'It's a sign!' New White House photo of Trump 'with devil horns' sparks online frenzy

Alexander Willis
October 10, 2025

RAW STORY

A new photograph taken Thursday of President Donald Trump has ignited an online frenzy, with the placement of a golden bald eagle in the White House Cabinet Room having created the illusion that the president was sporting a pair of “devil horns.”

“Fitting!” wrote X user “Madd_Gigi,” a frequent critic of Trump who’s amassed more than 3,100 followers.

The photo was taken Thursday during a cabinet meeting attended by Trump and a number of high-ranking officials in his administration. Photojournalist Jim Watson, formally a photographer for the U.S. Navy, captured a shot of Trump with a golden statue of a bald eagle, its wings raised, directly behind Trump’s head, which Democratic strategist Keith Edwards shared on social media with the following caption: “New picture of Trump with devil horns just dropped.”

Edwards’ post spread wildly on social media, amassing nearly 900,000 views at the time of writing (since being posted Thursday afternoon), with users noting the symbolism of Trump depicted with what appear to be a set of golden horns.

“Biblical,” wrote Adam Cochran, a professor and policy consultant who’s amassed more than 258,000 followers on X. “Just not in the way MAGA expected.”

Others, like X user “Brisologyu,” who frequently posts cryptocurrency content and has amassed more than 6,700 followers, dubbed Trump as “Lucifer, bringer of light,” and another X user, “F--- You I Quit,” wrote to their more than 450,000 followers that photographs that depict Trump with horns “happen far too often to be coincidence.”

Some users noted the similarities of the photo with the debut episode of South Park’s season 27 premiere that depicted Trump “getting into bed with Satan.”

“It’s the lovechild foretold in South Park,” noted X user “Ken Akehurst,” who’s shared content critical of Trump’s mass deportation policy.

And others noted what they believed would be the outrage among conservatives should a similar photo have been taken of a Democratic president.

“If this was behind Biden ONCE MAGA would’ve been holding prayer circles daily outside the White House,” wrote X user “Ari,” a TikTok creator and marketing entrepreneur.

Eagle-Eyed Viewers Spotted Something... Unique In This Trump Photo

David Moye

Fri, October 10, 2025 

A photo of Donald Trump got a helluva reaction when it was posted to social media on Thursday.

The image, taken by photojournalist Jim Watson, shows the president sitting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussing the proposed Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas.

Watson’s camera seemed to be positioned so that a golden bald eagle behind Trump appeared more like devil horns emanating from the president’s skull.

Here’s the original picture:

Donald Trump (C) speaks, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio (L) and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (R), during a cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 9, 2025. Jim Watson via Getty Images

And here’s a cropped version:

Trump in a cropped version of the photo above. Jim Watson via Getty Images

Considering how polarizing Trump’s presidency has been, it’s no surprise that the photo went viral on social media.

It’s also no surprise that many people responded to the picture as a joking confirmation of what they already suspected about the president.

And, of course, one person had to reference the current season of “South Park,” where Trump is depicted having a same sex relationship with Satan.

This book explains everything about how Trump befouled America

Greg Palast
October 9, 2025 

RAW STORY



Pay attention to this professional liar:

“I’m the only president in modern history who left office with a smaller national debt than when I came into office.”

That’s quite a whopper. Fact check: “During Trump’s presidency, the national debt actually increased by $7.8 trillion, nearly 40 percent and more than any president in history.”


ALSO READ: This Nazi philosopher's playbook explains everything Donald Trump does

The fact check is courtesy of Thom Hartmann. Indeed, Hartmann’s new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, is one giant fact check on the Whopper-in-Chief, and much more — a disturbing dive into the roiling miasma of self-aggrandizing, self-deluding, psychologically shattered, wailing man-child who is Commander-in-Chief.

Don’t read Hartmann’s book twice, as I have. It’s not just the nightmares it induces; it’s the fact that you’ll wake up to the nightmare that is our new reality.

Hartmann is known as America’s number one progressive radio host. But he is also a certified psychotherapist, ordained theologian and noted historian who has brought his extraordinary bandolero of skills to an excavation of the dark regions of the president’s brain.

