…Laws were clearly broken; but the sentences turned on what the defendants said and believed, which the prosecution cast as proof of Antifa membership — a case that rested largely on one man: Shideler.

His job on the stand was to convince the jury of two things: that Antifa is a real, organized terrorist enterprise, and that these eight belonged to it. That task was complicated by the fact that the defendants had never actually called themselves Antifa…

Shideler was baptized into this worldview on the job. By his own account on the stand, he “lived over my parents’ garage for a little while” after college, took a job as a news director at a radio station “for a short period,” and did “some blogging and writing” before being recruited by Stand With Us, the Los Angeles pro-Israel group, where he was responsible for “managing their database of extremist groups and individuals.” From there he went to the Endowment for Middle East Truth, a foreign-policy nonprofit that bills itself as operating “from an unabashedly pro-America and pro-Israel stance,” where he studied Islamic movements “with a particular emphasis on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In 2014 he was hired at the Center for Security Policy, the Frank Gaffney–founded think tank best known for promoting the Iraq War and claiming “Sharia law” is the leading domestic threat to the United States. He left for a stint at the Middle East Forum — a Philadelphia outfit whose stated mission is to “protect Western civilization from the threat of Islamism” — then returned to the Center in 2020, where he now directs Homeland Security and Counterterrorism research, which as far as I can tell means tracking left-wing Americans.

Under cross-examination, Shideler acknowledged he had authored an article on combating far-left extremism whose subtitle, a defense lawyer pointed out, was “A Roadmap for the Trump Administration.” It ran in The American Mind, a publication of the conservative Claremont Institute. He conceded his work isn’t peer-reviewed and rests on “open source research” — material one can “find on the internet” — which, he agreed, carries “both false information and true information.”

Somehow, some way, Shideler ended up being the Justice Department’s expert witness to explain “Antifa” and the grave threat it poses…