As President Donald Trump was being pressed by Chris Wallace during last week’s presidential debate over whether he would disavow white supremacists (something Trump has done repeatedly), Trump hit back by questioning whether Joe Biden would also condemn antifa’s violence. Biden sought to adhere to the Left’s blatantly false narrative that the violent anti-police riots (ahem, “protests”) rocking American cities since the death of George Floyd are primarily caused by white supremacists. He dismissively stated, “Antifa’s an idea, not an organization,” to which Trump responded, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” Biden then asserted, “That’s what his FBI director said.”

Biden deliberately distorted the terminology FBI Director Christopher Wray used so as to dismiss antifa as a non-threatening entity. Here’s what Wray said in his comments to Congress:

We look at antifa as more of an ideology or a movement than an organization. To be clear, we do have quite a number of properly predicated domestic terrorism investigations into violent anarchist extremists, any number of whom self-identify with the antifa movement. And that’s part of this broader group of domestic violent extremists that I’m talking about, but it’s just one part of it. We also have the racially motivated violence extremists, the militia types, and others.

He later reiterated:

Antifa is a real thing. It’s not a group or an organization; it’s a movement or an ideology. … We have seen individuals … identified with the antifa movement, coalescing regionally into what you might describe as small groups, or nodes. And we are actively investigating the potential violence from those regional nodes, if you will.

Following a question from Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw, Wray further explained:

I want to be clear that by describing it as an ideology or movement, I by no means mean to minimize the seriousness of the violence and criminality that is going on across the country, some of which is attributable to people inspired by or who self-identify with that ideology and movement.

No organization exists without first being an idea. No movement can even be described as such without an ideology around which to coalesce. White supremacy is no more of an organization than is Marxism, though both ideologies have spawned political organizations such as the Nazis and communists. These organizations were simply the fruit these bankrupt ideologies seeded.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who’s plenty familiar with the asymmetric ideological threat of Jihadistan, contends that Wray’s description of antifa is not an attempt to diminish or dismiss the genuine threat posed by these anarchists. Instead, he says, Wray is actually expanding the FBI’s perimeters classifying the threat. “What Wray appears to be saying,” McCarthy argues, is that “if the FBI is going to counter Antifa effectively, it has to recognize, first and foremost, the ideological thread that knits all the militants together. You can’t kill it by arresting ten guys in balaclavas mixing Molotov cocktails in Portland… Chris Wray is right. He is not saying that the FBI is making no cases on violent insurrectionists who are driven by Antifa’s anti-American ideology. He is saying that if we’re confronted by a movement, and we want to protect the country, we can’t afford to delude ourselves into thinking we can beat it by taking out any particular organization. It’s bigger and more insidious than that.”