And dark it is. Trump grew up in an atmosphere of cruelty under the familial dictatorship of his daddy Fred Trump, whom the future president saw bully his older brother into an early alcoholic death. His mother emotionally checked out, leaving us with a president who needs a mother’s hug — and is taking it out on government employees.

Trump learned cruelty from his dad but learned how to weaponize it from his second daddy: Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s henchman, who taught Trump how to use media manipulation and fear to break your enemies — a group now encompassing most Americans.

Does Trump even believe his own bullshit? That’s not even a question for Trump, notes Hartmann. He quotes the master of prevarication himself:

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest. I call it ‘truthful hyperbole.”

The ghost-writer of Trump’s The Art of The Deal says he made up the term “truthful hyperbole” to cover up the word, “lie.”

But it’s a lie we love. Or, at least a lot of Americans love it. Here is a photo of one of Trump’s acolytes at a Trump rally my team attended in rural Georgia. There’s her T-shirt of Trump and JD Vance as vigilantes, gunning down the bad guys. She had a Trump hat, Trump socks, and sported a red, white and blue Trump ballet tutu.


A Trump supporter in Georgia. Photograph: Zach D. Roberts for the Palast Investigative Fund (2024)


The biggest sellers were shirts announcing, with an armed Trump image, “Daddy’s home.” Our national father figure is coming back for a second term to spank us bad kiddies as Trump Sr. did to his son. The parental abuse goes on, but now as a policy of fear, repression, mass firings, race-baiting, Constitution-defying lawsuits ginned up “by cynical attorneys and billionaires’ checkbooks, riding the algorithms of outrage and our insatiable hunger for spectacle,” as Hartmann says.

As Hartmann warns, democracy in America won’t roll in on tanks, it will come “packaged as entertainment.” He notes, chillingly, that, “It wasn’t just Trump, it was the system that fed him.” Trump’s beguiling fibs, his mayhem-making, his troops-in-the-street diktats are all spectacle to satisfy the desire for retribution of America’s working class wounded.

Trump is a symptom, notes Hartmann, not a cause, of what I’d call the New Hate. We don’t want to win arguments anymore. We want to hurt those who don’t share our politics. Trump revels in it.

And Hartmann is not afraid to call out the racism that lubricates Trump’s resentment machine, a GOP line of ugly innuendoes that originated with Richard Nixon. Hartmann quotes Nixon’s political guru Kevin Phillips:

“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”


Trump didn’t introduce racism into the GOP campaign plan, he merely, as Hartmann says, “revealed it.”

And Trump’s apostles are never coy about using code words for space-laser armed Jewish “globalists,” a line which Trump finds usefully echoed by Democrats on the Left.

What do we do? I think of those old billboards on Highway 80 that flashed, “STAY AWAKE! STAY ALERT!” That’s not too much to ask.


Hartmann, a happy-ending kind of guy, throws out a bunch of good ideas to, “Reform, Resist and Remember,” beginning with our own “empathy deficit,” though he admits our best efforts could be undone by AI “techno-feudalism.”

“Democracy,” Hartmann concludes, “doesn’t announce its departure with trumpets. It slips away in silence, one institution at a time.” But we do have Hartmann’s bugle blast. Hopefully, it’s a wake-up reveille and not Taps for this fragile experiment called America.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and filmmaker, author of New York Times bestsellers including, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Sign up for his reports at https://gregpalast.substack.com/

Trump says communism threatens America. He and his corporate cronies would know

Thom Hartmann
October 10, 2025 
COMMON DREAMS

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller say they’re coming for the “communists” in America, and they need the military on the streets of our cities to do it. Here’s what they’ve said recently on the topic:

Trump“We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” (Rally)
“The communists attempting to destroy the American human spirit will fail in their dirty deeds.” (Threatening to use National Guard)
“It is the enemy from within, and they’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick.” (Fox “News” appearance)
“If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me. They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates.” (Miami speech)

Stephen 'Pee Wee German' Miller:“We are not going to let the communists destroy a great American city, let alone the nation’s capital. Most of the citizens who live in Washington, DC, are Black.” (Speech to troops in DC)
“President Trump will make this nation safer than ever before, and he’ll do it over the fighting and opposition of the Democrat party, over the fighting and opposition of the communist left-wing judges.” (Fox “News” appearance)


Trump even included “anti-capitalism” as one of the “indica” (indicators) of “potential terror activities” that should cause the 200-plus Joint Terrorism Task Forces — set up in every major American city between local police, state police, and the FBI — to begin tapping your phone, reading your email, and surveilling your activities if they determine you’re an “anti-capitalist.”


