'Antifa Hunting' and the dialectics of fascism
Trump demands the jailing of Mayor Johnson and Gov. Pritzker
October 9, 2025
The dialects of antifascism.
Antifascism is not a doctrine. It’s a response. A popular reflex against oppression. It’s in the blood of humanity. Antifascism doesn’t emerge from thin air. It’s born in the cracks of empire.
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This morning, President Trump is demanding the arrest of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. Their crime? Refusing to bend their knee to his illegal federal immigration raids and resisting the invasion of their cities. Trump, ever the demented media performer, called for their detention on live television, flanked by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who is now comparing the mythical Antifa to MS-13, Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS.
The Specter of Antifa
Noem declared:
“We’re hoping as we go after [the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa], we’ll get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”
Meanwhile, Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader convicted for his role in the January 6 insurrection and recently pardoned, posted on X:
“Who’s ready to go ANTIFA hunting? Because I know a few guys.”
The ploy is obvious. It would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Create the specter of a shadowy cabal, complete with mysterious founders, girlfriends, dossiers, and conspiratorial meetings. Prepare the groundwork for using the Insurrection Act to legalize the use of military force to crush the democratic opposition, and possibly suspend or control upcoming elections. It’s the same playbook that’s been used against labor organizers, the Civil Rights leaders, political radicals, and antiwar dissenters for over a century. Repression has always needed its internal as well as external enemies.
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The real Antifa
My friend, author and educator Diane Ravitch, posted this on her blog in 2020. Thank you again, Diane.
Mike Klonsky’s Father Was a Real Anti-Fascist
Yesterday, on Father’s Day, Mike Klonsky posted a tribute to his father, Robert Klonsky, who went to Spain in 1937 to fight fascism as part of the legendary Lincoln Brigade. He was a “premature anti-fascist,” the saying at the time. The Spanish Civil War was a rehearsal for World War II. Only genuine leftists understood that Franco and Hitler were preparing for a wider attack on the democracies of Europe.
Mike says proudly that his dad was a true antifa. The current antifa lives mainly in Donald Trump’s nightmares… READ DIANE’S ENTIRE POST HERE.
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More good reads
Mary Elaine LeBay has a good piece on FB.
She writes that Kristi Noem has declared “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization…
Antifa is a made-up boogieman entity… created by the right … a complete fabrication … created as part of the designed basis upon which all the future illegal suppressive activity these corrupt monsters have planned will be based…
As Noem put it, “Their agenda is to destroy the American people and our way of life. This network of antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as Tren de Aragua, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them. They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years, and today is the day that we have a president who won’t tolerate it.”
Noem, who historically has shared that creatures who are “aggressive” and “dangerous” are to be taken out back and shot to death, the way she did with her puppy Cricket, who she shot in the head …Read Mary’s entire post here.
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This morning, my friend and repeat guest on Hitting Left, Floyd Webb, posted this on Substack.
Chicago Is A Different Flow
On the eve of another threat, a city remembers what defiance looks like — and who taught it to us…
Chicago is different. Defiance is this city’s breath. We’ve met oppression head-on and, time and again, forced it to retreat — if only for a moment. This city has been a crucible of resistance for more than a century — from factory floors and freedom marches to classrooms and city councils.
Every generation here inherits the same challenge: to defend what was won and finish what was started. At the corner of Ida B. Wells Drive and Michigan Avenue, that spirit has a face: 82-year-old Frank Chapman… Read the rest here.
My guests tomorrow on Hitting Left will be veteran civil rights activist/educator Jimmy Garrett and movement historian, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz.
Jimmy Garrett, a founding force behind the Black Student Union movement, helped ignite a wave of campus activism that reshaped American education. As a SNCC organizer and radical intellectual, Garrett fused Marxist analysis with Black liberation, challenging both liberal complacency and institutional racism.
Historian, activist, and truth-teller, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has spent decades dismantling colonial myths and amplifying Indigenous resistance. From the ‘60s Women’s Liberation Movement to authoring An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, her work exposes the empire’s foundations.
TUNE IN, FRIDAY 11-NOON CT at WLPN 105.5 FM IN CHICAGO AND STREAMING LIVE AT lumpenradio.com.
I am glad that Mike paid tribute to his father as a member of ALB -1936-1939. I will join Mike and also pay tribute to my father, who also was a member of the ALB and survived his wounds at the Fuentes de Ebro.
Antifa is real. https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/when-you-dont-know-what-antifa-or