Thread by @Mteuzi

When a ruler calls anti-fascism “terrorism,” they’re not talking about safety. They’re telling you exactly what kind of ruler they are.

Hitler did it. Mussolini did it. Franco did it.
Pinochet did it. And now Trump is doing it.

Bookmark this thread. 🧵🔖

History is not subtle here. Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to crush left opposition overnight. Mussolini built a Special Tribunal to prosecute “anti-Fascist subversives.” Franco criminalized loyalty to Spain’s elected government retroactively and filled camps with teachers, unionists, and neighbors. Pinochet perfected the disappearance: no body, no case, no voice.

This moment is not an echo. It's a remix with newer technology, more data, and a propaganda machine that fits in your pocket. If you care about basic democratic life, if you care about Black freedom struggles, workers’ rights, Indigenous sovereignty, queer safety, immigrant dignity, or Palestinian solidarity, understand what is being done. Power wants obedience. It will call your resistance “terrorism” to get it.

I'm going to show you, step by step, how this tactic works, what it did to entire societies, and how the 2025 Trump White House is trying to run the same play. Stay with me.

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Trump’s announcement sounds tough. Legally, it is empty. Politically, it is dangerous. You cannot designate an ideology as a terrorist organization. There is no domestic legal mechanism to do it. Even Trump’s own FBI Director from his first term has testified that “antifa” is a movement or idea, not a group you can list. That matters because the Constitution protects speech and association, especially when the viewpoint is unpopular. Courts have refused for decades to create a domestic terror list precisely because it would criminalize belief and dissent.

So why say it? Because the announcement is a signal to the state. It tells agencies how to set priorities. It greenlights broader surveillance, new RICO fishing expeditions, and selective prosecutions framed as “antifa-related.” It pressures universities, nonprofits, and funders to distance themselves from anti-fascist organizing. It chills protest before a single case is filed. This is how authoritarian power grows in the gray zone, using the language of security to make everyday democracy feel risky.

Layer in Project 2025 and you see the system. The blueprint collapses the wall between the White House and DOJ. It pre-drafts executive orders to deploy troops at protests. It rebrands civil rights enforcement to attack the movement ecosystem that defends multiracial democracy. When Trump says “designate,” cabinet surrogates float RICO for “those funding antifa,” and the bureaucracy begins treating the label as a new category of threat. The point is not to win in court. The point is to intimidate, isolate, and punish.

This is the next authoritarian escalation in their project plan. The target is not “violent extremists.” The target is political opposition to fascism.

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Here is how I want you to rock with me on this. First, I'll show the mechanics of the fascist tactic: invent a crisis, claim emergency powers, redefine opposition as “terrorism,” and then how they harden that lie into law through special courts, gag rules, and police powers. We'll trace how that exact process unfolded in four different places and why it always hits racialized and working-class communities first.

Germany: after the Reichstag Fire, civil liberties were suspended “until further notice.” Communists were rounded up by the thousands, Social Democrats were hunted, and parliament voted itself into irrelevance under armed guard.

Italy: Mussolini created a Special Tribunal and a secret police to prosecute “anti-Fascist subversives,” with no real due process and no right to appeal.

Spain: Franco criminalized past democratic participation, built a vast camp system, and used the law to erase the Republic’s supporters from public life.

Chile: Pinochet declared states of siege, outlawed parties, built an intelligence apparatus to disappear the opposition, and exported assassination across borders.

At each stop I'll break it down in two parts. First, the overview: what happened, to whom, and why it worked. Then the machinery: the decrees, the tribunals, the categories, the file cabinets, the routines that turned neighbors into suspects and democracy into nothing more than make believe. Finally, we'll return to present day and map those same moves onto Project 2025, Trump's agency guidance, and the cold silence already spreading through campuses, unions, media, networks, mosques, and community groups.

This is not about panic. It is about clarity. Fascism thrives when people cannot name what they are seeing. I am naming it. Next: Germany.

