Eventually Everyone Will Be Called A Terrorist

Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened representatives from 66 different nations on July 16 for a “ministerial meeting” on the resurgence of “political terrorism.” The White House described the summit as the launch of “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism.” This historic occasion took the form of Rubio, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent taking turns as they said Nazi shit for an hour. 

Rubio began his remarks by suggesting that the post-9/11 war on “global jihad” is the counterterrorism strategy of yesterday, in need of serious updating to address the blind spot of “extremist violence from the political left.” For too long, he said, “the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat [has been] treated as a right-wing fever dream—or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy” by the press, academia, and think tanks. Rubio should have included the Department of Justice on the list of deniers: In 2024, the DOJ’s research arm found that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.” Days after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the department scrubbed the study from its website. Then the White House made a series of attacks on left-wing political activity, including unleashing federal agencies on protestors and releasing a counterterrorism strategy which named “Narcoterrorists,” “Islamist terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists” as three major, intertwined terror threats. After this month’s summit, a White House press release promised that the left “will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

The whole exercise intends to advance the repressive norms and legal framework of the War on Terror, further collapsing any lingering notions of separate spheres of foreign and domestic politics. Left-wing extremists are portrayed as seditious, but also as foreign agents of terror whom federal police should encounter like the military has encountered millions of Iraqis, Yemenis, Afghans and Syrians. Rubio’s aim is to build on the recent successes of Donald Trump’s Axis of Evil redux—murdering people in boat strikes, kidnapping a foreign head of state, detaining and deporting pro-Palestine students, executing people in the street via anti-immigrant death squads, and sentencing ICE protestors to die in jail for being “antifa”—by expanding the dragnet even further. There’s space enough in the mesh for the pet projects of each of its agents.