So, what the hell are these guys talking about? What do Americans think of all this rhetoric, and what does that tell us about the future of the GOP and the Democratic Party? And the American middle class, for that matter?



ALSO READ: 'Bombing random buildings?' Alarm as Trump mulls 'antifa' foreign terrorist designation


After all, capitalism can’t exist without a little bit of socialism, and a middle class can’t exist in a meaningful way without a lot of socialism, as the New Deal and Great Society proved. But only Donald Trump is actually pursuing communism (more on that in a moment).

Gallup recently released a new poll showing that Americans’ support for capitalism has crashed from 60 percent as recently as 2021 to a mere 54 percent this year, the lowest recorded level in the history of their tracking. Big business is also sharply less popular: only 37 percent rate it favorably, the lowest since Gallup started asking.


For the first time, Democrats favor socialism over capitalism (66 percent vs. 42 percent), highlighting a dramatic shift and partisan gap. Republicans, on the other hand, are 74 percent to 14 percent in favor of capitalism over socialism.

Capitalism, simply, is a system that allows people with money (capital) to invest that money in ways that produce more money for them. The two most common ways that happens is by starting a business or buying stock in an existing company.

Most Americans will tell you they’re capitalists, but they’re not; real capitalists make the majority of their money not by working with their minds or hands in an office or factory but, instead, by putting their money (capital) to work via investment vehicles.


But capitalism — as Adam Smith pointed out back in the 18th century in Wealth of Nations and A Theory of Moral Sentiments — can’t exist without a “socialist” government providing guardrails, incentives, and systems for keeping people honest.

From laws against fraud and stock manipulation, to courts and jails to enforce those laws, to public roads and airways to facilitate commerce, a little bit of socialism (government using some of the money produced by capitalism and extracted from it by taxes) is necessary for capitalism to exist.

In fact, Americans have vigorously embraced socialism ever since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s woke us all up to the dangers of raw, unregulated capitalism. We have literally hundreds of socialist institutions all across our various government agencies that not only support capitalism but also built the nation’s first more-than-half-of-us middle class in the middle of the 20th century.


From fire departments to banking and insurance regulators to programs like Social Security and Medicare, socialism has built a massive edifice of American prosperity over the past century. Here’s a list of the top 50 socialist programs or agencies:
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Unemployment Insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Women Infants and Children (WIC), Housing and Urban Development, Earned Income Tax Credit, Public Schools, State Universities, Community Colleges, Minimum Wage Laws, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Public Health Departments, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Public Libraries, Fire Departments, Police Departments, Public Water Utilities, Public Sewer Systems, U.S. Postal Service, Public Transportation, Veterans Health Administration, Head Start, Federal Student Aid, Public Housing Authorities, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Aging, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, State-Produced Insulin Initiatives, State Disability Insurance Programs, Small Business Administration, National Science Foundation, AmeriCorps, U.S. Agency for International Development, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Affordable Care Act Exchanges, Child Care & Development Block Grant, Green Energy Subsidies, National Endowment for the Arts, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, National Park Service, Community Health Centers.


Rightwing billionaires — who are true capitalists, since they make most of their money with their money — hate the fact that these programs mostly help average working people and smaller businesses, and the rest of us want billionaires to pay their damn income taxes to help fund them.

So, they finance and elevate politicians and ideologues who use their positions and power to try to gut these agencies, while supporting think tanks and media stars who trash-talk socialism and deify capitalism to keep billionaire taxes low.


The most obvious recent examples are Elon Musk and Russell Vought taking chainsaws to the federal government, and red state governors who keep their people in poverty by gutting social programs along with holding down taxes on their richest citizens.

