This is the logical conclusion of the war on terror: bringing it home. Al Qaeda and ISIS are dead in the water, they’re flotsam, so we need the new big baddie to scare the people who thought that BFI’s grain elevator was gonna take a 737 to the face. Communism has no purchase, it’s just an epithet at this point that can be applied to anything that is against the conservative ideology. ANTIFA, on the other hand, “feels” like a cohesive group with a radical ideology and with mysterious leaders. And they believe it. You could explain that “antifa” is just a contraction of “anti fascist” meaning anyone who is opposed to fascism (and specifically Nazism if you want to be historically literal) is ANTIFA. But they’d insist that it’s not that, because they hate Nazis and fascists, but they also hate “ANTIFA.” The big trouble too is that Americans don’t understand what communism and fascism mean, at least at the economic level. The US has been quasi-fascist since WWII due to the relation between state and capital. That’s not because of any social issues or aesthetics, it’s because the state and capital have been roommates-with-benefits since the rise of the military industrial complex and the subsidizing of agriculture. That’s technically a core component of fascism. The vulgar part of fascism has existed in one form or another since the damn country was founded! The cultural problem is that Americans are largely ignorant, and I suspect that’s on purpose. Most chuds I know just do the “lol communism no food gulag!” But if you were to identify as an “ANTIFA” they’d be ready to sell you out because they think ANTIFA is a terrorist org and not an ideology, while they view “communist” as a meme worth mocking.