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In the past week a top official at Trump’s FBI helped to launder a right-wing disinformation narrative, claiming at a congressional hearing that the antifascist movement known as “antifa” is the biggest domestic terrorism threat in the United States.
Michael Glasheen, the director of operations in the FBI’s National Security Branch, told lawmakers that antifa is the agency’s “primary concern” and “the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing.” However, when questioned, Glasheen was unable to provide any evidence to back up his claim and could not answer lawmakers’ inquiries when they pressed for more information.
To those who study extremism and disinformation, what happened was immediately clear: the FBI, under Donald Trump’s renewed political influence, is now publicly endorsing a narrative born not out of genuine threat assessments but from right-wing propaganda.
In fact, Glasheen’s statement can be traced directly to a years-long disinformation campaign — one cultivated by Trump officials and Republican lawmakers, as well as right-wing media — that has aggressively portrayed “antifa” as a nationwide organised terror network despite the lack of any real evidence supporting such an assertion.
The claims made by Glasheen offer a striking reminder of how the dominant disinformation narrative surrounding antifa continues to infiltrate and distort US national security priorities by legitimising far-right extremist propaganda while suppressing and even criminalising legitimate dissent.
Glasheen’s testimony echoes previous statements made by Trump and his allies, who for years have coordinated with right-wing outlets like Fox News and a long list of pro-Trump social media influencers to launder and propagate a false narrative aimed at portraying antifa as a leading terrorist threat in the US, even though the evidence flatly contradicts this.
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Distorting Reality
The facts are clear: right-wing extremists are by far the greatest domestic terror threat facing the US, and it’s been this way for quite some time. Over the past decade, right-wing extremists were responsible for 76% of all extremist-related killings, compared to 4% attributable to left-wing extremists.
Going even further back, in an analysis of 900 politically motivated attacks and plots in the US since 1994, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found just one deadly attack attributable to antifascists — and the single fatality was the perpetrator himself. During the same time period, right-wing extremists carried out attacks that left 329 people dead. In multiple recent years, including 2022 and 2024, right-wing extremists were responsible for every single recorded extremist murder in the country.
Looking at those statistics, it’s pretty clear where the threat is coming from — and it’s not antifa. But that clarity has been muddied in recent years thanks to a coordinated and persistent disinformation campaign propagated by the Trump administration, right-wing media, far-right social media influencers, and even Russia. This disinformation campaign dates back to at least 2016 and has accelerated significantly since then.
Over the years, antifa has been falsely blamed for starting wildfires, busing in violent protesters, looting, making bomb threats towards politicians, coordinating nationwide riots, carrying out mass shootings, and more. On repeated occasions, conspiracy theories about antifa have even duped law enforcement agencies, resulting in everything from unnecessary shutdowns of major highways and panic among the public, to armed vigilantes showing up to defend their towns from a threat that never actually existed.
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Redefining Domestic Terror Threats
Trump and his allies have seized upon and amplified these disinformation narratives for political gain. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Trump and his allies repeatedly branded antifa as a domestic terrorist organisation (even though no US law permits designating a domestic political movement as such). This rhetoric continued even after Trump left office.
Most notoriously, in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection carried out by pro-Trump extremists, some in the right-wing media absurdly floated the lie that the attack was actually driven by antifa in disguise. In reality, just the opposite was true: some members of right-wing militia groups ultimately