't invoke the counterterrorism authorities in anticipating that that same system is going to be used the next time someone else comes in, and that's exactly what we've seen. In fact, FBI director Cash Patel testified before Congress that there has been a 300% increase in domestic terrorism cases, I went back and looked. And that's actually a similar number to the increase in domestic terrorism cases as a result

of January 6th. Long story short, the global war and terror has been drawn down. And so they're in search of a new mission. And January 6th happens, Charlie Kirk is murdered. And then Trump says, well, here's our new bad guy. It's Antifa. That's the new al-Qaeda. That's, yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, you can see the seeds of this, you know, in Trump's. first year because we go from Richard Spencer being punched, which sort of creates this national conversation where the New York Times is publishing, like, is it okay to punch a Nazi kind of stuff? Eight months later, you get Charlottesville. Trump immediately, you know, starts to, uh, trying to put blame on the quote, alt left and, you know, his very fine people on both sides speech. Um, he doubled down a month later and he says, I think especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what's going on there, you know, you have some pretty bad dudes.

on the other side also. And essentially, that's what I said. He is a great speaker. I feel like, so Gray and I went into this episode being like, okay, it's kind of like a satanic panic. But it kind of sounds like from what you've been reporting and the way you're looking at it is it's actually much closer to like a slow motion 9-11. Yeah.

And at least from the government. Well, there's definitely a moral panic component to it because they're imagining a degree of organization and sophistication and, frankly, a criminality that just doesn't exist. I mean, again, what is this beyond property destruction? I don't see much. Even outside of the U.S., like I haven't seen like, quote unquote, anti-far or black block even close to the level of violence that you would see from the far right.

Yeah, there have been interviews with some of these guys. I've talked to some of them informally. Andrew Callahan had an interview of some masked up guys. And you can just listen to their language or talking about like veganism and like it's just not. It's like, I'm not saying. they won't break the law, but it's like, doesn't seem like this militant movement that wants to go and kill people

that Trump has depicted it as? They will talk your ear off about folk punk. And, you know, if you want to sit and listen to Pat the Bunny records with them, sure, and they'll show you their tattooed dog and go dumpster dog. Okay, I have a lot of jokes about crowsports. And you can hear all of them right after the break. But first, a word from our sponsors, courier selling a signature gas mask fits perfectly over your balaclava.

You can pick those up at the Courier News Store. In our story right now, we are post-Richard Spencer getting punched, post-Charlottesville. How would you sort of describe the media ecosystem reacting to these things? Yeah, it was a lot of both-side stuff and, you know, we need to come together as a country and have some serious. I mean, it was like a politician would respond to it. And I think, to some extent, media is so concentrated in Washington that they end up sounding like them. because I start saying, like, we need a soul search and all this stuff that doesn't really contend with what I saw is the major question, which is, okay, so whatever you think about

him punching him, what does it say that someone felt motivated to do that in risk of felony charge? And that's what I think gets lost in a lot of this, which is that people really are afraid of Trump and don't like him. And that is like, to the extent that Trump is able to say there's some foreign financing, I feel like it's some attempt to rationalize away the opposition and say, oh, they're not actually opposition. This is all funded by the French or the Germans or whatever it is he thinks. And then you can't deal with the political problem, which is the whole point of politics, which is people are really angry. Why is that? How can we try to address and allay those concerns?

Instead, you invoke the national security state, which does the opposite of that. We will crush them. I mean, Trump, the administration says this explicitly. We are going to, quote, dismantle and destroy Antifa, which is what FBI director Cash Patel said. That is the opposite of figuring out why people are angry in trying to address grievances, not just on the part of Trump, but on the part of media as well. All it is is condemnation. From what we found, our researcher Adam, when digging into the media reaction in the first wave of Antifa discourse, and he did find that journalists were trying to get some answers, but they were doing it in a way that I think lines up quite well with your sort of, with your idea that like we sort of tend to imagine another

state as a state. And so it ends up being pretty funny, especially now reading it back. So Fox News in 2017 writes about 100 black-clad activists carrying makeshift shields in clubs descending on a California college town and viciously attacking a small group of peaceful protesters. The Los Angeles Times editorial board is even harsher calling Antifa traitors to the thousands of peaceful demonstrators and calling the group's thuggery, not action. And Fox News ends up trying to reach out for comment to Antifa. They're cops director. Yeah, and the group posts,

