Christopher F. Rufo, Hannah Grossman Will the Left Disrupt the Inauguration? A network of progressive groups and militants is preparing for battle.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/will-the-left-disrupt-the-inauguration
Left-wing radicals have been mobilizing near the nation’s capital ahead of the January 20 inauguration, which has been moved indoors. Since summer, we have tracked D.C.’s radical networks—their movements, methods, and potential for violence. After George Floyd’s death in 2020, these groups learned that street protests could yield political gains. Now, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they’re weighing their options.
This network is decentralized, adaptable, and steeped in organizing social unrest. Black Lives Matter messaging is fading, replaced by anti-Israel rhetoric. As Inauguration Day approaches, Communist militants and members of Antifa-aligned hubs have suggested storming the Capitol, bringing “direct action” to the streets, and obstructing law enforcement. If these demonstrations unfold, they will have been carefully planned and ideologically incited by professionals, some visible, others hidden.
The network spans college professors, nonprofit leaders, and masked and often troubled militants willing to engage in violence. Those less directly involved play a sophisticated inside-outside game, relying on prestigious NGOs to provide financing and logistics while maintaining arm’s length control over the more radical elements, which do the dirty work.
Key components of this infrastructure include legal organizations, violent demonstrators, street medics, propaganda specialists, and safehouses, indoctrination centers, and publications. Though some Antifa-aligned groups from prior riots have gone underground or merged, a core network of the most committed activists—veterans and new recruits alike—remains active and prepared.
This is their unmasking.
The militant Left organizes in the light and in the shadows. In the light, the Left has built a significant above-ground infrastructure that preaches abstract ideals—liberation, justice, equality—but operates with a sharper edge behind the scenes.
This upper level includes organizations such as the Open Society Foundations, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the National Lawyers Guild. These groups support a well-funded network that includes dozens of interlocking organizations, providing a level of legitimate infrastructure and cover for smaller nonprofits and other groups, which sometimes fraternize with street-level activists. (We reached out for comment to most of the groups named in this piece; unless otherwise indicated, they did not respond.)
In Washington, D.C., much of the left-wing activism since George Floyd is traceable to these groups. The chain begins with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which funds the Drug Policy Alliance. The DPA fundraised for a coalition of groups, called “Decrim Poverty,” many of whose members belong to Defund MPD (the Metropolitan Police Department), another radical coalition. Members of the Defund and Decrim networks worked in tandem, variously supporting the anti-Israel, race, environment, and anarchist movements, and the campaigns to defund the police, decriminalize drugs, legalize prostitution, and dismantle the system of law enforcement in the D.C. metro area.
What do the benefactors get for their money? Boots on the ground. Members of the Decrim and Defund coalitions have direct and indirect relationships with D.C.’s best-known anarchist groups. And their organizations are part of a network associated with most of the violent, ostensibly “decentralized” protests of the past decade.
A direct line connects the Decrim and/or Defund coalitions and a Black Lives Matter chapter that was heavily involved in the George Floyd demonstrations; Shut Down DC, which targeted Supreme Court justices at their homes and has taken part in other prominent mass-mobilization campaigns; organizations, such as Remora House and Feed the People Mutual Aid, which have endorsed Antifa; the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, both involved in blocking roads in D.C.; and the They/Them Collective, which brazenly glorifies violence and which supported activists implicated in the 2017 Disrupt J20 unrest to protest Trump’s first inauguration.
The above-ground institutions also provide support when the Left’s militants get in trouble. The National Lawyers Guild operates a “Mass Defense Program” that offers “legal support for protests and movements taking an abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist approach to human rights work.” Despite its neutral-sounding name, the NLG, a member of the Defund coalition, is a deeply committed political actor that has openly declared its mission to “dismantl[e] the capitalist economic system in our nation” and support for abolishing the police. Smash Racism DC, an activist shop, directs its followers to call the NLG if they’re incarcerated for “resisting oppression.”
During the first Trump presidency, the NLG encouraged a maximal policy for activism. “Taking militant and confrontational direct action . . . are a crucial part of the fight against fascism,” said the group’s research and education director. And the organization put significant resources behind these tactics, dispatching its “Legal Observers,” known as “green hats,” to document police activity during protests. When possible, they will sue for alleged “constitutional violations,” which, in some cases, have netted huge settlements.
