Trump’s Big Domestic Terrorist Threat Doesn’t Exist

—by Ellie Hall

If you’ve been following the Trump administration’s occupation of Portland, Oregon, at all online then chances are you’ve stumbled across a buzzword you might not recognize. It’s not exactly new, but it has rocketed into the mainstream vernacular thanks to the recent (and ongoing) spate of political violence in the USA: TRANTIFA. A portmanteau of “transgender” and “antifascist.” There’s just one problem: Trantifa isn’t a thing. 

Actually, there are several problems. The biggest one being that, as has been reported ad nauseum for years by many people, including former (Trump-appointed) FBI Director Christopher Wray, “antifa” isn’t an organization — it’s an ideology. It’s short for antifascism, a decentralized and leaderless left-wing-ish political movement, that more accurately really just describes anyone who is opposed to fascism. None of this has stopped the White House from designating it a domestic terrorist organization, of course. And the right wing is desperate for a way to connect their dangerous antifa to the so-called “radical trans agenda.” Thus, trantifa was born.

It’s a play on words that, over the years, continues to be deployed by the right as an excuse for why the federal government should go to war with a vulnerable (and, statistically speaking, not very dangerous) minority. Interestingly enough, the term appears to have originated as a joke used by self-described antifascists who happened to be trans. One of the first people to use the word on Twitter, back when it was Twitter, was Alana McLaughlin, who told Garbage Day that she and her (coincidentally Portland-based) trans activist friends were using it as early as 2016. And the term’s journey from the depths of shitposting culture to its current place as a Fox News fixture reveals the importance of irony within the culture war — and the dangers of what can happen when the context around an inside joke is purposefully stripped away by your political enemies.

There’s evidence that in 2019 there was an attempt to popularize the term on social media (see these examples from Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter), but “trantifa” was never adopted by the wider antifascist community as a descriptor, let alone as any sort of group or collective. Yet by 2021, the word was spreading throughout right-wing online spaces as if it was a commonly-used moniker.

The conservative who finally figured out how to weaponize it for right-wing moral panics was Andy Ngo, a far-right influencer and self-proclaimed independent journalist who has made a name for himself “reporting” on left-wing extremism. Ngo appears to have started using “trantifa” in September 2021, but the word failed to catch on until 2023, when he was covering protests in Ireland and the UK. It’s important to note that the first widespread coverage of “trantifa” erroneously attributed the term to a United Nations humans rights expert named Reem Alsalem. (Media outlets around the world failed to see her comments correcting the much-aggregated Daily Mail story that made the initial inaccurate citation.) 

“Trantifa” then seeped its way into wider right-wing and then mainstream consciousness in large part due to Ngo’s aggressive efforts to popularize the word, as can be clearly seen in his X post history and reporting for the Post Millenial over the years. You can actually identify two specific dates in 2023 in which Ngo’s dissemination of “trantifa” made a noticeable impact. The first, June 14, 2023, was when he appeared on primetime Fox News and described the word as a “manifestation” of antifa, composed of “violent, misogynistic men plus women who take on male-typical patterns of violence through the use of hormones.” The second spike was on July 17, 2023, when Ngo tweeted a picture of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas wearing a shirt reading, “antifa super soldier,” alongside a caption about how Thomas had “embraced” the “trantifa branding.”

“Trans violent militancy is the current focus of #Antifa,” Ngo wrote. “They believe that critics of trans ideology should be silenced, maimed or murdered. Some call for sexual violence against females in particular, as revenge.” An hour later, Ngo’s picture was shared by Chaya Raichik’s Libs Of TikTok account with a new, much shorter definition that has become the one most closely associated with the word as it is currently used: “Trantifa is an organization of far-left violent extremist trans activists.”

Any hope that trantifa might disappear back into the depths of the internet died alongside Charlie Kirk (who was shot while answering a question about transgender mass shooters). As this newsletter has covered, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, reports circulated that Kirk’s alleged killer had been motivated by “transgender and antifascist ideology.” Although much of that reporting was later debunked, the initial spread of information and the fact that shooting suspect Tyler Robinson lived with and was allegedly in a relationship with a trans woman has irrevocably tied Kirk’s death with the transgender violence narrative in the minds of many.

And now that Trump World has descended on Portland, yet again, the term has come back with a vengeance, with right-wing influencers all shrieking that the city is still apparently ground zero for trantifa. In an interview Tuesday, Nick Sortor (whom you right remember from Monday’s Garbage Day) lamented, “Trans violence, you think it's a big problem in other parts of the country, it’s especially a problem in Portland, because half the freaking population decided that they’re trans — at least the leftist population anyway.” 

The dangerous difference between the peak COVID years, when trantifa first emerged as a right-wing meme, and now, is that Trump is back in the White House and the country is being run by a chaotic digital feedback loop. Which is why OILab, an Amsterdam-based think tank that studies online political subcultures, has called the trantifa myth “perverse genius,” writing, “The ultimate terrorist organization is one that does not exist, and ‘Trantifa’ embodies this perfectly. Born as a trollish coinage on 4chan, it now circulates through congressional hearings and media talking points as if it were a coherent adversary.” What Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas calls LOLgislation. Any piece of internet ephemera, no matter how stupid, can easily devolve into right-wing hysteria and manifest as real-life violence. A regime that doesn’t need to make its own propaganda because it can safely rely on the the internet to conjure it for them.

