President Donald Trump announced last month on Truth Social that he would designate Antifa as a “major terrorist organization.” His move followed the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which the alleged shooter etched Antifa-linked slogans onto bullet casings.
The announcement was overdue. But it isn’t enough. The deeper problem lies in the way far-left ideology has wormed its way into America’s universities. For more than a decade, Antifa sympathizers in higher education have used their influence to normalize radical tactics and ideology.
Studying radical groups is not the problem. The problem is activist educators who weaponize academic freedom.
Hiding behind “academic freedom,” these activists have seized positions of authority, cloaked propaganda as scholarship, and worked to sanitize Antifa’s record of violence. Their work not only whitewashes street-level thuggery but also lends intellectual credibility to other radical movements.
Radicalized classrooms
In the fall of 2020, Rutgers University’s Rutgers Today gave Professor Mark Bray a glowing profile. Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” softened Antifa’s image by claiming the movement simply wants to “change the world dramatically.” He insisted its “strategic focus” is to shut down the far right and “protect progressive social movements.”
That framing wasn’t neutral scholarship. It was spin. Bray is a proudly outspoken leftist. His book is an apology for and encomium to Antifa’s “direct action” tactics.
Across the country, courses that elevate Antifa are now showing up in university catalogs. They are not taught as dispassionate examinations of an ideology. They are taught by activists who share the movement’s goals.
At the City University of New York, an English course titled “Global Antifa” promises to explore “antifascist traditions” and link them to “racial justice, anti-imperialism, intersectional feminism, and critiques of capitalism.” In practice, the course serves as movement training, rather than academic analysis.
Over the summer, video from the Socialism 2025 conference revealed the professor behind the CUNY course openly endorsing a boycott of the fossil fuel industry. Other footage showed a Seattle University law professor calling on activists to “break laws and rules” to hide people from ICE and “the cops.”
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Their classrooms mirror their activism. A review of one law professor’s 2019 “Race and Law” syllabus confirmed the bias. The reading list included Bray’s “Antifa Handbook,” a comic book glorifying Antifa, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” and a stack of pro-Palestine and pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions tracts.
Unfortunately, pro-Antifa materials are not confined to graduate seminars. They have also seeped into undergraduate classrooms.
At Harvard, the Department of Government offered a course titled “#Abolish Police.” The syllabus included Bray’s book and assigned a unit on solidarity with the BDS movement and the Palestinian cause.
Rutgers went even farther. A 2018 sociology course openly declared its aim: to study the “rise and success” of resistance movements like the Black Panther Party, Anonymous, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the “Anti-Trump resistance movement.” This is clearly not neutral instruction. It is activism disguised as scholarship.
From the ivory tower, these ideologies trickle down. What begins in university courses eventually lands in teacher training programs, K-12 classrooms, and education conferences. The process has a name: “idea laundering.” Academic activists flood journals, dissertations, and repositories with work that favors Antifa, then cite that same “research” to legitimize the movement.
The results can be laughable — or dangerous. One sociology dissertation at Mississippi State University read more like agitprop than analysis. The author admitted that Antifa “embraces the concept of violence and intimidation,” but brushed it off as a minority tendency. The dissertation concluded that the real problem wasn’t Antifa’s violence but the “negative press” it receives, while claiming fascist groups are the greater threat.
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Another paper, brazenly titled “Plantifa: Antifascist Guerrilla Gardening Curriculum,” shows just how far the indoctrination has gone. It links Antifa’s radical ideology with environmental “justice,” turning classrooms into training grounds for activism. The stated goal is to condition students in anti-fascism, to “plant seeds of love against hierarchies.” Translation: Enlist kids into a movement that openly rejects Western civilization.
Cleaning house
President Trump’s designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization is a long-overdue step. But stopping street violence is only part of the battle. The ideological campaign waged inside universities must be confronted with equal seriousness.
Studying radical groups is not the problem. Academic freedom allows rigorous analysis of movements and ideas. The problem is activist educators who weaponize that freedom. They smuggle their politics into classrooms, presenting indoctrination as scholarship. They use liberal values — free inquiry, free thought, dissent — as camouflage for an anti-Western ideology bent on dismantling the United States and its allies.
Universities ignore this threat at their peril. Antifa’s intellectual allies behave like a parasitic wasp: They burrow into the institution, feed on its resources, and, eventually, kill the host. If higher education refuses to police itself, the rot will spread unchecked — leaving the next generation radicalized and the nation badly weakened.
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