One benefit of the decentralized network structure is flexibility. Over the past year, the center of gravity for left-wing politics has shifted, and these groups have adapted. As a motivating force, race is on the decline, but anti-Israel sentiment is on the rise. The Open Society Foundations funds a range of anti-Israel NGOs. And in the run-up to the 2024 election, National Lawyers Guild then-president Suzanne Adely helped to organize a meeting in the West Bank in conjunction with Progressive International, a group that glorifies Vladimir Lenin and calls for “a “New International Economic Order.”
Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack, activists in the Decrim and Defund networks, such as Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, have connected with a wave of new groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement and the DC for Palestine coalition. These groups have leveraged anti-Israel sentiment on behalf of their pet causes here at home. For example, Dante O’Hara, a Marxist activist and DC for Palestine organizer, combines pro-Palestinian rhetoric with calls to resist “colonial rule in DC.” And O’Hara has notched some victories. Despite his extreme politics, O’Hara was able to use his coalition, composed of hundreds of activists locally, to pressure the D.C. council to pass a resolution last year calling on President Biden to end the Cuban blockade and remove the island nation’s state-terrorism-sponsor designation. “Yes, I’m a Communist,” O’Hara said shortly after the elections. “And people who know me know the work that I do in DC. And people who disagree with me are usually [silent] because they know I’m also about the s**t. I don’t f**k around when it comes to politics. I also don’t f**k around when it comes to fascist terror and white supremacy. This is about colonial rule in DC, yes this election.”
Remarkably, O’Hara works as a materials engineer for the U.S. Naval Laboratory. In December, he explained his plan to organize against Trump, whom he claimed was “bringing a full fascist dictatorship.” O’Hara asked, “Can we organize a nationwide walkout of scientists, engineers and tech workers that contribute to the war machine?”
We reached out to the Department of Defense for comment on O’Hara’s activism, and were directed to a media official, who told us that the materials engineer was speaking in his “personal capacity.”
“Let’s say I worked for a grocery store and I go on Facebook saying, ‘I love Hitler.’ I’m doing that in my private capacity as a citizen with free speech. So, it’s not on the grocery store to comment on my private comment,” the official explained to City Journal.
The militant groups follow a formula: recruit, prepare, activate. Recruitment takes place full-time, year-round. Even when the streets are quiet, the nonprofits, activist groups, and anarchist “mutual aid” hubs canvas for new members, publish propaganda on social media, and advance their ideological line.
The recruitment tactics vary widely. Some groups use traditional, analog methods. Smash Racism DC, for example, explains that it brought hundreds of activists onto the streets through “community outreach that included congregational organizing, public lectures, flyering, and old-fashioned door-knocking.” They published a revisionist history about “The Long Struggle Against Fascism in DC,” in which they suggest that violence against law enforcement is justified.
Other groups, such as Remora House, man tables in public parks, offering food while passing out publications detailing their views and past confrontations with cops. Among the wares: the Direct Action Survival Guide, instructing militants how to riot without getting caught, and Towards Anarchism, a tract that calls for overthrowing the government. “There is in every country a government which, with brutal force, imposes its laws on all,” the book reads. “The normal peaceful course of evolution is arrested by violence, and thus with violence it is necessary to reopen that course. It is for this reason that we want a violent revolution today; and we shall want it always.”
While the Washington Post has called Remora House a “D.C.-based homeless outreach group,” it is also a networking hub for anarchists. Remora House’s co-founders, Aaron Howe and Shannon Clark, have both served as adjunct professors at American University. Together, they bring Antifa-decorated carts to distribute Metro cards to the homeless, as their group advances militant causes, such as riot-related medical training with military-grade first aid kits.
Next comes preparation. As Patrick Young, a key Shut Down DC organizer, explains: “Every mobilization, every blockade, every march has depended on a complex network of movement infrastructure”–the coordinated work of hundreds of people who “organized legal support, set up medical clinics, designed websites, facilitated trainings, organized transportation, secured meeting spaces, maintained databases, and took on dozens of logistical tasks that allowed movements to operate.”
