Operation Headwind: Pam Bondi Declares War on Thought – Germany Is Already Listening. Antifa Is the New Word for Humanity

It takes a peculiar mixture of self-confidence in power and intellectual carelessness when an incumbent attorney general announces before rolling cameras that she will “take apart the entire Antifa.” Pam Bondi said it as if she were speaking about a drug cartel, not about a social current. Her tone was cool, businesslike, almost bureaucratic - which only made it more dangerous. Because when someone speaks like that in this office, she no longer speaks as a political commentator but as the chief guardian of the rule of law. And she said it as if the rule of law were her tool, not her duty.

Pam Bondi: "We will take the same approach with Antifa. We will destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We will take them apart."

Bondi knows, of course, that Antifa is not an organization in the classical sense. No membership lists, no leadership, no statutes that one could ban. Antifa is a milieu, a loose network, an attitude. Whoever talks about “taking it apart” really means people - not structures. They mean surveillance, not clarification. They mean criminal law as a substitute for political understanding. And they thereby reveal a mindset that belongs in authoritarian systems, not in liberal democracies. What Bondi demands is not only legally absurd but constitutionally dangerous. Because anyone who wants to dismantle a movement that has no fixed form must inevitably resort to methods that go beyond legality: digital repression, surveillance of communications, curbs on freedom of assembly, police arbitrariness. It is a pattern one reads about in history books - and it always begins with the same words: security, order, control. But in democracies these terms are not infinitely stretchable. At some point they tear - and with them the trust in the state.

Bondi’s martial rhetoric sounds like an echo of those political nightmares in which dissenting opinions are treated as threats. Her threat reveals less resolve than a deep misunderstanding of the idea of law. She speaks of “destruction” where she should be granting protection, of “taking apart” where she should be promoting integration. And she proves that the authoritarian reflex is no longer on the margins of power but has arrived in its center. One can dismiss Bondi’s words as a slip of the tongue. One can also read them as an expression - of a justice system increasingly being politically instrumentalized, and of a government that views constitutional rights as a nuisance. The belief that social conflicts can be settled with criminal law is the convenient lie of authoritarian politics: it replaces thinking with cracking down. And whoever sells that as strength confuses power with sense.

Friedrich Merz also rails against Antifa, with a passion he carefully avoids when it comes to the AfD. His politics resemble, in many respects and differently packaged, the Trump administration. Anyone who has followed his conservative speeches, interviews and appearances over the past years recognizes the pattern immediately: Against the AfD he often, though not always, chooses the tone of statesmanlike distance - "We do not work with them" - whereas he speaks of Antifa with the fury of a man who believes he must save the republic from an invisible army. Terms like "rioting", "street terror" or "left-wing violence" then follow in close succession. The tone is not analytical but indignant; not illuminating but moralizing. It is the language of a politician who knows that the safest place to demonstrate toughness is where it costs no votes.

Because Antifa is not an opponent for Merz but a prop. It serves him as a symbol for what unsettles his voters: disorder, noise, dissent. Toward the AfD he remains cautious, but not courteous. Their voters should be won back, not frightened off. So the left becomes the lightning rod, Antifa the stand-in for chaos. In it the fear of losing control can be concentrated without alienating the conservative center. It is political statics - controlled outrage as a means of self-reassurance.

Both share the idea that order arises only when someone dominates - a mindset that confuses power with clarity. Merz also uses Trump’s most successful tool: the perpetual affront as a method. Every sentence that provokes outrage shifts the coordinates a little further to the right and forces the political center to defend itself. Thus the discourse becomes a stage on which one’s own hardness appears as a principle.

Merz speaks of “the Antifa” as if it were a tangible organization, an opponent with a board, membership card and a mailing address. In truth he means a diffuse spectrum - from left-wing activists to civic antifascists who simply refuse to be equated with neo-Nazis. This equation is no accident but a rhetorical technique that has shaped the vocabulary of the right for years: criticism turns into chaos, protest into violence, antifascism into a threat. When Merz linked the murder of Walter Lübcke, carried out by a neo-Nazi, in the same breath with the alleged inactivity of “the Antifa”, he turned an assassination into an argument - against those who were actually on the victim’s side.

That was no slip, but a strategy. It reveals the disturbing misunderstanding that one can fight extremism by doubling it in language. Even within the CDU, unease about this arose, even among those who otherwise support Merz. But as so often in a party that still does not know whether it fears the far right more or its own past, the criticism remained quiet - quieter, at least, than the applause at party rallies when Merz speaks about “the Antifa” as if it were a bogeyman that only needs to be conjured loudly enough to avoid looking the party’s own political responsibility in the face.

It was one of those rare moments when political calculation and social change happened to head in the same direction. When Angela Merkel casually said in an interview in the summer of 2017 that she wanted to allow a conscience vote on "marriage for all", it was not a moral conversion but an act of controlled retreat. She opened the door - and did not step through herself. Three days later the Bundestag, with votes from SPD, Greens, Left and parts of the Union, voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Merkel voted against it, out of personal conviction, she said, but she knew: the train had long since left the station. Perhaps that was her particular political art - not to lead change but to stop blocking it at the right moment. Thus Germany became more modern without anyone having to lose face, and the chancellor could say she had merely let democracy breathe.

If one took the political language of the right and conservatives literally, "Antifa" would long ago have ceased to be a political milieu and would instead be a synonym for decency. In that logic anyone who raises a finger and says that human rights are not negotiable would already be considered suspect. An antifascist is someone who does not abandon empathy at the border, who does not mistake social ethics for weakness. Yet precisely this attitude is distorted in the new rhetoric: compassion is criminalized, the moral impulse pathologized. They call it "Antifa" because they do not want to admit that it is actually humanity. And so the oldest instinct - the desire not to remain silent in the face of injustice - becomes a political epithet. Perhaps this is the most perfidious twist of the current discourse: that those who behave like human beings suddenly count as a threat.

And thus to the solution of all these semantic misreadings:

The new word for human in 2025 can only be one: Antifa
Discovered, distorted and placed on a pedestal - not by its adherents, but by those who would rather declare humanity itself a threat.