4/x

Germany shows us the archetype of how fascists weaponize “terrorism” to erase opposition. The turning point came on February 27, 1933: the Reichstag fire. A lone arsonist, Marinus van der Lubbe, set the German parliament ablaze. Hitler and the Nazis instantly framed it as a Communist terror plot, claiming Germany faced an existential threat. Within 24 hours, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, “for the Protection of People and State.” The words sound neutral. The reality was the end of constitutional freedom.

The decree suspended freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association. It legalized indefinite detention without charges or trial. Police and Nazi paramilitaries raided homes, arrested more than 4,000 Communists within days, and began filling improvised camps. Civil liberties were not “temporarily restricted.” They were abolished in practice.

Less than a month later came the Enabling Act, passed under intimidation by Nazi troops, which transferred legislative power to Hitler’s cabinet. With Communist deputies barred and Social Democrats beaten, democracy literally voted itself out of existence.

Here is the pattern: create a crisis, brand it “terrorism,” suspend rights, and criminalize opposition. By the end of 1933, Germany had over 200,000 political prisoners. The Reichstag fire did not just burn a building. It burned the bridge back to democratic governance.

When Trump points to Charlie Kirk’s assassination and declares Antifa a terrorist organization, he is replaying this exact move. The event is weaponized. The opposition is framed as an existential threat. And the machinery of repression grinds into overdrive.

5/x

What made Germany terrifying was not just violence in the streets. It was how fast authoritarianism turned itself in law. After the Reichstag Fire Decree came a cascade of measures, each designed to eliminate anti-fascist opposition under a mask of legality.

The Malicious Practices Act (March 1933) criminalized everyday dissent: a joke about Hitler, listening to foreign broadcasts, doubting the war effort. Neighbors denounced neighbors, and Special Courts handed down sentences in minutes. Elfriede Scholz, a tailor, was executed simply for saying “the war is lost.”

The Law Against the Formation of Parties (July 1933) made the Nazi Party the only legal political organization. To form or even support another party meant prison. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 1933) purged Jews, leftists, and dissenters from all government roles. Opposition was not just outlawed — it was erased from every corner of civic life.

Then came the Special Courts and the People’s Court, extraordinary tribunals with conviction rates over 90%. Evidence could be dismissed as “irrelevant,” trials lasted under an hour, and verdicts were final. Between 1933 and 1945, these courts executed over 17,000 people.

The machinery was efficient, routinized, and bureaucratic. Arrests came from denunciations. Courts converted suspicion into conviction. Prisons and camps absorbed the bodies. This is how a democracy collapses: not all at once, but through a sequence of “emergency measures” that normalize repression.

Trump’s Antifa proclamation follows the same logic. It may lack legal teeth today, but it signals the beginning of bureaucratic targeting: surveillance lists, chilled protests, defunded organizations, universities punished. Fascism doesn’t need to change the law overnight. It needs to make opposition feel impossible.

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Germany may be the archetype, but Mussolini’s Italy pioneered the template. Long before Hitler, Italian fascists built institutions to criminalize anti-fascism itself. The lesson: fascism does not wait for chaos. It manufactures legality to crush resistance.

After an assassination attempt on Mussolini in 1926, his government created the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State. This military-style court existed solely to prosecute “anti-Fascist subversives.” Judges were Fascist Party loyalists. Defendants had no meaningful defense rights, no appeal, and trials could be announced with only 24 hours’ notice. Between 1927 and 1943, the tribunal heard 16,000 cases and issued death sentences, life terms, and thousands of years of prison time.

At the same time, Mussolini built a secret police force with an openly fascist name: the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism (OVRA). By the 1930s, OVRA had more than 50,000 agents and 100,000 informants. They infiltrated unions, surveilled intellectuals, and even assassinated anti-fascist leaders abroad, like the Rosselli brothers in France.

The language mirrored what Trump says: anti-fascists were not patriots but “anti-national enemies.” OVRA’s files labeled citizens as “dangerous” or “suspect” based on political activity. By criminalizing dissent as terrorism, Mussolini centralized power, destroyed Italy’s labor movement, and created a climate where fascist rule felt permanent.

Italy shows us how the infrastructure of repression is built brick by brick: a tribunal here, a surveillance agency there, new categories of “subversive” activity. Within a decade, anti-fascism was not just discouraged, it was a prosecutable crime.