Facebook group basically, I think like a Berkeley anti-fascist Facebook group posts a tersely worded response, responding to a statement from Nancy Pelosi at the time, saying that the California congressman has a lower approval than Trump and adding that they don't care what she thinks. And then you have a New York Times opinion piece right around the same time that comes out that reads, in Antifa circles,

the theme of hyper-masculine bravado is often right out front, and unsurprisingly, a large majority of the Antifac camp are men. Masculinity is prized. That is just not true. I'm sorry. They seem like the most open-minded about like gender is a spectrum kind of stuff. Like, what? It is a completely insane thing to say.

The New York Times goes on to write that it's a minuscule friend. of the left and a major gift to the right, quoting Noam Chomsky. I guess that is something to talk about now is like, do you think like anti-fascism is a gift to the modern right? Well, we have to interrogate what it means, and that's what's so dangerous when the Edmund just throws his term around. Because, for example, I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and I went out to the cover of the No Kings protest here.

And I was kind of joking with people. I was like, where are you guys hiding Antifa? Do you know where the local antifacella is? I kept getting the answer from just kind of ordinary looking moms. You know, oh, I think I consider myself anta. And I said, oh, why is that? They said, well, it's anti-fascist. So I don't like fascist, so I'm Antifa.

And then I realized probably like at least half the country would agree with a statement like that, that they don't like fascism. So that can mean, like we said before, basically anyone who isn't MAGA. But it sounds like you're asking about some of these actions and things. I don't know. I get uncomfortable. Like it reminds me of whenever you're during an election and you're trying to guess what like the swing voter in Iowa is going to think about something.

And it's like and frankly, that's true of anyone who's in these debates about, oh, does this help or hurt? It's like, well, who do you mean? Is this going to be persuasive to someone in San Francisco or someone in Boise, Indiana? Or like, and if they're saying anything other than where they live, they're just guessing, you know, and I would just be guessing. So I find the question tedious in the same way that I find like all leftist inter like debate tedious where it's like especially with something like antifa fascism where there is no centralized committee. There is no centralized leadership. Exactly. Who are even talking? There's no definition of terms. Debating tactics, debating its existence like which you see a lot of I think in the first Trump administration of like a lot of these conversations of like what is the right leftist liberal response. We should be doing this. And then.

You know, like you get like the Kathy Griffin, like holding Trump's severed head as a doll thing. And everyone's like, I can't believe you should do this. And it's like, well, there's no one in charge. Like there's no. Right. We don't really have a traditional kind of like working like labor opposition party, you know, leftist sort of operation in America to be discussing these things. These are just people doing things. And I think that is like even more apparent when you look at like the way anti-fascism mobilizes across the country.

As you said, in very different. specific ways. In my reporting, when I would talk to people who were, you know, black, block or whatever, and I would say, like, you know, do you, like, the larger ramifications are like, we've given up on a system that gives a shit about us. We're trying to make sure that, like, the unhoused people here, you know, minorities here are not getting jumped by these guys coming in. And we're trying to run them out and we don't really give a shit about like the larger political conversation. So like they're when you're talking about tactics like what what mainstream media I've like I see media I think at large miss during Trump one was that people are not all just looking at the

entire chess board. Some people are just trying to be like we if we that we don't want the world to become a Nazi bar and if we let people say hail in one part of town then that whole town becomes a place that people have to avoid is like not what we're letting happen. That's a really good point because again, media and obviously the government are concentrated in D.C. and to a lesser extent, New York, they nationalize issues? Like, that young man I interviewed that I described before where he got a knock on his door from the FBI. I asked him, he said, they kept asking him, you know, like, who were you coordinating with? Where was the money coming from? What was, like, as though there's some message from corporate that tells him to go. Corporate Antifa,

tell him to go out there. He said, they were really, seemed fixated on this idea. And I asked him, I said, well, why did you? He says, I just saw posts on Instagram about people getting deported and they didn't do anything wrong. And I was mad about it. That was it. He was just in his own community, hyper-local issue. No, I think they're incapable institutionally from understanding that people could respond