The simple reality, first identified by Adam Smith in 1776, amplified by David Ricardo in the early 19th century, and now understood by most economists, is that without these “socialist” programs, predominantly capitalist societies will revert to their natural state: a tiny 1 percent of the morbidly rich; a sliver of around 5 percent of a middle class made of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who serve the rich; and a groaning, toiling 94 percent of the working poor who provide the labor to make the rich even richer.

Read any book by Charles Dickens and you’ll get the picture; his father was dragged off to debtors’ prison and most of his books accurately depict how capitalism ravaged working class people for a thousand years leading up to and including the Victorian era.


In A Christmas Carol, in fact, the morbidly rich don’t even make an appearance; Scrooge was that era’s middle class, owning a small (one employee plus himself) business, and Bob Cratchit was the working poor who couldn’t even afford healthcare for his disabled son.

This is the world that Trump, Vance, Musk, Vought, and their GOP lackeys want to take us back to: they’re committed to undoing virtually every one of the agencies and programs listed above, along with at least a hundred others.

At the same time, the Overton window for how much socialism Americans want has been steadily shifting to the left.

The majority of Americans today want what other “socialist” developed countries (like most of free Europe, Asia, and Costa Rica) have: free or cheap healthcare and college, top-flight public schools, an end to widespread homelessness, action against climate change and toward green energy independence, and higher taxes on billionaires to pay for it.


Which finally brings us to the real outliers: the communists.

Communism is generally defined as an economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are collectively owned — typically by the state — rather than by individuals or corporations. The government, in other words, owns the companies that generate wealth, create goods and services, and employs the people.

Which, weirdly, is where Trump is taking us as he demonstrates his total lack of economic understanding. He’s now had the federal government buy or otherwise acquire stock in multiple companies, including Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and the US Steel Corporation.


As a recent contrarian article in Current Affairs points out:
“Since the Intel deal was announced on August 22, making the U.S. government a significant stakeholder in the tech company, there’s been a slew of news articles and op-eds solemnly warning about the rise of an orange-hued Trumpian communism. Variations on this theme have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times (twice!), the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, Axios, Yale Insights, the Atlantic, the Free Press, Reason, and even regional newspapers like Indiana’s Indy Star.”


While Trump is shifting our political system toward the single-party strongman authoritarianism (sometimes called fascism) of his heroes who run Russia and Hungary, he’s pushing our economy in the direction of communist countries like Cuba, Vietnam, and China.

Which just makes sense. Because pure communism only works in small societies like Jesus and his disciples (with “a common purse”) or ancient tribal societies, when it’s tempered with a bit of capitalism the strongman types who run those “communist” countries get to skim massive wealth off the top of the businesses they allow to function.

This is today’s Trump-grift 101, whether it’s his brand-new $5 billion crypto fortune (with government support) or his recent real estate deals around the world cut based on his power in DC.

Republicans are racing toward a billionaire-friendly, every-man-for-himself version of capitalism, while Trump pushes a strongman, one-party communist model of top-down control of the economy (tariffs by fiat, politicize the Fed, have government own companies) that puts political power over markets.

Democrats, by contrast, are trying to restore the healthy mix that once worked here: private enterprise policed by real rules, paired with public investments that serve the common good, the balance that built the mid-century American middle class before Reagan took an ax to it by destroying “socialist” high taxes on rich people and gutting “socialist” labor unions.

Whether America can put its middle class back together will depend on how simply and forcefully Democrats can explain it in the face of Trump’s and Miller’s “communist Democrats” scare talk.

The stakes are enormous. In 1981, roughly 65 percent of households could live solidly in the middle class on a single paycheck. Today, after the Reagan-era shift to “reject socialism” and cut taxes on the morbidly rich, only about 47 percent manage that even with two incomes. Rebuilding a broad middle class is not nostalgia; it’s the foundation of a functioning democracy.

Reviving the once-great American middle class is vital for democracy to thrive, and only progressives within the Democratic Party are working for the modest amount of government socialism that history proves will produce that outcome.

If they fail and Trump and his Republicans succeed in making the entire American economy subservient to this country’s billionaires, we’ll all become Bob Cratchits and our children will all become tiny Tims.