The most sophisticated groups, such as Extinction Rebellion, function as movement leaders and training institutes for so-called direct action, a hotly debated term that has been used to refer to tactics ranging from blocking roads and disrupting transit to destroying property and attacking police. Extinction Rebellion teaches new recruits its methods, which have included dumping cow manure near the White House, gluing themselves to Capitol building doorways, and blocking major highways around D.C. At every step, it reminds aspirants that the organization’s goal is to cause “economic disruption to shake the current political system,” which is, in their words, “f**ked.”
Some of these tactics, such as blocking highways, are impersonal. Others focus on people. Shut Down DC, for example, has offered to pay for information on the whereabouts of conservative Supreme Court justices and targeted the home of Missouri senator Josh Hawley. “Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel,” Hawley said. Smash Racism’s activists have pursued similar tactics, including demonstrating outside of the home of then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s wife, home at the time, was terrified. “She had been in the kitchen alone getting ready to go to dinner and she heard pounding on the front door and screaming,” Tucker Carlson said. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door.”
Then, there is riot season. Many of these groups, which operate at arm’s length from the above-ground institutions, make no effort to hide their violent intentions. Their members have engaged in a string of riots for the entire time Donald Trump has been in politics, beginning with his 2017 inauguration, when, according to USA Today, “anarchists and activists tore through the streets for 16 blocks, tossing bricks at police officers, setting trash cans and a limousine on fire and smashing windows, all in opposition to the new commander in chief.”
After all, as a They/Them Collective banner put it, “it takes a bullet to bash a fash.”
The final step is activation. Militant groups always organize around a flashpoint. In this case, they’re anticipating what might be the most publicized event of 2025: the inauguration of Donald Trump.
They have been preparing since the November election. Two days after Trump’s victory, a coalition of socialist groups, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), and the ANSWER Coalition, gathered in New York City to discuss potential responses.
Miriam Osmon, the representative for the Palestinian Youth Movement, said that the groups wanted to “build power” and “draw more and more people into our struggle against the shared enemy, the shared enemy of the Palestinian people, the shared enemy of the working people of the world, and the shared enemy of working people in the United States.” Another leader, Brian Becker from the ANSWER Coalition, said that the first Trump administration revealed that militant tactics were effective. “So many people went to the airports because he said, ‘We’re going to ban Muslims from coming into the country.’ Massive protests on Inauguration Day. We outnumbered Trump supporters. This was the anti-Trump resistance,” he said. The activists compared their work with the historical abolitionists who used force against those who opposed the Fugitive Slave Act. “People were pulling out guns,” explained one activist. “You can say it’s scary, and it is scary.”
After the meeting, the activists went to work. The District’s Party for Socialism and Liberation began organizing “to level a real fight back against the racist and anti-worker Trump administration,” beginning with the “mass mobilization against the inauguration.” One of the party’s leading figures, Sean Blackmon, promised that “if young people get involved in struggle . . . then we’ll be able to have that society that we all need.”
Other groups seem poised to disrupt the incoming administration and are getting ready for conflict. The Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America has set up meetings with hundreds of activists to discuss how to “fight fascism” in the incoming Trump administration. The DSA responded to our comment request, stating, “Our organizing spans many interconnected issue areas that affect working class people.” The DC for Palestine Coalition, which claimed to have “activated 100s of DC residents” over the past year, provided protest training for its base in October. Likewise, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, which is a coalition partner with the ACLU’s D.C. chapter, offered a similar course in “direct action.”
The extended activist network is also ramping up on-the-ground efforts to train “street medics,” After a period of inactivity, the DC Street Medic Collective began fundraising for a “street medic training”; the group’s webpage mentions “Riot Medicine,” which links to a manual linked describing “insurrectionary” medical practice in support of militant action. “The act of challenging the state is dangerous, but with some basic knowledge, medics can drastically reduce the repercussions protesters face,” the manual reads, offering lessons on treating “[handcuff] neuropathy,” “riot control agent contamination,” and burns, lacerations, and fractures. The People’s Medic Collective DMV has been recruiting and training new medics since June. The Baltimore Street Medical Collective is currently advertising that its members are available for social action, and soliciting advanced details about protests, including march routes, the number of attendees, plans for dispersal, and “jail support” information.