this way, both because of their own arrogance, but also because I, I mean, Marjorie Tether Green's been talking about it on her like weird economic populist pivot tour right now, which is like a large, large, large chunk of the, particularly people. people online you see supporting Trump are paid actors. They are working in some sort of like paid dark money situation. And I think the Trump administration genuinely has a tough time understanding that like a person could see something on Instagram and be like, fuck that. I'm going to do something. Totally. I think it frightens them. Yeah, I can only tell you what my view. I generally don't, I don't ever like violence. Maybe because it wouldn't go so well for me if there's like a civil war.

I'm not particularly tough guy physically. But that's just, I mean, I don't know. That's my opinion. I tend to have like a very kind of removed view of it, which is like white and red blood cells where it's like if your politics are sick, like people respond and they respond with strikes. Let's see a thing. It's going to happen. It's like. Okay.

Great. So you don't like this. Like, sorry. You're sick. It doesn't mean anything. Again, because it's symptomatic of something deeper. people like I was saying before and that's what politics has failed to address and which none of these columnists at the times or wherever seemed to care about which is i remember they had they had this

hand-wringing column about uh it was something like a facebook post from uh the united health care the the CEO that got killed yes and it was like thousands of comments just laughing and joking about it and you scroll through it almost none of these were like young edgy guys these were like ma i saw grandma's in the comments like laughing about it and that should make you say like okay something must be going on here because these are nice ordinary people and they're in their so it's like huh maybe there's a story there that's what's so frustrating it can't address the political grievances that that people rightly have they're not wrong to be angry about things whenever i hear someone be like i don't think it's good to have like black block protesters at your demonstration it's like the same as being like i don't think it's a

appropriate to have a running nose because you have the flu. And it's like, it's just going to happen because you're sick. My view is make politics responsive enough that people don't feel like they have to do this stuff. Right. Do you know what I mean? And no one ever says that. It's so frustrating because they can't acknowledge that there's a problem. That is a perfect transition into where we're headed next in our story, which is the minute the boiling water spills over the pot. In May to June of 2020, we see a massive national response to the death of George Floyd. protests broke out across the country. Trump is blaming Antifa constantly. He's calling in law enforcement and the crackdown is vicious. As the Hill reported, Donald Trump said, I will fight to protect you. I'm your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters. But in recent days,

our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and others. That is when Trump tweets for the first time that he will consider Antifa a domestic terror organization. Interestingly enough, there is no law in the U.S. that punishes the far right the same way, which I think is, you know, worth pointing out. So now you get the sort of rise of the Antifa Super Soldier properly, the cartoon villain of the whole thing. In late 2020, NBC reports that false rumors that Antifa is organizing bus rides to take protesters in white neighborhoods and loot homes have gone viral in recent days on digital neighborhood platforms and in group text messages throughout the U.S. We later find out that it was white nationalist groups that were spreading this kind of misinformation and get using it as cover. And then here's the crescendo, January 6th, after the attacks, Antifa is blamed before anyone else is blamed. And we found this really fascinating antidote.

Actually, our researcher Adam pulled it from Newsweek at the time who got the messages of a January 6 rioter. And they reported, he texted the group, it worked. I got away with things that others were shot or arrested for. They were ordered to allow Antifa. to get away with anything he allegedly texted. I was one of them. I was there. I got a nice helmet and body armor off a cop for God's sakes, and I disarmed him. And then the FBI

shows up, and he told FBI agents that someone else had found the police vest, abandoned near the Capitol, and put it on him. He also said that he had only bragged about attacking a police officer in the text message group to sound tough. Investigators said that he claimed most of his text messages were untrue

and meant mainly to provoke his sibling over their deep political disagreements. Yeah. You see, we're all laughing at this, but I'm going to report this next week. I had an intelligence report from DHS where they, I'm not joking. It literally says, we have found the leader of Antifa. And I'm sure it'll get walked back internally. Who is it?

