Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump’s Antifa Threat Is a Threat to Free Speech

This isn’t the first time that labeling something “terrorism” has been used to censor it.

June 1, 2020 at 3:30 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Speech is a powerful tool, one the government shouldn’t control.
Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

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On Sunday, President Donald Trump tweeted that the executive branch will designate Antifa as a “terrorist organization,” apparently in an attempt to pin blame for the weekend’s violent protests on the loose collection of far-left activists.

The president’s announcement was characteristically unclear. Federal law says that if the Secretary of State designates a group as a foreign terrorist organization, then materially supporting that organization becomes a very serious federal crime. There is no comparable domestic terrorism designation under existing law.