The Movement Infrastructure Project, which calls D.C. the “center of an imperialist government responsible for countless atrocities,” is ready to deploy protest equipment such as tents, speakers, generators, and megaphones. Left-wing gun groups, such as the D.C. John Brown Gun Club, have stoked fear on social media about a far-right takeover of the U.S. government, urging action. “It’s about to get really, really bad. Like extraordinarily bad for anyone in this country who isn’t [a] fash,” warned the John Brown Gun Club over the summer. “Things will get exponentially worse this coming year. Prepare for that inevitability.”
After Trump’s election, Jason Charter, another prominent D.C. Antifa member and alleged instigator of unrest, expressed the hope that Trump dismantles the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, so that the far Left can mobilize with impunity. Meantime, the They/Them Collective, which supported activists arrested at demonstrations during Trump’s first inauguration, scoffed at “[l]iberals and their high horse.” “‘At least we didn’t storm the Capitol’ isn’t the flex y’all think it is given the circumstances.”
What will happen on Inauguration Day remains uncertain, but the Trump administration and law enforcement must prepare for potential “direct action” or even widespread violence if threats from D.C.’s militant networks escalate. The government appears unprepared. Under Biden, the Department of Justice adopted a lenient stance on protests, emphasizing “de-escalation” and crowd appeasement after pressure from the ACLU and a BLM-related lawsuit against the government. The resulting policy requires U.S. Park Police and Secret Service to prioritize negotiation and issue repeated warnings during civil unrest, effectively prolonging opportunities for violence. According to the U.S. attorney’s office’s summary of the new policy, “the fact that some demonstrators have engaged in unlawful conduct does not ordinarily provide blanket grounds for use of force, crowd dispersal or declaration of unlawful assembly.”
The D.C. government, for its part, is aware of the street-militancy threat and has consistently looked the other way. During the Floyd riots, the district’s then-attorney general, Karl Racine, offered to seal over 200 demonstrators’ arrest records. More recently, after militants staged a riot in response to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit, only a handful were arrested. Of those, the successor attorney general dropped 11 accused demonstrators’ charges entirely, and the U.S. Attorney released those charged with making threats and assaulting police.
Meantime, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department has atrophied to the point that it puts vanishingly few officers on the street. Hundreds of police officers fled to more amenable jurisdictions after the 2020 rioting, which, at one point, caused serious delays in emergency response calls. As of April 2024, the department remained 700 officers short of its recruitment goals; it will likely need a decade to reach capacity.
Denial remains a problem. In Trump’s first term, FBI director Christopher Wray testified that Antifa is “not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.” This is absurd. D.C.’s radical networks are well-organized and use “anti-fascism” as a justification for violence. And they’re counting on the government to remain passive. Some Antifa-aligned groups acknowledge that local police have shown up at their safehouses or meetings, with little consequence. Even if they get caught by police, these activists have come to believe that, most of the time, left-leaning prosecutors will drop the charges.
The government must stop making excuses and take the threat of left-wing militants seriously. Americans have a right to free political speech, but not to commit violence. The FBI has duty to investigate, disrupt, and refer for prosecution anyone using violence and intimidation to achieve political ends, without bias. Left-wing militants should be treated with the same diligence as right-wing ones. The standard is simple: anyone breaking the law will be stopped.
Federal law-enforcement agencies, in coordination with the IRS, should investigate left-wing foundations and nonprofits potentially operating outside of their charitable purposes. Organizations providing material support for political violence should lose their tax-exempt status. Preparing militants for riots is not a public benefit—it is, in fact, a crime.
While left-wing militants may fail to organize on Inauguration Day due to flagging enthusiasm or bad weather—particularly given the recently announced decision to hold the ceremonies indoors, due to frigid temperatures—the new administration must act swiftly against those organizing for future violence. It should send a clear message: Americans will not permit activists of any political stripe to block roads, attack police, destroy property, threaten officials, or riot in the streets.
The George Floyd revolution is over. Let no one underestimate the damage it did to the United States. It’s time now for a counterrevolution, which entails a new commitment to public safety and civil government.
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