I can't remember the guy's name, but I'll- Do you have something to tell us? Is it Grant or I? Are we, or you? I think I would recognize- At the Bunny show. I hated it. But that's-

I think I would have recognized the name was one of you guys. But my point is, like, you would be. surprised how common this level of just idiocy. A point I always try to make is national security is way less Jason Bourne than it is burn after reading. Like this is scary common how often stuff like this happens. That's really terrifying. I really assume a duplicity that you are telling me does not exist that makes me rethink life. My whole learning experience has last 10 years covering it because I came into it thinking I'm going to find the family jewels and all this shenanigans that are going on. And I definitely

find a lot of bad stuff, but it's more stupidity and ignorance than it is for thought and design and planning. What would you think would be scarier if like the national security apparatus was super smart or if the fact that they're kind of run by people who don't know what they're doing? Which is a scary. Yeah, no, that's a tough one because I think we have to be honest, historically, fascism is often dumb. Like, it's just stupid and it's ridiculous and absurd.

And this idea that, you know, the trains are running on time and everything. That's never really been true because you have to believe patently irrational things. And because of that, the system adopts irrational views. So I don't know. That's a tough one because there's a good side to being incompetent, which is that they can't ultimately achieve what it is they set up to do. They're not going to find foreign financing because it doesn't really exist. And so they're off chasing the Snape that is a thing of imagination.

But at the same time, I can tell you people, For example, it's not going to guy in Department of Homeland Security who was saying, we're trying to figure out how to operationalize Trump's crazy ideas. And so we're going to start looking. He said, he said, well, he actually had a scary good understanding of to what extent antif exists. He's like, well, they have these affinity networks where these kind of lefty anarchists get together.

They have potlucks and things. And I was sort of freaked out because I was like, that's actually a much better idea of how it works. I mean, that's what I've seen in my experience. Right. Right. And so, and I said, well, what would you do? And it's like, you know, they can't just bring in black helicopters.

whatever, but we can start looking at them to check their taxes or the filing their taxes, right? Stuff that's like not good and much more. So that's an example of it being intelligently run. And that's, to me, that's scarier than chasing the Snape that you're never going to catch. Yeah. But it's so complicated because there's different layers. Like what Trump says, just because he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, that doesn't mean that the guys in the bureaucracy aren't trying to figure out how to intelligently implement it at the same time. they're going to be limited by the outrageousness of the request, and they themselves are skeptical of a lot of it,

and you don't believe it. And that's a rare type of person that's subtle like that. I'm trying to give you one example I can think of to someone intelligently implementing it. So I guess I'd probably say that's worse than the stupidity, but there's obviously pros and cons to either. Yeah, I know what you just described is, I think, much more frightening than like a dumb guy.

It's not understand what he's looking at, to be honest. And we're going to talk about sort of the modern concept of the anti-of-a-super soldier, and the second Trump administration's quest to destroy it. Right after a word from our sponsors, Seminole folk punk band Defiance, Ohio. O'Susquahana. Coming soon to you on a train car that they snuck aboard.

Okay. We're calling all friends. That's right. I guess where we are now, as you've sort of said throughout the episode, is probably the most dangerous place we could have ended up with all of this, which is a world where the good. government can effectively outlaw the concept of Antifa based on sort of a misunderstanding of what it is,

but then also legally define anyone they want as Antifa. Is that fair to say? Yeah, totally. So I imagine there are probably many people who are listening to this episode right now and just went, what the fuck am I supposed to do? So I guess my question for you would be is like, and I guess it kind of mirrors the question I asked at the top, which is like not only, you know, how seriously should the average, person take this, but what could the, what can the average person even do? And if you say vote,

so God damn help me and I will get you off this show. Yeah, what is the average person supposed to do? Shift public opinion. We just saw an example of how it defied not just Trump, but the entire Republican Party. The entirety of Congress just voted for this Epstein legislation, which was unthinkable a month ago. And that was purely public pressure. Nobody in government wanted to do that. Even the Democrats were saying as recently as like four weeks ago, I'm remember them saying this is a distraction we need to stay focused and you know all these things and they bent the knee to the public because people just would not shut up about it and everybody can see how outrageous it is that this that this pedophile that we can't know what the hell happened and who he

was talking to yeah so i think that should be like a proof of concept for that like if you shift opinion and talk to people about stuff and in this case we have the benefit of trump very kindly posting a lot of this stuff and not even trying to do much of it in secret. I mean, details tumble out with these things all the time because these people just have no ability to self-censor or to be discreet or to be disciplined in any way. You know, he has diarrhea, verbal diarrhea all the time. Hey, we don't know if he also has normal diarrhea every day, too. We do have no idea.