When Trump says “antifa” is terrorism, he is not innovating. He is imitating. Italy wrote the script. Germany perfected it. And the United States is now in rehearsal.

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Mussolini’s Italy shows us how fascism turns legality into a trap. After 1926, repression wasn’t just thugs in black shirts, it was a state machine grinding down opposition, step by step.

The Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State was staffed by generals and Fascist militia officers who owed their loyalty to Mussolini, not to the law. Trials were stacked: evidence could be hidden “for public interest,” defense lawyers had days to prepare, and verdicts were foregone conclusions. From 1927–1931 alone, 1,412 defendants were sentenced to over 7,500 years of prison combined. Antonio Gramsci, one of Italy’s greatest thinkers, was silenced here — the prosecutor said outright: “We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.”

The OVRA, founded in 1927, became a vast surveillance web. With 50,000 agents and 100,000 informants, they carried out 20,000 raids per week. They kept files on 158,000 “subversives,” detailing everything from education to sexuality. They blackmailed priests, infiltrated unions, and even infiltrated the Vatican. By 1936, the Gestapo had signed a protocol to copy their methods.

This is what “law and order” looked like under fascism: extraordinary courts, endless files, permanent surveillance. There was no need for mass trials when every citizen knew a neighbor’s whisper could destroy them.

Trump’s Antifa proclamation is built in this same blueprint. The point isn’t to win in court, it’s to build cases, to mark dissent as “subversive,” to intimidate until the opposition self-censors. Mussolini proved you don’t need to abolish law to end freedom. You just need to weaponize it.

8/x

Spain under Franco shows what happens when this tactic hardens into decades-long permanence. Franco criminalized anti-fascists for two generations.

After the Civil War, Franco passed the Law of Political Responsibilities (1939). It declared anyone who had supported the elected Republican government guilty of “military rebellion”, even if they’d done nothing more than vote. It was retroactive to 1934, making past legal activity into a punishable crime. Half a million people were prosecuted, often on the basis of denunciations by priests or Falangist officials. Families inherited the sanctions when loved ones died.

The scale was unbelievable: between 1939–1947, Spain ran up to 300 concentration camps holding as many as half a million people. “Worker battalions” forced prisoners into slave labor to build dams, highways, even the Valley of the Fallen monument. Franco’s courts continued issuing death sentences into the 1970s — the garrote, a medieval strangulation device, was used in public as late as 1974.

For nearly 40 years, “anti-fascist” meant “criminal.” Only in 2022 did Spain finally nullify those convictions. Think about that: millions of lives scarred, families broken, children raised knowing their parents’ opposition to dictatorship had been criminalized by law.

Franco’s Spain proves this isn’t about “temporary emergency powers.” Once fascists criminalize opposition, they never willingly give the freedom back.

9/x

The Spanish regime perfected repression through law. It didn’t matter if you had never picked up a weapon. The Law of Political Responsibilities made mere loyalty to democracy a crime. It stripped people of jobs, property, citizenship, and the right to live in certain towns. Trials were based on denunciations. Proof wasn’t required — suspicion was enough.

Military tribunals handled political cases until 1963. They worked fast: sometimes hundreds of cases in a week. In Valladolid, fewer than a third of victims even saw a courtroom before execution. The rest were shot in ditches. Historians estimate 50,000 post-war executions, most by 1941, but killings continued right up to Franco’s death in 1975.

Spain also built one of Europe’s largest concentration camp systems. Between 367,000 and 500,000 people cycled through 200–300 camps. Many were forced into labor battalions constructing infrastructure for the dictatorship. Foreign diplomats observed it and said plainly: these were slaves of war.

The cruelty was codified into procedure. Prisoners were categorized as “recoverable” or “non-recoverable.” Execution methods were standardized: the garrote for civilians, firing squads for political prisoners. By the regime’s end, repression had become an institution, as ordinary as paying taxes.

Note: Please look up “garrote execution” if you don’t know what that is — so you can fully grasp the depth of the sickness we’re talking about.

This is the fascist logic in full bloom: law becomes a tool of revenge, the courts a theater of obedience, prisons a substitute for politics.