GOP Leaders Smear Upcoming ‘No Kings’ Marches as ‘Hate America Rallies’ by ‘Terrorists’

“Looks like everyone in my former political party has signed on to the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller game plan, which means calling Democrats ‘terrorists,’” wrote a disgusted ex-Republican in response.


Protestors march during an anti-Trump "No Kings Day" demonstration in a city that has been the focus of protests against President Donald Trump's immigration raids on June 14, 2025 in downtown Los Angeles, California.
(Photo: Jay L. Clendenin/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Oct 10, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Multiple Republican lawmakers on Friday lobbed smears against the upcoming “No Kings” rallies scheduled to take place on October 18 across the US.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) described the “No Kings” events as “a hate-America rally,” which he said would include “the Antifa crowd, the pro-Hamas crowd, and the Marxists.”

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“They’re all going to gather on the [Washington] Mall,” Johnson continued. “We’ve got some House Democrats selling t-shirts for this event. It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes.”


Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) echoed Johnson and linked the “No Kings” marches to the continued federal government shutdown, claiming Democrats were refusing to vote to fund the government “to score political points with the terrorist wing of their party, which is set to hold... a hate-America rally in DC next week.”

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), during an interview on Newsmax, described the October 18 protests as “a Soros paid-for protest” filled with “professional protesters” and “agitators,” and threatened those who attend with a deployment of armed forces like the ones President Donald Trump has imposed on cities including Chicago and Memphis.

“We’ll have to get the National Guard out,” he said. “Hopefully it will be peaceful. I doubt it.”

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois who broke with the party over its refusal to hold Trump accountable, expressed disgust with linking the “No Kings” marches to terrorists.

“Looks like everyone in my former political party has signed on to the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller game plan, which means calling Democrats ‘terrorists,’” he wrote in a post on X. “Terrorists? Despicable. Shameful.”

The October 18 “No Kings” rallies are a sequel to nationwide demonstrations that took place this past June and drew an estimated 5 million people across over 2,100 cities and towns.

Contrary to the Republican lawmakers’ claims, these protests were overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against what organizers described as “the gross abuse of power that we’ve seen consistently from the Trump administration.”

Ezra Levin, cofounder of progressive organization Indivisible, one of the groups behind the “No Kings” marches, vowed on Thursday that the upcoming events will be “the largest peaceful protest in modern American history.”

Levin also remained defiant in the face of baseless claims that his organization funds violent rioting.

“Trump and Miller can lie, smear, and threaten all they want,” he said. “They will lose.”

‘We Will Not Back Down,’ Says Indivisible as Trump Aims FBI, IRS at Liberal Groups

“Let’s call this what it is: A baseless attempt to chill free speech and scare people away from exercising their constitutional right to protest an authoritarian regime.”



Demonstrators take part in a protest against the Trump administration during the “No Kings” national rally in downtown Los Angeles, California, on June 14, 2025, on the same day as President Trump’s military parade in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands of protesters rallied nationwide Saturday against Donald Trump ahead of a huge military parade on the US president’s 79th birthday.
(Photo by Ringo Chiu/AFP via Getty Images)

Jon Queally
Oct 10, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

The pro-democracy group Indivisible is among those speaking out against the Trump administration’s reported targeting of progressive and liberal organizations with various government agencies, including the FBI and IRS, as part of what critics call an “authoritarian playbook” by President Donald Trump that seeks to criminalize dissent, chill free speech, and frame nonviolent protest and opposition as “domestic terrorism.”

In-depth reporting by Reuters named Trump’s far-right, xenophobic White House advisor Stephen Miller as “playing a central role” in the internal effort to wield the power of federal agencies at a variety of organizations that the administration claims—contrary to all available evidence—are funding or orchestrating violent protests and political attacks.


As Trump Escalates Attacks on Dissent, Oct. 18 ‘No Kings’ Protests Set to Be Even Bigger Than June

Granted anonymity to speak more freely about the internal mechanics of the operation, Reuters’ reporting is based on discussions with “three White House officials, four Department of Homeland Security officials and one Justice Department official to produce the first comprehensive account of how decisions are being made, forces deployed, and operations coordinated in the crackdown.”