We do have an AI video of him releasing. That's true. Yeah. That might be telling more than he wanted. Yeah. And, you know, I always sort of approach everything that Trump administration does for, from like the propaganda side. So like that and that,

because that's usually what I'm focusing on it. And, and one thing that I think that they have actually kind of noticed over time is that they, if they don't change up their subplots and their stories and the things that they sort of transmit, they get really boring. And I actually do think the sort of Antifa fear

kind of losing its power. And so I'm working on a story right now for Rolling Stone about sort of about basically like the fact the internet is just making fun of Charlie Kirk nonstop now. I saw a post the other day that was like, it was like a smiley face with its eyes rolled back. It was like, Bubba when Donnie's Kirkin on it. That's pretty good. Yeah.

Charlie Kirk is not the trade towers, you know? It's funny because it's indicative of this era that we're in where everyone lives in these information trances, where you can have one group that, as far as they know, this is basically Jesus Christ died, but they don't understand that they're in an information space where they all agree with each other. And then the rest of the country either doesn't know who he is. Like my dad had no idea who he was. Yeah. Or they're like me and he's just that like right wing Koch brothers guy that I've seen for like the last 10 years.

So they're trying to make it al-Qaeda, but al-Qaeda did something that everyone agrees was terrible on 9-11. In this case, like it's sad that a person died, but it was one person and it just doesn't have the same emotional import, I think, that they're trying to, that they think it does. because all their associates think it does and their echo chamber thinks it does. I mean, the people that I've been speaking to this piece have been making the argument that they may have overplayed their hand. Like, if you blame everything on Antifa

and you go super hard after Charlie Kirk dies and you're like, we are in it, we are in an anti-fascist takeover. And you can't immediately, as you said, prove or explain to the average person. It's going to be just like Epstein. It's going to be just like Epstein. Because here's the thing.

This isn't rhetoric. I know for a fact, from my own source I assume there's been reporting around the edges about this, they really are subpoenaing Treasury Department records looking at cash flows overseas. They really are trying to find foreign funding. They really believe this stuff. But they're not going to be able to just make something up out of nothing. So they're going to come back either empty-handed or with something so laughably weak that their own supporters are going to react the way they did with Epstein, which is go back and find it again. So they've really signed up for an impossible task here.

Well, the Epstein comparison is really good because in October of this year, I mean, so many crazy things have happened in the last three months that, you know, you're forgetting. Anyone who hit listening is forgiven for not remembering this. But the White House held an Antifa roundtable with like Trump and Christy Noam and a bunch of like right wing influences. Andy No. Yeah, they had influence. That's a thing, man. They're in an information echo chamber. I can't stress that enough.

And they end up like trying to use it as a pretext to deploy the National Guard to Portland. And I do think that like when people hear that and then they see photos of like a giant dancing frog and like a jazzercise class and like a naked bike ride, I think people just are like, this is goofy, dumb garbage. Like I don't understand why this matters to me. Totally. After 9-11, if you look at the polling, there was 90% support public approval for George Bush, unprecedented for president. I was one of them. No, I'm kidding. I was 11 years old.

Yeah, I was exactly I was I was 11 too Yeah And so was our entire audience Yeah so is every single person listening to this The QAnon people are gonna love that Yeah What so No no to be clear they were 11 years old in 2001

Not right now They're not 11 years in this show do not You gotta put a disclaimer there All of us were watching cat dog At the exact same moment That's right Exactly I think you're fine combat

If you So I went to the No Kingsportness And again, a lot of just ordinary people like moms, dads, kids, and nobody, like after 9-11, if you had said, oh, don't you think this Al-Qaeda stuff is overblown, everyone was terrified of it, as I remember. You know, like, and then I said it to different. Yeah. Yeah, right? Like, and now I said, I couldn't find a single person that was like saying the stuff you were mentioning before that the, oh, both sides and it's really concerning. And we've got a, no, no one took it seriously.

