An estimated 7 million Americans nationwide demonstrated peacefully on Saturday against what organizers view as U.S. President Donald Trump’s authoritarian overreach. The “No Kings” protests, as they are called, were the second such nationwide version of an ongoing string of everyday actions at facilities used by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in places like Portland, where protesters have used satire and pageantry as well as peaceful marches to oppose the arrest and detention of immigrants, and Chicago, where a federal judge criticized police for tear-gassing protesters without provocation in the run-up to the nationwide protests.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s demonstrations, the police departments in Washington and New York both announced that there had been zero law enforcement actions in connection with the No Kings protests, and the vast majority of related protests have been peaceful. But a few instance of political violence have occurred as well in recent weeks, including a sniper attack on an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas, in late September. Shortly thereafter, Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, appearing to define all left-wing “anti-fascist” dissent as terrorism and tasking the National Joint Terrorism Task Force—formerly aimed at foreign terrorists like al-Qaida—to root out domestic anti-fascist activists.
This is dramatically different from standard FBI definitions of terrorism that involve acts or threats of actual violence, causing many commentators to express alarm. To those concerned with the rise in political violence in the United States, the move seems like an effort to associate any opposition to fascism—often referred to as “antifa,” short for anti-fascist—with the violence of an extreme minority, which could then empower further political violence against the left. In response, the largely peaceful No Kings protesters have quickly claimed the Antifa label as their own, proudly claiming to be “anti-fascist” while working overtime to ensure that those on the streets use nonviolent tactics, refuse to be baited into escalation and police their ranks to ensure the same.
