ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
Earlier this week, President Trump issued an order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. Antifa, short for antifascist, is not a single hierarchical group. It's more of a loose umbrella term for a wide range of people. So the order jumped out to Odette Yousef, NPR's domestic extremism correspondent.
ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: This order sets a precedent. The U.S. has never designated a domestic terrorist organization before. And so the first question is, what is the legal authority to make this designation?
LIMBONG: And also, what ripple effects could the order have?
YOUSEF: So I'm hearing a real fear that this conflation of antifascism and terrorism may stigmatize anyone or any group working on movements for community-building and racial or social justice.
LIMBONG: There's also constitutional questions.
YOUSEF: Will we now also see people reporting stuff for no other reason than, you know, they think it's connected to antifa? And will that spur investigations? You know, if so, that could run into First Amendment issues.
LIMBONG: There's a lot here. So we wanted to talk to Odette about how she reports on this complicated story and also on the other story she's chasing down - the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination. We started with the antifa question.
If it's not really a group where you can be a card-carrying member, how can the administration really target them?
YOUSEF: That's really the question, I think, that we're all asking. So for comparison's sake, a lot of people have been like, well, there is a process to designate foreign terrorist organizations. So, you know, like if you're thinking of ISIS or al-Qaida, for example, like, there is an actual mechanism to do that. It lies with the State Department. And there is a list of foreign terrorist organizations.
There is nothing like that for domestic terrorist organizations. There's no list. There's no legal authority for the federal government to designate something a domestic terrorist organization. So it's really unclear what this executive order ultimately really even means. Even that first step of providing evidence that it is a structured organization, that's something that the Trump administration actually tried to establish five years ago when he was in office, you know? And they...
LIMBONG: The first term, yeah.
YOUSEF: During his first term, yeah. And it didn't succeed. And so it remains to be seen what's going to happen with that effort this time around.
LIMBONG: OK, so if defining who or what antifa is, is a challenge for the administration, how do you go about thinking about it in your coverage?
YOUSEF: Well, I mean, it's a movement. You know, I think about it as covering a movement. You know, some people do self-identify with that word, as antifa, but many people are involved in antifascist work who don't call themselves antifa. And so, you know, I think the more important thing as this story continues to develop will be to identify what the work is that, you know, people or groups are doing, you know, who may be falling under the eye of the federal government and to really ask, like, what is it that they are being investigated for?
LIMBONG: Yeah. I want to turn now to the Charlie Kirk story. Tyler Robinson, who is accused of killing Charlie Kirk, will appear in court on Monday. What are you going to be keeping your eye on, on Monday?
YOUSEF: You know, I am very interested in any additional evidence that we might learn about Robinson. You know, one of the things that's very interesting about the charging document against him is that his parents reportedly told investigators that Robinson had been moving more politically to the left, but in the charging document, it only talks about his view on gay and LGBTQ rights. It doesn't mention any other issues that he might have been perceived as moving to the left on.
This is interesting to me because much of the talk that we've heard from administration officials and the president himself has been that Robinson was a radical leftist. And so I am curious to know if we will see any evidence showing that. We know that Robinson perhaps was for gay and LGBTQ rights, but that is one single issue. You know, I'd be very interested to hear any other evidence that they're able to present about what his political views are.
LIMBONG: In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there was this kind of weird thing online that I was seeing about everybody trying to play hot potato as to whose team he's on, you know what I mean?
YOUSEF: Yeah.
LIMBONG: People would just be like, oh, he's a Groyper. Oh, he's a leftist. Oh, he's, you know, a MAGA guy. It is all this misinformation or, like, taking things out of context. How, like, as a reporter, as someone interested in, like, you know, the truth and what is real, how do you parse all of this glut of information that comes out about him and all the interpretations on top of that?
YOUSEF: You know, I am in sort of a weird position where something like this happens, I know that it's going to fall onto my plate, but I can't start addressing it until we have a named suspect.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
YOUSEF: And so I'm off in, like, part of the news cycle, like, a day or two or sometimes three days after the incident has occurred and everybody has, frankly, already made up their minds about who's responsible. And so then when I come in and I'm like, well, actually, you know, we know that this person was on the left, you know, perhaps because - on this one issue of gay and LGBTQ rights, people have already made up their minds that he's a radical leftist. So it's a difficult moment to try to come into covering a story and introduce just the facts as we know them because people at this point have already kind of made up their minds about who they think is responsible for the violence. But it's still, I think, important to remind people, this is the evidence we have. This is the only evidence we have. And this is how it lines up.
I'm also able to offer sort of the context against which that act of violence sits. And so, you know, in this case, there's a lot of context, you know, that we - all we had really to go off of were the inscriptions on the bullet casings, you know, which a lot of people were trying to interpret what those things meant. But just the fact that there were inscriptions on the bullet casings was very telling about sort of the cultural script that this person was looking at when they were, you know, perhaps planning this attack and that it doesn't necessarily fall on the left or the right. It's just, you know, more indicative of how much time this person spends online.
LIMBONG: On that note, I want to ask you something. So I spend a lot of time online. I've got all this lore in my head, right? And then when I try to talk to, you know, family members of mine who are less online, who have touched grass more recently than I have, I sound like I'm a - like someone from a foreign planet trying to explain. It's like, oh, this guy was part of this faction, and now, like, there's - it's like I'm explaining, like, a 16-season long K-drama to somebody who's never seen it, right? And so as a reporter who, you know, also has to have all this context when you're covering extremism and all these different groups, how do you make that legible to someone with a more regulated news diet?
YOUSEF: To the normies.
LIMBONG: To the normies. I didn't want to say that word. I don't want to say it, but yeah, to normies.
YOUSEF: Yeah, I know. It's hard. I feel like over the time that I've been reporting on extremism, the amount of coverage of extremism has, unfortunately, just increased, not because of me, but just because it's the news. And I think listeners are learning more and more of the lore, more and more of the terminology. And so, you know, some of it is just sort of having to, like, check myself and remember, like, OK, you know, I'm keeping track of the day to day. I think the public, though, is catching up. They're just, like, a couple steps behind. And so it's - you know, a lot of it is sort of trying to just sort of bring people along.
LIMBONG: That's Odette Yousef doing Sisyphean work covering extremism for NPR. Odette, thanks a lot for all the effort.
YOUSEF: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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