It was on the level of the dancing frogs. and the guy's important. Like everyone was just thought it was the most ridiculous thing. Yeah, I think it, I, in, you know, I, I try to sometimes, like, imagine how I'll describe this period of time, like, in the future. And my most optimistic sort of view of the current moment is a lot of Americans kind of like growing up politically. Like America sort of going through like a really intense period of, like, like, a really intense period of, like, political growth and sort of understanding like how democracies function and and you know what it takes to sustain one and I think part of that is the average person really understanding like

what authoritarianism feels like and and accepting like how you respond to it and what will happen what people will do with the threat of it you know everything from the grandma on the corner with the whistle doing ice watch I was watching a video this morning of like this older woman in the in the Midwest who has a neighborhood ice watch and she has like a whistle system She's like this old white lady that just sits in the corner and calls, you know, when people see the sea ice to the people at the No Kings Day that are like, huh, I guess I am an anti-fascist. It's a little frustrating to me that it took this long for us to get to this point and take it this seriously in a way. Like the first Trump administration feels like a lot of missed opportunities for the conversations that people are now having. A kind of capstone on this could be Mom Dhani's election and something like that would not have happened before the Trump administration.

That is a reaction to a lot of the grievances I've been describing before. Congress looks a lot different than it did before Trump. Yeah. Most of the progressive caucus is there as a result of Trump. So I do think it's getting people more engaged in making people realize the stakes of things. I guess like where I want to end with this is like kind of once again, imagining the average person sort of thinking about these things. And do you feel like it's overblown right now to suggest to people who want to protest Trump

or want to sort of do see? actions, even if they involve like the fun kind of anti-fascist crimes, quote, like the fun, safe ones. Like, do you feel like it's worth at this point? Like, if you are a liberal or leftist in America, like, you start sort of taking like your security more seriously, like your digital security more seriously, like the way you sort of like, like attending a King's Day protest, like, do you take your phone? Like, I've seen arguments like this, particularly on a blue sky.

And I always sort of wonder like how often to recommend those to be. people. Yeah. So like in the cybersecurity world, they have a term called what is your threat model. And so you've got to match what you adopt your threat model. I would say for your ordinary person who's not committing a crime, who's just going, yes, you can get a visit by the FBI. And I feel like I have some authority to say this because I have been visited by the FBI twice in relation to stories that I've done. Are they chill? Are they cool? One was a very young man who looked like he tripped over his umbilical cord and his way over. And so that was kind of funny because it was very much not what I was expecting, which is some, you know, big-chested, scary guy that's going to, like, sit you down

and make you give up the secrets or whatever. And the second time, they were a little bit more scary. But ultimately, nothing became of either of them. And that is the message that I would like to get to most people. For most people's threat model, I don't think that you certainly shouldn't be intimidated from going to express whatever it is that you think. Because what can happen is this cough-gas process of an annoying visit, annoying questioning, that's uncomfortable.

But going beyond that is not something that I've seen yet. And for that reason, I really hope that it doesn't have the chilling effect. And I think the administration knows and hopes that it's going to have when they do these things. Yeah, I would tend to agree, you know, unless you were someone who was like actively, openly talking about anti-fascism, like that professor that had like his flight suddenly disappear, the anti-fascist professor that was like trying to leave the country of this family a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, I saw that. Like, if you're not someone who.

who is being in from what I can see like the Trump administration has like a hierarchy that they kind of go through to target people and like the first level is like getting the attention of right wingers on the internet and then they sort of like have a system for bubbling this up to like larger and more serious like parts of the Trump apparatus if you are just like going to rallies and you want to like maybe even do ice watch in your neighborhood or whatever it is like I think you're probably fine it's like once you start to like catch the attention of that of that world that's when i would tell people to like lock up your instagram and like maybe get proton mail get signal you know stuff like that but i i i hope that's you know as far as we have to

have to think about these things i hope it doesn't yeah i think i think that's well put this is a very online administration and they define their enemies as such it's funny i always used to think when i was younger i was like oh that'd be cool to have an online president of course the monkeys paw curls yeah i know exactly but they're why did why did you think that'd be cool It's hard for me to now imagine. It'd be cool to be famous on the internet. Because at that time, it was like Obama and just all these very stiff statements on Twitter. It was just so boring.

