President Donald Trump has moved to designate "antifa," or the broadly-defined collective of activists fighting against what they perceive to be fascism in America, as a terrorist organization — but an intended boast by far-right podcaster Glenn Beck accidentally revealed the effort is already "falling apart," wrote Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling for The New Republic.

Specifically, Beck said earlier this week that FBI agents from the Trump administration came to his house to ask him about everything he knows about antifa operations. "So we dove in headfirst and we analyzed the antifa network," said Beck on his show. "To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement. Let's just say the FBI is turning over every single stone."

But this actually shows how little the FBI has to go on, Houghtaling argued.

"Antifa be warned: The Trump administration is coming for you, but first they have to speak with some podcasters," she wrote. "The fact that Beck might catch FBI Director Kash Patel’s attention should come as no surprise, especially since Patel used to host his own conspiratorial political opinion show before he was tasked to run America’s lead investigative agency."

Nonetheless, Houghtaling said, this marks yet another chapter in the right's desperate attempt to take what is essentially an unorganized mass of protesters loosely defined by a similar ideology, and paint it into a cohesive group that can be investigated, taken down, or busted up.

"For years, Donald Trump and his allies have pushed the idea that violent, far-left radicals are wreaking havoc in cities across the country, but their rhetoric has been noticeably devoid of evidence," she wrote. "To quell the noise, members of the House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA and FBI in 2020 to investigate false intelligence campaigns and find proof of the anti-fascist group’s supposed 'invasion.' Despite reports contradicting Trump’s rhetoric, the noise did not die down."

Ultimately, she wrote, it's doomed to fail regardless, because Trump doesn't have the authority to unilaterally declare antifa a terrorist organization. "That power resides with Congress," she wrote.