We’re throwing a party in Queens tomorrow!

On October 9th, we’re taking over TV Eye for a big party in Ridgewood. It’s going to be a bit different from the live events we’ve done before, but it should feel substantially garbage-y. Tickets are $26! Special musical guests include Kill Alters, Reagan Holiday, and RGEM. Click the big green button below to grab your tickets while you still can!

A Great Way To Handle Taylor Swift’s New Lyrics

This was dropped in the Garbage Day Discord by Alex.

Texan Troops Arrive In Chicago (I Genuinely Feel Insane Writing About This)

Texas National Guard members arrived in Chicago last night. To make sure they aren’t missing out on any of the fun back home, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on X that he’s launching “undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells in Texas.”

The Department of Homeland Security cheered on their arrival by posting a music video to X of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and various other soldiers rounding up migrants and teargassing unarmed protesters, set to Zach Bryan’s “Revival.” The song choice, aside from copyright infringement, was meant to subtweet Bryan’s new song which has lines in it attacking ICE.

The arrival of the National Guard in Chicago is sure to escalate the violence we’re already seeing on the ground there. Recently, a minister was hit in the face with a pepper ball in retaliation for the dangerous act of peacefully praying in front of an ICE facility. You can watch footage of the shooting on X.

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council wrote on X, “DHS is an escalation spiral; the more they do things like this, the more people on the ground push back, the more people on the ground push back, the more officers do things like this, and I'm deeply worried what the ultimate result will be.”

There are plenty of reasons for the Trump administration to continue their slow moving civil war against blue states, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is, obviously, a big one. But the fact we are almost assuredly in a recession now is probably a big motivator as well. Global investment firm the Carlyle Group published their own employment data this week and, according to them, only 17,000 — SEVENTEEN THOUSAND — jobs were added to the market in September.

Oh well, at least Theo Von is starting to realize he backed the wrong candidate.

The Brits Vs. Taylor Swift

This week, while promoting The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift went on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show, and it was a weird vibe, to be sure. On Monday, I wrote about how the British media has been very quick to turn on Swift, likely due to a combo of her just being too big and her new album not being the artful masterpiece UK critics were apparently expecting. And British media cannot and has never been able to ignore blood in the water.

During the episode, host Graham Norton asked British singer Lewis Capaldi if he wanted to talk about his new EP. Capaldi, looking visibly nervous, seemed to, first, ask Swift if it was OK to answer, before explaining that he was told he “wasn’t allowed to talk about.” You can watch a clip of the moment on Reddit. Awkward!!

It’s safe to assume that there will be more Swift-related drama as the album — and its dozens of special versions — continues to roll out. There is clearly a vibe shift happening around Swift. The fact that she was caught by fans seemingly using AI to promote the album hasn’t helped matters.

Let’s Check In On Argentina

Argentina’s libertarian wolfman president, Javier Milei, decided to throw himself a big concert to celebrate the release of his new book. I assume, if Trump was still physically capable of walking around a stage, he would probably try to do the same thing. The whole world, it seems, is being held hostage by very stupid men with absolute power.

Milei’s concert arrives at a very interesting moment, though! A photo taken last week captured an exchange of texts on US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s phone that were seemingly complaining all about Milei. Apparently members of the Trump administration are not happy that we gave Argentina a $20 billion bailout, only for them to turn around and do more business with China. Whoops!

Has Minecraft Streaming Reached The Edge Of The Map?

—by Adam Bumas

Minecraft is a generation-defining juggernaut because it was made online. The game first got noticed as a public pre-alpha in 2009, and spent years being hammered on the anvil of rigorous feedback and discussion among gamers. Many of the signature elements associated with the game, like Creepers or the name “Steve,” started out as memes and fan suggestions before they were implemented. Even The End, the closest thing to a final level Minecraft has, can trace its roots back to the Far Lands, a glitch in the game’s randomized world creation that led to huge, impossible floating cliffs that formed the edge of the map roughly 7,700 miles from where you start. 

The Far Lands aren’t in most versions of Minecraft you can play today but they still reverberate in the culture. And for fourteen years, since before they were patched out, streamer Kurt J. Mac has been walking the entire distance as part of Far Lands or Bust. The regular stream has both raised over $400,000 for charity and maintained a dedicated community as Minecraft YouTube has sprung up around it to become the north star for the entire entertainment industry.

Over the weekend, Mac finally reached the Far Lands, as part of a daily stream that had been going for 69 days in a row. It’s a moment for celebration, but it’s also unavoidably the end of an era, because Minecraft YouTube has been diminishing over the past few years even before this longtime goal was reached. Dream and Quackity have both ended their paradigm-shifting “SMP” roleplay servers. Pioneering children’s creator Stampy ended his show in 2023. MrBeast’s Gaming channel still churns out Minecraft videos, but his idol PewDiePie hasn’t streamed the game in over a year. What lies beyond the Far Lands of Minecraft content? As Garbage Day’s resident zoomer, I wish I had an answer.

Lollipop Finally Got To Leave The Barn

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a good towel hack.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***