And it's like, come on, man, let your hair. Like, come out and say something. Like, you know, join us out here or something. I don't know. It was dumb. But that was my feeling. Everything just felt so sterile and boring. Yeah.

And it's not sterile and boring. And now I wish it was terrible. I would love to, like, do a flash mob, like wearing a hoodie. Yeah. It's so innocent, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to me, we haven't.

Trump, too, is worse, and we are not seeing the sort of, like, factions making a hobby of counter-protesting and fighting each other each week. We're not seeing proud boy, like, there's not, like, a new proud boys. We're not seeing Black Block out constantly. I'm wondering why you think that is when this is even a more contentious regime. And if we are headed in a direction where we start to see. more active protests, is that going to play into the hands

of the Trump administration that I think is failing at making Antifa a boogeyman when we're not seeing signs of black block online. The first Trump administration for me is just like logging is just like what I remember most is logging

on to Twitter and just seeing different videos of different versions of the clan be in a fist fight or like running away from counter protesters. And we're like, we don't see that anymore. Well, I mean, we don't see it because one side one. Yeah, no, I think part of it is what's Ryan saying. But then also, unfortunately, I think the proud boys now are ICE and Customs and Border Protection and the National Guard.

I'm not saying that they themselves on a personal level are it. But those are Trump's jackboots now. And he's explicitly using them in that way. He's deploying them to states whose governors don't want them there, and he's invoking obscure national security authorities in order to do so. Nobody can pretend like it's helping with what he claims that it's supposed to help with, which is crime. All that being said, he is trying to project the image of that these are the stormtroopers now instead. And so when you tap those different agencies, you have probably hundreds of thousands of people that you can deploy. And unfortunately, I don't think he needs that.

Because in the ICE is a real threat. I mean, have you guys seen some of these videos of pepper balls? I mean, it's just, these guys are just thugs. And I do think like even if you, like if you go back and you read about sort of like the rise of the Nazi party and in the Vimar Republic, like the clashes in the street violence happened before they take power. Like that's where you kind of see that conflict. You see the decentralized militias versus the decentralized anti-fascist response. And once like the party is in power and they feel like they're safely. power. What Ken is saying tends to happen, which is like you create, I mean, look.

Now they're safely in power the first time he was still fighting the. Yeah, like, look, like it's an all me back all the way down. If I was president and I knew that there were like a bunch of militias across the country that want to hurt people for me, I would absolutely start a student loan debt, a racing scheme and find a way to bring these people on board, whether they are or not. But like, it's a very different professionalized response. Yeah. And he is he's doubled the, ICE law enforcement budget, the largest increase since 9-11, which should have been the headline everywhere. He's using the national security state to effectuate what his campaign promises were, and that takes the form of all these federal agents marching around major cities in the U.S.,

all of which are democratic states. So unfortunately, I think that's what the Pride Boys are now. And in some respects, it's scarier because they have authorities that the Pride Boys don't have. Yeah, and you, the only thing really to do is what if you're in a neighborhood that ICE is in is set, you know, I've, I have lots of friends in D.C. that live in that live in areas that like are harassed all the time. And like, they have neighborhood checks chains and they're blowing whistles and they're forming one another and they're telling people to get out of town, et cetera. It doesn't allow a black block response. So it kind of undercuts what Trump wants to do. Like when, when you have a great. grandma out there with a whistle. Right. Like you're not going to, you're not going to, it doesn't have the same propaganda.

