MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Last night, President Trump posted on social media that he plans to designate antifa, quote, "a major terrorist organization." This comes in the wake of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. And this development is raising a lot of questions, questions we're going to put now to NPR's domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef. Hey, Odette.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: The president has talked before about designating antifa as a terrorist organization. So what's different here?
YOUSEF: Well, I'm going to start with what's not different now. There is no provision under U.S. law that allows the government to designate something as a domestic terrorist organization. That was true when President Trump spoke about doing this in 2020, and it remains true now. Now, back then, Trump's efforts didn't go anywhere. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, antifa is not a national centralized organization. It's better described as a movement, a set of principles, maybe an ideology. And there are no clear links between antifa and foreign entities because, if there were, then maybe there could have been an avenue towards such a designation under a process at the State Department. But, Mary Louise, you asked what's different now, and I think the key...
KELLY: Yeah.
YOUSEF: ...Difference seems to be the focus this time on alleged funders of antifa.
KELLY: Focus on the funders - and why is that significant?
YOUSEF: So this gets to what I mentioned about the State Department's process. That department does designate certain groups as foreign terrorist organizations, so think ISIS and al-Qaida. Now, that process assigns severe criminal penalties for providing material support for those organizations. And because there is currently no such process to label domestic groups as terrorist, this creates an interesting contrast. I spoke with Tom Brzozowski, who, up until June, was counsel for domestic terrorism in the National Security Division of the Justice Department.
TOM BRZOZOWSKI: What that means is that if, for example, I sent a $20 gift card to an organization on that list on the State Department's website knowing that that organization was a foreign terrorist organization, I could be looking at 20 years in jail. However, if I sent the same $20 gift card to the local chapter of the KKK, for example, I would be subject to no criminal sanction whatsoever.
YOUSEF: And today on Air Force One, NPR asked the president how he would go after antifa, since it's more of an ideology than a formal organization. He said, we're going to find out. And then, Mary Louise, he asked our colleague if antifa had anything to do with NPR.
KELLY: Right. So what is the impact of President Trump's claim in the circumstances you're describing? And I guess also the timing - why is he reviving it in the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing?
YOUSEF: Well, Kirk's assassination seems to have provided an opening for Trump and some other Republican leaders to bring antifa back into the conversation. But there is right now no publicly available evidence tying the man charged with killing Kirk to antifa in any way. As to the impact, though, you know, on the one hand, it may just be, as one person put it to me, rhetorical theater.
But look, you know, Trump has been known to break with precedent back in 2020. He was also talking about designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations. He didn't do it then, but he has done it now. And so this kind of intentional expansion of how the term terrorist is applied is already underway. And second, you know, even if this fails again, just associating the words antifa and terrorist creates a stigma with real-world impact. We saw that in 2020, and we may be seeing it again.
KELLY: Right. Thank you, Odette.
YOUSEF: Thank you.
KELLY: NPR's Odette Yousef. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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