When Trump criminalizes “antifa,” this is the lineage he joins. It's not the language of democracy. It's the language of Franco: permanent repression justified by permanent enemies.

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Chile under Pinochet shows how this fascist playbook carried into the modern era, updated with intelligence agencies and Cold War geopolitics. When the military overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973, they didn’t just seize power, they set out to erase the entire idea of democratic opposition.

Pinochet declared “states of siege” that outlawed parties and suspended constitutional rights. Leftist organizing became synonymous with “subversion.” The new regime established the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), an agency designed not to defend the country but to hunt, torture, and disappear opponents. Between 1973 and 1990, over 3,000 people were killed and 200,000 driven into exile. Tens of thousands were tortured.

The logic mirrored Europe’s fascists: anti-fascists were reframed as terrorists. Teachers, union leaders, students, priests — anyone who resisted — became targets. False flag operations staged “leftist attacks” to justify crackdowns. Propaganda painted dissenters as a danger to the nation’s survival.

But Chile added an international dimension. Through Operation Condor, Pinochet’s Chile coordinated with Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil to assassinate exiled opponents abroad. Orlando Letelier, Chile’s former foreign minister, was killed by a car bomb in Washington D.C. in 1976, a terrorist act carried out by Pinochet’s agents with U.S. allies looking the other way.

Chile proves this is not just a European history lesson. It is a global pattern: fascists criminalize anti-fascism, then use that label to justify mass repression, torture, and murder. The 20th century is littered with graves from this tactic.

What set Chile apart was the systematic precision of repression. DINA agents didn’t just arrest people — they made them vanish. The disappearance process was bureaucratic: coded files, rotating safe houses, and systematic torture designed to break people without leaving public records. Victims were blindfolded, kept in coffin-sized boxes, shocked on metal “grills,” submerged in tanks of excrement, assaulted, and then either executed or disappeared into unmarked graves, the ocean, or acid.

Villa Grimaldi alone processed 4,500 detainees, with at least 240 killed. Doctors monitored torture to keep victims alive long enough to extract information. Confessions obtained through pain became “evidence” in military tribunals with 95% conviction rates. Trials had no defense, no appeal, no pretense of fairness.

Pinochet’s repression extended across borders. Operation Condor created an assassination network spanning South America. “Special teams” were formed to kill anywhere in the world. The Letelier bombing in Washington proved no exile was safe.

The terrifying part? All of it was wrapped in the language of legality. Emergency decrees, national security justifications, and “anti-terrorism” rhetoric gave cover to a system built on terror. Fascism always dresses itself in law, even when it is dismantling law.

Chile is the bridge to today. The tools are different, digital surveillance, financial investigations, campus crackdowns, but the pattern is identical. Label dissent “terrorism.” Expand powers in the name of security. Build a bureaucracy of fear. That is what Trump is doing.

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We’ve walked through Germany, Italy, Spain, and Chile. Different languages, different decades, same tactic: criminalize anti-fascism, call it terrorism, and use that lie to dismantle democracy. The results were always catastrophic: mass arrests, torture, executions, entire generations scarred.

Now look at what's happening right now. Trump’s “designation” of Antifa has no legal basis. But legality is not the point. It is political signaling. It tells federal agencies to prioritize surveillance of protesters. It tells universities and nonprofits they can be punished for tolerating dissent. It tells the base that opposition equals treason. It's Project 2025 in motion:a collapsing DOJ independence, weaponizing law, and rebranding repression as “security.”

The danger isn’t just what isn't just what is said. It's the chilling effect, the material changes that occur. Students are already afraid to speak. Activists are already being questioned about “antifa ties.” Civil society organizations are already being targeted for financial audits and defunding. Networks self-censor. This is how fascism tightens its grip, not in one motion, but through a thousand bureaucratic squeezes.

History’s verdict is clear. When fascists criminalize anti-fascism, they are not protecting democracy. They are destroying it. Trump is not inventing anything new. He's following a script written in blood across the 20th century.

The question is not whether this is fascism. The question is whether we'll recognize it in time.

end/🧵