Branded a terrorist by Donald Trump,Michael Taylorwears the name Antifa as an inheritance the same legacy that once stood against fascism on the battlefield.

I AM ANTIFA. Or so says PresidentDonald Trump, branding me and millions like me as terrorists in the same breath he decries fake news and radical left bogeymen.

Its a label that stings not because its novel God knows weve heard worse but because it erases the very soil from which it springs. Let me tell you who I really am, before the algorithms and outrage machines bury the truth.

My father fought in World War II. He was one of the Diggers who stormed the beaches, dodged the shells and stared down the abyss in places whose names still echo like ghosts: Tobruk, El Alamein, New Guinea. When the war spat him out, he landed in a Soldier Settlers camp on the dusty fringes of rural Australia a patchwork of tin shacks and hopeful paddocks where broken men tried to stitch lives from the scraps of peace.

Everybodys father there had fought. The camp was a republic of the scarred: limps from shrapnel, coughs from gas, eyes that flickered away when thunder rolled like distant artillery.

Trumps push to brand anti-fascism as terrorismmay just encourage a global revival ofresistance.

Nobody talked about the war. Not really. The soldiers wore their deep wounds like second skins visible to all, but spoken of in silences around the communal fire, or in the way a mans hand trembled pouring tea. Their lives were irrevocably changed, folded and refolded like old maps no longer leading anywhere familiar. But they carried on. They planted crops in unforgiving soil, raised kids who knew the taste of damper bread and the sting of billy tea and built a world where freedom wasnt a slogan but a hard-won breath.

Wed eventually learn, piecing it together from half-heard stories and library books, that they werent just fighting other armies. They were battling ideals the poison of fascism that choked Europe, Asia and beyond. Ideals that promised order but delivered ovens and gulags, that crushed the human spirit under the boot of blind obedience.

My father and the thousands around the world Allies from every corner of the globe were the antidote. They were anti-fascists, plain and simple. Not with hashtags or headlines, but with bayonets and bullets, with the sweat of reconstruction and the vigilance of survivors.

And so were we, the children, schooled in the camps unspoken creed: Guard the light. Question the shadows. Forgive the man, but never the machine that marched him to madness.

As scarred as those soldiers were, something extraordinary happened in that camp. Former enemies Germans, Italians, even Japanese migrants fleeing their own ruins washed up on Australian shores, seeking the same fragile peace. Friendships formed over shared fences and shearing sheds.

My father put it to me one evening, his voice gravelly from years of unspoken grit:

A common thread ties the rise of American authoritarianism with the Nazis marching on Melbourne streets.

That forgiveness wasnt weakness; it was the ultimate defiance of fascisms divide-and-conquer rot. It built bridges where bombs had fallen. It echoed theNuremberg trials, theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, the quiet revolutions of decency that followed. Anti-fascism wasnt a club or a costume it was the air we breathed, the legacy etched into every settlers callused hand.

Yet now, in 2025, President Trump tells me and millions like me that I belong to a terrorist organisation. ANTIFA, he calls it, a shadowy cabal of chaos when, in truth, its the ghost of that very fight: a refusal to let authoritarianism creep back in, disguised as populism or America First.

As a result, I see good people everyday folks with settler blood in their veins being abused on social media. Labelled warmongering ANTIFA bastards for daring to call out lies, for marching against wars and White nationalism, for remembering that fascism doesnt die; it just rebrands.

I seem to have missed something. What changed? The weapons? No, the ideals are the same: the cult of the strongman, the demonisation of the other, the march toward unchecked power. The difference is the battlefield. Its not Normandy or the Pacific; its Twitter feeds and town halls, where words are the new front lines.

And the soldiers? Were still here, the children of those camps, scarred by our own wars of inequality, climate denial, eroded truths but carrying on.

Trumps slur isnt just an insult; its an erasure. It paints the anti-fascist as the fascist, the defender as the destroyer. But history doesnt bend that way. My fathers forgiveness teaches me to pity the man behind the microphone, twisted by his own governments machine.

Yet it also demands I fight the belief that fuels him the one that whispers war is glory, division is strength, and truth is optional.

So yes, Mr President, call me ANTIFA. Ill wear it like my fathers medals: not for the shine, but for the weight. Because in the end, the real terrorists arent the ones who remember the war. Theyre the ones who want to start another.

This story was originally published onThe Australian Independent Networkand has been republished with permission.

Michael Tayloris a retired former public servant who resides in Canberra andwrites atThe Australian Independent Media NetworkandCaf Whispers.

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