“Trump wants to scare people away from exercising their constitutional rights. We won’t let him succeed. Don’t let this smear distract you. The best response to attacks on our rights is to exercise our rights. That means showing up in huge numbers on October 18.”

According to Reuters, “Miller is deeply involved in reviewing government agencies’ investigations into the financial networks behind what the administration labels ‘domestic terror networks,’ which include nonprofits and even educational institutions, a White House official said.”
In response to [a Reuter's request], the White House highlighted seven political protests in 2023 and 2025 that included acts of violence directed against law enforcement officials, and two incidents of vandalism at Tesla dealerships this year as well as half a dozen social media posts celebrating the damage.

It named nine liberal groups, donors or fundraising organizations that it said helped finance or plan protests where the violent incidents occurred.

While the second White House official stressed that the organizations were not necessarily potential targets, the material provides insight into the administration's thinking.The list includes Soros' Open Society Foundations; ActBlue, the funding arm of the Democratic Party; Indivisible, a grassroots coalition opposed to Trump policies and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a Los Angeles-based group.

"The goal is to destabilize Soros’ network," a third White House official said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Soros’s network of charitable organizations rejected any claim by Trump or the White House officials that its operations have anything to do with violent conduct or promoting violence.

“Neither George Soros nor the Open Society Foundations fund protests, condone violence, or foment it in any way,” the spokesperson said. “Claims to the contrary are false.”

Other groups named by the White House officials were two Jewish-led advocacy groups, IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, both of which have organized protests and nonviolent sit-ins to oppose the genocide in Gaza being carried out by the US-backed Israeli government.




Citing the Reuters reporting, Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin said in a social media thread Thursday night that the fact a looming crackdown on groups opposed to Trump and his far-right agenda is coming less than two weeks before “before the largest peaceful protest in modern American history is absolutely intentional.” On October 18, massive protests are planned nationwide as a follow-up to the “No Kings” day of action that took place in June, bringing an estimated one million people into the streets against the Republican Party’s authoritarian lurch under Trump.

According to Reuters, “Miller is taking a ‘hands-on’ role in investigating the funding of nonprofits and educational institutions and is sharing recommendations from Attorney General Pam Bondi and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with Trump and other top advisers,” as well as sharing information with the joint terrorism task force.

“We don’t have all the details, but it appears Trump’s regime is gearing up to smear us with ludicrous accusations that we’re somehow tied to violence at protests—a claim that’s as false as it is predictable,” said Levin. “Let’s call this what it is: A baseless attempt to chill free speech and scare people away from exercising their constitutional right to protest an authoritarian regime. We have been committed to nonviolence from the very beginning. It’s a core principle, not just a talking point.”

“We will not back down,” Levin said in the post. “Trump and Miller can lie, smear, and threaten all they want. They will lose.”

“By floating false allegations of violence,” he concluded, “Trump wants to scare people away from exercising their constitutional rights. We won’t let him succeed. Don’t let this smear distract you. The best response to attacks on our rights is to exercise our rights. That means showing up in huge numbers on October 18.”

Opinion

Trump's war on 'antifa' is both buffoonish and sinister

Paul Waldman
Fri, October 10, 2025 

MSNBC

At a bizarre gathering in the White House on Wednesday, President Donald Trump and many of his top aides assembled a group of far-right activists and influencers to discuss the alleged horrors of antifa and what the administration will do about it. And they are going big.

Attorney General Pam Bondi pledged that the government will be “breaking down the organization brick by brick” to “destroy the organization from top to bottom.” FBI Director Kash Patel explained that the administration is taking “a whole-of-government approach” to antifa, deploying resources from multiple agencies. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wanted everyone to understand the “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.”

Here’s the reality: “Antifa” is not a network, or a collective, or a syndicate. It has no headquarters, it holds no assets, and it has no members. It publishes no pamphlets, records no podcasts and sells no branded merch. It has no policy agenda or plan for a national takeover.


It is essentially an idea, one that begins in a place all Americans should support, but unfortunately don’t: opposition to fascism. Then there are a tiny number of (mostly young) people who take antifa to a different place — people who like to go to public gatherings of far-right groups and get into street fights. If a video of someone punching a white nationalist comes up on your social media feed, the one doing the punching probably calls themself antifa.