Right. What I see, I know some people that probably could have been, you know, like anarchist in character. And they're just filming this stuff and posting it. And I think that's great. Because the environment is such that

very few people are going to be sympathetic to an image of a nice officer, pepperballing like a priest or something. There's just so much in terms of just documenting what's happening. it's self-shifting public opinion, and we're already seeing that. The bottom is falling out for Trump's support for these various initiatives that we're talking about, and I imagine a lot of that is because people are consuming what's being shown on social media,

which is insanity every day. I can't even keep up with how many outrageous incident. I just saw today there was, I think it was two ice vehicles got around one they were looking at, and they just start shooting pepper balls. Did you see this? Stuff like that happens all the time. And to the extent that that circulates, I think people, the theory of oh Trump is going to get the cartels and only the illegals like you see the reality of it and that theory kind of just is washed away in the in what's actually happening you can't really pretend anymore to say that nspm 7 is desperate doesn't make it less dangerous but I do think it is like trying to address the very thing you're talking about grant which is like when you professionalize and operationalize the far right militias into an actual Gestapo style secret. police, you can no longer respond to that force effectively as like a bunch of like t-shirt

mask ninjas with Molotov cocktails and piss bottles. Like it's not going to work. And so you see a smaller presence of what you would call Black Block or Antifa. And so you have to create a lot to label everyone as Antifa because the optics no longer look right. Yeah, it's really frightening. Look at the recruitment materials that they're posting. They are looking for ideologically simpatico they don't want to just grow ICE as swell ICE's personnel number. If you look at the ads they're posting on social media, like Instagram and this is the official ICE social media. They're clearly going for like Gropers and MAGA and like a very specific like. So that says to me that this is supposed to be their boots on the ground now.

I went into the cynically thinking these they know that these organizations doesn't exist. And this is really just an attempt at anyone who is anti-Maga, anyone who is. blowing a whistle on ice like literally uh we can now label them antifa and like that was their main purpose but they were in on it but like those things are true that's exactly yes they want the they want the gloves to come off and have the new authorities but they also believe it somehow so those are not mutually exclusive yeah well i guess it's like so like your read is really from the from the diehards that are in there and from your sources orca again gorka is head of all counterterrorism So this is his portfolio.

Like, this is a very different administration. First admin, he was like a deputy assistant. Right. He was pretty low down. From your read of it, anyone who is there like yelling at ice or just like telling people to get off somebody or going to a no king. They're like, yeah, this is the threat from within. Like it is like we're in a place where it's all the same to them in an earnest way. Yeah, totally.

Because they have to rationalize this. 60% of the country doesn't like them. And so how do you do that? you say, oh, actually, they're a member of a cell that's being, that's from another country. It's not, these aren't Americans. These are some other thing. And so we're actually well liked. Like, you see Trump does this with the, do you know, the crowd size thing?

He's like, oh, huge crowds. Like, they really want to believe on some, it's, it's almost sort of heartbreaking. It's like a kid is like wants to be liked or whatever. And so part of that is your mind has to block out this reality that like a hell of a lot of people really don't like you. And so you get this. Oh, it's foreign financing. It's, it sells.

It's international. One thing we had in the outline that like just wasn't worth hitting on, but when there was like a 75 year old who was protesting like police brutality in 2020 who the Trump administration came in. And it was like that was an Antifa provocateur. And like I just like my reaction is just like roll my eyes. Of course they'll just say and like you just put out bullshit because then you're arguing about the bullshit. But it's like it is scary to believe that they actually could believe that. 75-year-old is a provocateur. Yeah, they're obviously taking this too extreme.

But you see this in politics all the time. Do you remember 2016 when Trump first run? And there was all this stuff. I'm not saying that there wasn't Russian interference. Obviously, there was. But there were all of these liberals that were like, oh, actually, it's not that Hillary Clinton could have ran a better campaign. It was like all of this shenanic, like, there's no Bernie wing that we need to deal with. Like, it's just the Russians.

And that was them sort of doing the same thing, right? Like saying like, oh, actually, it's some other country and it's not our own problem that we have to deal with. It just said Biden was in the way. It's not that there's any lessons to learn. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was a great conversation. I feel like I learned a lot and I'm sufficiently terrified. If people want to follow you online, where can they do that?

Where can they read the thing that will cause the next visit from the FBI? I'm on substack at Ken Clippenstein.com. I run a chat there. And then I'm also on Twitter at Ken Clippenstein. Thanks so much. This is great. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick.

Josh Fielstead is. our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing, YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer Samantha Hollos. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President sales and distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at courier newsroom.com. Be sure to check up the Panicworld

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