The group that put Charlie Kirk’s group on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan forward of his assassination final week additionally has an extended historical past of carrying water for the violent Antifa motion that President Donald Trump has focused for investigation.
Tyler Robinson, 22, who faces homicide costs within the assassination of Kirk, had reportedly adopted leftist political positions and endorsed the transgender motion, in response to authorities. His bullet casings reportedly included anti-fascist messaging resonant of Antifa.
Trump introduced Wednesday evening that he could be designating Antifa a terrorist group.
Antifa agitators model their opponents as akin to Nazis, figuring out themselves as “anti-fascist.” These agitators reportedly embed themselves in additional mainstream protests, break free to have interaction in violence, and sometimes return to the protection of the group later. Whereas the motion is essentially disconnected, it typically varieties organizations like Rose Metropolis Antifa in Portland.
Antifa agitators have engaged in violence for years, most notably within the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The riots that grew out of these protests induced an estimated $2 billion in injury, measured by insurance coverage payouts, and took the lives of 26 People, notably together with black folks like 77-year-old retired St. Louis Police Captain David Dorn.
The SPLC
The Southern Poverty Regulation Heart, a public curiosity legislation agency that gained its repute by suing Ku Klux Klan chapters into chapter 11 and presents itself as America’s premiere “hate” watchdog, has steadfastly refused to place any Antifa group on its “hate map.” In the meantime, the SPLC places mainstream conservative and Christian teams on the map, calling them a part of the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy.”
A terrorist used the map to focus on the conservative Christian Household Analysis Council in 2012, and the person who opened hearth at a Congressional Baseball Recreation apply in 2017 had “preferred” the SPLC on Fb. The SPLC condemned these assaults.
This summer season, the SPLC added Kirk’s Turning Level USA to the “hate map.” It stays unclear whether or not this may increasingly have impressed Robinson, and the SPLC condemned the assassination, however it has not eliminated Turning Level from the map.
The SPLC has refused so as to add Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or vandals focusing on church buildings and pro-life being pregnant facilities to the “hate map.”
One Condemnation Of Antifa
Richard Cohen, who resigned as SPLC president amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, did provide a uncommon specific condemnation of Antifa violence in 2017.
“We oppose these teams and what they’re attempting to do,” Cohen mentioned.
“We expect they’re contributing to the issue we’re seeing,” he added. “We expect it’s more likely to result in different types of retaliation. In Berkeley, antifa confirmed up and shut down speeches. The following time the white supremacists introduced the Oath Keepers with them, they introduced their very own military.”
But he mentioned SPLC wouldn’t label Antifa a “hate group” as a result of it doesn’t discriminate folks on the premise of race, sexual orientation, or different courses protected by antidiscrimination legal guidelines.
“There may be types of hate on the market that you could be think about hateful, however it’s not the kind of hate we comply with,” Cohen mentioned.
Carrying Water For Antifa
In 2023, nevertheless, the SPLC added “antigovernment extremist teams” to the “hate map,” together with parental rights organizations corresponding to Mothers for Liberty. Antifa stays absent.
In June 2020, the SPLC attacked then-President Trump for asserting his intention to designate Antifa as a terrorist group. It warned that “those that establish with” the Antifa label “signify a big spectrum of the political left” and that “far-right extremists use comparable ways” to the Trump administration in condemning Antifa.
The SPLC condemned Trump’s transfer as “unprecedented and alarming” and minimized Antifa violence as “skirmishes and property crimes,” including that “the specter of deadly violence pales compared to that posed by far-right extremists.”
In 2023, authorities arrested an SPLC lawyer, charging him with home terrorism for his alleged function in an Antifa riot involving Molotov cocktails. The lawyer is one in every of 61 defendants, who’re represented by many attorneys. That case stays ongoing, and prosecutors anticipate a ruling from the choose quickly.
Megan Squire, whom Wired profiled as “antifa’s secret weapon towards far-right extremists” in 2018, reportedly labored carefully with the SPLC, feeding the group knowledge on white nationalist and different teams. She mentioned she doesn’t think about herself antifa however is “sympathetic to antifa’s objective of silencing racist extremists.” She handed alongside info “to those that would possibly put it to real-world use. Who would possibly weaponize it.”
Squire joined the SPLC full-time in 2022 earlier than leaving the group in March 2025, in response to her verified LinkedIn profile.
Neither Squire nor the SPLC responded to requests for remark about relationships with Antifa.
Whereas the connection between Antifa rioters and the SPLC stays unclear, its historical past suggests an investigation could show fruitful.
Syndicated with permission from The Day by day Sign.