Yet it seems that in the imaginations of the president and his supporters, there must be a vast conspiracy behind antifa, one that involves huge sums of money and an intricate bureaucracy managing its many tendrils. That’s why the White House confab was filled with talk of the usual liberal suspects: billionaire George Soros, the Tides Foundation, the Democratic Socialists of America — any or all of them simply must be funding people in hoodies. Only a billion-dollar organization could mount a complex political scheme like getting into a shoving match with a Proud Boy. The administration has to follow the money — which apparently the Treasury Department is doing right now.

We know antifa’s arsenal is fearsome; as the White House proclaimed in a news release this week, “For years, an antifa-led hellfire has turned Portland into a wasteland of firebombs, beatings, and brazen attacks on federal officers and property.” At Wednesday’s meeting, Trump painted an even bleaker picture: “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have stores anymore.” All evidence indicates that, in fact, Portland remains a city with stores.

As easy as it is to mock the president and his staff, they are attempting something quite serious: to convince the public that war must be waged against this imaginary enemy. It is the most extensive government propaganda campaign since the George W. Bush administration’s effort to win support for a war on Iraq.

The difference between that propaganda campaign and this one is that back then there were some true facts propping up the lies. There really was a country called Iraq, which really was led by a man named Saddam Hussein. He didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, but he was a brutal despot.

In this case, there is no antifa organization and no leaders to fight. But the fact that Trump’s version of antifa is imaginary makes it no different from other boogeymen in the history of American conservatism. From communist infiltrators in the McCarthy era to QAnon today, the far right loves a cabal so secret that a lack of evidence becomes the best evidence of all.

Just as important, because this imagined antifa is a phantom, the term becomes infinitely flexible. If you are accused of being a member of the Audubon Society, when in fact you want nothing to do with those bird-huggers, you can rebut the assertion by pointing to the organization’s records. But if you are accused of being part of an imaginary conspiracy, how can you prove it is a lie?

Because antifa is everywhere and nowhere, anyone and everyone could be antifa. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Antifa. Jan. 6 rioters? Actually antifa. Your neighbor who plays his music too loud? Definitely antifa.

For all the buffoonery on display, the Trump administration is doing something sinister. Shortly after Trump issued an executive order declaring antifa a domestic terror organization, the White House issued a “national security presidential memorandum” on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” According to the memo, “common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

These remarkably broad terms make it quite clear that the administration sees the war on antifa, at least in part, as a way to designate its political opponents as adjuncts to terrorism, then target them for official harassment. In other words, the war on antifa can, quite easily, become the justification for further steps toward actual fascism. But if you say that, you’re probably antifa.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com

‘Dr. Antifa’ Professor Blocked From Flying After Trump Roundtable

Wiktoria Gucia
Thu, October 9, 2025


William B. Plowman/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

A professor dubbed “Dr. Antifa” tried to flee the country amid threats to his life but was stopped at the gate and told his reservation had been canceled.

Mark Bray, a historian of modern Spain and the world, taught in Rutgers University’s history department in New Jersey until a Turning Point USA chapter petitioned for his firing.

“We believe in free speech and the First Amendment. However, this does not mean that one is free from the consequences of their actions,” the petition stated, calling Bray “Dr. Antifa” for the content of his academic work.

In 2017, Bray published Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, based on interviews with anti-fascists, which explores the movement’s philosophy and history. At Rutgers, he taught a course on the history of antifascism.

Mark Bray appeared on major national and international media outlets, including Meet the Press, BBC World News, CNN International, PBS, and many others to discuss his expertise on the history of anti-fascism. / NBC NewsWire / William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC Newswire/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesMore

“My role in this is as a professor,” Bray told The New York Times in an interview shortly before his flight to Spain. “I’ve never been part of an antifa group, and I’m not currently. There’s an effort underway to paint me as someone who is doing the things that I’ve researched, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” the professor added.

Bray decided to flee the country ahead of death threats that he received following the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which led to President Donald Trump designating Antifa—a broad and decentralized political movement that opposes fascism— as a domestic terrorist organization.

On the same day Bray was set to fly to Spain with his wife and two children, Trump hosted a White House roundtable focused on Antifa.

Mark Bray, a historian of modern Spain and the world, taught in Rutgers University’s history department. / Anadolu / Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images

“‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,” Bray posted on Bluesky, adding, “We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”


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Since Sept. 26, Bray had received three death threats, including one threatening to kill him in front of his students, The Washington Post reported. His address had also been leaked on social media.

Students have posted screenshots on Reddit of Bray’s emails canceling or moving classes online, with many expressing disappointment that this was happening to their professor.

“Hope he enjoys his time in Europe, I was enjoying the class discussions,” one Reddit user said, posting an email from Bray that read: “Since my family and I do not feel safe in our home at the moment, we are moving for the year to Europe. Truly I am so bummed about not being able to spend time with you all in the classroom.”

In a statement to The New York Times, Rutgers University said that it “is committed to providing a secure environment — to learn, teach, work and research — where all members of our community can share their opinions without fear of intimidation or harassment."

When asked about the threats to Bray, the White House claimed to The Times that “examples of Democrat violence are plentiful.”

After Bray announced his decision to leave the country, students launched another petition calling for the disbanding of Rutgers’ Turning Point USA chapter. As of Thursday, that petition had about 2,000 more signatures than the one calling for Bray’s firing.

On Wednesday, President Trump held a roundtable discussion on Antifa. / Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

“I think that all death threats and doxxing are unjustified and not how political disputes should be resolved in civilized society,” said Ava Kwan, a Turning Point USA chapter member, in an email to The Times on Wednesday. She added, “I think Dr. Antifa, who believes in violence as a political tool, should be fired, of course. Taxpayer money should not fund the salaries of terrorists.”

Bray and his family have rebooked their flight for Thursday, but hope to return to the U.S. and the classroom in the future. For now, his classes will be pre-recorded.

Charlie Kirk's group chases anti-fascism professor out of the country

Travis Gettys
October 8, 2025 

ALTERNET


FILE PHOTO: Founder and president of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, U.S., February 28, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo/File Photo

A history professor is abruptly leaving the U.S. after a conservative group founded by the late Charlie Kirk singled him out for persecution, according to a report on Wednesday.

Mark Bray, who has taught about antifascist movements at Rutgers University since 2019, notified students Sunday that his courses would immediately move online as he and his family prepared to flee the country for their safety, reported the Washington Post.

“Since my family and I do not feel safe in our home at the moment, we are moving for the year to Europe,” Bray told students by email. “Truly I am so bummed about not being able to spend time with you all in the classroom.”

Far-right social media accounts called attention to Bray in late September, after news outlets quoted his remarks about President Donald Trump’s executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization," and the Washington Post confirmed three death threats sent to the professor since Sept. 26.

One online activist called him a “domestic terrorist professor," while another shared his home address in New Jersey, and the Rutgers chapter of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, which was founded by the late Kirk, launched a petition Thursday demanding Bray's firing, referring to Trump's executive order and smearing the educator as a threat to their safety.

Bray decided to move his family to Spain for the rest of the year, and he's optimistic they'll be able to return one day.

“I’m hopeful about returning, and I’m hopeful — and I say this as a history professor — that someday we will look back on this as a cautionary tale about authoritarianism,” Bray said.

The university told the Post that administrators were aware of the Turning Point USA petition and Bray's message to students.

“We are gathering more information about this evolving situation,” the university said in a statement.

Bray, the author of four books on anarchism and antifa, also faced widespread criticism when he told NBC News’s “Meet the Press” in 2017, while a lecturer at Dartmouth University, that violence was sometimes justified, after the deadly “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

Dartmouth's president at the time condemned Bray in a statement and accused him “supporting violent protest," but more than 100 of the university's faculty members rallied around him.

Turning Point USA did not respond to requests for comment on the report, but the Trump administration justified the threats he received by blaming Kirk's assassination, which remains under investigation, on "Democrat violence," but Bray characterized the threats chasing him to Europe as part of the president's crackdown on academic freedom.

“There’s been a concerted attack on universities, and I feel like this is a facet of that," Bray said, "to make it so that professors who conduct research on protest movements don’t feel safe sharing their research or teaching about topics that the administration doesn’t like.”